34 Spotlight on: Ted Conover
Learning to immerse
Nicole Kraft
Journalism education teaches a formal way of learning things, which when it comes to living people, involves the interview, hopefully in person.
A formal Q&A is really important for lots of kinds of journalism. For other kinds, you can get somewhere by thinking of this encounter, not as a news-gathering expedition but a personal experience — something you are going to appreciate at multiple levels.
It’s not just asking questions and writing down the answer. It’s making yourself fully present.
This is immersion writing.
In an interview, you can notice a football player seems stiff or tired. You can notice a fast-food worker is wary. But putting yourself in the article as a participant or as using a fly-on-the-wall perspective can bring writing to life in a way that makes the reader feel and live the experience with you.
Ted Conover is one of the world’s best-know participatory journalist and has written books on riding the rails as a “hobo” in “Rolling Nowhere” (1984), living and working among Mexican migrants in “Coyotes” (1987), chronicling Aspen’s celebrity culture as a local cab driver and reporter at the Aspen Times in “Whiteout” (1991), and documenting what it’s like to be a guard at Sing Sing prison in “Newjack”(2000).
In his book, Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep, he talks about gaining access, turning the experience into a story, undercover reporting, and the ethical issues around this type of long-form nonfiction.
Nicole Kraft sat down with Conover, a legend in immersive writing experience to get his take on the practice and how journalism students can make it part of their writing repertoire.
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My idea with immersion writing is to try and move beyond the formal roles of being either a questioner or an answerer. Get into a place where you are getting to know somebody.
It takes more time.
To get to know somebody is a different thing than asking them questions. The product also can be different. If you are simply asking questions, you are preparing for a news story. Having a conversation, paying attention to the room, and opening up all your senses. Now you are preparing to write a feature.
More and more features are first-person. Describing a place or a situation, sharing with a person you are writing about. Be with a policewoman at the doughnut shop on her five-minute break. That scene is interesting to write about. It’s more than a quote. Be with a person at a moment of their life. It’s a more nuanced and humankind of reporting than classical just-the-facts interviewing.
Trying to make a connection with someone, capturing them in higher definition. There is more to people than the fact that they are a quarterback, or a record holder, or a felon.
I got involved in immersion because I wanted to write about the experiences I’ve had — whether it be crossing the country on my bicycle or working in a factory in Spain. I liked writing and I liked the idea that some of th