Why “Shut-Up-and-Listen Journalism” Matters

Bestselling author Earl Swift examines the difference between immersive reporting and simply doing your job—and reveals why embedding deeply in a world is critical.

This piece is the first in our series, The Art of Narrative Storytelling, a special collaboration from Narratively and Creative Nonfiction that explores how writing moves us and changes us in ways we might never expect. You can learn more about this special series and experience the rest of the stories as we publish them here each week throughout June.

Photo courtesy of Maggie Messitt; collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

She was a reporter at The Oregonian — at the top of her game, with admirers far and wide, and possessed of an elegant style she’d honed over 30 years of writing every day. Her aged parents were ailing back home in Ohio, so she took a three-month leave to coax them to health. It soon became clear that three months would not be enough.

So Anne Saker quit Portland for the Cincinnati suburbs, where she covered her bills with a job at the local Kroger supermarket. And in her first hour in the store’s floral department (an hour in which she earned $7.70), she discovered that she had stepped into a story she’d only glimpsed until then: the daily struggles, despair and dignity of the American millions subsisting on minimum wage.

Now positioned to tell that story from the inside, Saker kept record of her interactions with customers and co-workers, her observations of the store’s routines and small dramas. Over nearly a year she transformed this reporting into a collection of vignettes, many heartbreaking. She posted them to Facebook. The Kroger Chronicles, as they became known, grabbed all who read them.