“The Girl in the Window” leads Roy Peter Clark to raise two crucial questions for those who care about journalism:
You can find more lessons from Lane DeGregory in “Best Newspaper Writing 2008-2009“
Let’s move from reporting the story to writing and producing it. How did you know when it was time to start doing that?
DeGregory: Well, the family moved out of town at the end of school. … We got to the point where we felt we had enough, and had done enough research around them and behind them and underneath them through public records and listing every person who came in contact with them. …
Lyttle: I think we both kind of had the feeling that we knew the story, inside and out, at that point, and we knew it enough that we felt like we had a complete view and we weren’t just looking through our periphery.
I’m sure if I would’ve told Lane, I really need to make this picture, I really need to go back one more time, I’m sure it would’ve been held. We weren’t rushed on this story at all, which was wonderful. … Mike Wilson [DeGregory’s editor] was instrumental in saying, “You guys work until you have it right. You guys work until you think you’re done.” And there isn’t that pressure to try to get it in the paper in a week. I think that afforded us a lot of opportunity with the family until we felt like we could tell their story properly.
ONLINE PRESENTATION
DeGregory: … We reported the story from February through about April before the editors finally go, “What do you have for the Web?” … Well, we had nothing for the Web. Mike said, “Well, let’s redo it then.” Let’s go back and do the Web. We could’ve finished it and gotten it in the paper by Easter, which was our original goal, because that was their one-year anniversary of having Dani. … And we had all the pictures, and all the words, that we thought we needed up till then, and then we went “Oh!”
… I think I had 17 characters on my list that we had featured. And so we took a deep breath and we redid it. I reinterviewed them, Melissa recorded all the audio –- we had what, 40 hours of audio, at least that we recorded from these people –- video’d as many people as would let us, or as we had time to go back and do.
But in doing that, we gained more time to go talk to more people, to go look up more documents and to re-hear and -think things. We got different answers a lot of times the second time through. So the audio was hard. The audio was different sometimes from what I had in my notes. And we had to make a decision about what are we going to use? Because it’s both truthful, but it’s not the same.
As far as multimedia, do you think that was a misstep? Do you feel like you should have been doing that all along or do you think that was fine in the end?
DeGregory: I wish we had been doing it all along, but I think it ended up working to our advantage on both levels because by the time we got to it, we knew what we needed to get. We weren’t shooting in the dark in terms of shooting everything and recording everything. …
So you could target more finely? Whereas maybe before you would’ve had 80 hours of audio because you didn’t know what you wanted?
DeGregory: And it added a whole other level for me in reporting, to be able to go back and do it again.
Was the expectation that you haven’t had to do this for your previous stories?
DeGregory: I’ve never done anything like this before for the Web.
Lyttle: We do it on a smaller scale for bigger assignments, but, yeah, never to this level. Never incorporating video, never incorporating so many different pieces of the puzzle. And it was both a challenge and an opportunity to get your stories out there.
DeGregory: We had several people who helped us, who weren’t any part of this story until all of a sudden we were giving them this raw stuff …
There are some things that are online that are not in the newspaper. … I’m thinking of one -– the part about the Beatles song, was that in your story?
DeGregory: No.
Can you tell me about what it was that made you decide to put that in the online presentation but not in the newspaper?
DeGregory: I hope this doesn’t embarrass anybody, but when we went at this story, when they said, “Oh, what do you have for the Web?” Melissa and I conceived this as, what can we put on the Web that will complement the story? And when we sat down in a room with these 15 people and showed them the raw audio/video draft, first draft of the story, first edit of the story, they said, “Well, what you have on the Web isn’t a complete story. It doesn’t tell a whole story. We want that to be a whole narrative that someone can enter and experience without ever reading your words. Your words don’t matter to these people on the Web. Go ahead and write your whole 100-inch story, but this is its own story.”
And so, after I sucked it up that maybe some of these people won’t read my words, we started talking about it and said, we don’t want it to repeat. We don’t want it to all be the same thing. So I had a draft of my story, she had a draft of photo edits, they had a draft of the audio. But what could we put in this package that wouldn’t overlap and retell exactly what was in this package? And orally, the Beatles music was very, very telling, and I didn’t want to give that away in the story, because it’s a nice surprise when you get to it.
Lyttle: The lyrics really helped to tie that together. And then, hearing it both in the audiocassette that helped soothe Dani when she was having a fit, to then a very intimate singing of the song … to calm her down again, it brought the whole thing full circle for me and it really helped connect the pieces in there.
DeGregory: … I think what the multimedia did that my words could never do, and even perfect still photos could never do, is show Dani moving, listen to her “Uh, uh, uh,” her frustration and her temper, her collapse into herself again, that comes alive in a minute of audio.
Lyttle: It really does make something 2-D into something 3-D. … Multimedia is essentially just another tool. Lane has her pen, and I have my camera, and to be able to take an audio recorder or a video camera out there, it’s just helping to complete the full story. It’s just adding another piece. I really do think they complemented each other well.
STRUCTURING THE STORY
As far as writing, did you know where you wanted to start and end? Did you know you wanted it to be three parts? Can you talk about how hard it was to write?
DeGregory: … When I first thought I was going to write the story, I thought I would start with them adopting her. But once we went to the house where she was taken from, and once we talked to all the neighbors who had known she was there that time, and we actually climbed through the broken window that she had looked out of and got in this room where she was kept, and Melissa made photographs of the little boy next door looking out the same window — I knew that I had to start out with her in that room, where she was taken from. And that became the beginning after that, and we started talking about that. This ghostlike face in the window that people were worried about and enraptured by, and it became iconic in a way. …
Lyttle: It definitely made the story go full circle. It starts and ends in the same place, and you read the first section and pretty much every voice, either consciously or subconsciously, is asking, who could do this to a child? Who could do this to a child? And you get to the second part, and you can almost feel the family asking it, and you can almost feel Danielle asking it: Who could do this to me? Who could do this to our little girl? And then you get to the third part, and you learn who and you start to learn a little bit of the why and the how.
DeGregory: … I should say we didn’t know we were going to talk to the birth mother. That was never a thought in our mind ever that we would ever go and connect with this woman.
Why not? You assumed you just couldn’t?
DeGregory: Well, we were going to tell this story from the time she was adopted until now. … And my editor, Mike Wilson, was like, no, you need to tell how she got there. If you’re going to tell the miracle of what she became, you have to show the before so we realize how far she’s come.
PRINT PRESENTATION
It’s the only thing that ran in the Floridian section (on Sunday), no ads. So is this how it was conceived all along? Were you thinking series or what?
DeGregory: We didn’t ask for it. We had no idea we’d ever get anything like that. Maybe something other journalists can learn from this is, we were really communicative from the beginning in terms of Melissa showing almost every take of her photos. … I’m going back and debriefing with my editor … sending him notes and passages, showing him documents.
So they knew for two or three months before we ended up putting it together what we had and what we were doing. And they started bringing other people. They started getting excited about it -– not excited in a weird way, but there was a buzz that this was a really interesting and unusual story.
DEALING WITH THE EMOTIONAL CONSEQUENCES
Was the writing particularly harder than any other story you’ve written?
DeGregory: I think emotionally this story was harder than anything I’ve ever written. … The emotional journey of the story was really taxing on all of us. You’d go to interview this cop, and this big, strong, strapping cop with guns on his hips would start crying. Oh my gosh, the horror that went into this story –- and then the joy that came out of it, because then you’d talk to the people, her social worker or the psychologist, she’d be like, “My God, somebody adopted her! What’s that family like? Oh my gosh, praise God! This is amazing!” So there were these highs and lows throughout the whole way.
… Journalistically, our editors might have been mad at us if they realized how much we cared how this affected this family. We can’t show or tell some of these things –- or, we don’t need to, I guess — because they would be too painful, when you’ve already got all this other stuff going on.
You felt like there were some things you learned that would be too harmful to disclose and to put in the story?
DeGregory: I don’t think information-wise, but we weren’t going to show her when she had an accident on the potty [or] … when she couldn’t put the green beans in her mouth. … What do we need to tell to convey what’s really going on versus what would just sensationalize and embarrass this family?
… That was the hard line for us to draw. As journalists, we could have gotten anything we wanted. But as people, what did we need to get and convey to readers or to the world at large that would show you enough to know, OK, I show her sitting on the potty and pulling her pants down, but I’m not going to show the time she was eating dinner and had this accident.
How do you deal with the toll of this? What sort of things did you do in the process of reporting this to make sure it didn’t take a negative toll?
Lyttle: Like Lane said, it was definitely heavy. One of the bonuses was having her as a partner and having that three-hour drive. What a great time to decompress. We’d both talk about it, and we’d start laughing about something else, and we’d go back to it. We were kind of flushing it out of our systems as we would drive back. …
Other than that — therapy, therapy, therapy. [Both laugh.] I kind of joke, but there’s some truth to it. My therapist all the time says, Melissa, “Why can’t you do a flower and puppy dogs story?” The answer is that I can’t. It’s not in me. But just being able to talk my way through it, whether with Lane or friends outside, who are all very supportive of me and my mission in life, and talking with a professional to get it out — you learn how to work through some things and take that breath.
DeGregory: There was a lot of guilt going on with this story, between the two of us, big-time, when we realized that we were going to journalistically have to find the birth mother. And yet the adoptive parents had told us again and again, we don’t want to know what happened to her, we don’t want to know what went on, we don’t want to know anything about that woman, we don’t want her to know anything about us.
[Melissa and I] had to make that bridge as journalists. And we came to this hard point, I think over a beer one night … We don’t want to do this to this family, we don’t want to do this to ourselves. How could this woman justify this, and yet, yeah we kind of need answers.
… And the family was amazing. … I wanted him to know before it came out in the paper, before it came out on the Web. … I must have called Melissa and Carolyn 15 times before I got the courage up to tell the family and say, “I know this, and I met this woman, and I’m sorry.” Melissa and Carolyn were like, “You can do it, you gotta do it.” They were really helpful and encouraging. But I called him [Bernie] and he was so nice. … He said, “We didn’t want to know, we were never going to go there on our own, but I understand why you needed to know that. And can you send me whatever documents you have?” Because they don’t have any of her medical records. They didn’t know where she was born, who her dad was, what the medical records said.
HOLDING AGENCIES ACCOUNTABLE
There is an aspect of accountability that I as a reader wanted in this story. I want some answers for how this could happen. I want someone to be held accountable for it. … So those are not a big focus of the story. I wanted to know how you made that decision.
DeGregory: My story wasn’t about setting out to indict anybody. I wanted to be able, at the end, to show the holes in the process, to show how this could have happened. I don’t think it answered all the questions at all. … The head of DCF … alludes to the hole in the process, that they didn’t try to talk to the kid. But no, it didn’t set out to be a DCF investigation. It didn’t set out to be an indictment of the process.
But I think, hopefully -– the reaction that we’ve gotten in the day that it’s been in the paper, a lot of the calls have been, where the heck were the investigators? Where was the Attorney General’s office, who didn’t decide to prosecute? … I don’t know why they didn’t press for more jail time at all. I don’t know why except that they were going to settle the case and Danielle was out of her care, and hopefully she was safe, so let’s just be done with it.
Are any of those stories going to be coming? Is someone else going to be working on those stories, or will you?
DeGregory: I don’t know. It probably depends on the fallout from this, if the editorial board takes it up, or the reporter who covers DCF, or somebody else wants to do something. It might be too late. Her parental rights are terminated, she’s been sentenced, I don’t know what there is still to be done, other than hopefully really make sure it never happens again.
THE STORY’S THEME
Lane, in the “Best Newspaper Writing” interview that you did, you talked about how you and your editor Mike come up with a word that describes what a story is about. Did you do that for this one, and if so, what was it?
DeGregory: I think this word was “nurturing” and “hope.”
Lyttle: I would say “love.”
DeGregory: Love. That was the good part of it. The bad part was incredulity. I don’t want this to sound really dramatic, but it kind of became medieval in a way. We couldn’t get our brains around how this could happen in this day and age for a long, long time. We read about the monks in the Roman Empire and you read about the wild boy in the 1800s and you’d think, oh my gosh, that’s here. That’s our community. That’s now. That was kind of something that we were trying to put in context. … It could still happen.
Lyttle: From the very beginning, every single person that was touched by Dani, it was the same look in their eye and the same burning in their heart, that they loved this child, and they really did want to see her better and … thriving. And every single person we came into contact with, I do think the theme was there, and that word was hope.
