Very early in my career as a journalist, I attended a training program geared towards helping journalists write better stories. Our trainer began with a saying that would become foundational to how I approached storytelling. He said, “the closer you get to people, the closer you get to a story”. It was perhaps the most straightforward statement he would make over the one week that he led us through various techniques meant to sharpen our craft, but that stuck with me. It became the succinct maxim that would guide my work for the better part of twenty years as an investigative journalist in Nairobi, Kenya. There wasn’t a story where this didn’t apply — be it in the stories that I told when covering the darkest moments in my country, or those that gave me joy to just be a part of. I still hold this to be true. This post isn’t about ripping apart a foundational part of my journalism, but what I hope is the start of a redesign of the house that I build on top of it.
I’m one among a cohort of journalists who are part of the 2025–2026 John. S. Knight Journalism Fellowship program at Stanford University. We are spending almost a year thinking about and designing our own projects to tackle some of the world’s most pressing journalism challenges. Each of us acknowledge that the challenges we face are enormous. Looking back over the past decade and a half, it feels like the profession has gone from a surfeit of funds to the hunger games. That has and is a difficult enough hill to climb. Today the profession faces even bigger sustainability challenges, for instance, how does journalism respond to the ever-growing tech-giant hegemony? I’m writing this reflection a week out from Open-AI’s valuation growing to $500 billion. For context, you’d have to combine the nominal GDPs of Africa’s two largest economies to surpass this valuation. Yet the biggest challenges we face today go far deeper than finances. Once again, humanity is showing itself its very darkest instincts in degrees of depravity. Palestine and Sudan’s El-Fasher region, and the responses to the mass murders taking place there as well as in all the military conflicts around the world continue to test our supposed shared understanding of which human beings deserve our collective help. The United States’ mass deportation program is stretching this country’s understanding of who deserves due process, and the youth protests around the world (my home country Kenya’s being one I witnessed up close) are forcing the overdue question: What is owed to those who will live in the future? All of these issues ask one question of journalism — what should journalism be to meet this moment?
It would be a safe bet to assume that every one of my JSK colleagues is struggling with a piece of this question. I am as well, but as I mentioned I’m starting from the cornerstone that I built my career from. Is it true that if you get closer to people, you get closer to a story? I still think that this is true, but being here has me asking myself some follow-ups: For example, are stories all that the people need right now? What does “closeness” actually mean if the purpose of journalism goes beyond storytelling? The time I’ve spent so far challenging the maxim that I have tried to live by as a journalist has stripped away more than I expected it to; but this vulnerability, I believe, has drawn some answers to me from the very people that I am on this journey with. For example, civic innovator Jenn Brandel’s longstanding approach to journalism — where she asks what if journalism was produced with a posture of humility — made me question whether my own approach was a humble one, or one focused more on the product than the people that it is made for. As an investigative journalist, I haven’t had to question that the premise of my work is in part to expose wrongdoing, but have I been so wrapped up in one part of the canon of muckraking that I am losing touch with its core purpose of serving the public? Photojournalist Sebastian Hidalgo’s approach to covering Chicago as the city battles through its encounter with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — ICE has me thinking hard about investigative journalism and community building. Classes in Stanford’s d.school are challenging my own assumptions about how and why I have chosen to build the things I have in the way that I have.
Being here has also reminded me that rebuilding my understanding of journalism and its purpose today doesn’t come from just grinding harder. When my cohort colleague investigative editor Damaso Reyes said, “rest is revolutionary,” I finally understood why. Rest isn’t retreat — especially when your work feels like a mission. The world is a shitshow right now. It is impossible for journalists to ignore just how far adrift power is from the ideals of justice — so many are dying around us as we scroll past. Yet we are implored not to look away, because apathy in the face of unchallenged cruelty cuts deep. The threads of community are wearing thin in the face of distraction by disinformation and algorithmic empires. What rest is teaching me, though, is that stillness can be resistance too. It is how I hope to rebuild on re-examined foundations. What I rebuild may first be a house, to help with shelter in these times. I hope though that becomes a stage, so that I may be open to welcome the ideas that will benefit all of us.
