#arynbaker

Aryn Baker

15 February 2017

“I need 100 Euros.” The request came out of the blue. Minhel, the husband of one of the central characters in our Finding Home documentary project, was lounging on the hotel bed as his wife, Illham, narrated her struggles as a Syrian refugee in Greece for the camera. Four of her sons, in identical bowl cuts, were bouncing on the beds while Illham held the fifth in her arms. To be honest, the family needed a lot more than 100 Euros. They needed a home, jobs, childcare, school, diapers, warm clothes, food — you name it. But we weren’t in a position to give them anything. From the very start of the project, when we approached a very pregnant Illham and proposed to follow her and her family’s story on camera and in print for the next year, we made it clear that we would not, could not, pay her. Many other women had declined, but Illham and her husband agreed. That didn’t mean Minhel wasn’t going to ask for help when he needed it. We diffused the situation with a joke, and continued on with the interview. But the episode sent a chill down my spine.

 As a journalist who has reported from the frontlines of dire need and extreme poverty for most of my career, I am well accustomed to requests for help and money. Sometimes the need is genuine; sometimes the ask comes from pure and understandable opportunism — after all, the combined cost of my computer, phones and camera equipment probably amounts to more money than most of my subjects will see in a year, or even a lifetime. I usually deflect such requests with heartfelt apologies and an explanation that journalists are not allowed to pay for interviews.

 That said, there have been times when I have been so moved by a subject’s suffering, or the fact that she slaughtered her only chicken in order to cook me dinner, that it would be unconscionable to walk away without doing anything at all. In those cases, once my reporting is done, I make sure to send over a bag of rice, a jug of cooking oil or a bundle of fruit. Usually I send it through a local NGO, or have my fixer or driver deliver it in a way that it won’t be directly associated with me as a journalist. Does that break one of the core tenets of Journalism 101? Probably. But every instance comes with a personal gut check: Am I doing this in order to get something journalistically, or am I doing it to help someone in a way my journalism likely won’t? When I do it after my notebooks are closed and the story written, the answer is clear.

 But working on a long form documentary project that will be reported over the course of a year is a whole different category. The desire to help women in desperate circumstances competes with the demand for absolute journalistic integrity, which in many cases is in conflict with the ongoing need for continuous access. Just because the women in our project agreed to participate on day one doesn’t mean that they still want to several months in. After all, we are asking them for an extraordinary time commitment and access to the most intimate moments of their lives (literally – videographer Francesca Trianni was in the delivery room for the birth of all but one of the babies we are following).

 And unlike most documentary productions, which come out several months after filming has wrapped up, we are reporting in real time. Even as Francesca collects video for a feature-length documentary to come out at the end of the year, I am regularly publishing stories about the families in TIME magazine and on the website. Francesca and photographer Lynsey Addario are posting images and short videos to Instagram on a daily basis. We all create Instagram Stories, and do Instagram Lives. At the beginning it felt exciting to be on the cutting edge of multi-media journalistic storytelling. These days I’m starting to understand why it’s rarely done.

 Real-time reporting is the journalistic equivalent of quantum physics. The act of telling a story as it happens impacts the narrative in unpredictable ways. Even in regular documentaries the subjects are aware they are being filmed, and often perform accordingly. When they see the narrative of their lives unfold, in video, in the magazine or through Instagram, it affects how they conduct those lives and how they perceive our project going forward. One of our characters complained that she looked haggard and poor in some of the photographs, and asked to vet any new pictures going forward. (We reminded her that we were trying to report the real life of a refugee, and that no one would judge her for bad fashion considering her circumstances).

 Another character’s husband complained vociferously about his circumstances in multiple on-the-record interviews, but once he saw how friends and family back home reacted to those interviews, he decided to pull out of the project. “How does this story help me?” he demanded, when he saw the magazine article. As we have repeatedly done with everyone else in the project, we tried to explain that it wouldn’t help his family directly, but that it would help all refugees if we could show the reality of what it’s like to be a Syrian looking for safety in Europe. He wasn’t convinced. He accused us of making a profit from his suffering.

 Fortunately, our other characters understand. Despite the challenges of being constantly documented, they continue to open their lives, their dreams, their fears and their homes — no matter how impoverished — to our team. Their willingness to share is what makes the work so powerful.

 It also opens up another conundrum. Scores of readers and viewers and Instagram followers have reached out asking how they can help the families. They want to donate clothes, or baby strollers or money. They want to volunteer, and provide much needed medical assistance. This is the kind of impact every journalist hopes to have when a story is published. Many journalists end up directing the queries straight to the subject, or set up a fund, or create a foundation. I have done similar in the past. But we can’t do that with this story because are still reporting it. So even though I would love to see Minhel get the 100 Euros he needs, or more for that matter, directing money from our readers his way would be the same thing, in a sense, as buying access outright. It wouldn’t be me paying for the interview, but my gut check says it’s still wrong. Doing so would fundamentally alter the nature of the reporting.

 We as a team have struggled with this issue for weeks. We decided that the best approach would be to direct our readers and viewers to the humanitarian organizations that are directly helping our families. It’s an imperfect solution to be sure, but it lets readers act on their desire to help, and it helps our families indirectly through the aid organizations. Most importantly it keeps our readers engaged in what we believe is one of the most important issues of our time: refugees.

 We are working with a new company, Speakable, that has just developed something called an Action Button. It allows readers of an online news story to share their support, be it a donation, a tweet, an email campaign or a petition, directly with the organizations involved. It’s not something that could, or even should, be used with every story. But as more people dive into this new kind of journalism, it’s one more tool to help deal with the inevitable complexities of reporting and publishing a human story real time.