REPORTING AGAINST YOUR OWN ASSUMPTIONS

Wednesday, January 27, 2027 from 3 to 4:15 p.m.
Lee Hills Hall, 715 Elm Street, Columbia, MO 65211. Room 303
and Zoom

Every reporter arrives with a thesis, and the best stories are the ones that fall apart on contact with the people you’re writing about. For years, Emmanuel Felton covered desegregation as an unambiguous victory—until older Black Americans kept telling him it was the worst thing that ever happened to them. That contradiction became the spine of his forthcoming book. In this workshop, he’ll walk through how to recognize when your sources are telling you something your framing can’t hold,  how to report toward complication instead of away from it, and how to build a story that surfaces irony and tension without editorializing them into neat resolution. Students will leave with strategies for interviewing against their own priors, structuring a piece around an unresolved question, and trusting reported detail to do the arguing.