Our Reporting Process on November 9
Dear readers,
This is neither a defense nor an apology. As an editor of the Quest, it is not my responsibility to defend my own work, nor is it my place to express views on the events I cover. Indeed, it is my obligation not to. That is why I have, until now, kept silent about our coverage of November 9, and the backlash to it. Yet it is my responsibility to do what we have always done as student journalists: bring light to the hidden, and clarity to the opaque.
So I will write to clarify, and correct, some of the misapprehensions and rumors that have been circulated about my work and the work of others.
On Monday, November 6, Quest editors were informed that a walkout was planned for that Thursday. The story was then offered up to the several Quest reporters present in the room for open story claim. As our reporting is done entirely by unpaid volunteers, in almost all cases, a story that no one wants to write simply isn’t written. This proved to be the case with this story, which received no volunteers.
On November 9, at 12:32pm, I received VP Karnell McConnell-Black’s email, which referenced the upcoming walkout. That email came as a surprise, and I immediately reached out to reporters Owen, Sam, and Adrian, who agreed to be on a breaking news team.
Adrian, Sam, Owen, and I met at the student publications office around 1:00pm. As is Quest practice, Owen, Adrian, and I wore press badges. This is done for several reasons. First, it protects those we interview: it immediately shows anyone we talk to who we are and what we do, and ensures they aren’t caught off guard by our role or our reporting. Second, it protects us: if the police sweep in, a press badge might offer some meager protection against arrest.
As a result of the fast turnaround, we didn’t have time to retrieve or make professional press badges (mine was in a drawer in my room.) So we improvised as best we could. This is the cause of the now (in)famous orange duct tape I wore on my jacket with the word “PRESS” written on it in black sharpie.
At this point we had all made an agreement that the edges of our coverage stopped at the edge of campus. We are a campus newspaper, and we cover events on campus. And we were simply not prepared to run breaking news coverage in downtown Portland on an hour’s notice.
At around 1:14pm, we walked to Eliot Circle. We began taking photos, audio, and video at around 1:24pm (the timestamp of my first photo.) I encouraged the team to focus on audio, from which we could later piece together quotes and speeches. We would go on to collectively record a total of 4.18 gigabytes of footage in various forms over the course of the following hours, only a fraction of which has been released.
To those who have cast doubt on whether the events we reported really happened, I say only this: we have it on tape.
The editors would later make difficult decisions about how much of that footage to make public, and in what form. Simply releasing all 612 photos, videos, and audio clips would be the best way to corroborate our reporting, and many newsrooms might have done so.
Yet, unlike a professional newsroom, our first obligation is to Reed students. Releasing the footage might have solidified our reporting, but it would also have put Reedies at risk both from the law and from doxxing attempts. We would not allow that, so we carefully selected the clips that would go out, and blurred visibly identifying characteristics. So I can only give you my word that the footage corroborates our reporting, and leave it at that.
At around 1:48pm (the timestamp of my last photo outside the PAB), I turned to Adrian and Sam and asked if they would go with me if I made the call to abandon our resolution and follow the protest off campus. They said they would. Based on what we had already seen, it was my assessment that the story had expanded beyond Reed and would be of interest to the professional news. I felt it important that a student newspaper like the Quest be involved in breaking that story.
The rest has been reported at length in the stories you have all read. I will elaborate only on our experience as reporters, which is, for good reason, kept out of news reporting.
Shortly before I took my first WOTC photo at 2:42pm, we arrived at the Center ahead of Reed protesters, and waited in a nearby cafe. When we saw Reedies arriving, we exited the cafe, and I took several photos from the back of the crowd.
We soon crossed the street to get a better shot, and would remain there for much of the rest of the protest. As we have previously reported, a group of masked men, at least one of whom appeared to be armed with a baton, soon established a perimeter around the main body of the protest. We were unsure of their goals, but thought it best to avoid interacting with them on the hunch that they might oppose our taking photos of the crowd, which ultimately proved correct.
Contrary to what some have suggested, we never moved farther than one street from the crowd, and at no point allowed the police to “get between” us and the protest, both for the quality of our coverage and for our own safety.
Throughout the roughly two hours we spent downtown, we recorded a significant amount of audio footage. This is a standard practice for Quest reporters covering protests, as it conserves storage space and battery life when we are limited to working with mobile phones while also accurately capturing language and quotes.
Many of those audio clips were used as the basis of our later reporting. However, a significant number were not initially released, as mistakes on our part caused them to pick up our conversations instead of the voices of the crowd.
Under normal circumstances, these “junk” clips would not be worthy of publication. However, as I have said, I consider it important to be transparent about our reporting process, so we are releasing many of them online today as part of a single sequence. It is important to be clear that this audio archive should not be taken as a news story — many of the clips are garbled and are not necessarily in chronological order. They were never intended for release. But they do provide a valuable “found footage” record of what we saw, heard, and did that day. I encourage anyone curious about our process to listen to the full sequence.
Adrian, Sam, and I returned to the student publications office at around 5pm, where we reunited with Owen. Over the course of the next few hours, we sent out several requests for comment, including to college administration and to the Reed SJP.
Sometime shortly before 8pm, Owen was in contact with a representative of Reed SJP. I put forward an initial comment deadline of noon on the 10th, thinking that it was necessary to set such a deadline to give reporters time to incorporate comments from the SJP and others before publishing on the evening of the 10th. However, I didn’t clarify, and Owen initially misunderstood my comment to mean that we would publish the story at noon on the 10th, and communicated that to the SJP representative.
The representative reacted negatively to the deadline, and asked for the contact information of an editor of the Quest. I gave Owen permission to share my phone number. At 8:04pm, Owen, Adrian, Sam, and I began a phone call with the representative that lasted for about twenty minutes. With the permission of the representative, Adrian recorded that call, but, at the representative’s insistence, we all agreed not to release the recording or to quote from the conversation directly.
However, since misinformation has since been spread about these events, I feel it necessary to explain in vague terms my own words. I clarified that the noon deadline was not a final deadline, but a hold minimum — ie, that we would publish nothing before noon, and any comment we received before that time would be guaranteed to appear in the first story we released. I was clear that any further comment we received after noon would, of course, be accepted and included in our coverage, and, if possible, in our breaking news coverage. We simply would not be able to guarantee its inclusion. I also stated that we could not alter a deadline that had already been set. I refused to provide further details of our story and its contents prior to publication, in line with the Quest’s firm stance against prior review.
The call ended at approximately 8:30pm, and the Reed SJP released a statement criticizing the paper shortly before 10:52pm, which said that “we plan to release a detailed statement to the Quest (as well as the general public) on all relevant information in the coming days.” The Quest has received no further statements from the Reed SJP since that night, but will publish them if they arrive.
We remained in the press office until 3am that night, working on the story for a total of 14 hours that day. Owen was minimally involved, and eventually chose to withdraw from the story due to a conflict of interest, and left all relevant group chats and documents. At 3pm, the rest of the team began to return to the office to continue work. Editors Lindsey and Henry joined us in person to help with word choice while the writing and review process was still ongoing. Editor Finn was away from Reed on a personal trip, but called in that night to discuss.
As has been common practice while I have served on the Quest editorial board, we took turns reading the story aloud several times to catch poor writing and minor mistakes. Work continued until close to midnight, at which point the full story underwent final review by those in the room — myself, Sam, Henry, and Lindsey — and by Adrian and Finn over the phone. The final text was signed by Adrian and Sam, and then approved by unanimous vote of the editorial board. We published at 12:01am that night, after a total of twenty three hours of work.