Read her speech - Columbia University Graduate School of ...

Joanna Connors
First, I want to congratulate all of you on your achievement today, and along with all of my
colleagues I want to welcome you to a profession I love, and that I know is here to stay. So that’s
my pep talk.
But here’s what I really want to talk about.
It’s somewhat ironic that I am here receiving the Mike Berger Award, because my message to
you today is to learn the value of taking time to develop important stories. As you know, Mike
Berger became famous for reporting on a mass murder in Camden, New Jersey in 1949, going to
the scene that morning, talking to dozens of witnesses, and writing a 4000-word story, making
deadline by 9:30 that night. It’s amazing stuff, and we all study it as a classic of reporting and
writing.
There is obviously an important place in journalism for fast reporting – we all work on deadlines
and we all need to get the story first, in increasingly tough competition. And this is of course
your primary job.
But I want to suggest to you that perhaps a more important aspect of your career will be to
preserve the tradition of the long-form narrative, the stories that evolve out of the daily reporting
and add context and perspective and detail. Some say this is a dying form, that in the age of
Twitter and live blogging, news organizations don’t have the time or space to devote to these
stories. I’m here to tell you that these stories are still essential to our profession, and might even
save it.
The story that brought me here today evolved over months, starting in January of 2009, and
running in the paper the following December.
On a snowy Wednesday morning not long after Christmas, a Kent State University professor,
Trudy Steuernagel, was found beaten and unconscious on her kitchen floor. Sheriff’s deputies
found her 18-year-old son hiding in a small room in the basement. He could not tell them what
happened.

Trudy’s son, Sky Walker, was severely autistic, and had become increasingly violent as a
teenager. His father had remarried. Trudy, all alone with Sky, knew she was in danger. But she
loved her son so much, and was so afraid of institutionalizing him, that she loved with the
danger and kept it secret.
A week after the deputies found her, Trudy died. Sky was charged with murder and held in the
county jail, where he wailed, “Hurt Mama,” and spit and lashed out at jailers who tried to control
him. He remained isolated, in a tiny cell, for months.
What no one knew, including law enforcement, is that Trudy predicted her own death. In a letter
her brother found in her home safe, she asked authorities to pardon Sky. It was not his fault, she
wrote, it was her fault and the result of failures in the mental health system.
The family never intended for anyone to see that letter. Yet it became the lede of my story, and
generated an important debate in the autistic community about the violence that can emerge
when autistic children reach puberty. I discovered that Trudy was not alone, and that this was not
a unique and rather sensational story. I found that many parents, out of their immense love for
their children, conceal and downplay the explosive behavior in their homes.
How did I persuade Trudy’s family to tell me about the letter, and then give me a copy. The key
was time. At first no one in the family would speak to “the media,” but as the months went on,
fewer and fewer reporters kept going to the court hearings. Eventually, I was the only one there. I
spent a lot of hours with the. I listened to them. I gained their trust that I would tell Sky’s story
fairly and accurately, and in a way that might help other families going through similar
situations.
Taking all of this time on a story required the support of my editors, of course, editors committed
to the idea that these deeply reported stories have value to readers and the community.
The Plain Dealer is struggling with the same financial realities that have hit every other
newspaper. We’ve had buy-outs and layoffs. But our editor, Susan Goldberg, has also decided to
devote some of our resources to these stories.
Readers tell us they want them. Every time we run a long-form narrative, we get an enormous
response. The emails and online comments tell us something that we all, as journalists, need to
remember: People are hungry not just for headline news and information, but for understanding,
for the stories that connect us as human beings and tell us something about who we are.
So as you start what I hope will be great and exciting careers as journalists, remember:
Concentrate on your deadlines and get those daily stories. But always fight for the opportunities
to tell the stories that take time and patience.
May 2010