How NBC News Reporters Earn the Trust of Sources
An NBC News exclusive found that Mississippi authorities had buried people without notifying their loved ones. Here’s how reporter Jon Schuppe gained the trust of the families.
He first reported on Dexter Wade, who died after being struck by a police car in Jackson in March. It took five months for his family to learn about his death and burial in a county pauper’s field. Schuppe soon learned of two other men buried in the same field without their families’ knowledge. By December, NBC News had the names of 215 people anonymously buried, posting them in the hopes of alerting more families. In response, Jackson police adopted a new policy for notifying dead people’s next of kin.
The “Lost Rites” series relied on Schuppe carefully building trust and forging relationships with traumatized families. Those relationships allowed him and his colleagues to show that the botched notifications were not isolated cases but indicative of systemic failures all over the country.
“Each of the families that we've written about told us, in a deep and emotional way, how much it meant to them to be heard and to be given a voice,” Schuppe said. "It really returns me to why I became a journalist in the first place.”
Check out our full blog post here: https://nbcuacademy.com/trust-sources/
Photography by Ashleigh Coleman for NBC News; additional photography featured: Imani Khayyam and Craig Mulcahy for NBC News
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