Transcript
Sara David: You’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America East. In each episode, you’ll hear from union members who create films, TV series, podcasts, and news stories that define our culture. We’ll discuss everything from inspiration and creative process to what it takes to build a successful career in media and entertainment. I’m Sara David, Vice President of Online Media, and today I’m joined by some of the incredible journalists nominated for the 2026 Writers Guild Award for Digital News. So let’s start with some introductions. Maybe Taiyler, if you could introduce yourself and maybe tell us a little bit about your piece or actually pieces that were nominated this year.
Taiyler Mitchell: Perfect. Yes, my name is Taiyler Mitchell. I am a reporter at HuffPost on the Breaking News team. When I get the chance, I try to cover all sorts of things related to social justice, race, culture, gender, and sexuality. I was nominated for three pieces this year, one with Njera about Cassie’s lawsuit galvanizing a movement of survivors and accusers. And then, the second one was about Altadena and the Eaton Fire, which was one of the neighborhoods that was struck by the Los Angeles County fires last year in January 2025. And then my third story, which won in this category was about the troubled teen industry, specifically a facility in Arizona.
Sara David: Thank you. Njera?
Njera Perkins: Yeah. Hi, I’m Njera Perkins. I’m a culture reporter at HuffPost. I mostly cover entertainment and broader culture around streaming, films, television, sometimes music. Also write about trending topics online and just pop culture more broadly, particularly issues at the intersection of race, politics and identity. The piece I co-wrote Taiyler here that was nominated was about the numerous allegations against Sean Diddy Combs in the lead up to his sex trafficking and racketeering trial last year. In particular, we broke down how this massive lawsuit filed by his former partner, Cassie, accusing of physical and sexual abuse kind of galvanized this movement of survivors who were essentially looking to hold the music industry and its alleged abusers accountable.
Sara David: Thank you. And Alex?
Alexander Sammon: Hey, I’m Alex Sammon. I am a features writer at Slate. The piece that I was nominated for this year, it’s about the town of Jena, Louisiana, which was the sort of first and central node of the new ICE detention center cluster in the United States. It’s an infrastructure sort of built out in Louisiana first and we’ve seen it expand the last two years of the Trump administration. But the town in question that I wrote about was the first one in central Louisiana to get an ICE detention center. And it was a place where a number of the student protestors on the Israel-Palestine issue were sent in the early months of that crackdown in 2025. So yeah, it’s about the rise of the ICE detention town as an economic and geographic formation.
Sara David: Thank you. I want to start with going back to the basics and origin stories, and I’d love to hear how each of you started your writing career and how your journalism and reporting interests and work kind of blossomed. So maybe let’s go in reverse order. We’ll start with Alex.
Alexander Sammon: Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. How did my writing career start? I guess I started as a fact-checker, which is sort of a well-trod path I think for people in magazines, or at least it used to be. And so I spent a number of years fact-checking on magazine features. I spent a lot of time working in various print magazines, checking a lot of political journalism, but also just reported features broadly. I started at Mother Jones Magazine as a checker there. And then, at Outside Magazine, I was a checker for a while and then The New Republic [inaudible 00:04:29] and started writing at that point, working my way into pitching and writing reported features. Yeah, I’ve been doing that for a number of years now. I spent the time as a politics reporter as well, and that sort of undergirded a lot of my work, but now it’s less patently about politics and more about narrative nonfiction and investigative work and the like. So that’s how I ended up at Slate and covering the stuff that I tend to cover, which is varied and non-specific, but very fun.
Njera Perkins: For me, I would say I had a more unconventional start to journalism because I didn’t get a journalism degree in college, my BA is in communications. So I found writing as a hobby during my, I’d say sophomore year of college. I started writing about entertainment and music. That’s always just been my interest. Growing up, that was music, movies, TV shows, all of that is what really interested me. And then yeah, that’s my start as a writer. I started out writing for free essentially for some small outlets and pubs. I’d say my first official start, I started out as a contributor working for Blabbity. They had multiple brands. I would write for Afrotech and Shadow and Act, that’s more their tech and business entertainment publications. And then from there, I started out as a celebrity entertainment editor over at PopSugar, was there for a few years and then went off to freelance, worked at People Magazine for a little bit, and then found myself here at HuffPost as a culture reporter, where I’ve been doing a lot of in-depth features and reporting. So yeah, I’d say that’s the gist of my career.
Taiyler Mitchell: For me, I’d say I’ve always loved to write. And by the time I got to college, I had gotten involved with the student newspaper at Howard University, The Hilltop. And then when I transferred schools, I started writing again at Dillard University’s The Courtbouillon newspaper and worked my way up to editor-in-chief. And immediately after I graduated, I started working at Business Insider on their West Coast news team. And after about two years, I headed over to HuffPost, and I’ve been here for the past three or so years.
Sara David: Thank you. Next, I kind of want to talk about how you found the specific story and perspective that you wanted to share. So actually, I think I’ll start with Alex, so then we can talk about the piece that Taiyler and Njera wrote together and then move over there. So Alex, for your piece, it’s like there were so many layers. I understand that ICE detention is kind of in the news more because of the ramping up of ICE, but also with protestors, and how did you find Jena in Louisiana specifically?
Alexander Sammon: Yeah. I was probably following the news, like anyone else and was curious, confused by the fact that people arrested in New York and Massachusetts kept turning up in central Louisiana, which is obviously very far from where they were initially detained. And the more I saw the name Jena, Louisiana in the news, the more I felt like, “Well, there has to be something interesting about this place and this facility. Why is it that people are being sent here from all over the country?” It felt like there was obviously something newsworthy about it. I couldn’t find very much in what was published at the time. You go through the paces of sending emails and doing phone calls and still, I wasn’t really able to get very much. And so I felt like I really had to go down there to get a sense of what is this place and what does it mean to be a ICE detention community, like have a town that’s where life is sort of built around.
Prison towns are a thing that we’re familiar with, but ICE detention is a novel formation. It’s certainly something that has arrived recently. And, is there anything to say about that? Is there a different economy that builds up around that? And so, I went down there with the hope that something would come of it. It was one of those sort of shots in the dark at some level, given that it was not a very press forward community. They didn’t really jump at the opportunity to speak to national press.
And so, once I was there, I talked to some people. There are two private prison contractors that furnished the majority of the support for this stuff. There actually is a long history of 10Ks and financial reports and shareholder reports on their facilities and this facility in particular. Anyways, it turned out it had a very rich history and the combination of that plus the sort of blanket no comment and that sort of hostility that I encountered while I was down there felt like the sort of pieces for a really compelling story about how these companies operate, how the system works, and also the way in which not talking about it, not disclosing the lack of oversight is actually really core to how it functions. So that was the way it sort of came together, but it was a difficult process because it was not easy to get anyone to say anything about what was happening, and I really had to piece it together in sort of an unorthodox way.
Sara David: Thank you. And then, Taiyler and Njera, if you want to address together first talking about, obviously the Diddy case was in the news, but how did you land on the specific story that you ended up writing?
Njera Perkins: Yeah, I can start. I know me and Taiyler have both been following the news with Diddy ever since Cassie’s lawsuit had come out. I had wrote a piece about it when it first happened, and I know she had also written about it and done her own reporting in HuffPost before I’d gotten there. So when I joined the staff around this time, 2024, we both were aware that once Diddy got arrested and indicted, we would probably be covering his trial in some capacity. So we all kind of mulled over just what kind of coverage can we do in the lead up to this trial? The conversations around Diddy at that time kind of spun so wildly out of control into conspiracy theories and just uninformed discourse generally about him and the conversation rarely focused on the accusers. So I think both of us were more interested in leaning into that side of the narrative that had been ultimately forgotten.
So yeah, we kind of mutually agreed on this angle in particular. I think we both kind of felt for the accusers in the situation, who didn’t really have a voice in all of the news and the headlines and everything. So we just started from there and the story kind of blossomed.
Taiyler Mitchell: Yeah. I had been covering Diddy’s legal issues for some time since the start of the lawsuit had happened. I remember when Njera joined HuffPost, I was already familiar with some of her work and I admired what she had written about, so I was like, “This is a great opportunity for us.” We were able to collaborate on not just this story, but tag teaming all of the incremental updates that led up to the trial. I also felt like it was really important that the two of us got to write about this because we both are Black women and so were a lot of his accusers and so were a lot of his fans and are still some of his fans. Yeah, it just felt really important for us to cover it with nuance and being able to speak to the people that we had connected with and we had already had all of these pieces coming together.
Sara David: Thank you. And Taiyler, I wanted to ask more about your other pieces. Obviously, the California wildfires had a very large and widespread impact. How did you land on Altadena and West Altadena specifically? And also, how did you find for your troubled teen industry piece, Spring Ridge Academy in Arizona? I’m wondering if you are kind of West Coast-based or those were sort of just places that you found while you were researching and decided to dig further, yeah.
Taiyler Mitchell: Okay. Great question. I am West Coast-based currently. I live in LA. The Altadena story kind of came to fruition and just from us live blogging the story a bunch. I mentioned I’m on the HuffPost Breaking News team, so we were constantly reporting on the stories. I live in LA and I was also kind of living it. I, thankfully, was not directly impacted by the fires, but it was still something that I felt emotionally tied to, so I wanted to be able to shed light on it. The Altadena story really highlighted how much of a diverse and prominently Black neighborhood Altadena was and continues to be right now. That’s kind of how I stumbled across that story.
The Troubled Teen piece is a little bit different. So this was kind of fate. I had told my editor at the time, Carla, that I wanted to cover more long form or do more long form reporting. And Sebastian, who I co-wrote the story with, had mentioned that he wanted to work on this story, but he needed help to his editor. And our editors talked, and then we ended up linking up on the story and working on it together for about 14 months or so.
Sara David: Thank you. My next question is for Alex. You kind of touched on this a little bit, but yeah, when I was reading your piece, I was very struck by you were kind of reporting on a town that had essentially stonewalled all of your attempts to hear from people directly. And even when they said, “I don’t want to talk to you,” they would throw little comments that were still, even if trying to be roundabout, felt a little hostile or not necessarily welcoming to a news reporter. How did you handle that atmosphere and how did it impact your reporting process and shape the piece ultimately?
Alexander Sammon: Yeah. It was an interesting process because obviously you don’t really ever want to go into a reporting assignment with building a piece around no comment. That’s a pretty unfortunate or it’s a difficult jumping off point. There are reporters who can do it very well. Obviously, people have done write-arounds that are fantastic. And so that’s sort of what I got pushed into here is, how do you do a write-around about a place? It was interesting because I think the way in which people didn’t want to talk to me or the way that they would speak to me and then ask that that comment be taken off the record, there was a lot of caginess. And so it sort of forced me to go to places I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. And there were a number of conversations that I had for the piece where I would speak with someone on the phone, they would tell me something that was really interesting or I’d see them in person.
And then an hour later I get a phone call that was like, “Please don’t publish that. If that goes to press, I’m going to lose my job. It’ll compromise my standing in the community. I am worried about social ostracization or consequence of various forms.” And I tried to be respectful of that. You don’t want to burn the people that you talk to and you don’t want to put people in danger. It was a difficult balance, but I thought that actually the more it happened and the more that I had doors slammed in my face or had things said to me and then withdrawn, it sort of felt like that was core to actually explaining how this economy operates. Incredibly, there’s a local newspaper in this town of Jena, which despite having 4,000 residents or fewer, had a regular weekly publication and they had an online archive.
And so the way that people talk to each other there was a little more available to me than it would’ve been otherwise. So I spent a lot of time going through the archive of that newspaper. I spent a lot of time going through the archive of these 10Ks and these shareholder reports and stuff. The two companies are GEO Group and CoreCivic. So GEO Group is, of course, the one that has the facility in Jena. It was sort of a combination of how do people talk to me as an outsider? How do they talk to each other internally?
And there were a few opportunities I had to see that. And so, I think patching those together, it felt like even though people were saying no comment or that they didn’t want to be on the record, it did feel like it sort of got to the essence of something that was a little more colorful or illustrative than just no one wants to talk. So I think that despite some discouraging early days on that story, it felt like it sort of came together once I found some of these back channels and pieced that into place.
Sara David: Yeah. And it seems like the voids where people weren’t able to offer context, you were able to fill with interesting other history of the town. So obviously, one was learning that Jena had been in the news and headlines for history of racism and some scandalous student events. And then another one, this is interesting, was kind of just what the local sports culture was like. I understand that the news headline can be something that you find in your research and kind of reading. Was the sports angle something that you kind of just stumbled upon there or something that maybe you’re just attuned to because you’re a sports head? Just wondering.
Alexander Sammon: Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. The history of the place also I didn’t know about until I really had already left. Part of that was people mentioned that there’s a hostility to press and hostility to outsiders in general based on what happened there, and no one really got into it. So once I figured that out, that felt like a really important sort of node in explaining why people are cagey. Maybe it’s not just because they have something to hide, but also because you do have this very strange history of the country descending upon Jena for a moment of national outrage over race and politics in Louisiana and the South. The sports angle, yeah, it was interesting because when I drove into the town, the only sign that they had or the sign that sort of welcomed you in said, “Jena, home of the Panthers, the Mighty Panthers, the softball division three or whatever softball champions.”
And when I spoke to people, they would talk about softball all the time. That was one of the things that came up, is that they want to talk about softball. They don’t want to talk about the ICE detention center. And as I went through the local paper again and again, what’s on the front page? It’s always the softball. And then there would be stuff about the ICE detention center tucked in there, but it felt like the way that the culture of the place is rendered is through the softball program, and that felt really important to me too.
People wanted to tell me about their daughter’s softball program or her season or whatever. That came up way more often than anything else. I sort of struggled to how to put that in there. Was it relevant? Was it not? But it felt like, “If this is the story that the town is telling about itself, it does seem like there’s a place for it in the piece.” And so, I put that in there and that’s how it came to be. I don’t know that much about softball or it didn’t going in, so that was something I had to learn about.
Sara David: Thank you. Taiyler, I wanted to ask similarly about sources for the troubled teen industry piece about Spring Ridge Academy. You were able to interview six former students and talk about the facilities treatment that left a lot of folks traumatized. Surprisingly, I thought that you might be stonewalled by folks from the school, but you’re able to speak to the director of the school. I think her name was Jeannie Courtney, and it was just her versus the six interviewees accounts were kind of totally opposite. How did you handle that in your reporting and present that story?
Taiyler Mitchell: That’s a great question. We had a lot of back and forth over the time period that we were reporting this story, so between reaching out to sources and being like, “Oh, somebody said this, can you confirm or deny?” That was across pretty much everyone at the school. Some people, of course, didn’t respond to us. Some people initially wanted to speak and then they didn’t want to anymore, which is totally fine. There were unfortunately more than enough people for us to talk to. And the way it worked was we would talk to one person and then they might give us a couple of other sources or potential sources to talk to as well. I hope that answered your question.
Sara David: Yeah, definitely. I guess I’m also wondering how did you build relationship and trust with these sources to handle such delicate and sensitive topics?
Taiyler Mitchell: I feel like it depended on the source. So if another source vouched for us, then they kind of have that trust there. Sebastian had already covered a lot of troubled teen stuff before I got involved with this, so he had that prior record and that helped. We also kind of divided and conquered the interviews, especially because we’re on two different coasts working two different shifts. We only overlap three days out of the week, I believe, at that point for sure. So we would just kind of toss them, and then if there was something that was more sensitive, he would be like, “I think this one might be better for you to do,” and vice versa.
Sara David: Thank you. And then, this next one’s for Njera, and then I know since you worked on together, you can hop in after if you’d like to add anything, Taiyler. But Njera, you had mentioned earlier that you felt that a lot of the accuser stories were previously either untold or just not given the weight and the platform that they deserved. What was your goal and strategy for making sure that you could do it right?
Njera Perkins: Yeah. So obviously, with the sources that me and Taiyler reached out to, we really wanted to speak to people who could talk about how cases like Diddy’s happen, how they stretch over periods of time, and how harm is able to happen in institutions like the music business where there’s a culture of misogyny and an abusive power where people are able to use their influence to silence people and keep stories like this quiet. So the goal always was to just give a voice to the people who had come forward with their claims. But I feel like just looking at news headlines sometimes, you see a story in the news one day and then it’s forgotten, but you see a million with Diddy leading the headline and whatever conspiracy theory or whatever conversation is happening around his latest allegations being levied against them. So it just felt like a just disjointed conversation surrounding his allegations, so we really just wanted to try to balance the conversation again.
Again, we started with the lead, it all started with Cassie’s lawsuit, and it seemed like by the time we had gotten to the indictment and then ultimately the trial, some of that had gotten kind of lost, so we really wanted to just refocus the narrative.
Taiyler Mitchell: I think Njera basically said it all. Same thing with the other stories had a history of covering it, so I think that led people to be more okay with speaking to us. And I feel like we made it clear that we wanted to make this a bigger story and a focus on the idea that this is a big issue. This isn’t just Diddy, it’s the music industry, it’s bigger than the Black community. It’s really the product of the society that we live in and that it’s a capitalistic patriarchal society, where women are continuously subjugated and these ideas of power, domination, success are put over these ideas of respect and care and community. So I think that was what we kept in mind the whole time, and it, I hope, really showed in the piece.
Njera Perkins: And really quick, I just want to add a note about the sources that we talked to. We didn’t really run into a lot of roadblocks. Obviously, we had some people who declined to comment for the story, but all of our sources were very open and really eager to speak with us once we told them exactly what this piece was kind of about. I remember I was just talking with Taiyler, one of our sources, I was looking at our email thread, she responded almost instantly to our initial outreach email and was like, “I’m available this week to talk.” I think that eagerness gave us more confidence that we had found an angle that would both resonate with readers, but obviously something that would add something meaningful to this conversation and really give a platform for people who feel like they had gotten bypassed or forgotten in this conversation.
Sara David: Yeah. I also wanted to touch on, Njera, you mentioned how the Diddy trial, but also this is something we see in all trials today, kind of inspired conspiracy theories and a lot of, I don’t know, I guess armchair detectives and investigators, and we see this a lot on, for example, TikTok for today’s Lindsay Clancy trial. Was that something when you were going into the story, you were kind of just like, “We want to set the record straight,” or was it something that it felt like you were in conversation with, or was it just an annoyance?
Njera Perkins: I guess maybe a little bit of all that. I think by that point, just me personally, I was just kind of annoyed with what the headlines were saying and what conversations online were looking like and how people were discussing these allegations. By the time we had published this piece, it felt more like a lot of these claims and allegations and just the things that have been said about Diddy had become more of a joke and a punchline. So a little bit of it was setting the record straight and injecting some seriousness back into this topic that people have just bypassed and it just had become something to kind of poke fun at. That I would say inspired the angle that we went with for the story.
Taiyler Mitchell: I would also add that there seems to be, at least in the Black community, a lot of excuses or leeway given to men in power. A lot of times we refuse to hold these Black men accountable who are causing harm or accused of causing harm because it’s like, “Oh, but they contributed this way to X, Y, and Z.” And I just think that that’s unacceptable, especially when it’s at the expense of so many other people and many of whom were Black women, so we also tried to keep that in mind as well.
Njera Perkins: In cases like Diddy, I think we saw a lot of similarities with R. Kelly when that trial happened and everything, which is why we spoke to the co-founder of the R. Kelly movement to really speak to the emotional ties that people have to powerful figures who’ve made so many contributions to pop culture, like an R. Kelly, like a Diddy, that I think also has an influence on how people talk about things like sexual abuse and physical abuse and how serious they take this when someone that they essentially care about or have been a fan of is a subject of it. So I think that also impacts what these conversations start looking like.
Sara David: Thank you. Alex, I wanted to ask about, obviously, ICE and our fascist administration’s attack on First Amendment rights and journalism specifically have really ramped up in the past two years, but your reporting showed that this ICE facility in Jena had reports of mistreatment and even death as far back as 2016. Yeah, what was the response like, and did you feel a bit of a pressure of trying to help debunk the idea that ICE is new and good and important and just showing that there’s actually a long history and this is an experiment that’s working exactly as it was meant to?
Alexander Sammon: Yeah, totally. It’s a great question. It’s funny because I came away from that story feeling like the really treacherous stuff only happens with the bipartisan support. Obviously, there are aspects of this that are very much particular to the Republican administration, but then as you go through the history, part of what allowed for this expansion of ICE in Louisiana specifically, which to add, the reason that Louisiana was chosen as a place is because it’s very remote, because it’s very hard to access, there are very few lawyers, it’s remoteness and lack of resources is part of why it was chosen for this new deportation and detention infrastructure. It’s not a border state. It’s not a place where there are a ton of undocumented immigrants, but it’s where they’ve chosen to warehouse them. And obviously, the Trump administration, both the first time around and in its current form, decided to put a lot of money and energy towards building this up.
But in the interim, what’s interesting is that it was a Democratic governor in Louisiana doing prison reform that actually really inaugurated this, which is so interesting, something that I think a lot of liberal people would support and say was really well-meaning. They managed to do some sentencing reform and stuff, get people out of prison in Louisiana, which is a very incarcerated state. Of course, the one problem with that is that when you have private prison companies doing the work, taking people out of prison costs them money and they’re not just going to sit there and take the loss on the balance sheet. They’re like, “Well, if we’re not going to be imprisoning people for various criminal reasons, we’re going to find money elsewhere.” And so where do they go? They go to the Trump administration and they say, “We’re taking a hit on this criminal justice reform and we need you to make us whole.” And that’s exactly what the administration does.
They say, “All right, great. Turn all those prisons into ICE detention centers.” The history of this one facility goes back to the early 2000s, like even before ICE existed, this is a prison, it was a juvenile detention center, and there was so much abuse there, they ended up shutting it down. Even the Clinton years actually is when it started, the process of shutting it down, which is a very tough on crime administration. And they were like, “This is too much. We can’t keep this facility open.” So it gets closed down and then Hurricane Katrina hits and it gets reopened for that reason. Then it gets closed down again because of abuse. And then, it’s sitting there idly and finally GEO Group goes to the Trump administration and says, “We want in on the ICE money.” And the ICE money is bigger and better than regular criminal detention.
So they go there and they get these contracts and all of a sudden they’re making way more money per bed and there’s way less oversight because it’s private and ICE is a new entity. In a weird way, it’s a really interesting political history, for me at least it was, yes, it’s very much about the Trump administration and its ambitions and the particular flavor of cruelty that immigration enforcement has arrived at. But at the same time, it’s like you get there incrementally and there are Republican and Democratic administrations that take steps towards the system that we’re in. That was new to me. I’m not an immigration expert and I think I learned a lot while I was reporting it. It sort of shocked me to see that even really well-intentioned policy decisions ended up adding to this morass that we find ourselves in now.
Sara David: Yeah, absolutely. Taiyler, I also wanted to ask you in a similar vein about the ways that policy props up disparity in your Altadena story. I think that some readers might be familiar with the idea of racism and wealth disparity and how that impacted and was very clear in things like handling of disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina. But I also was kind of shocked to hear and read and learn that it could impact evacuation efforts. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned in terms of how policy widened those inequities?
Taiyler Mitchell: Yeah. I remember there being my sources talking about how a certain area of Altadena, the western part of Altadena, they didn’t receive the evacuation order until eight hours after the eastern part of Altadena did. The eastern part of Altadena is the white part, and then the western part is where more of the Black-owned homes are, the people of color, and that was a result of redlining over the years. It’s just even things that have technically changed over the years still leave a lasting impact because those families, they own their homes, they’re passing them down, and so what ended up happening is I believe all but one or two of the deaths from the Eaton fire were from the Western part, and that was absolutely a result of systemic racism that had already been ingrained decades before.
Sara David: That is so tragic. And for context, that’s one of two out of 18, so that’s a huge tragic majority. I’ve got one last question before we start wrapping things up, and this will be to all of you, and I’ll start with Njera. What are some of the, I don’t know, I guess most important conditions that helped ensure that you felt like you wrote your story in a way that you felt really proud and happy to stand by? And how, if at all, did your union impact or help those conditions?
Njera Perkins: Yeah. In terms of what made us feel good about the story we’re writing, I think really just speaking to our sources, at least for me, them knowing that this is the kind of story we’re pursuing when there aren’t too many stories like ours that were out at the time, so I think hearing from them, just us pursuing this angle and us trying to tell this story and give a platform to people who needed to be heard in this situation, that was really reassuring. And also just having really strong support from our editor on this piece, Erin Evans, who’s unfortunately no longer at HuffPost, but she was very supportive from the very start when we came up with this idea all the way through edits and publishing. So yeah, that made us feel proud of the work we did. And then, the fact that I think the piece really performed well, so just knowing that people actually took the time to read this and hopefully it resonated.
And then in terms of the union, this is honestly, being at HuffPost, this is my first ever union job. So just being a part of the Guild and having them recognize the work we did, it’s been amazing.
Taiyler Mitchell: I’ll say I agree with Njera about how nice it feels to be recognized by the Guild for the work that we put in for this story and also my other two stories. I’ll also add that the Altadena story came at a time when HuffPost was doing layoffs, so that was a really challenging aspect to go through, but the layoffs would’ve been way worse had our union not been what they are and our contract, if it wasn’t what it was. And I was also a part of the union committee at that point in time as well. The Troubled Teen piece we worked on, and Sebastian and I are both breaking news reporters, so we worked on it through the election and Trump’s first 100 days or second first 100 days. The Troubled Teen industry has gained a lot more attention in recent years, but it felt good for us to also add to that conversation.
We had maybe close to 10, 15 people help out with this story, from visuals to edits to our audience team and really could not have gotten it done without them. And there was so much back and forth. The Altadena piece, it was kind of the same thing in the sense that there was a lot of people who had touched it. We had a photographer who helped capture everything in all of its sadness. And yeah, I think one of the things that I feel called to do as a Black woman in a reporting role is to make sure that I’m shedding light on marginalized communities whenever I can and telling these stories where I’m able to center people with empathy and with nuance and call out some of these systems of injustice. I was just really happy that I got to do that with all of these stories.
Alexander Sammon: I agree with both of you guys. Obviously, getting acknowledged by the Guild for your work is such a great outcome. It’s so flattering just to be in the company with your guys’ stories was an awesome feeling for me. And I think that obviously, I’m sure I’ll sing a similar tune here, but I give a lot of credit to my editor who supported the story and was willing to spend time and money on it. I think at the time we were not sure that there was an audience for a piece about ICE detention centers. It’s not a terribly seductive headline or topic, or at least it hadn’t been to that point. Obviously, there’s been a lot more interest as, I don’t know, the 12 months since this piece is published or 14 months since, there’s proven to be a lot of interest in ICE and ICE detention.
But at the time, I don’t think we knew that for sure. And so we were motivated, I think, by something that felt like it was the right thing to do, but maybe was not going to be rewarded necessarily, as is often the case. I’m sure all three of us feel that that happens with our work sometimes, so that was great. And I think also having the Guild’s backing, knowing that the Guild was there made me feel more comfortable, I think, in publishing the piece, if only because at that time as well, members of Congress were being barred from entry to ICE detention centers trying to do oversight. This piece was the second part of a two-part publication that we did. And the first part was about Mahmoud Khalil and his detention inside the facility, and that got a lot of lawyers very upset. And so I think that there was an awareness that the administration could come down hard on us, that there were going to be lawyers that were going to be mad about this portrait.
And knowing that the Guild was there and that there was some institutional support made me feel confident that we’re going to get the facts right. We’re going to do the best that we can to render this thing as truly as possible. And with that, we’ll have at least the support and backing if it gets hot when the thing does run. That was really nice as well, and even if it was a little more implicit, I think it made me feel confident in publishing the piece and going forward with some more difficult and maybe legally thorny reporting.
Taiyler Mitchell: Alex, I wanted to say that your piece was really thorough and it was just an incredible outstanding piece of journalism. So I love how you included so much about the town’s history and culture. It really felt like we were there with you, and yeah, I learned so much.
Alexander Sammon: That’s so kind. Yeah, I read all of your guys’ pieces or your three, Taiyler, and Njera, your piece as well. And yeah, I was going to say, I’ve been trying to do some lawsuit reporting lately myself and I’ve found it to be really challenging. I feel like I was taking notes while I was reading your guys’ stuff and I’m trying to incorporate some of that into my own approach with reporting. So yeah, I’m a big fan of both of your guys’ stuff.
Njera Perkins: Thanks. Thanks.
Taiyler Mitchell: Thank you.
Njera Perkins: I have a question for you, Alex. Being in that town on the ground, do you find that you prefer that kind of reporting, just being able to go to a place and really investigate for yourself versus just doing a bunch of research online?
Alexander Sammon: Yeah. I do really like that. I think that if you have the opportunity and there’s money to do it, or at least for me, that’s been the most rewarding type of reporting experience that I’ve had. I think I just couldn’t do the story from the office. I really tried, and I think that they would’ve been happy if I could have pulled it off. But yeah, it felt like it was one of those things that I just had to show up and see it for myself. And yeah, I think that I tried to do a lot of reporting on the front end to prepare myself, and then also after I got back to shore up some of the holes and stuff. Yeah, it was a cool experience.
I think, honestly, when I got there, I was like, “Oh, I’ll be able to ingratiate myself a little bit.” I could talk to people and I had a rental car with Texas plates on it, and I would pull up places and people would be like, “Are you from Texas?” And they would be already looking at me as scants being from Texas, and I’d be like, “Oh no, no, I’m not from Texas.” And they’d be like, “Where are you from?” And I’d be like, “Oh, I’m from New York.” And they’d be like, “Oh, my god, we’re not talking to you.” And then I’d be like, “Whoa, whoa, I’m not from New York. I’m from California. I have this Southern California accent.” And that was even worse.
It was a funny experience because I was like, “There’s pretty much nothing I can say that’s going to make them trust me. I’m not going to be able to ingratiate myself. It’s going to be pretty much just like it is what it is. And just have these conversations. It was funny though, I was like, “God, I just am such an outcast in this environment.” And it was an interesting challenge. It was definitely added to the baseline hostility because it was like the clothes didn’t look right, the accent wasn’t right, the rental cars were … all of it was just very off-putting, I think, so it was funny.
Njera Perkins: Yeah, I imagine. But I mean, the piece that you were able to write out of all that is honestly incredible. The fact that you can turn a no comment kind of angle into a really expansive story, that was so impressive.
Sara David: Yeah, 100% agree. It just shows how important the investing in the journalism and the work and getting reporters to places can really fill a story out in ways that you don’t expect. I did not expect there to … I also learned about softball in your piece, and I was like, it just paints such a specific picture about the town.
Alexander Sammon: Totally. And I’m sure, Taiyler, you’ve done that with the Altadena piece. Doing a story about a place sounds so great in theory, but then it’s like you actually have to find something that propels it, that there has to be some sort of … And I feel like that stuff is so interesting about how the dynamics of that town and how information traveled and all that stuff. Did you know that going into it or is that something you figured out on the way?
Taiyler Mitchell: I don’t entirely remember. I know we were live blogging things as things were coming out, so I think I headed into that story having some of that in mind, but also stuff had developed along the way even after our live blog had concluded on the fires. I think it was a combination of stuff I had already known and covering it, and then what I had learned along the way and talking to people and their experiences, and then, yeah.
Sara David: I’m wondering too about the after the piece. You can see the response, but is it a story that stays with you? Do you wonder what’s going on in Jena or Altadena or with the accusers and follow up with each other? Or is it something where it’s like, “Well, there’s a lot of news to do too?”
Njera Perkins: Well, yeah, there is always just a lot of news, but I think once you work on just such an in-depth story like that, you just naturally follow it. And then, obviously, me and Taiyler, we continue to follow the Diddy story because of the trial and everything. We both wrote about that throughout those, what, eight weeks or so. And then even still every now and then, just keeping up with his sentence, which has gotten pushed and moved multiple times at this point. So yeah, the story does stay with you after that. You just naturally feel compelled, just follow it.
Taiyler Mitchell: Yeah. I’d say you keep one eye on one story and then you have to keep up with the rest of the news cycle and stuff.
Alexander Sammon: I imagine you guys probably got a lot of feedback too, right? I feel like with the trial like that, it gets so much attention. You probably get a lot of reader feedback as well, good and bad.
Njera Perkins: Yeah. I feel like maybe for our piece, maybe more good. I feel like sometimes every now and you get those hate emails. I think I got at least maybe one from that. But the good, it’s nice of the good always the bad in those situations.
Taiyler Mitchell: Yeah, I feel like I’m fairly good now at blocking out the haters, so I don’t even know.
Sara David: Yeah. I just want to thank you all so much, not just for joining this podcast episode, but also for your work. I think that you all have just touched on the fact that it is harder every day politically, industrially, financially to tell stories that shed light on injustice and tell the truth about power. It’s important work and the union stands behind you. And for everyone at home, I want to say thanks for listening and be sure to follow the Writers Guild of America East for updates about the OnWriting Podcast and of course the Writers Guild Award.
Voiceover: OnWriting is a production of the Writer’s Guild of America East. The series is produced by WGA East staff members Jason Gordon, Tiana Timmerberg, and Molly Beer. Production editing and mix by Julia Yort. Original music by Taylor Bradshaw, artwork design by Molly Beer. To learn more about the Writers Guild of America East, visit us online at wgaeast.org or follow the Guild on all social media platforms at WGA East. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe to the podcast and give us a five star rating. Thanks for listening. Until next time, write on.
