Laura Lopez Gonzalez “borrows trust” in public health journalism

There are moments that define your perception of a certain issue, career, or way of thinking. McGill’s 2022 “Public Health Reporting and Misinformation” event stands out as one of those moments for me.

It was a cool spring day, and McGill’s Faculty Club was packed with eager students, professionals, and faculty, all ready for the event organized by McGill’s Department of Global and Public Health as part of McGill’s Global Health Week. Little did I know that I was about to listen to one of the most engaging speakers I have ever heard, Laura Lopez Gonzalez.

Equipped with a master's degree in journalism from the University of Chicago, Laura is a celebrated health and science writer and editor with experience heading the news desks of half of South Africa’s fifty health reporting outlets. She has also worked on the Treatment Action Campaign to help people living with HIV and AIDs access healthcare.

I was so intrigued by Laura’s presentation sharing her experiences in public health journalism that I reached out to her to ask her more questions. We spoke about her journalistic work of communicating dense scientific material to non-specialist audiences, the potential emotional burdens that come with a career in journalism, and her use of “narrative transportation” in journalism.

Adele: Laura, thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. How did you get started? What was your personal motivation for being a storyteller? What motivated you to decide to write about health and inform your audience?

Laura: Most people who get to journalism are fueled by an intense problem with inequality. It’s certainly [present] within healthcare. I look back on people who we lost in my family early in the HIV epidemic, and just how unfair it was...how little people understood it. And so that sticks with me a lot, even after 20 years. What gives me hope is the perseverance I experienced in my early career [while] documenting the fight for HIV treatment in South Africa. It was incredible what people were able to achieve, against all odds, because they had the information they needed about their health.

As part of this, I worked with citizen journalists who were part of the movement called the Treatment Action Campaign. These journalists were well-aware of their rights and were able to advocate for them across different platforms. Combining their knowledge, they knew about treatment strategies, health care inequities, and side-effects from drug interactions which even the doctors were unaware of. They could offer their help and expertise because they knew about health care systems so well and helped with troubleshooting with patients in the community. It's incredibly powerful what people can do when they have the information [that] they need to take charge of their health.

Adele: There are a lot of heavy topics that you cover in interviews and articles. How do you approach victims or their families who have suffered in a way that makes them feel comfortable, and in a way for you as well to not feel emotionally burdened during this work?

Laura: Yeah, I think journalism has [made] an interesting shift in the last 10 years to kind of take this stuff more seriously. Some basics are to interview people where they're most comfortable, being clear about what's going to happen, and what the interview process looks like. We also let interviewees know that they can stop at any point, or that they don't have to answer every question. Another thing I think of is not rushing those interviews because people need time to tell those stories. The great thing about making sure that you're interviewing people in the spaces they're most comfortable in is that those spaces often reveal something else about that person.

I try to remember that there's a power to witnessing and being able to recount something that has happened. There are so many times in journalism where you tell a story, and you don't really get any resolution for that person. That's incredibly hard. But what I have learned as my career has gone on, is that there's a value to even posing those questions to somebody in power because although you may not get them to change immediately, [you make it known] that somebody is watching, and that's important.

Another thing that we also don't talk about enough is that there's a power in being able to tell your own story, not just to be able to feel like you've been heard, but also because when we experience a trauma, there are stages on how you make sense to and react to the trauma. I think it's been interesting to watch people “meaning make” through traumatic experiences by telling their own stories. I think that's a powerful thing to allow somebody to do, or to be part of somebody's journey in that way. It’s a part of healing and it's a real privilege to be part of people's ‘meaning making’ in that way.

A lot of stories, where somebody has experienced real hardship like sterilization, people really do talk a lot about wanting to do something to prevent it from happening to somebody else, or to hold people accountable. You get a sense of people's agency in the fact that they're already “meaning making” like, ‘this happened to me, but I don't want [it] to happen [to] somebody else and that's why I'm talking to you [now]. I think that’s powerful.

Adele: In terms of writing these powerful stories, to give victims a voice and to shine a light on problems, how do you set the scene to create an impactful story?

Laura: So, if you begin a scene, sometimes there's establishing shots where you look down on a whole town, and then they’ll zoom in on like a dripping tap. As you move to those different kinds of perspectives like the wide angle versus the zoom lens views, it helps create movement in your story. It also helps create pace and keeps people interested in that kind of movement throughout the story.

Adele: Pictures, pace, and shifts are three techniques that you use to help break down science in your articles. Could you give me some examples of how you use specific metaphors to connect with your audience?

Laura: We used one metaphor that was based on the idea that everyone can relate to having to write something down. When we talk about mutations, we said imagine having to write your name 1000 times--you would start making mistakes. We talk a lot about the immune system. I hate to use metaphors based on militarization of health, because people have different relationships with the military, but if you make them unique, they work really well. We can use Special Forces, which are like memory cells, or different things. If I was talking to an American audience, I might have said something like Navy SEALs. However, I specifically didn't reference certain famous specialized forces in African news writing because they tend to have bad historical connotations. That's another kind of thing that you think about when you're trying to make those metaphors.

Adele: Not only does setting the scene help orient readers, but it also keeps them engaged. What was the process like when you started to use narrative transportation in your news articles? Were the articles more effective?

Laura: I started using this strategy in my first newsroom where we would do the story once as the news story and a second time as a feature. Both were telling the same story. I sat on our web metrics, and I could see how different the engagement was. I could see that in the narrative features, people were reading much farther down. The solution-based features also did really well--it's a different way of telling a story that is responding to some prominent themes.

When we're trying to tell the reader as much as we can, as quickly as we can--and this is what news reporters do--there's not a lot of room for pacing. You're throwing a lot at people, all at once. When you use a narrative, that narrative helps to pace the story and the information that you're giving somebody. With narrative, people see themselves, there is a much better pacing of information, and people tend to experience it as less prescriptive and less preachy.

Adele: At McGill Global Health Day, you spoke about “borrowing people’s trust.” I think that’s a great concept. Could you expand more on what that means to you?

Laura: I’m going to give credit where credit is due, that came from David Harrison, CEO of the DG Murray Trust. We were talking about how trust takes a lot of time to build, he said, ‘Well, you’ve got to borrow it’. Sometimes that’s borrowing healthcare workers’ trust, Traditional Leaders’ trust, which still plays a big part here in South Africa in deciding what happens to communities, or religious leaders, as well.

When it comes down to sourcing, we so often go to the experts at universities. Expert sources are great, but when that message still isn't landing, it is much more beneficial to include voices like the Traditional Leaders. You need to know who your community is listening to, and to make sure that you're including them in your article. I think that’s the writing version of borrowing trust.

Looking ahead, Laura is moving into the nutrition “beat” with the goal of transforming an area of writing “laden with jargon, numbers, and shaming” into a more accessible and accepting community. You can keep up with Laura on X and through her website and articles.

Since 2017, Diane Dechief has been leading courses and giving workshops to help McGill students and researchers better share their specialized knowledge. These interviews are the outcome of students’ work in science communication at the Office of Science Education and in the course FSCI 500: Science Communication and Outreach.