We need to talk about how the media covers poverty
Changing my mind about Joan Didion, previewing the newsletter's first season, plus a discussion on why analyzing media coverage of poverty is important
Thanks for subscribing to Conversations on Poverty. I’m very excited to share these discussions with you over the next ten weeks. This newsletter will feature conversations about how the media covers poverty — and discuss the urgent task of doing it better.
Here are a few teasers:
Coming up are conversations with New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman (“I don't think I've ever really fully emotionally reconciled the strangeness of writing about the experiences of other people’s lives, that always feels fraught”); Squeezed author Alissa Quart (“there’s no outside of ideology … and one of the problems with the ‘neutral’ stance is that it doesn’t acknowledge that”); Independent Food Aid Network director Sabine Goodwin (“we need to hear from people [in poverty] as much as possible, but we need to make sure that happens in a way that’s appropriate and supported”); the Guardian’s John Harris (“no matter how downtrodden, deprived and disadvantaged somewhere might be, there are brilliant people trying to do brilliant things”); discussions with my own sources (“I hadn’t seen myself from that angle before, and that angle was a positive one — as a person who stood up to someone, and fought back, and won”), and many more.
I’ve launched this newsletter in part because, as I work on my own narrative nonfiction about poverty in the UK, these are questions I’m constantly turning over in my head. The other part is that, as we enter the six-month countdown to decisive US and UK elections, I hope these talks will be interesting and useful — not just to writers but to readers too. As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, eradicating poverty needs to be on the political agenda; we urgently need writers to spotlight it, but it’s crucial they avoid exploitation and extractive relationships when they do.
This week is slightly meta: a conversation about Conversations on Poverty. Usually I’ll be asking the questions around here. But the first episode is me being interviewed by Daniel Spielberger, executive editor at Study Hall, the freelancer community that has kindly part-funded this newsletter. Our discussion was edited and condensed for clarity and first published here. Coming up next week is Sarah Stillman.
DS: How did you get started in journalism?
JB: I’m a freelance reporter from the UK, and I recently moved from New York back to London to start a narrative nonfiction book project about poverty in the UK. I spent my early childhood in council housing, after my family experienced an eviction that left us homeless, so I’ve been drawn to writing about poverty, homelessness and inequity. I fell in love with nonfiction writing through reading Joan Didion, and it really made me want to come to the US and study her kind of style of longform reportage. I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to come over to New York in 2019.
Can you discuss your newsletter about media coverage on poverty and social inequity?
First of all, thank you so much to Study Hall for supporting this project and having faith in it. This newsletter was based around my belief that right now we need reporters who document homelessness, chronic poverty and exploitation more than ever. But we also need journalists to be really aware of the inherent risks and complexities of doing that type of coverage. It can be easy to fall into extractive relationships with sources. The newsletter is intended to be a series of conversations on ethics, craft and representation in journalism.
Who are the journalists who've inspired you to cover this topic?
I'm always inspired by the empathy of someone like Sarah Stillman’s work. The immersion of someone like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I’m also inspired by the psychological depth of novelists like George Eliot or Leo Tolstoy. Also, the emotional honesty of writers like Annie Ernaux and Elif Batuman. The main inspiration behind this project is a quote from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer which is, “all journalists feel, or should feel, some compunction about the exploitative character of the journalist-subject relationship.” Often as reporters we don't think about these relationships [enough] particularly for immersion work, about how they play out both during the reporting process and after publication.
With this newsletter, how are you aiming to interrupt that dynamic between the journalist and the source?
It will definitely include [the perspectives of] some of my own sources: people whose lives I've reported on, who have seen their experiences in print. It'll be an opportunity to check in about how that process went: the experience of going through a series of interviews and having someone sort of tag along and follow your life over a number of months, and then see that reflected in a piece of work. I'm really excited about having those conversations and looking back at the start of my career. Hopefully, those conversations are helpful to other journalists as well.
Part of the newsletter will be media criticism. Will you be covering poverty as well?
There are two parts of my writing practice. One is reporting on poverty and how to build a better society. The other branch is, I've been writing for Columbia Journalism Review for a while now, reporting on the media. This is bringing together both sides of that in this newsletter. [I will have] conversations with people working for change, and their views on these topics. I think the thrust of it is to be an exercise in self-examination for journalists. There's this quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem that I used to be inspired by, which is: “my only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate, that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”
I reread that quote now, and I think, is that right? Does a reporter's presence always run counter to a source’s best interests? I don't think I agree with that anymore. I don't think writers are always selling someone out. I think great reporting can and should be an opportunity for building empathy and bridging divides. Inhabiting someone else's reality [can help] show there is a pathway for building a better society. If the project tackles some of those questions, then I'll consider it a success.🗨️