How deeper conversations and close listening led me to my biggest stories this year

As I spend more time reporting, it’s become increasingly important for me to avoid transactional interactions with my sources. A key part of being a journalist involves seeking people to interview and get information from in an effort to craft a well-sourced, balanced story. But beyond asking pointed questions that quickly get to the core of an issue, I also feel the need to understand the people I talk to on a personal level, and to create deeper connections with them. 

Because of this, many interviews with sources turn into conversations. We talk about people’s life stories, about how they got to San Francisco, about the ways they’ve worked to make a living and how they’ve started to build their lives in the city. I learn about the activities they like to participate in, their existential worries, and how they have figured out solutions to get the support they need. 

As a journalist primarily covering Latino immigrant communities, I take the time to listen because I want to make sure that when I include my sources’ perspective in a story, I represent them in a way that resonates with who they are. I want people to feel seen, especially since their inclusion in a news article means many people will see them. It’s very important for me to make sure that my sources are not misrepresented; their words may follow them around for a long time as they try to build a life in San Francisco, including in legal proceedings and community spaces. 

As someone whose parents live in another country, I also wonder if another reason that I seek these deeper conversations, and why many of my sources respond in kind, is because we’re all trying to remember what home feels like, through each other.  

Sometimes, when I walk through the Mission District on my way to work and I bump into someone I’ve talked to for a previous article, we’ll smile as we remember that previous moment of connection. But there are other times when the long conversations we have during interviews about family, about migration, about making sense of living in the U.S., end up informing other stories I later write, as I try to get more deeply at what it means to be an immigrant in San Francisco today.

For one of my first stories while taking part in the Ethnic Media Reporting Collaborative, I profiled a group of immigrant women who were trying to come up with culturally resonant approaches to mental wellness they felt would be better received by their peers. One of the women I talked to, Rosario, told me about how her doctor had prescribed her acupuncture to address her migraines — the first treatment in years that had finally brought her relief. She later invited all her friends from the mental wellness group — “Somos Remedios” — to try out acupuncture as an anxiety therapy.

Rosario’s story reminded me of my mom. I remembered how I would accompany her to try out different wellness treatments when I was growing up, including a few acupuncture appointments. Like many of the women in the Somos Remedios group, my mom had an appreciation for alternative medicine, and talking to Rosario and her friends about their experiences helped me feel like I was understanding her more.  

Later I wrote a story about the impact federal health care cuts would have on aging immigrants with chronic conditions. I connected with G.H., a domestic violence survivor who has permanent damage to her hips and spinal cord. As part of her medical treatments, G.H. told me she receives acupuncture to help her manage her pain. Instantly, I thought of Rosario. Further along the story, one of the doctors I talked to about the impact federal cuts would have on community clinics mentioned how the clinic had recently opened an acupuncture practice, given the high demand from their Latino patients. 

Noticing a trend, I wrote an article about acupuncture in the Latino community, for which I interviewed Rosario again. I started realizing that there was an underlying, deeper story about how an underserved community that predominantly worked physically intense jobs grappled with chronic pain in the presence of so many cultural, language and financial barriers. 

It was then that some health care practitioners I talked to pointed me to a “supplement” called Artri Ajo King. Though it seemed like another alternative remedy that immigrants could rely on to find solutions to their pain, the pills actually had undisclosed steroids in them that were causing serious health complications. Reporting on the story, I found a number of stores that sold the product, and talked to several doctors across the state about the complications they were noticing in many of their patients.  

In November, we published an article calling out the false advertising presented in the product’s label and sharing the experiences of patients and medical practitioners who had come into contact with Artri Ajo King. A week later, a local community clinic told me that patients and even employees started approaching doctors after reading the story, letting them know they had been taking the pills and were now looking for help to stop taking the medication safely. Later, a store manager eagerly told my editor he had decided to stop selling the pills in his store. In the months since, other community members have reached out to me, asking for our Spanish translation and to have us share the story on the radio. The TikTok video my colleague Emma Garcia made explaining my reporting went viral, and hundreds of people shared their experiences and those of their family members’ in the comments. It’s very moving to see how my article has resonated with so many people. 

Listening closely is really what has taken me to some of the most important stories that I wrote this year. I really do care about the things that the people I’m talking about are sharing, and I think treating people’s words with respect and attention goes a long way in having them feel comfortable with you too. While I try to keep interactions organic, I think it’s important to keep these things in mind:  

• Make sure the people you talk to feel like you’re respecting their time and boundaries. People are being vulnerable with you because they want to and they believe in you, not because they owe you anything. It's important to respect that and let them share control of the direction that the conversation goes in, as well as how much it lasts. Something that is especially important when building trust is letting sources know what your full story is going to be about and where they fit in before you start an interview, so that they’re also mindful of what they’re comfortable sharing. 

• Give people the space to think and find their voice. Not everyone is a trained public speaker, and making sure there are some moments of silence in a conversation can help people gather their thoughts and later present their own experiences more powerfully. At other times, you might repeat what you understood from what they shared. Noticing what people feel strongly about and asking follow-up questions will also help you better highlight what is important for them, whether for this story or a future one. 

• Listen and be there as a person. Every conversation is different, because each dynamic is different. But it’s important to make sure whatever interaction you do have feels genuine, and that you approach it from a point of compassion and care. Letting people feel and validating their emotions goes a long way, and can also give the people you talk to a sense of relief, especially if this is the first time they’re sharing something difficult with anyone else. So does finding and sharing points of connection between you and whoever you’re talking to. Whether that’s from your own experience or from that of other people you’ve talked to, this can help people you interview feel more seen, and it can also help you better resonate with your sources’ experiences. 

If I hadn’t taken time to listen to Rosario in March, then perhaps the fact that G.H. received acupuncture wouldn’t have stood out to me. And maybe I wouldn’t have stumbled upon the Artri King pills, and been able to disprove misinformation that was widely circulating around the neighborhood. 

Health is such an interesting topic to write about because it is colored by our day-to-day lives. Where we work and live, how much time we have to pay attention to our bodies, what products and services we have learned to trust — up influencing our well-being. And so, I think we need to look more holistically at people’s lives to truly understand these inequities and trends we’re trying to highlight in our health reporting. I would have never been able to report on many of the stories I worked on, for instance, if I had opted for more superficial interviews. 

It is easy to simplify situations, and sometimes, when covering quick-turn stories, that’s all you can really do. But when you get the opportunity to cover a small community for a long period of time, like many reporters who participate in this collaborative do, you also have the opportunity to get to know the people you talk to. And if you are open to it, you will be able to find stories that the community keeps closer to the chest, that might be different from the ones that other outlets are already talking about, but that, because of that, are even more important to tell.