Survivors deserve better storytelling

Today’s newsletter is a little different. For many months—since before the thought of Spitfire News even existed—I’ve been working with some of my peers to address our frustrations with how survivors have been treated by the media. That includes both mainstream media outlets and social media creators, whose platforms can often reach even bigger audiences with content about survivors’ stories.

What we’re referring to broadly as survivor storytelling is a crucial practice. It encompasses investigative reporting that sheds light on abuses by individuals and systems, news and opinion journalism on high-profile survivors and their cases, viral posts and videos discussing abuse allegations, and much more.

This storytelling, journalistic and otherwise, is often what gives survivors a voice—or takes it away. It can shape the entire trajectory of a survivor’s experience in coming forward and how speaking up will impact their life. It can be a conduit for justice or a way to smother it. And beyond the impact on individual survivors, this storytelling shapes how the world understands and feels about violence and abuse. It informs how we treat each other and ourselves. It can and has done enormous good. But it can also reap serious, harmful consequences.

Today, I’m proud and excited to share an open letter and a list of proposals for survivor storytelling that I helped craft alongside Lauren Weingarten, M. Colleen McDaniel, and a group of researchers, advocates, and storytellers who shared their input during the editing process. We’re now collecting signatures from survivors, journalists, content creators, advocates, organizations, academics, and anyone who stands behind this mission to share these stories in an ethical and beneficial way. That could be you!

You can also follow along with the Survivor Stories Deserve Better Instagram account, which has been stewarded by Lauren, who also created MTMV, one of the first social media-based support communities by and for survivors.

I first met Lauren in my capacity as a journalist, and she has been the driving force behind this project. We’ve spent many hours discussing how the media industry and the social media landscape have been imperfect tools for survivor storytelling, and we want to help make them better through education, collaboration, and care.

These proposals combine the core journalistic ethic to minimize harm in reporting with more specialized knowledge about surviving abuse, violence, and trauma. Lauren and I, along with Colleen, who is the Director of Research & Program Development for It’s On Us (the largest American nonprofit dedicated to college sexual assault prevention),  drew from our areas of expertise and personal experience to build this resource and initiative. The proposals include things like understanding basic trauma responses, always reaching out to survivors for comment, allowing survivors to choose what details of their stories to share publicly, providing accommodations and transparency throughout the reporting process, and much more. It was also important to us to recognize that storytellers can be survivors themselves.

It has been my greatest honor and privilege to work with survivors to tell their stories and to advocate against the harm our society and culture—and our media—does to survivors. I’ve watched newsrooms and journalists and content creators get it right and wrong. I’ve watched myself get it right and wrong. I wish I had a tool like this when I started doing this reporting, because like most storytellers, I went into it completely blind. My hope is that through awareness and resources like the one we’re building, storytellers can be more informed before embarking on this consequential work. We’re not going to be perfect, but we should recognize and strive for a standard of care. We must pursue survivor storytelling when we can, but only if we can accept the responsibility it entails.

Something that I talked a lot about with Lauren and Colleen during this process is how individual reporters like myself can be disempowered in the hierarchies of journalism. I don’t think I would have been able to be as involved in Survivor Stories Deserve Better as I am today if I wasn’t an independent journalist. Most rank-and-file journalists I’ve encountered (although not all) care deeply about getting this right, but within sprawling newsrooms, bureaucratic editorial processes, and differing agendas, not everyone seems to. In addition to the people directly interacting with survivors in this line of work, I hope that people who possess editorial power can also strive to embody the care for survivors behind these proposals. There’s only so much you can do at the bottom of the totem pole as a journalist without the support of higher-ups in the newsroom.

If I could communicate just one thing, it would be that caring about survivors and working against injustice is not biased. Tragically, I’ve repeatedly encountered a stigma in the media world against compassion for the vulnerable, which is the opposite of what journalistic ethics and standards are supposed to be. But in the midst of Me Too backlash, this sense of so-called neutrality and pushback against the minimal gains survivors have made has become commonplace. That’s an injustice in itself. We cannot get better unless we understand and truly believe that our mission is to hold power to account. Addressing power-based violence through journalism and storytelling would have massive effects, not just on individual survivors, but on the massive systems that affect all of our everyday lives. It starts with caring for survivors and their stories.

Here’s the link to read and sign our open letter, and I have a couple other links to share from this weekend:

• For WIRED, I wrote about how AI slop is transforming the real estate industry and showing up all over online listings.

• And for The New York Times, I wrote an op-ed about how the media (and social media) environment around Britney Spears has curdled again in the years since she has been freed from her conservatorship. This piece touches a lot on the gendered stigmas around mental illness and celebrity discourse, and it intersects with the kind of rhetoric that Survivor Stories Deserve Better strives to address.

Thank you so much for reading, and if you’d like to support my independent journalism, please consider upgrading for just $5 a month. You’ll get access to my paywalled stories, too. I’m so grateful to the Spitfire News members for making this work, as well as our advocacy for improving journalistic standards, possible. Until next time.