Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Dakshana Bhaskaramurti, and I'm the author of This Is Not the End of Me. For the last 12 years, I've been a journalist with The Globe and Mail, and I spent four years reporting on the story of Leighton Reed and his family for my book. Today I'm going to be giving you five tips on how to build trust and maintain balance when telling someone else's story. Now, normally the reporting that I do is a lot of news feature writing, and so sometimes it's a story turned around in a day, sometimes it's a story turned around in a couple of weeks, and I do a lot of interviews, but nothing was quite like the experience of writing this book, where it was four years of my life devoted to really building a trustful relationship with people that I grew to have a lot of fondness for, and the clear line that I have in my day-to-day life as a newspaper reporter was blurred a little bit, because these were people that I had a source journalist relationship with, but I definitely also had a friend relationship with, and a very close friendship with when it came to Leighton in particular. So the five tips that I have that address how to balance this relationship, and also build it so that you get the richest stories possible from the people that you're speaking to, are as follows. Number one, keep a journal. Number two, don't feel beholden to your questions. Number three, remind the people that you're speaking to constantly that you're reporting on them. Number four, make sure you designate quiet time. And number five, put important dates in your calendar. So let's start with number one, keeping a journal. So many of the interviews that I do go on for an hour or more sometimes, and in the case of Leighton and his family, I would sometimes spend a whole day in his house with him, and I would have hours and hours and hours of tape to go through. So a lot of these interviews, I didn't revisit until months or even years later when I actually sat down to write the initial draft of this book. And in that time, there was a lot that I normally would have forgotten, and I would have then had to kind of listen to every single interview from top to bottom. But what helped a great deal with bringing my mind back to those moments and also just making the whole transcription process more efficient was keeping a journal. So it wasn't anything formal. Sometimes it would just be notes that I would jot down in email and send to myself or kind of a Google document that I kept adding to. But I would just keep a log after every time that I spoke to Leighton or anyone in his family. It would be sort of a mix of my impressions of the interview, maybe some key things that stood out to me that he or other people had said. Sometimes there would be little reminders from me of, okay, he mentioned this today, so make sure you follow up on that in another couple of weeks. And then also just the kind of notes about tone and appearance and just all of the sort of color description that was possible during a video interview or a phone conversation. And I feel like you can see a lot of that sort of description in my writing, and I think in some cases it's even difficult to tell what I was there to witness in person and what is reconstruction because that detail that was logged in my journal entries ended up being such an important reporting tool. Number two, don't feel beholden to your list of questions. So every interview I go into, whether it's a short news story that I'm doing or the many, many, many conversations I had with Leighton for this book, I would always have a list of questions or topics to talk about, but I never let myself be limited by those. A lot of times I would let Leighton take the lead in sort of directing where our conversation went. And even though I sometimes face time constraints with my newspaper reporting, whenever possible I try and give sources as much time as I can, and I try not to cut them off because there is this very kind of unbalanced transactional relationship between journalists and sources where we're the ones that are taking up their time, we're the ones that stand to benefit most from them speaking to us. And so I think that kind of the least you can do is let people talk, be a sympathetic ear. I know that a lot of times when I was working on this book, Leighton would tell me that I was the closest thing I had to a therapist, and sometimes that made me uncomfortable, but it also speaks to how this role that we occupy as people documenting the stories of others is pretty unique and appreciated, I think, by a lot of people who don't have people in their lives to listen to them. So don't feel like you can't veer from what you have written down, and sometimes it might lead you to far more interesting topics than you would otherwise have. My next point is remind the people that you're reporting on that you're reporting on them. As I said, friendships inevitably blossomed between me and Leighton and Candace and his mother in particular while I was reporting on this, and I wondered sometimes if they were telling me things kind of because I was a friend and they had lost sight of the fact that I was working on this. Because I started my reporting in 2013 and there was a long, long, long wait time before they actually saw this in print. So I think that if you want to maintain that professionalism that is drilled so hard into journalists when that line has been blurred between source and friend, really the only way you can do it is by constantly reminding them, I'm writing down what you're saying or I'm recording what you're saying, and I would sometimes do that by simply having my recorder out with me or if I was having a phone conversation, taking that pause to say, hey, I'm just going to hook up my recorder. So they always had that front of mind. And sometimes they would have conversations with me where I could tell it was very clear that they were telling me something kind of off the cuff as a friend rather than as a source and I would then follow up with them later and say, hey, you brought this up and I want to ask you about it kind of on the record if that's okay, and we would sort of navigate that conversation again and I just felt more comfortable doing it in that context versus the first conversation that we had. Make sure that you designate quiet time whenever possible when you're doing a long day, especially if in-person reporting with someone. So sometimes I would spend nine, ten hours a day at Leighton's house and I knew that it was exhausting for his family, I knew that it was exhausting for me, and so I would say, okay, maybe between three and four, you guys can do whatever you want. Take a nap, go out for a walk, I'll just hang out in the living room. And that ended up being perfect time for writing in my journal or even for me just catching up on emails or taking kind of scene photos so that I could, you know, report on all those details later. And then it also gave them a chance to take a break from talking to me and being on. So that was so essential, again, it's very draining to constantly be followed around and have someone telling your story, so make sure that you give yourself and the people you're reporting on that space and that time. The last point I want to make is that you should put important dates in your calendar and follow up with your sources on those dates. This is good for reporting, just because, you know, Leighton would bring up certain things that were coming up, like an oncologist appointment that was really important and I wanted to be able to follow up with him right after it happened versus waiting a couple of weeks when that memory of that day might have faded. So whenever possible, call as soon as you can after those important dates to get the freshest information you can. And this also serves a dual role of kind of, you know, building that trust again because you're showing that you care and so it isn't just appointments, I would also note things like birthdays or anniversaries and kind of call to check in on even the nicer things like how did you celebrate and it wasn't necessarily something I knew would make it into my writing but, you know, it showed that I cared and that I was interested beyond what I would be getting from these people for the purposes of a book. So those are my five tips and I wish you luck on all the reporting you're about to do.