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A Journalist Reflects on the Craft of Oral History (2003)

The SOHP invited journalist Leda Hartman, a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, to join our "Voices After the Deluge" research team. Here, Leda reflects on this experience:

I am not an academic, and I have no formal training in either journalism or oral history. But I seem to have made these fields my life's work at some point or other. Except for stints bagging apples in an orchard and frying eggs in a cafeteria, I've spent twenty years working as a reporter in public radio and print. Over the last few years I've ventured into doing several projects for the Southern Oral History Program. Here are some ruminations about the differences and similarities between these two honorable cousins.

The little eastern North Carolina town of Grifton is a good place to start. Grifton didn't get as much national attention as, say, Princeville, after Hurricane Floyd came, but it was hard-hit just the same. A full third of the town was under water - mostly the poor, low land closest to the creek, mostly owned by African Americans - though whites lost their homes, too. A few months after the high water hit I did a story for National Public Radio on how the town was coping. I did find news of a sort: people said race relations in Grifton were better than ever before, because Floyd was the great equalizer. Everybody had suffered in some way, and most everybody tried to help out in the ways that they could.

Later on I went back to Grifton to do a series of interviews for the SOHP's "Voices After the Deluge Project." It was different, all right. I didn't have to rush to meet deadline, so I could spend a hour or two or three sitting with folks and letting them talk, without trying to get them to cut to the chase and give me a sound bite I could use, without thinking about my lead or my salient points while I was still in the middle of an interview. I spent one very full day in Grifton for my radio piece; for the oral history work I spent three days, equally full.

Doing the oral history work I felt less burdened about fact-checking the things people were telling me. Working as a journalist, I have to be responsible for the accuracy of every bit of information in my stories, and if someone tells me something that's suspect, it's my job to get someone else to say so. With journalism, I have to cover both sides of an issue, or all eleven sides, as the case may be. With oral history, there aren't really "sides" so much as each individual's version of the truth, and it seems to me you just let that stand on its own.

When I work as a journalist, I feel compelled to show as little bias as possible in both interviewing people and in writing the story. Doing oral history interviews, I feel more at liberty to be sympathetic, to show more emotion, to just chat. Having said that, though, there's a particular skill I learned as a reporter that I think stands me in good stead doing oral history interviews - and that is to challenge, to challenge anything anyone might tell you that doesn't seem to make sense. It really comes in handy with officials, especially politicians. You can get sharper answers that way, and on lucky days a measure of accountability.

Perhaps the biggest difference between journalism and oral history is the end product. Writing a story is hard work - think "field notes" on steroids. But news stories reach many thousands and sometimes millions of people very quickly, and so can have a tremendous impact on our society and really make change, or at least raise awareness. If I have one frustration with oral history, it's that the wonderful interviews that took so much work and thought to procure aren't disseminated enough. It is critical to save the complex stories, to create a permanent record to which future generations can turn. But this stuff shouldn't be just for library archives and books given small runs by university presses. It should be out there for everyone today.

Fortunately, there are places where this can happen. I see it done successfully in "Frontline" documentaries, for instance, or in a series by the Raleigh News & Observer about the closing of Durham's cigarette plants, or in NPR's "Lost and Found Sound" series, created by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, the "Kitchen Sisters," which uses only the tape of people interviewed, with no narrator. By combining the punch of news reporting with the depth of oral history, these pieces create a satisfying chronicle indeed, and I hope to see more collaborations between journalists, scholars, and public radio producers.






The Southern Oral History Program
Center for the Study of the American South
Love House and Hutchins Forum
410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info@sohp.org