Facing Reporting Challenges Like a Champ

Not every trip can be sunshine and rainbows, especially when you’re working with anarchists.

After a full week of reporting, I’m still struggling to make progress on my anarchist story. I’ve hit dead end after dead end with people just refusing to talk or taking the time to point out how I’m part of an institution that flies in the face of their very beliefs. I’ve never heard the word “capitalist” spat out with such venom. It turns out anarchists don’t want to talk to a journalist or an America. Who knew?

I’ll be honest: I haven’t faced this challenge in the best way. I didn’t charge straight ahead, the “no’s” and rejections bouncing off my shoulders as I ran towards the truth. No, instead I furrowed my brow and acted like a child who was told he couldn’t have a cookie. Apologies to my friend who had to see me react that way (sorry, Bridget).

For a little bit I resented my story. Why couldn’t it be easy? Why did it have to be me that got this story? Then I realized how ridiculous those questions are.

Why should it be easy? Why shouldn’t it be me that got this story?

After pulling back and reassessing my strategy, I’m back out on the trail. I had an interview on a rooftop bar called Mikropolis with a political science professor yesterday. That was one of the more interesting moments I’ve had on this trip. I couldn’t find the bar for 15 minutes, but after asking three different people for directions I managed to locate it. I could hear the muffled squeals of electric guitar and the low rumbling of a drum set on the first floor, but I had to go up. All I had to do was walk up a narrow metal stairway that wrapped around a broken elevator shaft.

Up, up, up, each floor opening up to apartments with graffiti-covered doors or empty doorways leading into what I think were bathrooms (I don’t know what else to call a room with nothing but a sink). Eventually I reached the roof. There was minimal lighting, the bar was to the right and tables and chairs were set up opposite like any bar. It was pretty normal. I found my contact and sat down for a short and relatively uninformative interview.  I was pretty discouraged, but I ended up talking to a woman at the bar who said her sister, who was at Mikropolis, had worked as a journalist and was involved with some anarchists.

Long story long, I’m going to an assembly on Thursday to openly pitch my story to a group of anarchists (looking forward to more capitalist smack talk). The massive protest and demonstration tomorrow should also provide great opportunities for reporting too. The story’s not dead, it’s just evolving.

I don’t think this is anything new for a journalist; it’s not even new for me. But doing my work in a  foreign environment threw me for a loop more than I thought it would. It’s been a challenge and a strange adventure so far – and I still can’t even say I have faith it’ll work out. I guess it wouldn’t bother me as much if the chaos of my work wasn’t such an on-the-nose analogy for the anarchists themselves.