While sifting through some old folders the other day, I found a handwritten note from Mary Ann Willis. “Stay in touch,” it said. “Hope our paths cross soon.”
Those words yanked me back to when crossing paths with people was a regular thing. Back before Covid-19 grounded airplanes and pinned us in place.
As a journalist I’ve long enjoyed trekking all over, scanning unfamiliar skylines, and conducting face-to-face interviews. Though travel is still possible, it’s risky, and the pandemic has closed or disrupted colleges and high schools, where most of my assignments lead. It also halted in-person conferences where each year I catch up with folks who help me do my job.
Most articles you read are in some way the product of one or more connections, good, bad, or in between.
Folks like Mary Ann. She’s the director of college counseling at Bayside Academy, in Daphne, Ala., and a true admissions expert. I’m telling you about her, though, because she reminds me of something important: Journalism boils down to relationships, but not just any old kind. The interactions between reporters and their sources, as my wise colleague Tom Bartlett says, can be “complicated and fraught” yet also “human and wonderful and weird.”
Being stuck at home made me think harder about the meaning of those relationships, which often involve a degree of tension. Getting close enough to people to tell vivid, relevant stories while maintaining a critical distance is tricky. Especially because no two relationships are quite the same. Some fade; others last.
Before telling you about some other folks, let me say a bit more about Mary Ann. We met a decade ago at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference. Sitting in the lobby of a St. Louis hotel one morning, I sipped bad coffee from a foam cup while this no-nonsense, five-foot-three geyser of insights told me her story. She had chosen teaching over law school before getting her master’s in counseling, drawn to the task of nudging students toward their dreams. She started doing that in 1977, the year I turned two.
A big reader, Mary Ann had been following my byline for some time. How did I go about writing? What led me to become a higher-ed reporter? She really wanted to know.
After a while we shook hands and dashed to other appointments. But over the years we would have many more chats. About admissions trends, yes, but also about the knotty riddle of life. I learned about her husband, John, her two children, her four grandkids, a cross-country road trip that took her to the Grand Canyon, and her attempt to make iced Meyer lemon scones.
Most relationships, professional or otherwise, aren’t planned. They just kind of happen. But when they happen in journalism, reporters must confront a paradox: Their work often hinges on personal relationships, but it can’t ever be too personal. Getting to know people on the beat you cover is essential, yet restrictions apply.
The Chronicle, like most publications, has an ethics policy that speaks to relationships with sources. Our reporters, it says, should “preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias.” After all, bias can obscure truth and shroud complexity, things journalism should reveal. Therefore we must periodically “take a hard look,” our policy says, “at whether we have drifted too close to sources we deal with.”
It’s not a scientific exercise leading to quantifiable or entirely satisfying conclusions, though. So we must rely on our judgment, an imperfect instrument, for sure.
Still, 23 years of experience have taught me that writing meaningfully about other human beings requires getting to know them, listening like mad, and establishing a rapport. Sometimes that means opening yourself up a little to those whose trust you’re more or less demanding.
A few years ago, I set out to write a long, narrative profile of a young woman who had survived the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech. A few hours into a long interview, she started sobbing as she recounted a painful memory, and soon I was wiping tears from my own eyes. Sometimes, you know, crying just kind of happens.
Reporters aren’t supposed to be your friends. But that doesn’t make us anyone’s enemy.
While composing the article days later, I took a long, hard look at my draft, asking myself where more objectivity was needed, where more detachment would help. But I saw, too, that my emotional responses to the young woman’s story helped me feel, in some small way, what she felt. That enabled me to write more empathetically about her experiences. If you think that makes me a mushy little marshmallow, so be it.
Some hard-boiled reporters might have hated the speech about journalism I was asked to give a year later at the awards ceremony where my article about the survivor was honored. I called the talk “Empathy Matters.” Because it does, especially in the kinds of features I tend to write, about vulnerable students trying to overcome poverty and get to college, struggling with financial-aid bureaucracy, and reaching for a better life at campuses on the other side of the world.
Don’t get me wrong. Every article is different. There are many modes of journalism, each requiring distinct approaches. And, as I said, no two relationships a reporter establishes are the same. Some are circles, some are squares, and some are heptadecagons, with 17 sides.
It takes all kinds to do this job. A former college counselor who became an admissions reformer has spent many hours helping me see through the thickets of higher education. So, too, have dozens of admissions and enrollment officials, including those I’ve had beers with many times, and a few who might gladly pour beer on me if given the chance.
One cranky higher-education expert in the Midwest who frequently writes to critique my articles has made me a better journalist by challenging my conclusions. The tireless leader of a nonprofit group in Texas has deepened my understanding of college-access challenges while trusting me again and again to tell the stories of the students her organization serves.
Without those and many other relationships, I would be very lost.
I’m saying all this because journalists have a responsibility to explain their work, which is widely misunderstood. Recently, I participated in a virtual panel titled “Modern Media: Friend or Foe?” The correct answer is “neither.”
Reporters — who often cajole, confront, and ask difficult questions in their roles as investigators, analyzers, and storytellers — aren’t supposed to be your friends. We don’t write stories for anyone; our duty is to the reader, the public. But that doesn’t make us anyone’s enemy.
Whatever you call us, know this: Most articles you read are in some way the product of one or more relationships, good, bad, or in between.
Which brings me back to Mary Ann Willis. On my long list of contacts, she’s an outlier. We have known little tension, partly because she refuses to let me quote her on anything controversial. She’s opinionated all right, but also cautious and private. That’s OK; she helps me in other ways.
Since 2010, she has passed along many useful background tips and observations, about Operation Varsity Blues, student-recruitment trends, and technological innovation in admissions. Her long memory and eye for character once helped me write an article about a prominent admissions dean in the news. Whenever I get feedback about a story from just one reader, it’s always Mary Ann.
Her frequent messages sometimes read like nudges from the aunt I’ve never had. After I returned from a long reporting trip to Nepal, she wrote: “back safe and sound??????” Several times when I’ve been slow to respond, she’s sent messages with the subject line “Earth to Eric.”
It’s not betraying my ethics policy to say that I’ve appreciated her kindness. After I lost a loved one last month, she sent me a comforting, personal reflection on dealing with loss. It helped.
Mary Ann has more than once invited me to visit her school, which sits on a bluff overlooking Mobile Bay. Though I would sure love to meet Tater, the head of the school’s beloved Labrador retriever, the prospect always seemed unlikely. What reason was there to make such a long trip?
After nine months of isolation, though, I’m reconsidering everything. Maybe it’s because I keep thinking about how visitors to Bayside Academy are invited to sit and read a book to young children in the Lower School. No one whose schedule permitted it, as Mary Ann recalls, has ever turned down the opportunity to “read to the littles.”
Doesn’t that sound perfect?
OK, Mary Ann. You have my word: When it’s safe to come, I’ll do my best to get there. Thank you for letting a journalist in.