Deciding the right journalism problem to solve: How finding empathy might help clear the fog
I had imagined hundreds of times how I was going to spend a year at Stanford University as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow long before I came here. I was going to create a supercomputer tool for journalists in China to search public records more effectively and liberate them from laborious digging in their already harsh newsgathering environment.
But the first question I confronted during my orientation was: Am I solving the right problem?
This question is an existential one, which not only plunged me in deep self-doubt for quite a while, but it also has disrupted my plan ever since — in a good way.
‘Ambiguity tolerance’
My original project was: How might we help journalists in China search and use public records more effectively and push for greater government transparency?
After several rounds of merciless “why laddering,” a mental exercise that forces a researcher to peel off layers of decorative phrasing until unexpressed motives are revealed, I realized what I really wanted. It was not so much about pushing for greater government transparency but about helping my fellow journalists use existing public records more effectively, by digging deeply below the surface to find problems and evidence for their reporting. Therefore, I rephrased my question as: How might we help journalists in China with limited sources of information expand their capacities to discover underexplored issues and conduct cross-verification?
It was the closest I could get to clarify my motives, but I knew it was still too vague, because I could not even give it a folder name on my computer or create a label for a binder. So, I named it “THE PROJECT,” which has since served as a bold reminder to me every day that I am wandering in the fog.
While many researchers say that it is normal, and in fact, necessary to feel ambiguous at this point, it is easier said than done for me to develop what they call “ambiguity tolerance,” which is the “tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as desirable.” Nevertheless, I decided to start with “Empathize,” the first of the six stages of iterative thinking modes introduced by the Stanford d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
Prepare to find empathy
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, empathy is the “ability to understand other people’s feelings and problems.” In other words, empathizing is about finding out whether my problem is only mine or indeed shared by my fellow journalists in China. I need to find out what they need.
Design strategist and author Erika Hall in her book “Just Enough Research” lists a number of “data” a researcher needs to collect about her users at this need-finding stage. These include what the participants want to accomplish (goals); what is most important to them (priorities); what actions they take to meet their goals (tasks and habits); and how they interact with others when doing their tasks (relationships and environment). A number of design thinking professionals suggest that the researcher should entice as many stories as possible and never interrupt the interviewee. Hall even says that the first rule of this type of user interview is “never ask anyone what they want.”
However, as a television journalist, I am best at asking straightforward questions such as “What do you want?” I am trained to listen to 20-second-long soundbites and interrupt my interviewee when they are drifting too far. I aim to roll my camera no longer than 10 minutes for each interview I conduct. Now, that type of formal process no longer seems to apply.
For example, in my first draft of the questions I wanted to ask journalists in China about their perceptions of the quality of the public records they use. I wrote: When you reference statistics, how much do you trust the authenticity of the numbers?
When I showed it to my JSK colleague Guilherme Amado, an outstanding Brazilian investigative journalist, he immediately pointed out: “This is a journalistic question, not an empathy-finding question.” He then helped me rephrase it as: Tell me about an experience where you had to reference official statistics.
After another four drafts of questions, I cut the number of questions from a dozen to just a few ones that would prompt follow-up questions. I was almost ready.
Rich stories
To my surprise, recruiting journalists to interview turned out to be the easiest step. Within less than two weeks, I talked to more than a half-dozen Chinese journalists: They are all seasoned reporters with an average of seven to eight years of experience. They come from both national and local news organizations, state and more market-oriented media as well as a foreign news agency. Each of my Skype interviews lasted about an hour.
Finding the contexts and core figures of a story is the most time-consuming and least efficient part of their job, they said. A business reporter who specializes in China’s monetary policy often has to trace the earliest date of a particular policy. She said:
“The internal search engine of China’s Central Bank is probably the worst I have ever used. If you think about the importance of this agency and how many people are paying close attention to it, you’d be shocked by how out of order its search engine is. I often use my spare time just to search official documents on a particular topic and paste their links onto a spreadsheet in chronological order. Next time I need to reference such information I will just need to search my own little database… Every time I do this tedious work, I feel my eyes will turn blind soon.”
An investigative journalist said that being able to find sufficient government documents is crucial for her to establish credibility.
“I may be able to find one policy to back my reporting and establish my accusation of somebody’s violation of the rules, but often there are a series of laws or policies specifying this subject. As a reporter, I won’t feel sure about my reporting until I have read all the relevant policies. But government websites don’t seem to have such functions of aggregation. If there were some algorithms that would recommend relevant policies or laws to me and even sort them out [by different issuers] as soon as I entered a search item, that would be so convenient for me.”
However, given the immense difficulties in doing good journalism, my interviewees strived for information.
One reporter told me that once a colleague of hers was investigating an anonymous tip of a possible cover-up of a mining disaster by local officials. The first and foremost difficulty for him was to find the exact location of this alleged mining disaster, since the source refused to reveal it. The journalist started to call all the hotels and guesthouses in the region to ask about their vacancies; his logic was if there had been a mining disaster, the local officials would have had to relocate the miners and their families immediately. Where would they go? The local hotels. When he found that all the hotels in a small town were suddenly full, he proved his logic and located the collapsed mine.
Surprises
While some patterns and themes regarding searching government documents started to emerge from my interviews, I was surprised to find that “collaboration,” especially among journalists from different news organizations, was a prevailing practice in newsgathering.
One journalist said when he was investigating a major chemical explosion that killed 173 people at the Tianjin Port on China’s east coast in August 2015, he and other investigative journalists from different news organizations spontaneously met in the morning at their hotel to decide on and assign different directions of reporting. They met again at night to share findings and develop strategies for the next day. There was even consensus that nobody would scoop.
Although I’m not sure how I will incorporate “collaboration” into my project, I do feel that the fog hovering around me is starting to clear as I do more interviews. These vivid and detailed accounts have reassured me that I am trying to solve an important question and help my fellow journalists, and maybe that is what “empathy” is supposed to feel like.
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