Reporting on rural regions 101

This interview with a Kansas-born reporter named Sarah Smarsh is a great quick & dirty guide to avoiding the worst of the heinous acts often committed when ~big city journalists~ go and cover rural areas (hint: our culture is NOT exclusively your goddamn hayride sabbatical/big Trump country story ok??).

One of the biggest points that Smarsh makes is noticing — and deeply thinking through — what we do when we “clean up” sources’ language. Do we fix the big fancy cosmopolitan senator’s grammar but not the stay-at-home Illinoian mom’s? Is it because we want to add some “local flavor” or because it’s an inadvertently insidious way to make the latter seem more “other” or “lesser”?

Like Deez Links? Forward this to a hayride sabbatical bc actually that sounds great tbh.