Q&A with a journalist from eastern Ukraine

When Olena [last name removed], a journalist from eastern Ukraine, was a student at Donetsk National School, she and her roommates left a humorous sign on their dorm door. It had a list of rules for the house written in 10 Commandment style. The residents signed the list “the holy sisters.” The year was 1984. And Olena and her roommates were citizens of the Soviet Union.

The stunt nearly cost them their educations. Administrators reported the joke, thinking that they were serious, and Olena was almost expelled.

She likes to share this story because “it’s indicative of the time,” she says.

Olena, 49, recently arrived in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband, Yaroslav, 50, and their nine-year-old daughter, Olga. Olena and her husband, also a journalist, are from Donetsk, Ukraine, one of the cities seized by pro-Russian separatists this spring. The family left the city in May and spent the summer in the Lviv region in western Ukraine.

They continued to file stories — sometimes as many as 18 a day — but received a phone call from a friend in August warning them their lives were in danger.

After the threat, their 27-year-old son, Roman, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, arranged for his family to come to the United States on a two-month professionals visa.

From their son’s apartment in north-central Columbia, Olena and her husband, continue to report on the events unfolding in Donetsk.

Olena, who spent the early part of her career as a secondary school math and physics teacher, has been a regional correspondent for Ukrainian Independent News Information Agency (UNIAN) (http://www.ostro.org/) since 2000. She was always curious about journalism, she says, but it wasn’t until the Soviet Union fell and the media opened up that she chose it for her profession.

“The social importance of this profession is very high, and I decided for myself you can’t stay quiet, you need to have as much influence on the situation as possible,” she says.

The daughter of an electrician and coal-mine geologist, Olena grew up in a Donetsk suburb called Makiivka. Like most children of the Soviet Union, she participated in the communist youth group called the Pioneers. But even at a young age, Olena knew she had to be independent. “My personal freedom I tried never to exchange at any of those meetings or politically motivated events,” she said.

She met her husband during their second year of university study. Both were scientists, studying physics. But when the opportunity to study journalism presented itself, both opted to earn a 3-year post-secondary journalism degree.

At 35, she filed her first story. The information agency in 2000 was young, she said. “The most important thing wasn’t your age, experience, diploma, awards or anything like that, the most important thing was the result of my work,” she says.

Olena covered everything in the Donetsk region. She has been the agency’s only correspondent since she began. Her reports cover everyday life, general news, and corruption — including the 2001 murder of local reporter Igor Alexandrov who covered police corruption. (any stories in English I can link to?)

Fast forward to 2014. Olena sat down with Tracey Goldner to discuss the challenges of reporting from Eastern Ukraine.

(Olena’s answers have been translated to English from Russian.)

What is it like in Eastern Ukraine right now?

Olena: It’s a very difficult situation in Ukraine right now. There’s just one word: It’s war. No rule of law. It’s absolute spread of gangs. The police system doesn’t work. Special Forces don’t work. Most Ukrainians left a month ago. The National Squad and Army left. There are a lot of pro-Russian separatists and militants and international bounty hunters. We had a lot of gangsters of the local type before, but then the separatism, the military intervention, rocket artillery started. My relatives and friends that I talk to, they tell me they have rocket artillery and gunfire from different locations in the city. The fighters play with the city like it is a game of Battleship.

When did things start to get dangerous?

Olena: It began in April. Russian militants and armed militants seized our regional administration building. Journalists were hunted, threatened and intimidated at pro-Ukrainian meetings.

For some reason, they were very aggressive toward to the word journalist. They only talked to and accepted Russian journalists. Asking journalists to leave the events was the least offensive thing they did.

This was happening to all the journalists in the region. We had to hide our identities.

If they found out that journalists were at one of the events, they would make the crowd aggressive toward them.

There was this so-called referendum that the terrorists held in order to try to legitimize their effort. It was fully fraught of course. It was just pieces of paper that they just copied on a copier, and even then it was so-called polls. They found out there was a Ukrainian journalist there. They ran her out and she hid in the suburbs because when she left, she figured that had been tailed.

At the end of April there were massive meetings with Russian citizens. Six or seven buses of people came to Donetsk from Rostov, Russia. They lived in local hotels. It’s Yanukovych who paid for this. They basically tried to mind up the crowd with pro-Russian rhetoric. Russian television would show coverage as if this is what people in the region thought.

Can you give me a specific example of the violence in the city?

Olena: So this is a very precise example with students from the Donetsk National University. Seven boys were just hanging around their dorm, sitting and talking and suddenly some armed people came wearing masks and strip-searched them. They were standing there in their underwear for absolutely no reason. Nothing indicated what political opinion those boys had, the only thing was that one boy had a small Ukrainian flag.

They took them to the regional building, which had been seized by separatists, took them to the fifth floor and started torturing them. They had a personal conversation with each boy after that. When I interviewed them later they didn’t want to talk with me actually, but they did confirm that they were indeed tortured by people wearing masks. The separatists were trying to force them to claim that they were fighters for the pro-western Ukraine side.

They hit their toes with a shovel, crushed their ribs. When I spoke to them they couldn’t walk straight. One boy was wearing a hat because his head was covered with stitches. These were second, third and four-year students from the physics faculty, actually. They were pretty smart boys because they were studying on scholarship. They were all local boys and showed their student tickets.

I thought when I was talking to them that some young psychos tortured them. They told me, ‘no, we could see that those were grown-ups, over 40 that must have been working at a prosecutor’s office. They said they were skilled in what they were doing.

One of the most important parts of this story is that they tortured these boys separately and wanted them to admit that they fought for the right sector (a Ukrainian nationalist party). They were pressuring them separately and this lasted for the whole night.

About 4 a.m., they were put into one single room, were forced to lower their heads, and the separatists put guns in front of them, and at that moment Life News TV (a Russian outlet), rushed in. The separatists said they had captured right sector soldiers.

I couldn’t believe this myself. They must have some ethics. The boys told me they could see that these were professional journalists. They came with professional equipment. The journalists acted as if the students had claimed that they came from western Ukraine to fight.

The journalists left and from that moment we knew that those boys were captured so we tried to do whatever we could to release them. We found some international organizations and tried to buy them out. We did succeed and just paid cash for their release. That’s when I interviewed them. They were quite afraid to be in Donetsk after that.

Some relatives of those guys actually recognized them on TV and called back and were horrified. They asked, “Are our children really the fighters of the right sector?”

Did you continue to work after leaving Donetsk for Busk [a town in the Lviv region]?

Olena: Yes, we never stopped working. The only condition for us to stay there (in Busk) was to have Internet to be able to work. It was dangerous for us to tell the truth and report honestly from Donetsk. In Donetsk, if we used words such as separatists or terrorists in our reports, we could be taken hostage. Outside of the region, we could say the truth. We still had all the contact information for our sources. We received emails daily. People called us who knew us from all over the country. I had a phone connection all the time with the sources. We had contact information with the commanders of the Army Corps in Luhansk and Donetsk. The national squad would just call me and tell me stuff and I would record it.

Are journalists working in Donetsk now?

Olena: No, no one is working. Everybody is in the distance. Newspapers are gone long ago. Armed people would come into a newsroom and spend several hours explaining how to report, scare them very much and they were basically told how they should start working. All they could do is close the newspaper. People just stopped going to work.

What do you think of the United States?

Olena: It’s okay, we like it here, especially we are satisfied that the states are now supportive of Ukraine. We didn’t exactly expect the civil support, and it is a very good thing.

Are you still filing stories?

Olena: Yes, 10 stories a day. Sometimes more.

Your whole life is in Donetsk. What’s happening with your house and property?

I have no idea what’s happening with my house. I read some official reports, just look at the list to see if my address is on the list. I always worry for my building. We live downtown pretty much and so shells several times hit the stadium that you can see from our window. A lot of people just left, but a lot of single people stayed. I have no idea what’s happened to our car. We left it in a garage. We still pay off the monthly payment. My mom said armed people were checking around garages to see if anything was open. You can see they are bounty hunters. Shellings are not always precise. So I really want our home to stay safe though it’s not the most important thing. Even here with our son this is a relaxing situation for me. But every morning I wake up and see my house in front of me.

ah, editing

I have to admit. I am naturally resistant to editing. I was that kid who used to write a poem and and then leave it. I would move onto the next one, believing that editing would only destroy the magic and leave the poem weaker.

I continued that habit into high school and then into college. The bad habit that started with poetry when I was 11, persisted into my 20s with all of my writing. I'm not really sure how I got away with it for so long.

Before grad school, just one person ever explained it to me and that person, Patrick, is my best friend from high school. A few years ago, Patrick started writing poetry seriously and would talk about the wonders of editing. He said that's where his poems began. They would become better, stronger iterations of themselves after each edit. I kind of scoffed.

"What about the magic," I asked.

He told me there is no magic. Just agonizing, exhausting, mind-numbing editing. Every morning before he went to his job as a preschool teacher, he would wake up to move commas and search for the precise word. I wondered if I would ever become that kind of editor. I figured it wouldn't happen until I was forced. As my quantitative methods professor used to say, the mind is hard wired to find the shortest possible path to resolution. It's not that we mean to be lazy. It's just that we're wired to find the path of least resistance.

This summer, I learned the kind of editing Patrick talked about. The editing process with stories is now longer than the reporting process. The interviews seem easy at this point. That's the fun part. The icing. The hard part is being merciless with the copy. Cutting out every redundancy.

I love the lines "the lean editor is the mean editor" and I really love "kill your darlings."

I spent hours last week editing with various city editors and copy editors. It was mind-blowing to see how they work: being critical of every line and thinking of all the possible phrasings (as writers) and interpretations (as readers).

Although I am exhausted both mentally and physically, I am sad this advanced reporting class is ending. It's the hardest and most enjoyable course I've ever taken. There is something insanely difficult, yet rewarding about reporting. If I get to continue doing it, I will be grateful.

But the million dollar question at this point is, how do I get more stamina?

the unexpected turns of being a reporter

I like the unexpected turns that reporting takes.

Sometimes, I'll identify the key players in a story, only to write a story that hardly attributes them at all. People who seem like they'll be crucial to the story turn out to be unquotable. Experts never call back. A shot in the dark call for a quick verification on a minor detail offers a new perspective that adds an entire section to the story.

Constant flexibility is crucial and necessary.

Last Friday, I prepared for an interview I had with a national allergist for about two hours. Most of it was background and the rest was question crafting. The public relations coordinator for National Jewish Hospital told me I had an hour. I planned accordingly. I had so many questions I needed to verify and didn't want to rely on the Internet.

I called just a few moments after noon here and 11 a.m. in Denver. He was in with a patient. He would call back. I waited for 20 minutes, hoping I'd be able to cram all my questions in. I felt confident I could if I hurried.

About 12:25, he called back. I introduced myself, told him about the story and told him I had about 20 questions. He said okay hesitantly. I launched into my questions, starting with the background and planned to hit the technical stuff after we got going. Two question in, he said he had two minutes left.

I felt flat, realizing I shouldn't have hoped for so much. I should have diversified my portfolio of national sources. I asked one last question, trying to prioritize 15 questions into one in a matter of moments.

We hung up and I felt disappointed, insulted. My skin has grown thick enough in this industry to not take it too personally. I just felt isolated from the topic. Where was my spirit guide? Where was the person who would explain the intricacies to me? Why hadn't I been able to identify that person? I had been planning on that interview since Tuesday.

I learned a valuable lesson. National experts are important, but perhaps best reserved for that highly technical question: the one that can only be answered by someone in their position. The other background-y questions should be reserved for the local nurse or doctor.

I called a nurse in Columbia on Monday. She spent 30 minutes with me, patiently explaining while she read charts and ushered patients in and out. I know this because I could hear her and because once she admitted to reading to charts.

Health care workers are slammed. At the top level, they hardly have a moment. They are triple booked. While I was bummed to not be prioritized, it's hardly surprising. Just a couple hundred, maybe a few thousand will see my article. I'm not the AP. Perhaps experts like him should be reserved for the bigger media dogs.

I'm glad I tried my hand. I won't give up. I'll try again. Next time, I'll prepare the same. But instead of having one list of questions, I'll have two: one for the 5 minute interview and one for the interview that actually turns out to be an hour.

After all, he's a sample size of one. It's certainly not enough to generalize to all doctors of his standing.

so, quant was worth it

Last semester, I used to show up to my quantitative research methods course at least 15 minutes early. My palms were always a little sweaty. My heart beat a little quicker. Dr. Leshner had a propensity for passing out quizzes unannounced.

My first few scores were 2 out of 10. I thought for sure I wouldn't pass the class.

So, I bumped up my studying. Rather than just reading the material, I composed what felt like mountains of note cards. I flipped through them at all hours of the day.

I learned the language of quantitative researchers. I memorized the terms. I hoped that by knowing everything on command, I could reason my way to the answers. It helped. I was at times, unable to synthesize the necessary information. My brain doesn't quite work in a mathematical or logical way. I think in analogies and networks of information that look more like the roots of a tomato plant than a computer chip.

My parents have told me. Friends have teased me about it. Boyfriends have even endearingly termed our conversations slightly related tangents. Drawing relationships between seeming unrelated information is something I adore, but it can make communicating with other people who don't think this way, difficult. It's a logic that makes sense to people who know me, and a logic that drives people who work from point A to point B absolutely crazy, especially when I pop up with point K.

Although, it can be difficult at times, I'm okay with thinking differently; I've come to peace with it anyway. I like noticing patterns that might not be obvious to other people.

Taking quantitative research methods was like spending hours with point A to point B people. Every step had to be examined before the next decision could be made.

I could feel myself becoming more rational.

I'm not worried that I'll lose myself in a different way of thinking. This language is another option I now have. I have noticed that the downside is that it feels constricting. When I think "logically," I miss the freedom that comes from dismissing the "rules." But, being a health reporter, requires attention to detail and often, a careful examination of medical studies.

So, I felt especially grateful to Dr. Leshner today. as I combed through about two dozen medical studies. I read them with varying levels of understanding, yet am certain I comprehended much more today than I would have last year at this time.

Statistical significance and p-values scattered through the literature. I paid attention to confounds. My new knowledge helped me sort the information into a hierarchy and know which studies should be given more prominence than others.

I still felt like I was drowning in a sea of information, trying to make sense of it all. Synthesis is key, and that's the main task of the reporter. Stories bring the data to life. But, at the core of the story is the ability to make sense of it all.

I love striking a balance between the personal and the logical. People will always be anecdotal because they are a sample size of one. But, it amazes me to this day how much more powerful that sample of one can be when set against mountains of data.

Perhaps that's why I'm drawn to journalism in the first place. While the data is part of supporting the story, the story itself comes to life through quotes and personal experience, something quantitative researchers might quickly dismiss with the flick of a wrist.

thoughts on an interview

I'll never forget the moment I turned up the drive to Angela Anderson's house. My palms were a little sweaty and my chest a little tight. I was excited and nervous to meet the woman I had spent the past few weeks thinking about. Ever since one of my editors — Katherine Reed — told me her story, I had been thinking about the interview. I wondered how I would keep my emotions in check; and even wondered if I could. The interview took an emotional toll on me, as I expected it would.

It reminded me of the interview I did with Tracy Edwards last December. When I walked into his home and saw him in a wheelchair with bandages wrapped around the stumps of his recently amputated legs, it was hard not to get emotional. I am, at times, incapacitated by sadness.

I remember these interviews intimately. I remember the smells, the awkward moments, the questions I forgot to ask and even the ones I did. But, as the interviews begin to bleed into one another, I realize that these are the interviews that are easy to remember. But every interview is special and has surprises. I think it's easy to latch onto extremes, but it also is in the everyday experiences that stories lurk.

Yesterday, I met a mother, Amy Pope, who has two extremely allergic children. It was the first in-person interview I'd done since I interviewed Angela. I found myself comparing the two stories, but stopped once I got into the details and immersed myself in the story of the woman in front of me.

She surprised me with information I hadn't considered: shopping for children with allergies takes hours, is cripplingly expensive and has essentially forced her to stop working. As I biked back to the Missourian to finish off my copy desk shift, I felt myself pondering the life experiences of Amy. She had invited me into her world, as each subject of a story hopefully chooses to do.

I felt honored, as I typically do following an interview. I learned something. And, even though the timing was tough — my mind will wander back to Angela for probably quite some time — it was a good step back into more everyday reporting. It was also a good reminder that every interview is unique, is surprising and has something to teach.

spinning globe

I grew up in a 2-level home. The first floor is where we lived and the second floor is where we slept.

As a child, I spent summers in a hot pink one piece running around with a super soaker squirt gun. My brothers and I would scream until our voices became hoarse and my mom would call for us, particularly me, to do something cerebral.

I had no idea what the word even meant. I remember I was holding a sun chip and had my eye on a doughnut the first time she said it. "What's that," I remember asking. She told me it means doing some reading or writing; something with your brain. I protested that I was already keeping a journal. I guess it wasn't enough.

That afternoon, I ventured into my dad's home office to thumb through his books and spend time inside. I was glum. His shelves of dusty books looked thick. I stared at the computer. A stack of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing programs he'd bought us for the summer sat nearby. The plastic wrap was still on them. I told myself I'd start those programs soon and turned my attention to the globe to the left of his computer. I started spinning it around and stopping it with my finger to see where it had landed.

It was on this day, I started to really look at the countries of the world. Their outlines started to mean more than just a new blob of color. I landed on the U.S.S.R. (it was an older globe) and looked it up in the encyclopedia. I landed on Panama and started reading about the canal. The afternoon passed.

My dad came home and found me on the floor of his office with the globe and stacks of encyclopedias in a circle around me. Back then, we had one large book for every letter of the alphabet. I think it was 25 or 26 books in all.

I remember being unimpressed with Asia. I didn't feel an urge to go there, no matter how many times my index finger landed there. Years later, I told my friends Asia was the last place I wanted to visit. Iceland, Uganda and Peru were much higher on the list. The entries for those places seemed much more interesting for some reason.

So, it was strange when, at 27, I found myself living in Sri Lanka and just a few months later, embarking on a 2-year Peace Corps stint in Central Asia. Instincts, or rather, the information I'd gathered in those encyclopedias or in my daily life, had not successfully informed me about the wonders of Asia.

My experience in Asia was intensely life-altering. It's the reason I'm in grad school and the reason I'm studying journalism. Asia taught me about community and communality and the importance of others. It is a magical place. And I cannot for the life of me understand why I didn't understand that sooner. In fact, my little brother just said over the weekend, "I'd like to travel, but am not really interested in Asia."

I just thought: If only you could just go there to see it. You might have a different take.

I think that telling stories well is a lot like my struggle to understand Asia. Anyone who has been to Asia will understand this statement, which I know sounds a lot like a huge generalization. But, the dozens of Asian countries share a common culture, just as every state in the U.S. shares a common understanding.

It took me more than a year to wrap my head around the cultural differences. The divide between Western culture and Eastern culture is wide. But, when I left, I could safely say that I knew how to think like a Turkmen. It is a skill that is incredibly useful if used in parallel in the U.S., but that if used directly would do nothing to help me. Thinking like a Turkmen in the U.S. would be maddening for me and most likely maddening for everyone around me. Essentially, I would be unable to operate in our culture.

I think being a reporter means living in a divide like this. We are tasked with inviting readers into a situation they are completely unfamiliar with. We tell them what it's like. We invite them to understand it, to smell it and to feel it. But, they've likely never been there themselves.

Our job is to be the bridge and to invite readers over the divide.

rhythm

I love the readings we do for class. It seems they are reading my mind. Varied sentence length. Varied paragraph length. Varied example count ... I think about this constantly.

One word.

Two words.

Three.

Four?

I really love Roy Peter Clark's assertion that one is for power; two for comparison, contrast; three for completeness, wholeness, roundness; four or more to list, inventory, compile and expand. I also like how four can be used to introduce an awkward idea.

The more I delve into writing, the more I realize that the magic I once felt for it is starting to evolve into something less like magic and more akin to power.

Constructions are intentional and while writing from the gut is always the answer, knowing the tools used in those constructions by feel, touch and smell is equally as powerful.