Knight Science Journalism Fellow Yarden Michaeli is good in a crisis. And for more than a decade, he’s covered one after another for Haaretz, Israel’s newspaper of record.
Michaeli took over as editor of Haaretz’ science desk less than one month before the first reported case of Covid-19. He led coverage of the pandemic, then founded the paper’s climate desk and went to Greece to cover the deadliest Mediterranean cyclone in recorded history. On the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Michaeli was sent there to report on theground. For the first 10 months of the war in Gaza, he led a team that reported on what was happening inside the Strip.
While journalists were restricted from entering Gaza, Michaeli drew on technology to document the reality on the ground. His coverage of the war combined satellite data analysis, traditional journalism, and compelling visual storytelling to present the scale of destruction to a skeptical Israeli public.
In an increasingly digital age, Michaeli thinks technology and traditional journalism go hand in hand. Through intensive digital investigations, he’s helped readers cut through a vast sea of social media photos and footage, directing attention — and conversation — toward evidence-based facts. At MIT, Michaeli continues to explore how journalists can harness emerging technology and science to overcome reporting challenges.
I sat down with Michaeli to talk about covering crises, multimedia journalism, and the changing relationship between journalists and tech. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
AJB: You’ve covered science and climate, but recently you’ve been contributing to Haaretz’s war coverage. Are there similarities in the way you approach these rather distinct beats?
YM: I think that in your journey as a journalist, you pick up so many skills and ways of thinking about topics and challenges that some inevitably become useful in other beats. When we did this big digital project trying to map the destruction inside the Gaza strip, we were working with data directly from scientists. And the fact that I had a background in science reporting meant I knew how to ask the right questions and have a very meaningful conversation with those scientists.
You know, a science reporter works on all beats. You’re not a person that specializes in physics, or geology, or something like that. You get a little taste of the details in each field, and when you go into complicated studies or complicated events, you just need to know how to ask certain questions and how to mediate the answers to the public.
AJB: Your coverage of the Gaza Strip drew heavily on open-source satellite imagery, as well as videos and photos posted to social media. You took this approach, in large part, because most journalists weren’t being allowed into the Strip. How do you see the ubiquity of personal technology changing investigative journalism?
YM: I think it opens tons of possibilities. It’s very exciting. In Gaza, technology gave us a lot of advantages in a situation in which we were disadvantaged, as journalists. With social media, you can produce some very hard-hitting investigations that are not built in the traditional way that people imagine journalism — you know, two guys meeting in an underground parking lot with documents. Instead, we now get this abundance of imagery all the time.
But, still, it’s very hard to pick up a certain image and raise it above the bar of journalistic standards of verification. If you want to actually report on a digital image, I think that is the place where the human factor becomes very, very important.
AJB: What do you mean by that — the “human factor”?
YM: I think that the most powerful work comes when you harness the advantages of technology and use them combined with traditional tools of journalism. In all the big digital projects we published during the war, we also spent a lot of time speaking with relevant sources — people in NGO’s, people in the army, Gazans inside the strip. We managed to get important pieces of information from them that, together with what the technology produced, made everything much more robust.
It’s like in science. You know, when we talk about having various avenues of evidence? Robust theories of science stand on various avenues that all lead to the same idea or to the same argument. The same is true in journalism, the more variety you have, then the stronger and more robust your result is. I think it’s very important for journalists not to get too reliant, imagining that technology will do the work for them and that they will be able to let go of all those other avenues.
AJB: For digital investigations, you’ve produced immersive, visually rich stories. What do you think visual components add to a story?
YM: Ah, tons! We live in a world where the question of “What are we going to show?” is one of the first questions that you should ask when you set out to tell a story. I think every reporter should be thinking about it consciously, even in the reporting phase. When you collect information, when you speak with sources, you should be asking them about what kind of images they have and thinking about the way that people consume information today. Most readers don’t even make it to the end of the first paragraph. Competition for people’s attention is very tight.
In those visual investigations in Gaza, we thought about all these things constantly. Because to tell those stories, showing was very important. Satellite imagery, in an era of so much disbelief, is something which is very hard to argue with. We could show before and after satellite images, and people would come to me and say, “OK, I get what you say because I can see it.”
AJB: As you mentioned, you wrote about the horrors of the war in Gaza for a very disbelieving population at home in Israel. In both the U.S. and globally, distrust of media is rampant. How do we break through echo-chambers and write for skeptics?
YM: Sometimes in journalism, we tend to think about a story we publish like, “This is the story that’s going to solve the issue. I’m going to put it out there and then, aha!” But, actually, you are building with bricks. You’re having an ongoing discussion with your audience. When people push back, you can learn from the comments that you get. You can identify the things that people went after, and then you phrase your next story in a way that addresses those issues. Your texts become stronger when you look at them as an ongoing conversation with the public. I also think that there’s this bigger question of, what’s the purpose of journalism? As journalists, we need to acknowledge that sometimes our power is limited. But we do create a basis for discussion. We do create information that serves other entities in the public sphere. It’s important to have those archives of information for the moment when people will be able or will be willing to take action.
Anika Jane Beamer is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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