Sabah al-ward, Reader,

It means "morning of roses" or "morning of flowers" in Arabic, and it's a poetic way of saying "good morning" to friends and loved ones. I learned it from Hassan Herzallah, who wrote "Palestinian Storytelling Before the World Called It News" for the second edition of Cracks Magazine:

If you've read it already, asante sana!, which means "thanks very much" in Swahili. And that I learned from one of the subscribers to this newsletter. He responded to "The Categories Inherited From Colonialism," saying:

It's very nice to receive messages from subscribers. And some of you support Inclusive Journalism financially; I just want to mention that option here again too: go to Patreon!

I'm currently finalizing the long-awaited well-being course for people working in storytelling. One module is about grief and mortality. That's how this week's writing came about.

Sanne

DEEP DIVE

The right to mourn in journalism

Duncan McCue spent 25 years as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and later he wrote the book Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities. One of the core ideas I took from the book is that journalists should build real relationships with the communities they cover, instead of showing up only when there's a crisis.

The coverage of death is an example of such a crisis. In many Indigenous communities, the name and image of someone who has died are kept out of public view for a period of mourning.

In some communities, there's a belief that seeing or hearing the name of the recently deceased can interfere with their spirit's journey and can "call them back" or unsettle the process of moving on.

There's sometimes also a practical reason: constant exposure to a person's name or face is seen as re-triggering grief for the people closest to them, over and over, at a time when they need space to process it. That's probably true for many of us.
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And there can be an element of authority involved: the family and community (and not the journalist) get to decide how and when a person re-enters public memory, and in what form.

Media coverage is seen as something that can distort how a person is remembered if it moves faster than the community's own process. There is not one single explanation, though. Being Indigenous is not homogeneous.

McCue's own advice to Canadian journalists is about the habit of asking the family first. Don't assume a person's story becomes public the moment they die. It's the opposite of how Western news usually works, where a death is often immediately treated as a news event the moment it happens.

Source used here: Indigenous cultural protocols: what the media needs to do when depicting deceased persons by SBS/NITV Australia, which has formal guidelines.

Three examples from the past two weeks to reflect on

Nepali-British climber Nirmal Purja, 43, died on July 30 in an avalanche on Broad Peak in Pakistan, along with nine other members of his climbing team. As of today, two of the ten climbers' bodies still haven't been recovered.

I wrote about Purja in the previous newsletter. Besides posts and articles about his successes, there were also people mentioning the fact that in May 2024, The New York Times published on-the-record accounts from two women, mountaineer Lotta Hintsa and physician April Leonardo, saying Purja had kissed them without consent and made unwanted sexual advances. Purja denied this through his lawyers, calling it false and defamatory.

The debate started about timing: some said a full account of someone's life has to include the hard parts, even right after death. Others said his body hadn't even come down the mountain yet, and asked what's gained by reopening the story within 48 hours after his passing.

The conclusion can be that the accusations aren't going anywhere; they will be there next month or next year and can still be thoroughly investigated. So, what is the best way to go about this in the aftermath of such a tragic death?

Jason Arday: ongoing media pressure

Jason Arday became the youngest Black professor in Cambridge University's history in 2023. On August 5, he resigned after weeks of reports accusing him of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis. He denied plagiarizing, while admitting some early mistakes. Nine days later, on August 14, he was found dead at a home in south London. Police say the death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious.

His family, in a statement, described "a campaign of sustained abuse" going back over three years and said the pressure was too much for him. They also asked the press to "leave us alone" and to stop the "campaign of harassment".

A Cambridge colleague, Simon Baron-Cohen, who says he spoke with Arday hours before his death, told the BBC that Arday believed plagiarism accusations were being used specifically to bring down Black academics, and that he wasn't coping with the loss of his career and reputation.

It makes you think about whether ongoing media pressure was part of what led to his death, and whether that same dynamic is now focusing first and foremost on debating the plagiarism claims instead of sitting with the fact that an actual person has died.

An Indigenous newsroom following the kind of protocols described earlier wouldn't be knocking on the family door for a comment right now but instead would wait for the family to come to them.

The A59 crash: media spreading hate?

Two days ago, a deadly crash happened on the A59 highway in the south of the Netherlands. That same day, hundreds of farmers had driven tractors toward a protest, using the highway, where tractors normally aren't allowed. Police had said in advance they wouldn't stop them, citing the right to protest.

Traffic backed up behind the tractors, resulting in a traffic jam. A car then hit the back of that queue at high speed, killing an elderly couple. Police have not yet finished investigating the cause.

Some national coverage immediately linked the deaths directly to the farmers' protest. Nieuwsuur, the Netherlands' main national and a reputable current-affairs program, opened its Saturday item with an image of the crash and a line stating it happened because of the farmers' protest. It ran that frame throughout the rest of the segment.

In the meantime, the couple's daughter, Wendy Mollen, rejected that framing in a Facebook post. Her parents, she wrote, were killed by a driver who slammed into a stopped line of traffic, not by the farmers, and not because her parents weren't paying attention. She accused parts of the media of spreading hate and anger, and said her family's life would never be the same.

Everything has become speedy and "now"

If you put these three stories side by side, it shows a pattern: there is a lack of pause between the occurrence and the reporting. There is hardly any room for grief, nor a space for reflection about the fact that lives have been lost.

And it's not only happening in tabloids or bad actors. People who are actively working against those instincts, for example, those in anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements, people who are also looking for other ways to tell stories, also get pulled into the same rush. Especially on social media.

The problem might be the shape of the format itself. Which is exactly what Indigenous protocols around death are pointing at. They're not asking the news to go easier on anyone, but they describe a different structure of separating the space for grief and the space for accountability.

Building trust

A wire story can't win on speed anymore, because social media will always be faster. So, journalists should double down on judgment. Whether you publish a crash photo with a causal headline in the first hour, or whether you wait until the police research is finalized, matters a lot.

The outlets people end up trusting may be the ones that are willing to visibly stand still for a moment. It's an uncomfortable thing to do, but it's not about publishing nothing. You can report the facts that are solid but stay away from an interpretive or insinuating frame until there is clarity.

With Purja, the facts of his death didn't need the sexual assault allegations to be complete because the allegations weren't going anywhere. In the case of Jason Arday, the media needs to realize that they weren't a bystander to his death, but possibly a cause of it. If they keep reporting on the plagiarism question immediately, or hunting down Arday's family, they repeat the thing his family blames for his death.

Decolonizing journalism isn't only about words

A common complaint about Dutch current-affairs shows and opinion writing is that they often manufacture conflict that isn't really there. Two guests get booked to represent "sides," an interview format built for confrontation puts them against each other (literally, on other sides of the table), and a disagreement appears on air that mostly disappears once you actually compare what each person is saying. Dutch opinionmaker and friction expert Kiza Magendane calls it "fake commotion".

The same thing is happening in how these deaths get covered. The standard format for a death story in breaking news doesn't include a pause or reflection. There's no push alert for a wire story saying, "We'll mourn first and say more later". The format insists everything relevant gets said now.

Decolonizing journalism, seen this way, is also about infrastructure; about the story formats, the publishing schedules, and the interview structures we default to in the profession. Stuff to think about.

Don't be afraid to pause

This newsletter is about sitting with something before reacting. It's a skill, actually, and you can learn it too. I coach media and communication professionals on how to deal with complexity without losing urgency. It's also part of the well-being course that's coming soon. If this resonates and you're looking for guidance, let's work together:

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Thanks!

Sanne