OSO — Eric Stevick’s interviews take time.
He talks to Dayn Brunner, a man who spent 39 days searching through the Oso mudslide that claimed 43 lives a year ago. That included Brunner’s sister, Summer Raffo.
Stevick, a reporter with The (Everett) Daily Herald, speaks slowly and pauses often. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose as he decides on the precise combination of words. He’s deliberate for Brunner’s benefit, but also for his own — both men are revisiting the painful memories of the days following March 22, 2014.
Journalists at The Herald gained access to the mudslide site far beyond that obtained by national news outlets, and they continued to cover the disaster well after other news media had moved on to the next story. But as editors, photojournalists and reporters at the Herald know, they are far from immune to the emotional toll of covering tragedy day after day.
“We knew people up there,” said Scott North, an assistant city editor. “Or we grew up with people up there, we met their family, we met their friends. I know reporters who did stories then went out and cried in their cars.”
Stevick’s part of the team that, one year later, is returning to Oso and Darrington to take the pulse of a community once swallowed by a mountainside.
“I’m not really sure what the story is going to be yet,” Stevick said.
He is sure that there’s one to be told.
The community’s truth
Scott North, a former fellow with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, knows the difficulty of covering tragedies.
“Here’s the thing: It wasn’t about us,” North said. “It was about telling the truth of this community. Even though it was a horrible thing to be writing about, it also was a wonderful thing to be writing about. We got to see people at their best.”
North was a 2003 fellow with the Dart Center, an organization that provides journalists with the tools to help handle traumatic reporting. The principles laid out by the Dart Center guided The Herald through its mudslide coverage, North said.
Researchers have found that journalists who work shoulder to shoulder with rescue workers and law enforcement in the aftermath of tragedies tend to lack access to the same mental support and resources.
Revisiting tragedy and those affected by it can be particularly difficult, according to Dart Center literature. Reporters and photojournalists can find that the professional walls they constructed in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy can impede their own ability to process the trauma later on.
“We have a culture here that understands how covering ugly stuff can affect people. So we took breaks, we talked about it, people were not isolated,” North said.
The Herald has a newsroom of 12 reporters and five photojournalists, but it also drew from its features and sports writers to cover the story. Everyone contributed to mudslide coverage, North said, including photojournalist Genna Martin, who was the first journalist allowed on site to document rescue efforts.
Martin, who had developed connections to the small town from photographing high school basketball games, was granted unparalleled access in those first few days.
“Even through I’ve been here dozens of times and seen all this dozens of times, it’s still shocking every time I come around this corner,” Martin said. “We’re standing where a neighborhood was.”
Like many in the Everett community, members of The Herald staff regularly drive on the reconstructed Highway 530, which was buried by the mudslide.
Staff reporter Rikki King covered the reopening of the highway last September, the first time she had been back in several months.
“As I start driving up, I noticed my heart starts racing, I kind of had to do some breathing exercises,” King said. She said after the ceremony, “I had to wait until I got into my car to cry.”
North said he encourages his reporters to find an outlet to their anxiety, and to keep close watch on their own mental wellbeing. He tries to rotate them in and out of emotionally stressful stories, but with such a tremendous event and a relatively small staff, he doesn’t always have the manpower to offer breaks.
To further complicate things, the journalists themselves are often reluctant to leave such critical stories.
“I look at them, and if I see the thousand-yard stare, it’s like, you’ve got to step back. And that isn’t always possible,” North said. “I pay attention to my sleep patterns. I know. I know myself and I know when I am getting to a place where I’m not going to be effective.”
The Everett community saw more than its fair share of tragedy in 2014. On Oct. 24, 2014, just seven months after the slide, four students died after a freshman at Marysville Pilchuck High School opened fire in the cafeteria. The shooter commited suicide. One boy who was shot survived.
Diana Hefley, the Herald courts reporter, searches for ways to cope with covering heinous crimes. She’s come to the conclusion that being a human being and being a journalist aren’t mutually exclusive — in fact, emotion makes for a better reporter, she said.
“It’s OK to be human and be a journalist,” Hefley said. “If you think you’re going to go in there and just get the facts and not be affected, you’re going to miss the story.”
She’s a veteran at balancing empathy with maintaining her own sanity. She also searches for redeeming moments in tragedy — she said she once saw the mother of a murder victim embrace the mother of the defendant in a courtroom.
“I see a lot of crap. So I look for what I call moments of grace in the crap,” Hefley said.
Not a race to be first
In The Herald’s newsroom, they don’t use the word “anniversary.”
King said the people of Oso and Darrington prefer not to use the word because it has celebratory connotations. As she, Stevick and the rest of the staff reached out to members of the community, they tried to be as empathetic as possible as they interviewed sources.
Some of their sources notice the difference.
Throughout the rescue efforts, Dayn Bruner was open to the media’s questions and grateful for the aid provided by so much national attention. He and Stevick grew close in the weeks and months that followed, leading to emotionally honest interviews about love and loss that seem more cathartic than informational.
“They’re not looking for just a story,” Bruner said. “That’s the kind that I like.”
The Daily Herald was here 113 years before the slide. It will remain long after. It’s entrenched in the community, and sensitive to the culture and values in a way that national journalists who parachute in and out just aren’t.
“This is a community we live in. I went to go to my dentist, I walked in and the woman behind the counter got up and came around and hugged me and cried,” said North, his eyes welling up. “She’s from up there.”
For Robert Frank, the city editor, covering the mudslide and the road to recovery was a marathon, not a sprint.
“A story like Oso was not a race to be first. Keeping your commitment to your community front and center, you can’t go wrong,” Frank said.
The pace of modern news places tremendous pressure on journalists to crank out information faster. Frank said this pressure had terrible results in the aftermath of the Marysville Pilchuck shooting, as rumors and speculation circulated on social media and spread misinformation to the community and families of victims.
But, he said, breaking news is nothing to brag about. It’s when journalists stick with the story, when they tell the human stories lying underneath a shooting or a natural disaster, that they really uncover the truth.
“Being a journalist is about your better nature. It’s not about the get, it’s about the give. It’s about what you’re bringing to the community,” Frank said.
The common thread, present at every desk and every interview at The Herald, is a commitment to compassion above all else.
“Anybody can go harvest quotes, anybody can string together words. But making sure that it’s true, it reflects their truth, that it doesn’t needlessly cause them pain?” North said.
“If you’re not compassionate, you have no business carrying around a notepad.”
Calley Hair is a journalism student at the Edward R, Murrow College of Communications at Washington State University. The Murrow News Service provides local, regional and statewide stories reported and written by Murrow journalism students.
‘Returning to Oso’
Watch a video report by by Murrow College journalism students Calley Hair, Marc Wei and McKayla Fox at tinyurl.com/WSUReturnToOso.
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