Interview with Meredith Hoffman, Freelancer
Meredith Hoffman is a freelance journalist who primarily writes about immigration. Some of her work has been featured on Vice, Politico, and the New York Times. Some responses have been edited for clarity.
How did you get into journalism?
From the time I was a child, I was influenced by my father, who is a writer and a journalist. We would play games where we would sit on the sidewalk or on a street in New York City and play “Do You See?” where we would see what details we could find about people and it was kind of a way of just perceiving the world around me that expanded into writing in a journal all the time, to starting my own newspaper when I was young. I realized that the passion never went away. I majored in English at Cornell, and I thought that I wanted to be a social worker. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I was writing for a bilingual newspaper in the Mission District of San Francisco. I realized that I got such a thrill out of going out, asking people questions, and writing their stories that I eventually realized that journalism was what I wanted to do.
Could you tell me more about the newspaper you started when you were younger?
Oh wow! Well… it was..something that I did in middle school. My friends and I would interview storeowners in the town, and we printed the issues out ourselves and made our own covers. It was not really a real newspaper!
How do you go about writing and researching for articles?
It’s [laughs] a variety of different things depending on the story. I guess that now I’m in a particular situation because I have developed sources in a beat [a topic] in a specific topic, with that topic being immigration. I’m constantly reaching out to people in immigration, whether it be immigration lawyers or people who work in the government who I’ve established contacts with, immigrants themselves, and activists that can speak to me. I’m constantly reading what’s going on and I’m constantly checking in with them. And they will come to me and tell me when something is developing, changing, or if there is a concern which I should look into. And then I will go on the ground and interview people at a specific site. Usually it’s a combination of interviewing people at the place and people who are experts on the topic on the phone,sending emails out to people, and seeing what they know, in terms of data related to the story and then combining it all together, and at the top [lede]. I will either just start with the news itself or an anecdote about a person that is being affected by a policy change.
What about procrastinating/losing focus?
Oh it happens all the time! It was just happening to me today! So, one really helpful thing about journalism is that usually there are deadlines, so you establish a deadline with your editor, or if there is something that has just happened, and you know it needs to get out as quickly as possible, there really is no room for procrastination in these cases. Now, when you have more flexibility, that’s definitely when I take much longer on things, and procrastination happens to all of us, so sometimes it is helpful to have a conversation with someone. I sometimes go to my father, and turn over ideas with him, or I go to an editor, and reflect on why I’m procrastinating. This is usually because the story isn’t clear enough in my head. So, a lot of times planning out helps. I can make out an outline of the structure of the article and it’s more approachable than just writing from start to finish.
What is you favorite article that you have written? Or is there a certain type of article that you enjoy writing more? Why?
I’ll start with a topic that I enjoy writing about and it’s about one of the biggest articles that I’ve ever done. One of my favorite articles that I wrote was a few years ago, when I was the first journalist to go inside the family immigration detention center in south Texas called the Karnes County Residential Center. This was when our government under the Obama administration had just started detaining mothers and children who were coming to the U.S. from central America to seek asylum. This administration was holding them for 11 months. These were mothers with small children, and even babies. I got to write about one woman that I interviewed, the scene inside, as well as delve into the policy and what was going on. My favorite type of article is typically one where I get to blend narrative and intimate character portrayals with analysis of policy and laws. My favorite topic that I’ve written about [just because it’s so disturbing to me, and that I continue to write about] is family detention.
Do you have a favorite book?
I don’t know if I have a definitively favorite book, but one book that I recently read that has been one of my favorites is called Exit West. It’s a novel that looks at the immigrant/refugee experience through a slightly fantastical lens where this couple [you don’t know exactly what country they live in], but, you know that they have to flee because war is breaking out. Every time that they flee it’s dangerous, but rather than getting on a boat or crossing the border, they enter the country in a different way which maybe I should hold back on revealing so you read it!
