Responsibility to Our Sources

By: Katie Knapp, ACN Board Member and Contributing Editor for The Furrow magazine

Jerry Jennissen and his wife, Linda, built Jer-Lindy Farms nearly from scratch in the 1980s. Looking back at what they have accomplished in the decades in between leaves him humbled and proud.

As journalists, our main job is to document facts in a way our audience can understand and then possibly act on the information in a positive and productive manner. But to me, it’s so much more than that. Because of the nature of the magazine I publish most of my stories (The Furrow), I believe I have a responsibility as a human to develop stories my sources are proud to have shared.

I always give my sources a chance to review my drafts in layout before I turn them in to my editor. In my templated email, I ask them to ensure I have represented their story correctly, check I have spelled all their names right, and give them bonus points if they find the one typo that seems to always exist at this stage. It is the most vulnerable part of the process for me. I’ve just written a summary of this person’s operation or situation intending for it to land in nearly half a million mailboxes, and now I am sending it with the click of a button for them to judge. Whoa.

Most of the time I get an “all good” response or a simple spelling or number change. But for an article just published in the February issue of The Furrow, the response I got was: “Katie, you make me cry. Thank you, it’s a very humbling story.”

I immediately responded by telling him I was sorry to make him cry. His response: “No you are not. This is what makes you a good writer.” Okay, I really didn’t mean to make him cry, but yes, I did expect him to have an emotional reaction to the story. I had put his heart and soul on paper because I thought it was a story that deserved to be read by others. I also wanted to credit and honor him for the hard efforts he has been making.

Producing these feature stories is not easy, and I definitely self-impose a high bar. To get the material I need, I have to ask follow-up questions like: how does that make you feel? This is where I think the most important role of being an agricultural journalist comes in. I may very likely be the only person who asks that person how he or she feels that day, that week, that year…

Often, where the conversation goes after this question leads me to the story, but more often, the tone changes with the person I am visiting. They lean in a bit more. They open up and relax a bit more. It can seem almost therapeutic for them to answer my questions. That is not something I take lightly. I see it as a privilege of the job.

We often think of our stories from the perspective of what our readers will learn or could put into practice, but that is really out of our control. We can control how our sources feel during our interviews and photoshoots and if they take something positive away from their valuable time spent with us. The days my sources tell me “nobody has ever asked me that,” I know I’ve done my job well, and I have probably found material for a story worth sharing.

I encourage you to take a source-first approach during your next interview. After all, without our sources, we have no stories.