In the second part of a series on the challenging emotional situations journalists face,

This is a pity. Because nearly all journalists will at some stage work with people who feel stigmatised or have experienced some form of trauma.

The good news is that many seasoned professionals handle such potentially challenging encounters with skill and sensitivity. And they do so in ways that are likely to get them far better material than those who practice less emotionally sophisticated interviewing techniques.

Although it may surprise many of them, what they have learnt to do after years of experience is not dissimilar to the communication skills taught to medical students at the beginning of their careers to equip them to deal with patients. Journalism educators are largely unaware of what they have picked up, which makes it hard for them to pass these skills on systematically. 

The ones I interviewed for the study ventured that interviewing people in distress is largely a matter of “common sense”. Maybe it becomes so. Elsewhere in our conversations though, they admitted they had often lacked that common sense when they started out.

Picking through the 40 long interviews I conducted with educators, journalists and psychology professionals, a simple pattern emerged. Broadly, seasoned interviewers, be they medics, police officers or effective hacks, develop their skills in four areas. 

1. They listen well

I talked about this yesterday. Psychologists call this ‘empathic’ or ‘non-judgmental’ listening. It has nothing to do with being ‘nice’ to the interviewee, or agreeing with what is said. Rather, it is about giving somebody the space to speak freely.  

Obvious as that sounds, journalists are often guilty of ‘bad’ listening. Time pressure, the need to formulate the next question, and sometimes just a sense of guilt for being there can all get in the way
 
An inattentive journalist can ‘marginalise’ subjects, making them feel it is their fault they reacted emotionally to the trauma. On the other hand, an overly attentive journalist who strives too hard to demonstrate the extent of his or her own sympathy can ring false and be equally alienating.  

2.  They understand their role 

In the workshops we organised, journalism students often felt they had to ‘fix’ the people in distress they were confronted with. Some made extravagant assurances along the lines of: “Don’t worry, I am sure it’ll be all right”, or even drifted into active counselling.

The desire to help is very human. But effecting a quick cure of a traumatic stress response is beyond the reporter’s remit. The best way a journalist can serve an interviewee is by reporting his or her story fairly and accurately. Misreporting, however, can do real damage.

Interestingly, doctors and psychiatrists are trained to avoid rash promises when they triage patients. They talk about working with the patient towards symptom reduction, rather than promising quick fixes for problems.
 
3. They begin well and end well

Journalists, just as medical professionals, benefit from learning how to build good boundaries around their encounters with people in distress. It is vital to learn how to contain an interview, to give it a clear and appropriate beginning and ending. 

In the bomb scenario we described yesterday, the student journalists often forgot to identify themselves and explain why they were interviewing. The lack of clear introduction creates a muddiness that can unsettle both the interviewer and interviewee. If a journalist states his or her purpose with clarity, the source, who might be alarmed and confused, is less likely to feel that s/he is about to be taken advantage of. 

The way an interview ends is also important. When somebody is describing a traumatic experience, being abruptly cut off in mid-flow can be very disturbing. If it is a breaking news story, and time is really short, then a warning to that effect at the beginning of the conversation can make a sudden ending feel more explicable.  

If the interview is longer and centres on a past trauma – as in the hypothetical of the man who saw his parents being murdered we started with – another strategy works well.  

One would start discussing the man’s childhood before the trauma, a period he is likely to feel relatively secure about. From there, the conversation could be steered carefully to the day of the murder. We don’t know how much the man has talked publicly about the event. He may be a youth worker who campaigns against gun crime with hundreds of media appearances under his belt. Or it could be his first time talking to a journalist.

Whatever the case, any detailed discussion of a trauma as foundational as this is likely to be intense. So one needs to take time before entering that emotional arena, and for the same reason, one also needs to return the discussion back to a safe place before the end. 

To achieve this, one could talk about a recent achievement or an outing the man has planned with his kids. Or one could look at the latest photo album. There are plenty of possibilities – even a neutral chat over a cup of tea can do it.  

Rushing off, leaving somebody wallowing in what could be the most distressing moment of their lives is shoddy. In some cases, it may be actively damaging as well.

Learning how to manage an interviewee’s expectations of what happens after the interview is another important side to ending well. 

Many of the ex-reporters I talked to had a closing ritual, which foreclosed any possibility of misunderstanding. They would summarise the main points, to check for misunderstandings; give their contact details; and wrap up with some comment along the lines of: “I hope I can put a quote from you in, but I can’t guarantee it. I don’t have much space. Saying that, thanks to our conversation, I understand the situation better now.  Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.” 

That way there is far less chance of somebody feeling aggrieved if their name is dropped. 
 
4. They practice effective questioning

Question technique is more complicated than is usually assumed, so I will restrict the discussion here to just one aspect. 

The students we talked to knew emotionally vivid quotes would help make their pieces arresting. But to get those, they tended to ask questions which overtly fished for emotional responses. You can well imagine the response of the gangland killing witness if he had been asked: “How did you feel when you saw both your parents shot in front of you?”

The veterans say the best way to navigate this is to ask sparse, factual questions. What did you see? What did you do then? Who else was there? Indeed the more emotionally heightened the situation, the less ‘feeling’ an experienced interviewer would invest into the words that form the question. It is simple, open questions that are more regularly rewarded with natural and vivid answers, because they give people the space to speak freely. 

The four headings above are not an exhaustive list of do’s and don’t's, but rather a schematic for the areas we need to build skills training around. For more recommendations, see Dart Centre’s trauma and journalism guide.

THE techniques described here would work in any interview situation. There is nothing that radical about them: they embody elements of the traditional tradecraft that many journalists would recognise.
  
Having said that, there is one major difference: the list gives explicit attention to the emotional dimensions of the interview situation, a crucial aspect trainers in the past have been reluctant to address.
 
This goes to the heart of the issue. Journalists who are good at doing difficult interviews with people in distress get there because they learn how to avoid doing or saying things that might occasion feelings of guilt in themselves. 

By placing clear boundaries around the interview situation, managing the interviewees’ expectations, asking simple questions, and above all by listening well, an interviewer discovers there is no reason why a traumatic interview in any sense need be damaging to the interviewee. With that knowledge in hand it is much easier to move on to the next story. 

When they start out, students don’t necessarily know this. Watching them in the workshops and talking to them afterwards, it was clear that many felt highly conflicted about what they were doing and worried they could be doing harm. 

Why the students feel like this is hard to say for certain, but two notions may be at play here. One is perhaps the fear that disclosure is automatically dangerous: a person talking about their emotional state might come apart all over the journalist. How do you stop them? What are the consequences of bringing this painful story out into the open?
 
A second reason could be the feeling that there is something underhand about making money out of somebody’s misery. His pain is my gain. They feel they are being extractive when they should be helping.

In contrast, seasoned professionals do not assume that what is good for the journalist is necessarily bad for the source. In the classic death-knock situation, where a reporter is assigned to investigate a recent death, the family of the deceased could be waiting for the knock on the door. They might appreciate a sensitive write-up of their loved one in the local newspaper. Or they may feel differently. But the better a journalist understands the possible range of reactions, the easier it will be to handle an angry brush-off.

Some fear that being attentive to emotion makes one liable to writing gushy, sentimental copy. I would suggest the reverse might be true. The more aware journalists are of the emotions that lie under the surface of the situations they report on, the less likely they are to write about them inappropriately. It is the dead-eyed cynics who are more likely to smuggle their own feelings into their work without being aware of it, be it personal enmity or mawkish sentimentality.

A casual glance at any newspaper will reveal it to be already full of emotional language and descriptions of how we imagine others to be feeling. As journalists, we are great gourmands for collecting emotional colour. We spice our stories with it, because we know it makes our copy more appetising to consumers.

This is just as true of the broadsheet as the tabloids. While the latter concentrate more on sex shockers and grizzly crime exposés, the same preoccupation with the emotional lies hidden in the up-market press’s accounts of the back-stabbing and Faustian meltdowns that attend life in the corridors of power. It is interesting.

However, often that reporting could be far more accurate, in the sense of providing a truer account of the emotional experiences of the people we write about and film. A crude emotive shorthand – for instance, reducing things to just rage and tears – does not leave much room for understanding the emotional nuances of somebody’s predicament: how they got there, what might happen next, who else might be in a similar situation.

As journalists, we also play a strange double game we remain largely unaware of. We like to pretend that we, ourselves, are impervious to the kinds of emotional experiences we report on. We prefer to see ourselves as cool titans, the uber-rational reapers of facts. This contradiction puts a strain on young journalists when they start out: it is hard for them to report accurately on the feeling of others, if they are not supposed to have any themselves.

Given the confused relationship journalism has with the emotional, perhaps it is no wonder many of the young journalists we coached during our workshops initially found it hard to reconcile to being good at their job –  ‘getting the story’ – with a sense of how they should respond as human beings to somebody affected by trauma. But there needn’t be any contradiction. The workshops and the interviewing techniques described above teach that emotional self-awareness can make them more resilient in the face of other’s distress and improve the accuracy of their reporting.

This is the last part of this series. Read Part 1, So how did you feel then?

Journalist Gavin Rees is the European Coordinator for the DART Centre. This series is based on a 15-month research project jointly undertaken by the Media School, Bournemouth University and the Dart Centre.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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Just how do you look a man in the eye and ask him what it was like to watch his parents being killed? Or ask a survivor how it was when a bomb exploded? In this two-part series, Gavin Rees explores the challenging emotional encounters journalists negotiate in their work-life — and how to get the best interviews when emotions run high.


IN JOURNALISM MOVIES, there is always a wise old owl at hand to mentor junior colleagues. If you aspire to that role, here is a scenario:

A student knocks on your door. He or she wants to write about a series of brutal gangland killings that happened 20 years ago. The student has secured an interview with someone who was 12 at that time and witnessed his parents being murdered. The young journalist is apprehensive and seeks your advice.

What would you say?

It is a swine of a hypothetical, I know. And it had a visibly halting effect on some of UK’s most experienced editors and journalism educators who contributed to a study into how journalists are trained to interview people in distress.

Fact is, hardly any are.

Car accidents, violent crime, suicide, life-threatening illness and all manner of human conflict, these are the daily meat of much of our journalism. Nearly all journalists at some stage in their careers will find themselves working with the bereaved, targets of violence, survivors of accidents, the terminally ill, or people facing other challenges — addiction, debt, business failure, to mention just some of the more obvious.

Yet scant attention is paid to interviewing those affected by trauma. In contrast the police and medical professionals routinely give their recruits structured training in how to talk to the vulnerable and how best to interpret accounts that may be distorted by the raw experience of distress.

The educators I interviewed for the study had all done their fair share of tough stories. Dunblane, Lockerbie, Soham, the Rwandan genocide, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war in Iraq all came up as situations that had stretched the journalists’ capacities to report human distress effectively. We tend to associate trauma with war and terrorism, but those I talked to had often found domestic stories placed them in difficult positions as well.

One journalist remembered being asked by his editor to phone the father of a missing girl, who had been ‘outed’ by The Sun as a convicted sex offender, quite coincidentally as it turned out. The question he, as a young assistant producer, had been told to record for broadcast was: did you kill your daughter? Not easy, and not the kind of conversation, he had ever been trained to lead.

Another remembered a situation when he, as an editor, made a snap decision to broadcast a tape that arrived only minutes before the lunchtime bulletin. It had been rushed from a house fire, where a reporter had found a man with burn injuries in the garden.

Short of time, the journalist began recording. But the conversation ran out of control, as the man described how he had been unable to save his wife and daughter from the advancing flames. The father said he heard his daughter crying in her room.

“How do you deal with this kind of escalating level of appalling detail that begins to emerge?” the editor asked. “What’s driving him completely and utterly is that he needs to explain to his wife and family that he tried, that he tried to get them out, but he failed. He can’t bear the thought of anybody thinking he didn’t try… The microphone’s running and you’ve got to shut him up in the end.”

In the rush to go on air, the father’s self-accusing outburst was broadcast — a decision the editor still regrets.

The importance of listening

Clearly journalism can expose professionals to challenging emotional encounters and difficult conversations. The journalism educators I talked to were all well aware of this.

But what concrete advice do they give? Their answers to the gangland-killing hypothetical we started with tended to focus on the pre-interview build-up, the security implications, the necessity of doing proper research, etc. They skirted around, even ducked, the straight question: just how does one look somebody in the eye and ask what it was like to see his parents being killed?

But this is the kind of detail the students I spoke to wanted to know. The educators — and most students — I interviewed spoke of the importance of building rapport and being understanding. A typical response was:

“The journalist would need to be sympathetic to the victims’ feelings — perhaps be able to think ‘in their shoes’ so that s/he can really consider if his or her actions are going to worsen the emotional trauma of the victim.”

So most journalists are eager to be responsible. But that in itself doesn’t get us very far. The question remains: how do you provide a safe space for an interviewee to speak about his or her experiences? And can you do that and still get the information you want?

Of the 27 educationalists I presented the gangland scenario to, only five said they would communicate to the student something about the importance of listening.

This is interesting. All the more so, because most of the 22 who did not talk about it had given me the impression at other points in their interviews that good listening was a crucial part of what they did during the course of their work. Maybe they thought it was too obvious to emphasise to the student.

But good listening isn’t automatic. It needs work. Just how do you listen well when you are short of time, trying to ask all the questions you want to ask, and horrified or just plain embarrassed by the subject matter?

Working around distress is analogous to working in bad weather. You have to accept the likelihood of getting wet. The conversation will be difficult; in some cases it may make the journalist feel quite bad. But if you can accept that, and try to listen better, focus a fraction harder, then your discomfort is likely to slip into the background.

In fact it may even create a virtuous circle: the better the interviewee feels listened to, the more freely and vividly she or he will speak. Result: a better story for the journalist, a safer experience for the interviewee. If that happens, the content of the conversation, and not the journalist’s feelings about it, becomes the matter at hand.

‘Detachment’, a slippery lexical unit

Parking your own feelings to one side is not the same as suppressing them. Seventy-eight of the 159 journalism students we surveyed at the universities of Bournemouth, Falmouth, Roehampton, Huddersfield and Cardiff either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement that “journalists should try to cut themselves off from their feelings” when interviewing survivors from a train crash.

This is a superstition that needs addressing. Struggling to smother your own responses is rather like holding a conversation while trying to secretly strangle a cat in a sack. The process is usually visible from the outside. Interviewees pick up very quickly when journalists aren’t concentrating on what they are saying and distraction is fatal to building effective rapport.

Often the journalists I spoke to used the word ‘detachment’. That’s a slippery little lexical unit that causes much confusion. Detachment is surely good if what one means by it is dispassionate reporting. Most of us would not like to read copy that is all about the journalist’s own emotional reactions; we want to know what the people in the story are going through.

On the other hand, if by detachment one means severing the channel of emotional understanding between witness and reporter, we start heading into the territory of a complex phenomenon psychiatrists call disassociation.

A journalist who advocates extreme detachment, demanding rigorously of himself “that I must feel nothing”, may in fact be preventing himself from hearing fully what the interviewee is saying. Over time, if a journalist is regularly dealing with emotionally tough material, the emotion-smothering approach may also have a deleterious effect on his/her well-being.

Of course — and this needs underlining — that doesn’t mean there is an obligation for a journalist to feel particularly affected when listening to somebody in distress. Feeling comparatively little in such a situation is not unusual. Different stories affect different people in different ways.

It’s okay to find this difficult

To give students a taste of all this, we put some through a ‘live firing exercise’. They had to interview members of the public — actors coached to respond in a certain way — after an ‘explosion’ in a football stadium.

The interviewees they met displayed different traumatic stress reactions. Some were so affected that very little could usefully be gained by talking to them. Others were distraught but had key information, which they would disclose providing they were interviewed in an emotionally intelligent and precise way.

At the start many students found the exercise immensely challenging. They had hoped to ask calm, collected questions with the detachment that journalists in the films always seem to possess. But it didn’t quite pan out that way. As soon as they were confronted with the distress of strangers, they became involved. Some felt ensnared by the demands they believed were being made on them. As one put it:

“I was much more conscious of my own behaviour during this workshop than I have been in any other interview.”

The result? Eliciting information became harder. Some students became tongue-tied or asked rambling questions; others tried to ‘fix’ the people they were talking to, crossing over from journalists to carers. During the first few attempts they antagonised their interviewees by forgetting to identify themselves properly and asking inappropriate how-did-you-feel-when-you-were-blown-up type of questions.

After each 10-minute interview, the coaches stepped in to talk to the students on how they could do better. One key message was: “It is okay to find this difficult. We do too. Just try to listen a little harder. Try and picture what they are describing. Focus on them, not your frustration.”

By the end of the workshop, the improvement was marked. It was obvious to observers that the questioning was getting better. And the actors — the best judges of all — reported becoming progressively more open and eager to volunteer information.

The key points to emerge out of the exercise were whether or not the students introduced themselves clearly, how they dealt with the requests for information made of them by the actors, and, of course, the kind of questions they asked.

As for the ‘witnesses’, what they valued above all was whether or not the students listened to them properly.

Some might suggest that there is a necessary conflict between sensitive interviewing and robust journalism. In discussing ‘sensitivity’ in reporting, people often muddle the word empathy with sympathy. They fail to see that you can behave empathically towards people without being sympathetic to what they have done, or for that matter even liking them.

The students were inching towards a place where there was no apparent conflict between the rigours of professional journalism and behaving in a humane manner. The journalism educators I interviewed had arrived there themselves after years of trial and error. But mostly they had not thought concretely about how to pass these understandings on to their students — how to teach them what one might call the emotional practicalities of interviewing.

The problem here, of course, is that as journalists we rarely talk to each other about what it feels like to do emotionally challenging work. Our hesitancy makes it harder for us to pool best practice.

Does this mean we should parachute in psychologists or other experts to sort out journalism education? Not quite. Instead let’s look in more detail at what journalists who are good at reporting on trauma have learnt to do.

Part 2: The wisdom of the owls

Journalist Gavin Rees is the European Coordinator for the DART Centre. This series is based on a 15-month research project jointly undertaken by the Media School, Bournemouth University and the Dart Centre.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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