Pulitzer Prize winners: “Gather information as a reporter,listen to them as a human being.”

Julia Moskin and Kim Severson, Pulitzer Prize winners from The New York Times, shared their experience about their investigation process in Ken Friedman sexual harassment case, at Hong Kong Baptist University.

“Something that is really different in this reporting was the ability to not ask questions…simply to say ‘Tell me more about that’.”, said Julia.

As food reporters, this was the first time for Julia and Kim to involve in a new territory, the sexual harassment investigation. Last year, after few months of hard works and many conversations with the victims, they confirmed that in the hottest restaurant of New York “Spotted Pig”, the owner, named Ken Friedman, had continually sexually assaulted lots of female workers for over 10 years. Based on this investigation, they carried out the news story Ken Friedman, Power Restaurant, Is Accused of Sexual Harassment at the end of the last year. The story not only exposed the dirty secrets in ‘Spotted Pig’, where the most sexual assaults happened, but also many other Ken Friedman’s restaurants, caused an uproar in the whole society and whoopingly won the Pulitzer Prize. This month, Hong Kong Baptist University invited them to open a lecture to share their valuable experience.

The sharing lecture Art of Listening: How hours of conversations with victims led to a Pulitzer, was held at Communication and Visual Arts Building on October 24th, attracted a hundreds of students from different levels and universities and even professional journalists to join.

“The classroom is totally full and overloaded, lots of students have to sit on the floor or squeeze at the door. I didn’t expect this, it’s too crowdy. But the atmosphere is good and relaxing, most of the audience are very active.”, said Jessica Chen, a postgraduate journalism student from The University of Hong Kong.

In the lecture, Julia and Kim mainly focused on explaining how they talked with and listened to the victims during the investigations.

“Something that is really different in this reporting was the ability to not ask questions…simply to say ‘Tell me more about that’.”, said Julia. She gave many tips in how to ask questions to victims in such cases, such as focusing more on how the victims feel, using sentences such as “Just few more questions” to comfort interviewees to speak out more information that they are still holding with.

“Sitting and listening, being someone empathetic, but that doesn’t mean that we were not journalistic skeptical.” When talking about listening to the interviewees, Kim emphasized the balance between being sympathetic and skeptical, “You have to be there as a professional gatherer of news for your readers, but you are also there as a human being.”, she said.

Many students were also curious about why food reporters ended up in writing an investigative news, Kim answered the question: “I think you can tell any story in the world from food. Any kind of story always has a food angle. It’s universal, because everybody eats.” ���