Yanine Quiroz, a food, land, and nature reporter at Carbon Brief, still remembers the first time she stepped out into the streets to find a source. Quiroz, who is from Mexico City, was reporting a 2018 story for the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Science Journalism Laboratory on how people with low incomes couldn’t afford to buy new energy-saving appliances. Up to that point in her career, she had relied solely on scientific papers and academic institutions to find sources for her stories. Quiroz consulted scientific papers for this story, too. But she knew she also needed to hear the perspectives of the people in communities experiencing the issue. So, she took her voice recorder and headed out to one of the lowest-income neighborhoods of Mexico City. In the end, “it was a disaster,” she recalls.
An introvert at heart, Quiroz tried to gather the courage to knock on people’s doors as she walked up a few deserted streets. Person after person refused to talk to her. “They must have thought: ‘This is a thief who wants to check out everything in house and my things. Then she’ll come steal it,’” she says. Eventually, she found a woman in her front yard doing laundry with a very old washing machine. Quiroz introduced herself and got her interview, but the woman looked uncomfortable the whole time, she says. Looking back, she says she would do things very differently if she could do it over again.
Quiroz’s story brings to mind my own failed experiences trying to find sources out in a community. Less than two weeks after I moved to New York City in 2021 to pursue my master’s degree, my professors sent me out to report several stories across the city, from people’s perspectives on politics to Christmas celebrations and community gardens. I didn’t know where to look for sources, and every time I tried to approach someone, I felt a chill down my spine—I feared rejection and I didn’t want to annoy them. Like Quiroz, stepping into the real world took me completely out of my comfort zone.
Many journalists approach reporting on science primarily from an academic standpoint—find an interesting paper or report, talk to a few experts, and write the story. But science also shapes society and stems from issues affecting the daily lives of individuals. Including personal stories from sources in the communities we cover provides more than just color. It introduces valuable expertise from their lived experiences, grounding stories in reality and adding necessary nuance. Finding the right people to talk to within a community, approaching sources with sensitivity and respect, overcoming shyness, and maintaining connections over time are skills that every journalist should build into their reporting repertoire.
Starting Your Search
Including community voices may seem more natural in feature stories, which often highlight human narratives, than in shorter news stories. But if you can include a local source in any story, you should do it, says Victoria St. Martin, a staff journalist reporting on the intersections of climate change and health at Inside Climate News. “We are human and we respond to other humans,” she says. People need to be able to see how issues such as climate change affect real communities. It’s not enough to tell people that the planet is warming up, she says.
Think about how your story might intersect with people’s lives, and lean into that angle as you report. Health stories, for example, might benefit from a patient’s experience. And stories covering acute events such as natural disasters or gun violence would be strengthened by the voices of people directly affected.
When covering a community you’re unfamiliar with, try seeking the advice of local journalists.
For stories covering issues affecting large swaths of people, it may be less clear how to incorporate or find local sources. Try starting in places familiar to you—even in your own neighborhood—and expanding out from there. When reporting on stifling heat waves rolling through India for Wired in 2022, Kamala Thiagarajan, a freelance journalist, looked for sources just outside her parents’ house in Chennai, India. She found a man making steel frames at a nearby construction site and started a conversation with him about the heat. He told her that two of his coworkers had fainted while carrying heavy loads; then he held out his hands. “All of his fingers were black because they were burned by the metal rods that he was hammering outside,” she says. Those visceral details provided the opening for Thiagarajan’s story and helped her go beyond the science of how heat impacts people’s health. “I think you have to see it for yourself,” she says.
For stories that require a more specific type of source, start with an online search to look for local clinicians, researchers, or advocacy groups who might be working with the people you want to reach, says Barbara Fraser, a freelance journalist based in Perú. You can also use social media, such as local Facebook groups, to track down possible sources in an area.
Local groups can be useful bridges to communities you aren’t part of yourself. “You can find some organization there that can give you a bit of an entrada [entry] into the community,” Fraser says. In 2015, for example, she covered the effects of government-protected areas on overlapping Indigenous territories in the Amazon as part of a series for Mongabay. As a stranger to these Indigenous communities, she knew she needed to reach out through an intermediary. She sought the help of a pastor of a local parish and the director of an area radio station, whom she’d met at a government assembly of Indigenous people, and they connected her with families in the community.
When covering a community you’re unfamiliar with, try also seeking the advice of local journalists. This helped Dylan Baddour when he was working on freelance stories about migration and drugs in Colombia from 2017 to 2019. Through other journalists in the area, he learned how to approach potential sources there carefully and delicately—important given the history of conflict in the country. “It’s pretty deeply ingrained in their culture to be discreet,” says Baddour, who now covers energy and environmental justice for Inside Climate News. Connecting with local journalists can help you feel out the cultural norms of a community before you start reporting.
Breaking the Ice
The real challenge many journalists face when hitting the streets, especially if they’re just starting out, is the fear of going up to someone and starting a conversation. Even after more than 30 years in journalism, Fraser says she still sometimes gets anxious before these interviews. “It takes an enormous amount of energy for me to get over that [fear],” she says.
Approaching people on the street with confidence is a muscle you have to build, says St. Martin. Make a habit of talking to strangers. Ask your barista or grocery store clerk about themselves: Where are they from? How long have they worked there? Being friendly and making small talk will start loosening you up for reporting a story.
Even after you muster the courage to approach a source, that person might be hesitant to talk.
When you first start asking people for interviews, give yourself time to get your footing. “It’s just like riding a bike,” St. Martin says. She was nervous, for example, when she started knocking on doors in Louisiana for her 2008 print story for The Times-Picayune on Hurricane Katrina evacuees being notified of elevated formaldehyde levels in the temporary trailers provided to them by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But she pushed through a few rocky interviews and started to warm up.
Hesitant journalists can also quell their fears by shifting the focus from themselves to the story and what they need to do to report it well. It might even take a little fake-it-till-you-make-it energy. Quiroz says she can be a shy person in her personal life, but when she’s going out to report a story, that changes. She assumes her role, transforming herself into someone totally different, ready to ask the necessary questions.
It helps to take the pressure off, too, remembering that not every interview is going to work out or deliver what you need for a story. And sometimes a conversation just never gets over that awkward hump. Consider those experiences practice for future reporting. “Don’t be too scared,” Baddour says. A bad interview “doesn’t ruin your career.”
Building Trust
Even after you muster the courage to approach a source, that person might be hesitant to talk. People out in a community don’t necessarily stand to benefit from being interviewed in the same way a scientist would by you covering their work. And unlike public officials, private citizens are under no obligation to talk to you. Get used to people refusing to talk, and just keep trying. “The first five people may say no, but somebody is going to stop,” Fraser says.
Transparency is especially critical when interacting with a community or person who doesn’t trust the media.
A key step in establishing trust with potential sources is being honest from the outset. Show them your press pass or ID badge if you have one and explain who you are, what outlet you work for, and what you’re looking for. It might help to prepare a short script about yourself and your story if you tend to get tongue-tied when approaching someone. But try not to look at your notebook too much at the beginning of an interaction, St. Martin advises. Breaking eye contact risks losing people’s attention and might dampen their trust.
Be clear, too, about what you can and can’t do as a journalist. Some people may expect to receive money in exchange for information. Or they might think you can help with the issue they’re facing, says Claudia Altamirano, a freelance journalist in Mexico City. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case—and they need to know that. “I can’t make someone come and solve their problem,” she says. But, she tells her sources, “‘I can inform the rest of the population about what’s happening to you.’”
Transparency is especially critical when interacting with a community or person who doesn’t trust the media because they’ve been misrepresented or felt used by the media in the past. Some people might also fear retribution by speaking publicly about a controversial issue. Sources were running away from Thiagarajan, for example, when she was reporting her 2019 South China Morning Post story on the confiscation of parakeets that had been specially trained to draw tarot cards from a deck as part of a centuries-old Indian tradition.
Thiagarajan wanted to hear from the astrologers who owned the birds, but they were concerned about retaliation from local authorities and animal-welfare groups. One owner whipped into his house when she tried to speak with him, but she was able to convey a message to him through his nephew, who was playing outside. She explained that she wanted to understand the man’s perspective without judgment. While he did not agree to speak, his relative who also owned a parakeet did, under the condition that Thiagarajan not take his picture.
A patient approach like Thiagarajan’s goes a long way when approaching sources, especially in the aftermath of a traumatic event. Don’t be afraid to show empathy and kindheartedness. And start interviews off slowly, knowing that’s when sources might feel most vulnerable or uncomfortable. “As humans, we kind of feed off of each other,” St. Martin says. To help establish a rapport, St. Martin says she sometimes puts her notebook down and just talks with sources for a while. Once they seem more comfortable, she asks if she can take notes.
Sustaining Connections
After interviewing a source, it can be easy to move on to the next one or focus on other looming deadlines. But a powerful part of interacting with community sources comes from maintaining those connections over time. Staying in touch with sources embeds journalists deeper in communities, avoiding parachute journalism and bolstering trust.
St. Martin says she tries to create human connections with her sources, which makes the relationship less transactional. She follows some of them on social media and makes a habit of continuing conversations there. For others, she stays in contact via email, phone, or even letter. Keeping tabs on sources came in handy when St. Martin was reporting her 2024 Inside Climate News story on disproportionate levels of air pollution in some U.S. communities. She was able to interview a previous source she’d kept in touch with who lives near Newark’s airport and several major roadways—and whose children had all been diagnosed with asthma. That source became the lede of St. Martin’s new story.
Many journalists find that connecting with community sources can be one of the most satisfying parts of the job.
Cultivating relationships with local sources might produce more stories as they start coming to you with tips. In the same way, maintaining a regular presence in the communities you cover can tune your ear to story fodder. Altamirano says some of the stories she reports find her in places such as public transportation, where she overhears the issues people are talking about. Local markets, small businesses, and parks can also be ripe for meeting people and finding stories. Thiagarajan, for example, was buying vegetables when she found her 2018 NPR story about teaching honesty to children. After hearing a couple of women talking about an “honesty shop” at a local school in southern India, she joined the conversation and started asking questions.
That said, don’t assume that every conversation will turn into a story. Sometimes, it’s a slow burn, where stories arise from a series of conversations with multiple people. Anytime St. Martin is at a local event, she says, she introduces herself to the people there and gathers phone numbers to start establishing relationships. It might pay off for a future story, she says.
Many journalists find that connecting with community sources can be one of the most satisfying parts of the job. Well past her first failed attempt, Quiroz says she feels a sense of privilege when someone opens up and allows her to share their story. Learning how to initiate and guide these conversations well takes time and a lot of practice, she says. “Go for it. Learn. Mess up.” And eventually, you’ll start to catch on.
Myriam Vidal Valero is a bilingual science journalist from Mexico City. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, Science, El País, Inside Climate News, Slate, Muy Interesante, and Cancer World, among other outlets. She loves everything scientific, but her coverage focuses on life sciences, environmental issues, and science policy. In 2022 she completed an MA in journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY, in New York City. Find her on X @myriam_vidalv.