Every Story is Fabric

Last week I attended a press freedom roundtable at The Hague Humanity Hub, organized in honor of World Press Freedom Day. Across three panels, something kept surfacing. Not as a question anyone asked directly, but as a tension running just underneath the conversation.

The journalists on the panel talked about their work with an understanding of exactly what's at stake when someone trusts you with their story.

Dutch multimedia journalist Jelle Krings has been documenting Ukraine's railway workers since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Over 200,000 men and women have kept the trains running under constant danger, evacuating civilians, transporting the wounded, riding empty trains back toward the front to reach more people. Hundreds have lost their lives. His project, Iron People, has been published by The Guardian, National Geographic, CNN, and The Economist, and is now a book.

In sharing his experience following these railway workers, he talked about an unspoken trust compact.

Unspoken Understanding

When someone lets a journalist, writer or storyteller into their life, especially in vulnerable and fearful moments, there is an unspoken understanding. They trust that what they share will matter. That their experiences will reach people who care and might even move someone to act. That their experiences will be treated with dignity, integrity, priority, and not disappear into silence. ›That is the weight journalists like Krings carry every time they tell a story.

But journalists are also facing a competing challenge.

In a separate panel at the same roundtable, media freedom researchers and advocates described the challenges of the digital environment plainly. Disinformation. Shortened attention spans. Algorithms that punish nuance and complexity.

Layered, complicated, deeply human stories are exactly the ones those platforms are built to bury.

So the question no one said out loud, but that was sitting in the room: how do you honor the trust compact in an environment actively working against the storytelling it requires?

If greater reach is away to honor the compact, and social media is a vehicle for reach, but social media punishes the complexity those stories deserve, how do you square that?

There's no clean answer. But it's a question worth sitting with, because the stakes of getting it wrong aren't abstract.

Pulling Threads

For years leading the social media team at the Global Fund, I was on the digital side of this problem, taking long-form, multi-dimensional, personal stories and trying to make them fit in a world not built for them. The stories deserved thousands of words, but I had 280 characters. The people deserved films, but I had three-second viewership metrics.

Something that helped me was a return to an overused analogy: storytelling as tapestry. Every story is a fabric, woven from many threads. Even when you can't share the whole tapestry, you can share the threads.

Sometimes that looks like a series of profiles from health workers across a country. A rural volunteer malaria worker in Quy Chau District alongside an urban HIV program officer in Nghe An Province. Individually, they are specific and human. Together, they start to paint a picture of Vietnam's progress and the broader context of each individual. One thread at a time, until something larger emerges.

Sometimes it's a social media carousel following one specific aspect of a story. Not the full complexity, but a meaningful thread with a real voice and real stakes. Designed for the platform but not stripped of the person.

Sometimes it's building storytelling with the platform in mind from the start, so that the person sharing their experience can be part of deciding how it's shared. They know their story will be told in full through journalism or long-form writing. And they can consent to, even guide, the shorter versions, knowing the abbreviation exists for the sake of reach, not at the expense of their dignity.

These aren't perfect workarounds. But they are aspiring to carry the compact responsibly, respecting the person who shared their story and the audience you're trying to reach.

Building Content vs. Carrying Experiences

Storytelling in service of impact is always navigating this tension. Journalists feel it acutely. It's woven into the ethics of their work. But it's also the work of anyone using communications to try to make something matter.

We're not building content. We're carrying experiences that were shared with us in trust. That framing shapes every decision: what to cut, what to keep, how to meet a platform without surrendering the person.

If you want to see how Krings has carried this, Iron People is extraordinary. Worth your time, and one concrete way to support the journalists doing this work.