Tossed into the marathon
By Jasmine Johnson | Clarion Managing Editor
Seattle Times reporter Paige Cornwell adjusts her screen and shoves her dog over to the other couch cushion so she can focus on the Zoom call. It’s 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night, but she squeezes in a quick interview before her next meeting.
Moving from her cubicle plastered with photos from the month she spent in India to her living room was not the ideal workspace switch, but Cornwell had to accommodate along with the rest of her coworkers. The coronavirus may be in full swing, but the news must still be published.
How does an average day working from home differ from one in the newsroom? How has your day-to-day work changed?
I cover the east side, which is a region of Seattle. It includes Redmond, Bellevue and Kirkland as well. In the past, I would often go to those places, hang out for the day and work remotely a lot. So it’s very different because I’m staying in one place. And no commuting, and it’s like a specific portion of my day is gone, too. So it’s very different, very hard to get used to.
How do you stay proactive and brainstorm creative story ideas when most are related to the coronavirus in some way?
Yeah, that’s hard because it seems like everything is related to the coronavirus at this point. So really focusing on the human element and how people are being impacted directly. That seems to help with the creative part, not just like, ‘Oh, restaurants are down,’ or, ‘Oh, this income is down,’ but actually looking at how these people are being directly affected.
If you had to pick one of the stories you were most proud of that you’ve written during the pandemic, what would it be and why?
We’ve done a lot of stories now on nursing homes and how nursing homes have been really the epicenter of everything that’s happened, and we were able to do our own list of every nursing home that had had a positive case, which took a really long time and a lot of phone calls. But we felt it was really important for the public, so we finally published that. It took us weeks and weeks to figure that out, but it finally came out a few days ago. We’ve been working on several different stories related to nursing homes since then, like three weeks altogether, but it’s an ongoing look at this point. Not ending.
Did you say one of your family members was in a nursing home, too? How does that personal aspect of it affect how you write about it?
Yes, my mom was in a nursing home — or assisted living, which becomes a nursing home — three years ago now, and I’d actually thought about moving her to an assisted living facility in Seattle hopefully soon. And one of the places I thought would be really nice for her had positive cases, so that’s certainly, certainly on hold for now.
Do you find covering the pandemic more emotionally draining than covering other news events? How do you care for your mental health?
I think at the beginning of this, I was thinking of it very much as a typical breaking news story where something really bad happens and then dealing with the repercussions of it afterward. And I realized at some point that this is not a sprint, this is a marathon, which I’m not really used to. So once I sort of got that in my brain, it was a lot easier to say, ‘Okay, I can decompress.’ Because in typical breaking news situations, you’re thinking, ‘I’ll work work work, and I’ll take time off later,’ but with this, we have no idea when this is going to end.
What would you advise future journalists in covering a story of this magnitude?
Recognize that you’re in a very unprecedented situation, so any advice you get, no one really knows what’s going to happen in a day, a week, a month, a year. So take everything we say with a grain of salt. Really just work on documenting your life right now, this very unique time. So much is happening so quickly that you can sometimes lose sight of that one story or that one thought you have. So really, it might be something trivial now, but you’ll want to look back on it later.
Documenting life as it happens and telling the whole truth to an audience. That’s what journalism is all about, and that’s what Cornwell encourages journalists to continue to do during the pandemic. It may feel a bit like being tossed into a marathon of coverage when news brief sprints were the only practice run, but reporters must adapt and overcome in order to fulfill their roles and serve their communities.
