"I think any journalist who spends time in a place realizes that there are lots of stories around beyond their primary story. You meet so many interesting people and have all kinds of experiences"
About this Quote
Sacco is gently dismantling the myth of the journalist as a laser-focused truth machine, parachuting in, extracting “the story,” and leaving with a clean narrative arc. His point is messier: the longer you stay, the more the assigned storyline starts to look like a convenience, not a natural boundary. That’s a provocation aimed as much at editors and news cycles as at reporters. The “primary story” is usually a commissioning decision - a frame imposed by budgets, attention spans, and geopolitics. Time on the ground exposes how arbitrary that frame can be.
The intent isn’t just to romanticize immersion; it’s to argue for ethical proximity. “You meet so many interesting people” is a quiet rebuke to coverage that reduces communities to symbols: victim, militant, refugee, hero. Sacco’s work in comics journalism has always made room for peripheral lives, the conversations that don’t fit the headline but explain why the headline exists. He’s signaling that context isn’t a background layer; it’s the actual substance, and the official “story” is often the thinnest slice of it.
There’s subtext about power, too. When you accumulate “experiences,” you also accumulate obligations: people trust you, correct you, complicate you. The longer you listen, the harder it becomes to flatten events into a single moral or political takeaway. In an industry built on speed and spectacle, Sacco is making a case for the slow-burn narrative as a form of accuracy.
The intent isn’t just to romanticize immersion; it’s to argue for ethical proximity. “You meet so many interesting people” is a quiet rebuke to coverage that reduces communities to symbols: victim, militant, refugee, hero. Sacco’s work in comics journalism has always made room for peripheral lives, the conversations that don’t fit the headline but explain why the headline exists. He’s signaling that context isn’t a background layer; it’s the actual substance, and the official “story” is often the thinnest slice of it.
There’s subtext about power, too. When you accumulate “experiences,” you also accumulate obligations: people trust you, correct you, complicate you. The longer you listen, the harder it becomes to flatten events into a single moral or political takeaway. In an industry built on speed and spectacle, Sacco is making a case for the slow-burn narrative as a form of accuracy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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