Joseph Smith’s quote about kindness and mercy made me think about something I have been learning slowly in COMM 310.
A news article may contain names, dates, numbers and quotes, but there is still a person behind every one of those details.
I noticed that more clearly this week while working on my feature article in Brazzaville.
On Oct. 7, I sat in the CEO office at World Winner Academy and interviewed Dr. Mélodie BOUEYA. I already knew her professionally. I knew the CEO title, the meetings and the business side. What I did not know well was the part of her life before all of that.
We talked about her childhood, her parents’ divorce and living with sickle cell disease. At some point, I realized that I had to be careful with the story. It would have been easy to take the most difficult parts of her life and use them mainly because they were dramatic.
That is where I connect Joseph Smith’s words with news writing.
Compassion does not mean hiding the truth. If someone has been through something difficult, I should not pretend it never happened. But I also do not think good writing gives me permission to turn someone’s pain into an object just because it makes the article more interesting.
I had to ask myself a simple question: if Mélodie reads this article, will she still recognize herself in it?
That question stayed with me.
Mercy in writing, for me, can mean giving enough context. It can mean not reducing someone to the worst thing that happened to them. It can also mean being careful with a quote that sounds powerful but may create the wrong picture when it is taken alone.
I am still learning how to do that. I wrote more about that tension — how much room a story gives a difficult detail — in an earlier post about feature writing.
I used to think journalistic accuracy was mostly about getting facts correct. Now I think accuracy also includes the picture those facts create when they are placed together.
Sometimes the writing can be factually correct and still feel unfair.
That is probably where compassion enters the work.
