How to Immerse
Ruby Cramer on being there
Last year, rather than starting with exploring a topic, as journalists tend to do, Ruby Cramer set out on a reporting journey thinking instead about an emotion: anger.
Ruby is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post, who finds feature ideas off the news. She began talking to her editors about exploring a “coarsening” she noticed happening within communities and between people. There was a palpable sense of fury taking hold of the country, preventing some individuals from seeing each other’s humanity at all.
These instincts led her to a small town divided by an immigration crisis, to the living room of a man who made a threat against a politician, to a father who had been the victim of a hate crime, to a woman struggling to hold on to her own empathy for her neighbors, to a class for drivers who succumbed to road rage (where she dug into societal triggers that landed them there).
Ruby’s stories are immersive and kaleidoscopic. We see people affected by the same event, sitting in the same classroom, living in the same town. Yet each is experiencing it differently, depending on their point of view, values, and moments in their lives that have shaped how they interpret the world. Ruby focuses her literary camera lens inside of the auto shop, on the airport floor, inside the traffic cop’s car, on the living room sofa.
“The idea of immersion implies leaving home—or at least spending significant amounts of time outside it—engaged in daily exposure to your subjects and the problems they face,” writes Ted Conover, who emphasizes empathy in reporting in his book Immersion A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep. “This is no drive-by. I did more than get a quote. I lingered and I listened. I got to know them as multidimensional.”
When Ruby talked to me recently about starting this kind of reporting, she admitted: “I thought I knew what immersive journalism meant. I really did not know.” Her editor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative writer David Finkel, took her through a “crash course.” Ruby was generous enough to share some of the lessons she has learned with you.
