When Professor Lauren Kessler thinks about academic and professional “integrity,” she sees something more urgent than sticking to the rules: she sees decisions people make about who they are and who they want to be. Kessler’s own deeply immersive reporting—she is the author of seven books of narrative nonfiction and directs UO’s graduate program in multimedia narrative journalism—has taught her a profound lesson: there’s no such thing as an abstract “source.”
“Every source is a person; every source is the main character in his or her own life; every source has flaws and faces challenges,” she says. “You owe it to your readers and your own sense of integrity to remember that.”
“Sometimes school at all levels feels like, ‘I’m going to sit in this chair and somebody will tell me another rule like ‘don’t steal someone’s words,’” Kessler says. But that simple rule opens up complex questions and choices for writers.
Kessler asks herself: “Why should someone trust you with their words? If they do, whose story is it—yours or theirs? What part does your writing play in a larger community?”
Kessler started her career as a news reporter in California—laser-focused on “getting the quote,” “getting the story.” She graduated early from Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism. Hungry for the newsroom, “I pushed through my classes. But I lasted in that first job less than a year—it was so unsatisfying to me. ‘Jump into a life. Ask a few questions. Leave.’ It wasn’t about telling people’s stories.” So she traded “news” for narrative journalism.
“When you do immersion, long-form work, you spend a lot of time in someone’s life, and even though you’ve said who you are and what you’re doing there—even though you’re there with pencil, paper and a camera around your neck—people forget. Occasionally, I’ve known in my bones that someone has started talking to me like a friend. In those cases, I won’t use what they reveal. I won’t harm them, their family, their standing in the community.” Kessler won’t “steal words” unwittingly slipped.
Moreover, “Most editors will tell you not to show a story to a source before it’s published, but I circumvent than ban,” Kessler says. “I tell my students, ‘If you’re unsure of what you’ve heard, go back and read what you have to people. Ask them, ‘Did I get this right?’”
Journalists tell important, interesting stories and bring to the public ear the experiences of “people who are voiceless because of lack of power, or education, or access to a ‘bullhorn,’” Kessler says. If a journalist can tell those stories fairly, accurately, and in a way that amplifies rather than steals people’s words, “that’s a journalist working with integrity.”
—Eugene, Oregon April 2013