David Finkel and the Art of Immersion Reporting

David Finkel is a master of immersion reporting, most brilliantly showcased in his two books that follow U.S. soldiers in Iraq and their return to civilian life. A member of The Washington Post staff since 1990, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2006 for his three-part case study of the United States government’s attempt to bring democracy to Yemen. The following year, he embedded with a battalion of U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War, an experience out of which he wrote “The Good Soldiers.” He followed that up in 2013 with “Thank You for Your Service.”

During a talk with 2015 Nieman Fellow Dawn Turner Trice at Lippmann House this fall, Finkel described himself as a “pretty ferocious” reporter who favors silence as a reporting tool. He said he tries to recede from the scene in which he immerses himself “so something might occur as if it would have occurred if you weren’t there, if that’s possible.” A 2012 MacArthur “genius” grant awardee, Finkel is now the Post’s national enterprise editor. Edited excerpts:

On his immersion reporting

You don’t know what the story is. There’s just a question that illuminates the work to come. You don’t know the answer. You don’t know the story, but there is a precise question. The question I had in 2007—when the Iraq War seemed, by popular consensus, to have, perhaps, reached maybe its tragic moment, and then [President] Bush announced the surge and here go people into the teeth of this thing—is not to write a book about the Iraq War but to write a book to answer the question of what happens to someone who goes into such a war at such a moment.

I didn’t know, but I went. I spent most of the deployment of this infantry battalion out of Fort Riley, Kansas, they went into the surge, and I went along and embedded with them.

I was just with them through the course of their deployment, trying to figure out the answer to that question, not knowing what would happen, if there would be a story.

It turned out there was, I’m afraid, a pretty extraordinary story of these guys. The thing I want to emphasize, all of this stuff, whatever you might think of writing or longform writing or “feature writing” or immersion writing, the term I prefer is reporting.

Every sentence in this book is, first and foremost, an act of and a result of reporting. Every line in this book, there’s nothing assumed. There’s nothing imagined. That’s the death of a story to me. Every sentence I read is a defensible piece of reporting. If you point to any sentence, I can produce the documents or the interview or the paper, whatever you need to back it up.

What happened is it was a story finally of transformation in many ways, of resulting moral injury, and in so many cases of these 19- and 20-year-old guys who were going into war for the first time, the wiping away of a young man’s sense of invincibility.

On pitching a story

Now, I have a team with six reporters at The Washington Post. They have to answer two questions [when pitching a story idea to me]. They have to be able to complete the sentence without clauses. “This is a story about…” They have some sense of what they’re going after. They have to be able to complete the sentence, “This needs to go in The Washington Post now because…” It has to be a story that they have some understanding of and also occurring in a moment that elevates it to the front page.

On developing trust

It’s the first book that allowed the second. The way I finally got their trust was the fact that they did get to see what a journalist does. That I wasn’t a know-it-all. That I was genuinely curious, that I wasn’t afraid to ask a stupid question if I didn’t know something, and then I stayed and stayed and stayed. I didn’t go away. That helped.

The next thing that helped is this reporting depends a lot on serendipity. You go out, you see what happens. You don’t go out expecting anything to happen, but you’ve got to go. Sometimes when I went out bad things would happen.

When the smoke cleared and the dust settled from an explosion or whatever’s going on, and the soldiers are looking around, now they’re seeing a guy with a notebook or a digital recorder. “Oh, this is what… He’s not a problem for us. This is what he does.”

But finally, I think the thing that got the trust was by staying and doing my job and asking questions, it dawned on these soldiers, a lot of them, not all of them, that I wasn’t there with a preconceived notion, and that I wasn’t going to write some jingoistic, patriotic bullshit about the war effort. That in fact I was documenting what was happening to them. What was happening to them is that they were degrading.

Once they realized that, then they talked to me, and that trust is what allowed the second book.

On never looking back

I don’t know how you all feel about your own work. Whether when you’re done you go back and read it and you feel a sense of pride or revulsion. I don’t go back and look at my work. I don’t want to see it. I just remember all the mistakes and problems.

It’s the same with these books. I can point to any page and look at a sentence and wonder what in the world I was thinking. But the total of it is this is work that I think I got right. I’m proud of these, despite their flaws. I’m proud of this journalism, and I’ve never been able to say that before, so that’s not the worst thing.

On his process

At some point in Iraq I realized as I was writing everything down, “Oh, I think the story here is the transformation.” It’s embarrassing, because this may seem so obvious. What else does war do but transform you? But I didn’t know it was going to do that, and I hadn’t been in war before like this.

You finish the reporting for that story and then again it’s very deliberate. I go over my notes, I index all my notebooks. I transcribe everything.

I reread everything. I’m looking for… because I’m not just a camera you turn on and I record everything. I’m trying to think my way through things. I’m trying to find patterns or I’m trying to find things that might relate in an authentic way.

You read your notes and read your notes and read your notes and eventually I come up with a very specific outline. The outline is guided a lot by, and it’s not just knowing when I write this book, it’s going to be this many chapters. But it’s knowing where the book is going to end.

On listening

I want to reach the point in the story where people aren’t talking to me, where I’m just going along. The people I’m with, they no longer feel the obligation to be a host to me. You want to get past the special moment and let things go. You just want to be there. If people are going to be quiet, let them be quiet, and listen to them be quiet. If they’re talking to each other, hear what they’re saying to each other. That’s much more valuable—don’t you think?—than them answering a question. You have to ask questions. It’s not that benign a process.

For the second book especially, so much of that was built on just being present and being silent. A lot of the second book, these families recovering, took place while they’re in the front seat of the car fighting with each other, and I’m in the back seat just trying to stay behind the headrest so that maybe they’ll forget I’m there.

On getting close

When I went to Iraq the photo editor, the then-photo editor at The Washington Post, gave me a camera and he said, “This thing comes with a zoom lens. I’ve set it on wide. Don’t touch it because it’s going to force you to get close to your subject when you take a picture.” I’ve not heard a better description of the reporting I try to do.

It doesn’t mean I don’t move around, as we all do, to get different perspectives. But what I’m after finally is not distance, but to get as close as I can and stay as close as I can for as long as I can.