Reporter Roundtable Transcript: May 22, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:00):
We have reached the final session of the 2025 covering workplace mental health training, but in many ways it’s just the beginning. I think this session is going to be an opportunity for all of us to pull together all of the conversations that we’ve had around mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, and we’re going to hear from some seasoned reporters who are going to help us and researcher who will help us bring this topic together. First, we’re joined by Caroline Colvin, reporter, who has covered culture and accountability in the DEI space for HR Dive since 2021. Their work includes workplace mental health coverage and has evolved to include federal and state compliance regarding DEI and I take pride in also saying that they were also an NPF widening the Pipeline Fellow in 2024. Next to Caroline is William Wan. He’s a Washington Post investigative reporter who is known for his high-impact narrative stories.
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Williams’ coverage of mental health during the pandemic contributed to U.S. government action and an unprecedented increase in federal funding. And we’re also joined by Tori Espensen. She’s the media training manager at the American Academy for the Advancements of Science’s sideline portal. Her work helps scientists and journalists work better together to bring accurate, engaging scientific evidence to general audiences. This session is sort of a cornerstone in the NPF training strategy when we bring journalists who’ve done sort of best practice work in the topics that we’re focusing on, along with someone who can help us think about research and pulling it all together. These are the gold standard sessions for NPF trainings. I think you’re going to walk away from this session with tons of inspiration and insight about reporting on this topic. So we’re going to start with Caroline, and then we’ll take it from there.
Caroline Colvin/HR Dive (00:02:32):
Yay. I’m so excited. I’m chomping at the bit to talk about this just because I feel like being an HR reporter was not on my paper card when I was in J School, and so now I’m very deep in the beat and I’m just excited to share it. So yeah, this is the covering mental health at work presentation. So for starters, we’ll talk about background of the landscape, cultural trends I’ve noticed in reporting, waste approach coverage, and then the service journalism element because I love being able to offer people actionable things to do, especially when it comes to mental health. So a bit about me. My name’s Caroline Colvin. My pronouns are they them. I’ve been a reporter for HR DIVE since 2021, so I think I’m coming up on my fourth year anniversary students. I started in May, which is wild to think about. I started out as a DEI reporter mainly, but as you guys know, from everything ever happening lately, compliance is a huge aspect of DEI coverage. And I think something that’s interesting that I started in 2021, so we were still in lockdown, still navigating remote work. And of course, mental health was a big part of why people were saying, oh, we should actually stick with remote work and hybrid work. And I’m an NPF fellow, NPF stand here, and I went to Syracuse University, so that’s my baseball card.
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So about the background of the landscape, as I’ve said before, it’s been increasing the spotlight since the pandemic. People initially were turning to remote work so that they could keep one another safe physically, but of course people were like, oh, this is actually great because I could have flexibility. I can have a more fluid schedule, I can tend to my caregiving needs without feeling squeezed when it comes to the schedule. And of course, burnout was a big thing too, but not just for people who were desk workers, people who were on the front lines and healthcare people who were in service jobs. I think that was also compounded with that fear of getting sick and then all of a sudden being like, I still have to show up to work in person every day. I think that’s important to talk about as someone who’s an HR reporter, because I think a lot of the thought leadership and studies deal with people who have knowledge worker jobs who are at desks, but there are some people who aren’t returning to work. They’ve been at work this whole time. So I think that’s also really important to think about. And I think they get left out of a lot of conversations.
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Let’s see. So it was digital first work. People were like, okay, the flexibility is great. As people return to the office, a lot of people who have been advocating for staying at home are still saying, Hey, this is detrimental to us. And I feel like that’s something I’ve seen in studies even prior to the mandates becoming more popular. So people who are caregivers for their kids, caregivers for their parents, people with disabilities, of course, people who are immunocompromised, and a lot of black and brown people have been like, Hey, I’m not experiencing microaggressions at work every day. This is nice. I would like to keep working from home. So I think there’s also a lot of tension between the workers and the employers. This will be great for morale, and it’s like, will it be great for morale for everybody or only for a certain group of people?
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So I think when it comes to covering this, I think it’s important to report on this because I think sometimes if you just look at the news that’s coming out, it’s like, oh, this major Fortune 500 company is doing RTO. These companies like JP Morgan for example, or other more conservative approaches to work, they’re like, oh, everyone should be in the office five days a week. Again, it’s back to normal, but our world has been changed so much that it’s kind of hard to just be back to normal. So I think it’s important to cover that to kind of counter some of the maybe mainstream narratives that are being pushed on people.
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So approaches to coverage, being an HR publication and our reader is mostly being HR people. We have a compensation and benefits vertical and a newsletter that comes out every week. So something that’s been interesting is talking about how focus on mental health can actually be a good thing when you’re attracting new workers. It’s like, oh, if you say we do hybrid work or we’re a digital first workplace, obviously that’s going to attract people to want to work with you. So I think for my specific audience, it’s been really interesting talking about that being a benefit. And part of someone’s total rewards package should be like, okay, our pay is competitive. Maybe it’s not the best, but you never have to come into the office. You never have to spend money on commuting. So I think our readers really value seeing that counter argument for everyone in the office five days a week.
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And differences in generational approach is really interesting. I’m sure some of y’all experience this anecdotally depending on where you’re born, but I’ve seen a lot of research and studies about Gen Z kind of leading the charge on saying, Hey, I need a mental health day, and not lying about it, wanting to have better work life balance. And other generations either maybe being affronted by that or learning from that or both. Sometimes yes, and I think something that’s also interesting in coverage is writing columns too. When I was a couple years ago, I had an employee experience column, so I would write about current events or discourse that was happening online about mental health and work. And I think it was a nice way for me to have less straight laced rigid reporting and be able to infuse a little bit of my personality and my work, especially since I came from a lifestyle reporting background.
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So I was glad that my editors were like, we encourage y’all to write columns about certain things. And I think being a business journalist when you’re writing columns, I feel like maybe it’s not necessarily my opinion that I’m expressing so much as I’m trying to add the human element back to HR is how I look at it. So yeah, service journalism. So a lot of the stories I’ve written, it’ll be like, okay, this study came out and it said X, Y, Z about workers and how they’re feeling about mental health. And because we’re writing to HR professionals, in my case, I’m sure this is broadly applicable also, it’s kind of like, so what do we do now? People are burned out, people are depressed, people aren’t using their benefits. How do you remedy that? And I think what’s been helpful is in my case, interviewing either HR people or mental health advocates just to see what their solutions.
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One of the stories I did, I interviewed someone at Comm for Business and they were talking about how they have a mindful managers type of training. So it’s like, okay, we have the experts and they’re saying things are bad for workers and everyone’s stressed and burned out, but there’s something that you can do. So I think it’s always nice to do that. And also too, I’m really mindful of just not being a mouthpiece for vendors also. So I always try to interview consultants and then people who are HR people who may not even be in the space but are the gold standard for providing flexibility or encouraging psychological safety at work and being like, it’s okay to speak up. It’s okay to ask for a day off. It’s okay to figure out how you can take some time off for yourself beyond just a day off.
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And then going back to the employers just I think about this all the time because I’m an HR pub reporter, it’s kind of like cyclical. It’s like workers are expressing distress. It shows up in studies. Studies kind of legitimize maybe what people may think is just anecdotal evidence, and then our readers can understand what the climate is. I’m sure y’all heard about the great resignation and people quitting in droves because they’re like, I am fed up with everything. So I think sometimes having studies can help bolster that anecdotal evidence and then the best practices. I think that’s my favorite part of what I do. I feel like I just want people to have a good time at work. I wish no one had to work, to be honest. I wish we could all eat fruit and paint and read books, but until we get there, we’re working.
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And I want us all to have a good time at work. And I think this also ties into me reporting on DEI. If we’re going to show up and go to work every day, I want people to not feel terrible and not feel depressed. So however that looks, I want to help people do that. There’s just a couple of my stories. Burnout is a big theme. This was a more research focused story. I interviewed a researcher and then I interviewed an HR consultant. This story, I think this was mostly about burnout also. And I interviewed someone who was a part of a training org. Again, I think training comes up a lot, like partner with the organization that are mental health experts. And that’s a great way to start the conversation, show people that you’re comfortable talking about it. This one was the comp for business story.
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So I interviewed as someone for a comfort business. I think I also interviewed another HR pro about how that looks because I think it could be easy to be like, oh, just do a training, it’ll be fine. But I think it’s helpful to talk about things beyond trainings. And then benefits is a big theme. Again, a lot of research shows, and I’m sure maybe you all have experienced, you don’t even know all the benefits you have, you’re not taking advantage of employee assistance programs, things like that. So I think something that’s free for anyone to do is just educate their workforce about what’s available to them if they’re already paying into their benefits. And so I just told you my whole life story in terms of my beat. So I know we’re doing questions at the end. But yeah, that’s my presentation. So thank you. I really appreciate you listening.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:12:08):
Great. I’m really glad to get to talk to you guys and recognize some of your names from the stories I’ve read. So I’m William Wan. I’m in the investigative unit of the Western Post, but I’ve done a lot of different things. I’ve done three years on health and science, especially during the pandemic. I was one of their main reporters for that. I’ve covered national security. I was in China for four years. This you’ll see from the presentation, my kids have taught me how to use AI art, which was a very dangerous development. So I guess my approach, I thought I would focus what I talk about on really practical tips and the kinds of stories I do are they’re mostly narratives about people, about usually one person, but sometimes people in really fraught situations. And I was going to make an argument for that approach.
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Not every story lends itself to that. Those stories are often very hard to do and require a lot of sacrifice, both from the subjects you’re writing on and from yourself. This is my argument is how to think about pain. So when I started writing about mental health, it was not something my editors wanted. No one was asking for it. And then when I tried to do it, I think there was a feeling that it is like a squishy, touchy feely thing that is hard to put accountability to, hard to actually document the pain and suffering of it. And so for me though, the reason I was really interested in it is my own experience with pain. And I thought, we tend to think of pain as this terrible thing, like something to avoid or to sanitize. And my thought on pain is that it’s so ever present in everybody’s life.
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And so instead of running from it or dancing around it, we should embrace it. And the one foundational truth I’ve found in my reporting is that there’s so much beauty and pain and so much wisdom, and maybe most importantly, power. There’s power to change the world, power to change other people and also power to change yourself. And so we should run toward pain. That would be my argument. In practical terms, like what this looks like I spent, before I covered health and science, I actually spent three years, two or three years doing nothing except for mass shootings. It was a really rough job. I had a packed bag at my desk, and the moment something came across CNN, I would book a flight. I would be on the plane within an hour and I would be on the ground. And the thing that taught me, I had all these really, really tough, I would always find myself in front of a house and about to knock on the door and trying to figure out why am I talking to these people and what possible reason do they have to talk to me?
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And I learned from that experience to sit in my car very deliberately and just take a few minutes and figure out for myself, what is my motivation for doing this? Because it’s not only victims, it was often the families of the shooters. And this is the moment when they’re just finding out their brother had done this horrible thing. And so I found that moment in the car really valuable. I do this on the phone too before I make a call. I really think through, because I think there’s a lot of power in knowing why you’re asking them to talk to you and really interrogating what is this story about so that you don’t feel like a parasite, you don’t feel like you’re hiding your real motivations. And if you’re really honest with yourself, you become much more persuasive when you’re asking them because you believe in what you’re doing and then you understand why they would talk to you.
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This would look like this is what it looks like. I thought, shoot, I just had this story. So I haven’t done workplace specific mental health stories. I just published something yesterday and I wish I had done that before, so it could be part of this instead. But I thought the closest thing would be the story I did about Yale and how there were, I had heard this tip that these people, the administrations over decades had been pushing out students as soon as they showed any sign of being depressed or suicidal for liability reasons. And not only would you be kind of expelled, you would have to be forced to reapply, you’d have to get letters of reference. It was like you had never been there before and you had to become a student all over. You’d even have to pay an application fee to become a student again.
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And so I was trying to find students willing to talk to me about it. And one of the frustrating things in thinking through the story is there had been coverage of it. There had been 20 years of coverage about this phenomenon and nothing had changed. And so the bar I set for myself is like, if I’m going to spend several weeks, several months on this story, I really want it to actually make a difference and how is that going to happen? And so I thought about who I am and what I bring to the story. I do stories that are more, the power is not necessarily in the investigation, it’s in the emotional truth that I bring to the story. And so I designed the story thinking, setting a really high bar of I want to find a student who has just been expelled from Yale, is in the process of begging Yale to let them back in even as they’re suffering from all the trauma of having gone through a suicidal attempt, all of that.
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It’s really hard because what student in that vulnerable position would want to talk. But I thought following one student’s journey from beginning to end rather than many different students or rather than using figures or experts, would have a bigger impact and create some kind of change that hasn’t been possible in the years past. So I contacted so many students in a way that I was trying to not pressure them, they’re just been through trauma. I wanted someone who was willing to talk to me. And so in that whole sitting in the car thinking about what you’re going to say, I would say I sat before I sent this text, I sent several versions of this. I guess this would be my sitting in the car conclusion, this is what I’m trying to do. My hope is to let other people know they’re not alone, to shed light on the problems. I wanted them to get a sense of who I am. That’s why I included this part, the sensitivity that’s involved. I understand it and it really matters to me. And then usually what I would tell them is none of this is on the record. We don’t have, I’m not even interviewing you. I just want for us to get to know each other and see if this is something we could do together. Yeah,
Julia Carpenter/Independent (00:19:44):
Thank you for sharing that. I took a photo of it because it’s so helpful and instructive. I wanted to backtrack just one moment. I see that you mentioned Miriam here, that Miriam may have mentioned. How did you find this student to start and what was your process in finding other people that you could potentially include? And how did you talk about that with your editor ahead of time?
William Wan/Washington Post (00:20:08):
I usually think of it as an auditioning process where I try to be very low stakes in reaching out to people. I said, I just want advice and guidance on the story I’m trying to do. Could we talk off record about it? And then for this story, I really didn’t want pressure applied, and so I just went from word of mouth from one student to another. Do you know of someone who has gone through the same thing you have? What were they facing? Would they be willing to talk off record? And then as I got to know each student, I was trying to get a sense of how comfortable they would be, what their setup is, and whether they had a motive to really talk. And so the one that I ended up writing about was a student who had been in that exact, she had just been kicked out. She was in the process of reapplying. She was really angry with how she had been treated.
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This is what she told me. I didn’t include it. She had said something about how in our first conversation we met, one thing that’s important to in meeting with people who had just been traumatized I found is giving them power. I asked her where she would be comfortable talking. I asked what she would be comfortable talking about, and then I told her, even in this off record conversation, I want to ask these things that are going to be difficult because I want to understand. Tell me when we get to a point that is not comfortable for you, and we can pause and we can wait. We can figure other ways around that. But that was important. And so this is the story that ended up publishing. We ended up using just her first initial. She has a very unique identifying name.
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Yeah, this first point. So this rule of first do no harm arm. I think this is what I was talking about when you were saying how do you find and persuade someone to talk to you? The flip side of this thing though is I have found in myself, and I see in young reporters too, this, you want to be so sensitive and careful, but you can also get in your way in thinking that way of being not wanting to re-traumatize them. During the pandemic, I wrote a story about suicidal teenagers and one father I interviewed, this is very early on in my covering of mental health, and I was trying to be really sensitive. And he said, you keep dancing around these questions. You should ask me what you really need for this story, because the worst possible thing has happened to me. My son is dead.
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Nothing you say is going to hurt more than that. The reason I’m talking to you is because I want to help other people. So you go and ask me and me crying doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong. Just because I’m crying or feeling pain, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be asking these things. From that conversation on, I really tried to push as much as I can because you have to think of it as you’re honoring what they’re trying to accomplish and talking to you. And so you don’t want to pull punches and you want to go into difficult spaces. This is the thing that makes it, okay, I find I did a story about the widow of a COVID, a person who had died from COVID, and now she was left with two kids at a mortgage she couldn’t afford, and her life was falling apart.
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Her oldest son was suicidal. And I kept keeping this in mind. I kept pushing for access to different things, like even sitting in on her son’s therapy sessions. And I told her, you should tell me where the line is and when you start to feel uncomfortable. And she did, and I pushed and she pushed and we found a way to, I went with her to her son’s therapy and sat outside the office. And when they came out, I asked them to share with me what they were comfortable sharing with me from that session. And that was the scene. That’s how we built the scene.
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So the reason for this kind of work, I think with mental health especially, it’s very easy to do superficial work that just talks to experts or just talks to the family of loved ones who are affected by mental health. But I think the power in writing about mental health is like intimacy, like getting to the heart of the people who are suffering and sharing that with readers. And so this had been written about for 20, 30 years, but this story, it did something none of the stories had ever done before. The day after our story came out, the president of Yale issued this letter to the entire university basically saying our story was a misrepresentation of everything that denying most of what happened, but at the same time saying, we’re actually going to add an entire new counseling center. We’re going to add this many staffers. And then there was a class action lawsuit filed by students based on our story. Because of that, Yale actually changed every single policy that we had laid out in our story and changed their entire approach to student mental health.
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Okay, this was one other point I was just going to make is so when you’re making that initial contact with a possible subject of your story, I find myself and young reporters often you try to find things in common. Oh, you have a dog. I have a dog. Oh, you lost someone, I lost someone. I think that’s actually the wrong approach. I think you come at it because in many of these cases, you can’t understand that pain. What they’re going through is really, really, so instead of saying, I understand, I find myself saying, I want to understand. That’s why I’m asking these very difficult questions to take that approach. I used to also be afraid of coming off as a stalker. I know all of us, we naturally will do all the research we can before we interview someone, but I find it actually is better to be transparent.
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They see the importance you place on their story and how much power you think it holds. That’s why you’re investing all this time in it. Oh, I get ghosted a lot with writing about mentally fragile populations. It’s tough. The Yale story, the main character, we ended up talking to 50 different students, but the main character stopped responding to my texts several times and it led to these sleepless weeks for me that were so horrible. And I’m imagining all the things I said wrong, all the things that could be going wrong, the entire story scrapped. And then she would just text back two, three weeks later and be like, she was just busy. There were things going on in her life. So you just have to be, it’s not about you. Okay, one last lesson. I’m running a little long, so I would just say one last thing. Tip is to not be afraid to hurt a little.
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I covered China for three, four years. I moved my entire family there and I did it because I thought it was this. I really wanted to help people. There’s a lot of suffering going on then and now in China from the Communist party, and I thought I was there to make a difference. And then when we left, it was because of health reasons for my son, and I thought you told yourself you’re going there to help people. The second your own family encounters any kind of pain you’re leaving, did that really mean anything? It made me really question what I do. In the same way mental health, some of these stories have for three, four years after I left China, I couldn’t even read the smallest brief about China because it felt like I’d betrayed something or done something wrong. And then later on as I started covering other topics, I realized that it’s not a sign that something went wrong, but a sign that I was doing it right.
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I cared so much. I cared a lot. And in the same way, mental health, there are times in stories when I feel really lost and it’s really hard. And I think that’s a sign that things are going right. You’re going into places that are very difficult. You’re writing about things that matter to you and others, and that’s why it’s hard. And so this is a story I did about a woman who was struck by lightning, just a few yards from the White House. Four people were killed. She was the only survivor. She was in incredible pain to the point where she wanted to die and was suicidal. And she described to me how she would just lie there screaming in pain for hours at a time, and then after every scream she would whisper to herself. But I’m grateful. And I kept asking her, what do you mean when you say that?
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What are you telling yourself? Or what does that mean? And she was telling me how she was trying to explain it meant other people, everyone else had died and she was the only one left. And she was grateful for the chance even to experience that pain. She was grateful for everything she was working through and what she was learning about herself through that pain. And it just like what I mentioned to you guys about the China thing, it helped me view that it put it in perspective and it helped me finally make peace with the pain that I felt about that and other things in my life. And so I would just say we all get into journalism to try to make a difference or try to change the world. And I think there’s this beauty in journalism where if you’re open to it, if you’re open to the pain, you allow it to change you too. You become a different, better, more whole person in the process of these stories that you do. So this is the quote from the story that I included, but I think that’s it from me.
Tori Espensen/SciLine (00:31:38):
Yeah. Hello. So I’m going to be talking today about using scientific studies in particular in your reporting how to do it well, how to do it accurately. And I’ll just give you a heads up that I’m going to have several slides that are just kind of lists of questions you can ask. So you feel free to take or take pictures of those so you have them as references. So the first thing that I really want to emphasize is that when you’re thinking about scientific studies, about research studies, you don’t have to report a whole story on a single study. And in fact, a recurring theme that will come up is that I strongly caution you against as much as possible writing stories about single studies, right? So that’s the story that this new research came out, the researchers did this, here’s what they found, what it’s going to mean.
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And I highly recommend avoiding using studies in that way. Instead, you can look for studies, look to studies for evidence that you can insert into broader stories. So that story about the suicidal student at Yale may benefit while it’s focusing on her may benefit from the voice of a researcher or a study that shows the effects on mental health when universities aren’t supportive of those things. And so it’s not the focus of the story, it’s just one more line of evidence, one more thing that you’re using to back up your story. You can also use new studies that have come out as a news peg to cover bigger phenomenon. There are a lot of things that are happening, particularly when we think about this mental health space that are not exactly new. These are ongoing issues. And it can sometimes be hard to sell an editor on something that what’s the why now?
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Why this story now component? And so new studies can be a really great way to say, Hey, this new study came out. But then you go more in depth about the problem or about the larger trend or pattern that might be seeing, or more importantly say more importantly, also importantly, the trends and patterns of research, what their research is saying in general, because it is really, really important to remember that science is a process. It is not a thing. It is not a collection of facts. So when we say trust the science, we’re talking about trusting this process and that process is iterative.
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It moves continually closer to the truth. But no one single study is the truth. Capital T, capital T, which is why I recommend not reporting on single studies as much as you can is in that way. There’s a lot more room for the findings to change or other research to disprove it or whatever it may be. So focusing on the trends and patterns in literature as opposed to single studies. And if you do that, you can actually use studies not just to provide evidence for your particular story, but also as a demonstration of the scientific process and sort of how that iterative process works in a time where that is something the general public is not doing so hot at. So that can be a really, really useful way is if you focus on these trends in literature as a whole to display what that scientific process actually looks like.
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I’m actually going to skip this slide. So to include studies in your reporting, you need to make sure that it is a study worth including, I know I cautioned you against writing about single studies, but I do recognize that sometimes editors want you to do that. So you also want to make sure the study is worthy of a story. And one thing that you’ll see me emphasize over and over and over again from here on out is that you never have to report on a study or include a study in your reporting on your own. And in fact, you shouldn’t do that. There are experts, there are researchers. You can always, and you should always include those outside sources, outside comments on any particular study. And so these are some questions that either you can ask when you’re looking at a study or you can ask an outside researcher to determine whether it’s worthy of including in your coverage.
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The first one is does the type of study support the findings? So for example, if it’s an animal study and they’re making claims about what it means in humans, that type of study does not support the conclusions that they’re coming to. If it’s an observational study, which means they’re just looking at things as they currently are, they’re not changing anything, they’re not intervening in some way. You cannot draw causal conclusions from an observational study. So you want to make sure that the study supports whatever the findings and conclusions are. You want to take a look at how many subjects there were. The sample size, bigger is always going to be better, but how big is big enough is going to vary by field and circumstance and research method. So if it is super tiny, that’s going to be a red flag. But you can always ask an expert if the sample size is enough to draw the conclusions that the researchers do.
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You want to be aware of how the participants were selected and how that generalizes to the general population. A lot of times, for example, survey research, you’re going to get some bias in terms of who’s willing to fill out a survey or who is willing to, whether they’re the types of questions that people will answer honestly. So if you’re looking in one particular geographic region or in a particular population, if things are biased one way or the other, careful of generalizing to the general population, you want to look and see if any differences are the scientifically jargon term of statistically significant. This simply means that the researchers have deemed it acceptably likely that what they saw in the study reflects a real effect in the real world. That’s all it means. And there are different ways of writing about it in a paper that we won’t get into, but if there is not statistical significance, it’s not worth coverage.
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But you also want to ask if the difference is practically significant because just because something is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it actually matters. So if you’re looking at a study about whether listening to eighties rock music makes somebody more productive at work, and the researchers have half of their participants listen to eighties rock music every day, half of the participants listen to classical. The end of the study, every single person in the eighties rock group sent one more email per week than every single person in the eighties rock group because it’s every person that’s actually probably statistically significant. But is there actually a difference between sending 80 emails a week and sending 81 emails a week? Not really. So you want to be aware of that practical significance as well. And here, when you do talk to outside experts, they can also be the ones that can help you understand whether this study is worth covering or including.
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So here are a list of some of what I consider some of the most important questions to ask of an outside expert, not the study author about whether the conclusions are supported. They’ll know more about the methodology in the field than you were. It will So use that information. And this one here, will this finding stand the test of time? That’s super valuable. It’s going to give you a lot of insight into how this fits into the larger body of research and sort of what the kind of general zeitgeist is and how it fits in there. And I’ll wrap up with some quick tips for when you are including evidence from studies in your reporting or your reporting on a study in general. Again, don’t use causal language if the study itself isn’t causal, that goes back to that observational study type of thing. If you’re not directly manipulating something, you can say as opposed to X causes Y, you can say X is associated with Y, or people who X tend to also Y as a way of getting around that. And that’s more accurate.
(00:40:54):
Going back to what I was saying about how the process of science, it is iterative and self-correcting and continually gets closer to the truth by ruling other things out. A study can never prove anything. Never ever, ever use the word a study prove. You can say the finding or the study suggests, you can say the results are consistent with the idea of, but a study on its own is never going to prove anything because whatever it found depends entirely on the conditions of the experiment. And so it might not generalize to prove anything to that same idea about the iterative process of science. True breakthroughs are really, really rare. Even things that might seem like breakthroughs have tons of decades of research going on behind the scenes. So I really caution against using the word breakthrough in any of your reporting. And if a press release comes across your desk that heralds something as a breakthrough, be very, very wary of that as well.
(00:42:01):
Most often, science is a small step, not a giant leap at a time. Include whatever important caveats are necessary. You can find these. There will be a limitation section in every scientific paper. There should be in the discussion section, and hopefully you’ve spoken to that outside expert who has given you information about the limitations and caveats as well. And you want to make sure that you include those in your reporting to either temper people’s excitement or fear as necessary. And science can be a little bit tricky sometimes for those that don’t necessarily have a background in it. So you really want to make sure that you checking your understanding the entire way through that reporting process. So that includes during an interview asking the expert that you’re interviewing questions like, if I say X, would that be correct? Or what I’m hearing is Y, is that right?
(00:43:05):
And never worry about looking dumb, never worry about looking stupid. Always, always, always ask. Can you say that again? What do you mean? I’m not sure I understand. And then as you proceed through your reporting, make sure those experts ask them if they’re going to be available for follow-up questions so you can continue to check your understanding and hopefully lead to more accurate final stories. And if you have the ability, ask if that expert will be available for a fact check just to make sure everything is copacetic before you send it, before you submit. And so all in there. But I will say if you scan this little QR code, that will take you to sidelines science reporting tip sheets. We have a bunch of tip sheets there. There was a new one coming out every month including things like how to read a scientific study, how to vet scientific claims, how to interview scientific experts, all that good stuff. So with that,
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:44:11):
Thank you. I promised you three good conversations and I think we came through with that. So any questions? Let’s start.
Aneri Pattani/KFF Health News (00:44:23):
My question’s for William. So I think I have never reached out to a source and promise like, Hey, this story will have this impact. If you share this story with me, it’ll change this. I don’t think any journalist does that, but that is sort of an implicit message when we’re talking to people. Even the email you shared, I hope to shine light on what’s happening to students. And in some cases, your Yale story had a bunch of that impact. And so I imagine that felt rewarding and fulfilling for the source who participated. What happens in cases where you don’t have the impact? Not because reporting or writing was bad, but just there’s a lot of factors outside of our control. How do you deal with it as the reporter and how do you work? Do your sources react to that and how do you deal with them?
William Wan/Washington Post (00:45:12):
Yeah, I think reporters can have different philosophies on that, I guess. I think there’s, people warn about being crossing the line into advocacy versus journalism. I think as I’ve done more and more work, I’ve gotten a little less worried about that. I think some newsrooms are doing that as well. ProPublica, you look at, I feel like their philosophy is when people die, it’s a bad thing. We can all get behind that. So we can implicitly that can be a thesis of the story. It doesn’t have to be sure on one side or the side. The thing with sourcing is a little, I try really hard not to be, because you really don’t know what a story’s going to do. You can say the reason you’re doing it and the hopes that you have of doing this. And so when I talked to students, I said, we all know this is a problem, and people have known this as a problem for a long time.
(00:46:16):
My hope is that the story will do something to change that. And then the trickier thing though is I think usually if you’re doing that, there’s less of a chance of them being disappointed upfront. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. The trickier thing is your own expectations. I worked for three months on a story that just published a day ago, and it was great. It was like the most read story on our website. It was great. But there’s this crash that happens after any story where you feel like the world, like what? The world is still the crappy place. It is. I didn’t change that much. Nothing really has a trumpet. It’s about federal workers killing themselves in the middle of all of this mass firings and chaos. And Trump is, they’re still going to do what they’re going to do if people are still going to suffer.
(00:47:10):
And so I don’t know, that part is a little trickier. I try to tell myself with every story that success can be measured in different ways. It could be huge readership, it could have real world impacts. Sometimes it’s like I wrote a story about a transgender student who was suicidal and in the middle of all this stuff happening in her state, anti-trans laws. And there was one trans other student who read it and emailed me this long email. And if nothing else, that one person felt like they were not alone and they knew someone else was going through the same thing. So you had to look for success in different ways.
Amira Sweilem/ NJ.com (00:47:59):
Thank you all for speaking and being here today. I had a question about the email because I think I was sort of surprised by how warm it was. And I think that especially when I first started reporting, I was really concerned about coming off as biased or too invested. And so sometimes when I would reach out to sources, I would come off as very professional and cold and they would often say like, oh, you were so different when we met you in person. And I think I would just feel so nervous about sending emails that were warmer, I guess, because yeah, I just didn’t want to come off as unprofessional or biased or anything like that. I guess, how do you navigate that and concerns about coming off as biased or unprofessional, et cetera?
William Wan/Washington Post (00:48:46):
I would say I keep in mind any email could be leaked and shared with other people. So I try not to have bias, but I also, I think you wear many faces. I try to make all of them authentic. There’s different sides of me. If you see my email to the Yale Dean of Admissions, it was similarly very warm and on their side and saying, this is a problem all colleges struggle with. You’re in an impossible place. I want to understand how you guys have dealt with that difficult choice.
Amira Sweilem/ NJ.com (00:49:19):
But then I guess how, and both of those, that’s our whole job is to be as open-hearted to everyone as we can and open-minded. But then I guess, do you ever have concerns about, oh, they thought,
William Wan/Washington Post (00:49:36):
I try to be really transparent before I contact the administration. I told the main character that I’m going to talk to them. This is what I really want them to talk. Because without them, the story’s kind of just an attack on them. It doesn’t try to understand. So I tried to set that up. I also think empathy, at least for me, I’m not a terribly amazing investigative reporter in other ways like data. I’ve done some data stories. It’s not my power. Empathy is my superpower. So I try to use that to its maximum. And I’m not being duplicitous that moment in the car. I really do mean that you have to interrogate yourself. So I have that same conversation with myself before I reached out to Yale officials. I ask myself if I were them, there’s a possibility of a student killing themselves on your campus. All of the lawsuit implications that brings all of the, even that student itself, you can tell yourself, you’re doing this in the best interest of the student. I need to understand what exactly is the motivation here. So I try to wear different faces, but for them to be authentic, you deal with HR people, I’m sure, right? Yeah. That’s my nightmare.
Caroline Colvin/HR Dive (00:50:58):
It’s really hard because especially the higher up you go, especially Fortune 500 companies, they’re so media trained, they’re very cold, rigid. I stuck to the PR points we’ve gone over for the past hour. So I think that’s really difficult. But I think smaller businesses, and especially HR consultants, they’re a bit more honest and transparent, willing to say, we made mistakes, we messed up. I think especially reporting on DEI, so many people are so squeamish about going on the record these days about things. I mean, yeah, it’s tough sometimes for sure.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:51:30):
Do you struggle with the advocacy thing when — ?
Caroline Colvin/HR Dive (00:51:34):
Well, I think it’s a really interesting question. I think at the end of the day, no one wants a Title seven lawsuit, so I think that’s kind of the baseline. Whether or not you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing, at the end of the day, it’s a liability and a company could lose money. And I feel like you can’t really taking how you feel about it personally outside of that, I think that’s a big part of my DI coverage too. I cover a lot of discrimination suits and being like, okay, you can be racist if you want to, but it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand, 200,000, 500,000, 5 million in the case of Google the other day. So yeah, it’s tough sometimes.
Katie Langin | Science Magazine (00:52:15):
I’m Katie Langin, I’m a reporter and editor at Science. I cover the scientific workforce and sometimes struggle myself with wanting to make a difference, but also feeling kind of the emotional challenges of talking to people about really difficult parts of their career life. And so William, what you said resonated with me in terms of leaning into the pain and there’s good that comes from that. But I am wondering if you could talk at all about whether you also face, is it hard for you in terms of your own mental health to write those stories and other things that you do to cope with that?
William Wan/Washington Post (00:52:50):
We had all talked about whether to include self-care stuff. You were like, oh, we’ll be practical, they’ll get it from other places. I think I do a few things. I pace myself. I do this thing where I celebrate small victories. So anytime I do something that was hard, I will go to the nearest place where I can get barbecue ribs and I’ll buy half a rack. And they don’t have to be good. They can be the worst ribs in the world, but it’s like when you train dogs, you do the clicker because you can’t get them to snack fast enough. So I try to do that so that mentally I’m like, oh, I did something really hard that was successful. And then I have a really good support system. I’ve cultivated these friends I can call at any time just to talk about anything, even if it’s unrelated to the thing I’m struggling with. I keep a victory pile. So whenever I do a big story, there’ll be all these emails that come in and I print them out and actually keep them in my closet so that on really bad days I can go and look through and remind myself that these things make a difference and stuff. I dunno if you guys have,
Caroline Colvin/HR Dive (00:53:59):
I think I have a good support system helps. A lot of my besties are also journalists, so even if they’re on different beats, they can understand the distinct struggles in our industry. I think gas support system helps. I’ve started doing what you’re talking about, about having a list of victories. And so I have a work in Google doc of, I literally just started this week of good things that are happening in the journalism space for me. So I’m really excited about that.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:54:23):
That’s great.
Tori Espensen/SciLine (00:54:24):
And the other thing I’ll add for you in particular, Katie, is you come from a science background. You were the scientific workforce that you are now reporting on. So I think that keeping that in mind also differs from, it’s going to differ from a lot of journalists who are, they’re not necessarily seeing, this could have been my life. This was my life. And that’s going to be really hard as well of that empathy gets turned up till two, 1200. You have these conversations with the scientific workforce during the day, and then you go home and all of your friends from grad school and whatever are dealing with those same issues. And so I think I just want to call that out as a unique thing that is, I don’t have the answers to, besides the value of recognizing that that’s a unique situation and letting yourself know it’s a unique situation and that it is completely understandable that you would be struggling with this, that you would find it difficult because if you didn’t, that would be a red flag.
Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (00:55:41):
Hi, I am Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald with the Miami Herald. I have two questions. The first one’s for William. I noticed in the email you mentioned that they wouldn’t necessarily be going on record. Did you have that talk with your editor before approaching and at what point, how do you do the conversation of, I would like to interview officially on record without them feeling that you were trying to build this relationship just to get them to talk. And then the second question is, for all three of you, do you guys have any tips to help journalists find mental health stories that would really resonate with their communities? Especially like for example, in South Florida, it’s local, but I’m struggling to find interest for our readers in mental health and with SEO and Google and Clicks, that’s something that’s really challenging to pitch a story that you believe is important when your editor is just saying the numbers aren’t coming in.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:56:40):
Shoot, your first question was about —
Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (00:56:43):
On if you spoke to your editor before.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:56:47):
Oh, right, yeah.
Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (00:56:47):
And then how you do that conversation.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:56:49):
There’s different types of stories. So in my mind, I have three cooking burners often, and I’m doing two day story, two week story, two month stories. So on two day, two week stories, I wouldn’t necessarily do that. Everything’s off record, but on a really difficult story that I know is going to take time. Those first auditioning interviews, everything’s off record because the premise of it is genuine. I’m trying to understand what kind of story is even possible. And then when I have identified a few people that I think could be the main subjects, I tell them, this is the whole authentic, but also wearing a face thing is like I tell them the truth, which is, I’ve talked to 50 people at this point, and your story is the most compelling out of anybody. You have a way of turning what you have experienced into an incredibly eloquent quote, what you come from.
(00:57:51):
I think a lot of people would identify with it, I want to do, I think you have a really important and powerful story. I want to use that to make a difference and to tell that story. It’s something you should think about because it will involve. And then I’ll go into how much time, what we would have to do. I would want to be there for key moments that would, otherwise it would be weird to have someone around you when you’re crying or struggling with your parents or that kind of thing. So I have that.
There’s usually steps to getting toward that. But yeah, that’s how I approach it. What was your second question?
Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (00:58:32):
About how to pitch.
William Wan/Washington Post (00:58:33):
Oh, yeah.
Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald (00:58:37):
And questions for all three of you. Just tips for us to keep in mind when we’re doing mental health coverage, especially with Google search, SEO, and the pressure of clicks of how to find these critical stories, presenting them in a way that’ll actually get people to read them, especially if you’re in an area that there’s a high need for mental health support, but people are kind of skeptical or might not be actually reading it.
Tori Espensen/SciLine (00:59:04):
My answer to that question sucks. I’m just going to come out and say I’m sorry for what I’m about to say. But in that situation, what I would really recommend is thinking about what does resonate, what does matter to that community, and how can you tie mental health into it? So for example, if you live somewhere rural, there’s a lot of farmers. Well, how is mental health playing into the lifestyle or maybe the economy of people not showing up to work and how that’s affecting maybe, well, these mental health issues are using this much in tax dollars for thinking about what is the burden of the mental health issues on the things that people that are resonating with people. And it sucks that it’s not mental health on its own. And it’s like, well, let’s talk about the money aspect of it. But I think that’s one approach is to think of the downstream effects of mental health difficulties and whether there’s something there that would be more attractive to your readers.
Caroline Colvin/HR Dive (01:00:22):
You mentioned, you say you work for the Miami Herald. Yes. Well, my first thought was maybe there’s distinct populations that have distinct challenges. So maybe if there are Latinx specific issues, or maybe I can only speak from a black perspective, but if there’s cultural resistance to going to therapy, talking about it being open, maybe that’s a story. And then you can be like, look at the demographics of where we live. That’s definitely a story that’s going to resonate. And even though in your heart that it might resonate, I feel like having those numbers to support it and pitch it to your editor will be like, this percentage of our readership has this lived experience. It’ll be really cool to talk about it. And I think about Miami too. There’s a big hospitality industry. So maybe you can talk about people who work in hotels or in food service and be like, what are they going through right now? How is the economy affecting how they feel? How do they feel about, I don’t know difference with tipping and being able to have enough money to make ends meet. So I think there could be location specific things. Think about,
William Wan/Washington Post (01:01:17):
My advice would be concentration rather than dilution. So if you’re writing the Washington Post still doesn’t have a mental health reporter, even after I spent the last four years —
Tori Espensen/SciLine (01:01:32):
They don’t need one. They have you.
William Wan/Washington Post (01:01:33):
I don’t, that’s not, yeah, it’s terrible. But I would say when you’re writing about topics that people don’t care about, the thing to do is you have to be better at every aspect of the craft in order to, because your job is to make people care when they don’t. So sometimes my stories I’ve noticed with my editor, the headlines are more not sensational, but they grab the reader because the bar is harder. With mental health, I do, I make a list of 10 stories and then instead of doing all 10, I will only do two because I know that story has to be really, really good. I have to find exactly the right person in a really dramatic situation that will pull the reader in from the beginning. So concentrating all of both your skill and the stories so that you’re not doing that many, you’re just doing the ones that are actually going to resonate.
Lindsey Leake | Independent (01:02:34):
Yeah. Okay. Hopefully this is a good one to end on. I’m Lindsay Leake. I’m an accidental freelancer. I was just laid off from Fortune a few months ago, but my question is for William. I think we can, all of us here at this table, we know the excitement and the dread that comes with staring at a blank page. And you mentioned with your Yale story that you had 50 sources you had talked to and Lord knows how much other research you did. I mean, how do you start it just when you have an overwhelm of information like that?
William Wan/Washington Post (01:03:07):
Oh, that’s a really good question. There’s a long-term answer and a short-term answer. The long-term answer is you are going to get better at it. You should think of yourself as a marathon runner. So after running 50 marathons, you’re going to have a whole pregame routine. You’re going to have a whole recovery routine you’ll get better at. And so there won’t be procrastination or writer’s block. It’ll reduce over time just because you know what the next step is and you can easily get into that gear. The short term answer is I use some of these tricks. These are, some of the tricks I do is sometimes I have 500 pages of material and I put it all away and I sit down and I write either the top or I write the outline of these are the most, whatever’s left in my memory is the things that have seared there, and that’s the most important stuff, not the 500 pages.
(01:04:05):
And so I’ll sit there for the first day of writing and just, or the first half day and just do that without being able to look at anything or listen to any tape or anything like that. Another trick is I think of myself as the past me and I think about how the past me works so hard to find the people, convince them to talk, get the university officials to open up, figure out statistics, get documents they didn’t want me to have all so that I could be at this moment with this material to write. And that past me worked so hard. I don’t want to let that person down. He busted his ass and he ate so many ribs just so you could write. You can’t betray that. And some of them were really bad. So I try to think of it that way and that it’s a privilege. You work as a chef, you source all of this material so that you can be there with the best that you possibly can. So I think about that and what a privilege it is to write rather than a burden. Like I have to go through this 500 pages, I have to get a top.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:05:18):
This has been a really terrific way to wrap up this training and this conversation about how we as journalists are going to be communicating this issue in our community. So I want to take this opportunity to thank our three speakers.
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