Second January Post

Yesterday I went up to Middlebury College to sit in on a class taught by Sierra, the journalist I met at Emma in November. The class is called “Writing What You Don’t Know: Craft and Ethics in Narrative Journalism.” In it, students write two long form journalistic pieces, read and discuss magazine journalism, and learn about the ethics of journalism while grappling with it in their own projects.

In the class I sat in on, the students started off in three-person consultancy groups in which they discussed an ethical problem each student was having regarding the article they were working on. Each person in the group had a certain amount of time to explain the problem, and then the other two members had time to ask questions and discuss a possible solution—inasmuch as a concrete solution to an ethical problem in journalism is realistic! In the group I watched, I was so impressed at how thoughtful and invested every student was in discussing the problems that arose, which included one student’s difficulty in finding more sources to talk to her about class divisions at Middlebury, a naturally touchy subject; another student’s dilemma about how best to represent differing political opinions in her article about free speech on campus; and another student’s struggle in writing about sexual assault and misconduct against women of color at the school.

After the consultancies, the class discussed one of the readings for that day, Gay Talese’s “The Voyeur’s Motel.” Having read it in the car on the way to Middlebury, I came into the discussion feeling weirded out by its content, but the class’s focus on the construction and integrity of the piece made me see the real value to the reading as more than just a fascinatingly disgusting story. Listening to only a half hour of this kind of discussion made me feel more prepared to read magazine articles like “The Voyeur’s Motel” more intelligently.

Overall, the trip was incredibly exciting and eye-opening to me, not only in terms of my Signature project, but also in terms of my ability to read and think about journalism more insightfully and effectively. It was an amazing experience that I am so grateful I was able to have.