Nieman Storyboard podcast: Erika Hayasaki on trauma-informed reporting and celebrating the ‘reported essay’

Stories continue, people's lives continue, it continues to be hard months, years, many years after. Coming away from being a newspaper reporter, that's something that I've also really learned to recognize — the long tail of a tragedy or any kind of story. Time changes a lot of the events within the story, and people's lives change, and those can be also rich for storytelling in terms of “how do you really come to understand the aftermath of a tragedy and the people who are most affected by it?” Sometimes it's the people who are the most vulnerable in society who are affected by these things, and they are the most often forgotten and left behind.

What do you do when you're thrown into the worst moment of somebody's life, right in the aftermath? When you're [working] in news, it's right on the day it's happening, and you're knocking on the door, and that's the job.

I didn't love that, but I did it because that was the job that I got a degree to do. And so I didn't know any better. And then when you do these longer-form pieces or features, when are you taking a story instead of telling a story? When are you being extractive and exploitive versus humanizing, and bringing them in, and giving them a bit of agency in this process? I think that that was not ever something that we talked about giving to people we write about: agency in the storytelling. We were taught to be the people who control the narrative we're telling, in a way. But I always thought, well, it's their lives that have happened, that we're telling the story of their lives and what happened to them.

So it just felt imbalanced to me, but I didn't have language to articulate that, and really, for many years, nobody that I could have these kind of nuanced conversations about this with.

I want to name [this] kind of reporting, and celebrate it and bring it into the conversations of traditional narrative journalism. … We have had this power dynamic within media where we are the ones who can come in and take a story from a person or a place and feel like we have, like, the ownership over it all. That's been the sort of traditional framework of media. "We are the reporters; we know best."

So much of what we've come to understand literary journalism to be — I think that so much of that work is valuable. But I also think some of it has been historically exploitive. And I also think that if people were able to learn these tools and understand it, but also bring their own perspectives, like as somebody from the community, and do more of that kind of reporting, merging of the reporting and the written, first-person [essay], [then] we could have all the more  powerful stories.