I left repeated voicemails and sweet-talked receptionists Yojimbo -style, pitting lawyer against lawyer for the important facts at hand. I pressed attorneys for details on car accident cases and medical malpractice settlements. LESS THAN A YEAR AGO, I was a beat reporter for ALM, a legal-news outlet based in Manhattan. We typically don’t consider that getting such details wrong could have massive ramifications for a story’s subject or their family. Nor do all reporters work with the same understanding of best practices when engaging with a source in crisis, be it from a natural disaster, a shooting, or another horrific event.ĭespite our best efforts as journalists, we report on the messy details of people’s lives as outsiders looking in. But there doesn’t appear to be a guidebook for potential sources confronted with a sudden swell of media requests. I know that the folks riding news desks and navigating the latest national tragedy all have bosses to satisfy and bills to pay. ICYMI: Reporter for The Atlantic has extreme experience with Facebook’s repsĪs the mental fog lifts and I start to divide portions of my life into “pre-flood” and “post-flood”-as I start thinking about things other than where my car is, or where I am going to live for the next few months-I find myself troubled by my position in media coverage of the floods. It’s a struggle to answer questions like “What were you thinking at that time?” and “How high would you say the water got?”-to say nothing of offering whatever deep thoughts on the economic and political fate of your town. The background radiation that stays with you after a traumatic event sticks around for hours, days, weeks. At a certain point, however, you hit a wall. In the days that followed the flood, I answered phone calls or Facebook messages from reporters and media-types, asking me to recount what happened and politely requesting that I distill fuzzy memories and unsure feelings down to a handy quote. I took note a week later when Fox uploaded a segment entitled “ Why climate change has run its course ” to its official YouTube channel, and felt steadier in my response. Fox News eventually deleted tweets showing both the video and their initial request to me.
When pressed by the photography blog PetaPixel, a Fox News spokesman defended the decision and explained that they had licensed my footage from the Associated Press. Naturally, Fox ended up using my video anyway, as part of a compilation I explicitly did not agree to. When Fox News asked on Twitter, I half-mindedly replied, “ No, fuck off ,” a response which, for me, went viral.Īnyone but Fox News can use my photo or video The Twitter account I primarily use to goof around with friends or maybe share a Vulture article I’d written began showing up in news articles from NBC and CNN to AccuWeather and The New York Times. Many asked permission to use my photos and video footage, and for the most part I agreed. Requests from local news affiliates had come almost immediately after I posted my footage online. ICYMI: New York Times under fire for interview The producer reassured me that two minutes is all they would need-a sort of apologetic, conversational sherpa-ing that I’ve done before, to lead a reluctant subject to an interview. I’d agreed to talk, but as the lights flickered and then died in the apartment, I replied that I needed to conserve my prehistoric iPhone’s battery. With the determination of a fixer trying to get me on the last helicopter out of Saigon, he wrote that a woman named Christina would call me on Skype for a video interview. I was holed up in a stranger’s empty apartment, looking at the river that used to be my street, when I was contacted by a production associate at “Good Morning America” via Twitter. I took video of the waist-deep water magically held at bay by a thin apartment building door, and photographed the cars unlucky enough to be caught in the pull of the world’s largest draining bathtub. Trapped in the flood, my instinctive response-as a part-time journalist and full-time millennial scum-was to document the scene.
THREE WEEKS AGO, a devastating flood swept through sleepy Ellicott City, Maryland, shaking up the lives of residents and business owners and pouring them out for the world to see.
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