Lucia Jang clenched her teeth as she crossed the Tumen River from North Korea to China for the last time, cloaked by the darkness of a cloud that swept over the moon. Jang carried her infant through turbulent waters with the unrelenting fear of arrest looming overhead in the pursuit of her survival, her son’s survival, and the survival of her family’s story.
Years after escaping the brutality of the North Korean regime, Jang recaptured her experiences, sacrifices, and journey through the words of Susan McClelland, a passionate journalist and author of Stars Between the Sun and Moon.
“I hope that this book will help people learn a little bit about North Korea and North Korean people,” Jang said.
Healing with storytelling
The act of sharing your story can have more of an impact than simply serving as a source of entertainment.
Jang is still haunted by her life in North Korea, tortured by the experiences and separation of her family.
By sharing her life story in North Korea, suffering from human trafficking, imprisonment, forced labour, and starvation, Jang’s healing process has finally begun.
“A lot of my painful memories have been able to be worked away through working with this book,” she said.
Jang’s story is not the only one that has affected reader’s lives.
In 2008, McClelland co-wrote The Bite of the Mango, with Mariatu Kamara, a survivor of civil war in Sierra Leone and a UNICEF representative for children of war. It detailed her experiences of war and her triumph over adversity.
“I remember Mariatu and I gave a talk in the United States after the publication of The Bite of the Mango,” McClelland said. “We had this young girl come up to us and she tugged on my shoulder and said, ‘Thank you so much for writing Mariatu’s story because now I feel I can speak about my own rape.’”
Is it journalism?
Human interest stories are one of the classic products of journalism, according to Randy Boswell, a Carleton journalism professor.
“Any kind of storytelling that illuminates the lives of people—good, bad, whatever—holds a mirror up to our communities, helps people understand their own society, and generally informs us all about wonderful, awful individuals, and situations surrounding us. That’s certainly journalism,” Boswell said.
Boswell emphasized that journalism is not an easily defined activity.
“One doesn’t need a licence or certificate to practise journalism,” he said. “Anyone with an interest, an idea, and the urge to post stories and findings at a blog are free to do so and the efforts shouldn’t be dismissed.”
What about an organization like Humans of New York, political satire like The Rick Mercer Report and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, or biographies and autobiographies?
Not everything has to be political coverage or investigative research, Boswell said.
“We also need to read about great achievers, little old ladies who collect homeless cats, and a foodie who finally realizes her dream to open a restaurant.”
Are you a journalist?
According to Allan Thompson, a journalism professor at Carleton, professional journalists are different. Thompson stressed professional journalists are trained observers with standards who are seen as different than people who just post online.
That does not mean untrained journalists cannot produce journalism.
Thompson said citizen journalists are not the same as professional journalists, yet they still produce journalism. All the coverage we get from Syria is essentially from citizen journalists, Thompson said.
“Citizen journalism is a very amorphous concept,” Boswell said. “It can include everything from one-off video of a traffic accident, tornado, or some other unpredicted event being shot by a random passerby and sent to a media outlet, to full-scale investigations of a pressing social issue by a networked band of committed fact-finders and online storytellers who don’t happen to be full-time, paid journalists. Both such contributions to newsmaking constitute journalism in my view.”
Both journalism professors agreed society needs well-trained, highly skilled journalists. They must understand the discipline of verification, speak from a mostly neutral voice, and give sustained attention to probing public issues—while getting paid for it.
The softer side of news
Soft news is a journalistic style which was originally synonymous with feature articles placed in newspapers or newscasts that focused on human interest.
Now, it has adopted the blurred domain between information and entertainment, expanding to include personality-centred stories, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The appeal for soft news is not shocking, said Charles Gibney, a sociology professor at Carleton.
“Soft news is cheap to make, it doesn’t require much in the way of resources or expertise,” he said. “You can connect with the audience quickly and it doesn’t demand much of them.”
Gibney added people are consuming less traditional journalism.
“Advertising revenue is down, resources are limited, and the platforms from which news can be delivered are proliferating so competition is fierce,” he said.
From his sociological view, Gibney said he imagines soft news to be a bit of a self-perpetuating phenomenon.
“Ideologically-driven news has probably further fractured audiences, made people cynical, and burnt out by the constant appeals to their emotions, and, in the end, audiences watch even less news as a result of the rise of soft news,” he said.
According to McClelland, sharing the personal stories and voices of her subjects can help her readers to see the “universality of the human spirit.” She said these stories help us see that we’re not that different from each other.
Everyone has a unique story to tell; each story brings a little more insight into a bigger picture.
These human interest stories, in whatever form they may be in, give people a glimpse into a culture, a person, and a psychology that is different than one’s own. They allow people to connect with others even though they may never meet or speak to each other.
“To read that story and to identify with it, and to see her life being similar albeit so different from their own, that’s very beautiful,” McClelland said.
