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NARRATIVE SWEAT AND FLOW: THE CHALLENGE AND FULFILLMENT OF COVERING SENSITIVE SOCIAL ISSUES A Project Presented to the Graduate Faculty at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by SIMINA MISTREANU Professor Jacqui Banaszynski, Committee Chair Professor Mary Kay Blakely Professor Berkley Hudson Professor Tom Warhover DECEMBER 2013 DEDICATION This project is dedicated to the family, friends and mentors I’ve been blessed to have in my life, especially Jacqui, Carmen and my mother, Silvia. If I ever learn how to wear my wings, it’s because of you three. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This master’s project would not have been started, nor finished, if it hadn’t been for the guidance and support I received along the way from my committee. I admire and love you all deeply. Thank you. My gratitude also goes toward The Oregonian’s wonderful breaking news team. Working alongside these talented journalists for three months made for the most intense professional experience of my life. I also want to thank the seven long-form narrative writers who agreed to talk to me for my professional analysis. Your patience in answering my questions about journalism, and life, I hope will make for valuable reading for journalists of all ages. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................ ii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................1 2. WEEKLY FIELD NOTES ..............................................................6 3. EVALUATION AND LESSONS LEARNED ..............................44 4. ABUNDANT PHYSICAL EVIDENCE ........................................48 5. PROFESSIONAL ANALYSIS ARTICLE .................................143 APPENDIX 1. PROJECT PROPOSAL ...............................................................162 2. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................163 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...............................................167 4. PROFESSIONAL ANALYSIS QUESTIONS ............................169 5. LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................170 6. METHODOLOGY ......................................................................181 7. REFERENCES ............................................................................185 8. INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS Lane DeGregory ...........................................................................188 Amy Harmon ...............................................................................208 Anne Hull .....................................................................................219 iii David Finkel .................................................................................239 Chris Jones ...................................................................................257 Paige Williams .............................................................................281 Tom Hallman, Jr. ........................................................................ 288 9. ON-SITE SUPERVISOR EVALUATION ..................................311 10. PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH COPYRIGHTED CLIPS .......312 iv Chapter One: Introduction “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” -- Joan Didion In order to explain why I chose this project, I would need to ask you to join me back 22 years to my native village in western Romania. I learned to read when I was 3 by watching over my older sister’s shoulder as she was trying to decipher the alphabet. I had a slew of illnesses as a child, and I was afraid of a kindergarten bully, so I spent most of my pre-school years at home or at my grandfather’s house, reading: the Bible, Romanian folk tales and fairytales, and later on, novels by Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I learned to see the world through stories. I believe reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” when I was about 8 or 9 has taught me empathy as much as anything else. I started journalism school in Bucharest in 2006 because I wanted to tell stories about real people. I had a vague instinct that real stories might somehow have the same effect of revealing worlds and making people feel and care as the literature I loved, though I didn’t have clear examples of that. The post-communist Romanian media was producing mostly underreported and poorly written news articles and opinion pieces. Not much has improved since. During my sophomore year in college, I was incredibly lucky to end up in the narrative writing class of Cristian Lupsa, a Romanian journalist who had gotten his master’s degree at the University of Missouri and had returned to Romania with hopes to create a better journalism environment. Lupsa introduced us to classic American long- 1 form narrative stories such as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Michael Paterniti’s “Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy” and Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man.” I was blown away to discover that journalism could be told in narrative form, that it could take readers along on journeys and introduce them to new worlds and to characters they could ultimately care for. Lupsa held our hand as we, a group of mostly young undergraduate students, told our own deep-dive stories. We published them in various magazines, including the one we launched ourselves, called Decat o Revista. Wanting to become better at telling these stories is what brought me to the United States as a Fulbright scholar in August 2011. At the University of Missouri, I took all the reporting and writing courses I could fit in my four semesters of classes. I studied some wonderful long-form narrative work and learned from the masters themselves. I also gained hands-on experience as a reporter and then assistant city editor at the community newspaper Columbia Missourian. In the summer of 2012, as a reporting intern at The Wichita Eagle newspaper, I met a Roma family with deep historical roots who was going through cultural changes, such as trying to embrace higher education. I started working on a story about them, which led me to the opportunity to tell stories about Roma in the United States through the University of Missouri’s postgraduate O.O. McIntyre fellowship. Of the stories I’ve told in the past six years, while in Romania and the United States, the ones I cared most about were deep-dives about people struggling to overcome something: a woman working to defeat breast cancer and change her life, two young 2 resident doctors studying French in order to emigrate in search of a living wage, a man wanting to climb mountains and overcome loneliness, an American university professor battling the Food and Drug Administration, a group of four college-aged girls in Missouri struggling to break the poverty cycle they were in, and a released convicted murderer in Oregon hoping to earn people’s trust. Through most of this time, I worked as a newspaper reporter covering beats such as business, education and government. I realized, over time, that the stories that really mattered – for me and for the readers – had three things in common. First, I had allowed myself time to do extensive reporting and get to know the people and the issues I was writing about. Second, I tried to use narrative writing techniques to engage the readers and tell a good story. And third, the stories happened to be about people who were disadvantaged or struggling to overcome a burden, and about the system that put that burden there in the first place. Whenever I felt like the readers could empathize with the characters and also learn something useful about the system, I felt that my work was worth it. This relates to what I was trying to accomplish through my master’s project: become a stronger journalist, on one side, and then understand how people who are doing at a high level the type of journalism I love most relate to their work. I know that, on the long term, I want to make life better for people in Romania through journalism. I can’t get more specific than that because I’m still trying to figure out a life plan (my master’s committee has surely born witness to these searches). 3 Thus my master’s project was designed to serve two intermediary steps: become a better reporter, and understand how long-form narrative writing about sensitive social issues might fit in the long term in one’s life frame. I tried (and hopefully succeeded) to become a stronger reporter through the professional experience component of my master’s project. I worked for 14 weeks on the breaking news team of The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Ore, covering an array of topics, including rescue operations, wildfires, cops and courts. I wrote breaking news stories, daily features, and long-form narratives. I became comfortable with quick deadlines and with parachuting myself in the midst of events, and maybe more importantly, finding stories there. All in all, I had the time of my life. This project report includes clips and weekly field notes from this amazing summer. The professional analysis component of my master’s project tried to answer a question close to my heart: Do long-form narrative writers who cover sensitive social issues – such as poverty, race, illness and trauma – consider themselves happy and fulfilled people? In framing the interviews, I used the psychological theory of optimal experience, or “flow,” described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the state in which people are so absorbed by their work that nothing else