The Atlantic’s cover story this month is an 18-month investigation by Caitlin Dickerson, who conducted more than 150 interviews and wrote 30,000 words to reveal how, exactly, Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy of child separation at the border took place. Dickerson shared with Paul Miller fellows how she accomplished one of the longest pieces in the magazine’s history: “The Secret History of Family Separation.” [Video | Transcript]
5 takeaways:
➀ There are questions that won’t let go. Stay with them. Dickerson began covering family separation as an immigration reporter for the New York Times, which included navigating chaos, misinformation and high emotions. “The Trump administration was telling me it wasn’t true, even though I had evidence that it was,” she said. There was something larger going on, and she saw that families continued to get separated. “I needed to try to get to the bottom of what happened, and how it happened and why it happened, and who was responsible.”
She knew this needed to be an in-depth investigation. But she said the `basic questions informed it as inform feature pieces:
“What are the push and pull mechanisms behind this? Who’s responsible? Is there data associated with it? Is there a larger system or trend at play?”
Asking these questions leads to interesting answers.
➁ How to stay organized during an 18-month investigation? Excel. It quickly became apparent that the reporting on child separation would need to span from 9/11 to the present and across multiple different federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and Health and Human Services, so Dickerson used Excel to create a timeline. “If I’ve done an interview and somebody’s talking about something that happened in March of 2017, I can quickly look at my Excel spreadsheet and go to that date and the surrounding weeks or months and see what was going on for other people at that point.” She said it’s especially helpful for fact-checkers (she had six) and being able to share easily audio files and transcripts with them. Dickerson also said that she created a catalog in Excel of the FOIA records she received, and also categorized information from interviews by theme.
➂ Know whom to push and whom not to in interviews. “Our role is to help people see inside our government and understand how it works,” Dickerson said. In her research and interviews, she found two themes: a distrust of the bureaucracy and a distrust of the media. “All these things started coming up in my interviews and made me realize that this isn’t just a straight chronological story. This is a story about human nature and psychology, and career ambition and the bureaucratic structure and system.” She pushed hard for interviews for the entirety of the 18 months, some of which came at the 11th hour. “There was this huge question of access. I didn’t know if Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the Homeland Security secretary, was going to talk to me. I didn’t know if John Kelly, who’d been Homeland Security Secretary before her would speak to me. I didn’t know if Trump would speak to me. I didn’t know if Stephen Miller would speak to me.”
While she has also done a number of interviews with families as an immigration reporter at the New York Times, she didn’t want to retraumatize anyone when the piece had to focus so much on the history of the policy and how it happened. “I have watched a number of separated parents have full-blown PTSD flashbacks right in front of me,” she said. “I was not interested in reporting this story in a way that would require a bunch of people to bear their soul in a way that could potentially be very damaging if I couldn’t assure them that I was going to be able to use all that material.” Nonetheless, because of the extreme consequences and morality of the policy, many people told her they had a difficult time reading it.
➃ Build relationships with good editors. “I hope you all get to work with somebody like Scott Stossel one day,” Dickerson said, describing her Atlantic editor as “very generous and voraciously curious,” who advocated for her to have enough time for the piece. Dickerson said she’s always been very communicative with editors. “I remember my first reporting job I said to my editor at one point, ‘I’m probably in your office as much as the other reporters.’ He was like, ‘No, you’re in here the most,’” she said. Find an editor who will “geek out” with you.
➄ Keep a running list of story ideas. After staying on the same story for a year and a half, Dickerson went back to the list of story ideas she’s updated for a decade. “You always have just a certain number of things that you’re nursing in the background,” she said, otherwise you may get assigned a piece you don’t like. “It’s a good way to stay in control of your body of work and make sure that it’s progressing in an intentional way.”
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