Video: “On the World’s Front Pages” — Journalism in Times of Crisis

Living through a turbulent historical moment inevitably changes us.

As a journalist and historian Hochschild asks: “What was the experience that opened someone’s eyes?” The answer to this question is found in primary sources: “Thanks to the records that people have left behind, you can put a finger on a particular experience or a particular moment” when a person had a revelation that “changed how they felt about something.”

Traditional journalism practices have a place in the digital age.

Bauerlein asks: Are traditional journalistic narratives possible in the digital age? Hochschild thinks so: in a world where everyone has instant access to “the facts of the days news in an almost up-to-the-minute way,” that means you have to tell your story with craft in order to draw the reader in, “to show how people’s lives are being impacted by whatever is the subject at hand.” Studying heaps of data and charts is not enough, in other words: we still need stories to understand information in a human context.

Future historians will be influenced by what is documented now.

The writing of history is dependent on “who has left a record of what they were doing [and] thinking,” explains Hochschild. This means that those who have the access, ability, and privilege to document their life will be the sources most easily accessible to historians:

“When I choose characters, it’s because I can find their voices in the past. And this becomes a challenge because the voices that you can find are not always the voices that you would like to find.” —Adam Hochschild

“It’s much easier to find voices of the rich than of the poor, of white people than of Black people, of slave owners than of slaves, than of colonizers than of the colonized,” Hochschild said. But journalists and historians can and should write about the voices that are harder to find.

The Takeaway for Right Now

“Do future historians a favor and keep your letters.” —Adam Hochschild

Keep a diary. Write letters (or emails) to friends, snap photos on your phone. It might just feel like hurried notes in between teleworking, homeschooling kids, or taking walks around the block, but documenting our everyday lives is important for shaping historical narratives.

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