Telling high-altitude stories with on-the-ground insights: storytelling from the world view of Pulitizer Prize-winning alumna Helene Cooper ’87

by Barbara Wiedemann

Distinguished alumna Helene Cooper ’87, Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times, brought a searing wit and generous spirit to Carolina on Monday, Feb. 25, including an afternoon conversation with students at the UNC School of Media and Journalism, followed by a public lecture on “Gathering Global Stories” in the UNC Center for Global Initiatives’ Nelson Mandela Auditorium to commemorate the center’s 25th anniversary.

“What an opportunity for our students to sit down in the Freedom Forum Conference Center at Carroll Hall and have an intimate, personal conversation with a world-class reporter about her work,” said Hussman School Dean Susan King. “We’re grateful to the Center for Global Initiatives and to our Holding Power Accountable series for allowing us to take advantage of the opportunity provided by having Hussman School graduate Helene Cooper back on campus.”

The Hussman School students who spoke with Cooper on Monday afternoon heard about Cooper’s work as a decorated White House and foreign correspondent. On the day that Osama bin Laden was killed, Cooper explained, she broke the story that (temporarily) broke the Times’ website from home in her pajamas, working her sources by phone to follow up on a lead from her colleague, Times photographer Doug Mills. 

Cooper also shared her insights about building a career as a journalist.

“Our students are always interested in the nuts and bolts of journalism,” said Hussman School Lecturer and longtime NPR correspondent Adam Hochberg, who leads the “Holding Power Accountable” series for the school. Cooper also took the time to answer very hands-on, practicial questions from students, including how to get a reluctant source to talk with you; how to get the full perspectives on any given story; and how to fact-check sources.

In her evening lecture, Cooper brought down the house with a timely Carolina basketball joke before calling out her college roommate’s dad, whom she’d spotted in the amphitheater-style auditorium. She went on to thank him for taking her and his daughter out for dinner when they were broke college students.

The journalist then detailed how she came to Carolina as an undergraduate student three years — and a lifetime — after fleeing her native Liberia following a violent coup in which her cousin was executed, her father shot, her grandmother jailed and her mother gang-raped by soldiers. "Those soldiers," she told the stunned crowd,  “agreed to take my mother instead when she bargained herself in exchange for her daughters.”

A refugee whose family found shelter in Greensboro, North Carolina, after the coup, Cooper explained how she ended up at the Hussman School.

“The coup that turned over my life taught me one very critical thing. My world blew up, and I hadn’t seen it coming,” she said. “I never wanted to be surprised like that again. That was one of the reasons I wanted to become a reporter.” 

“There’s simply nothing more fun — more soul-feeding — than collecting stories both at home and around the world,” Cooper added. “It shapes you into a much more full person. It forces you to challenge the status quo and to look at things from other people’s perspectives.”

The reporter, editor, television commentator and best-selling author went on to tell hard-charging stories from the road. And after reporting from 64 countries for the Times and The Wall Street Journal, Cooper had plenty of stories.

A captivated audience went along for the ride, from racing down a tarmac in Kigali, Rwanda, to flag down an Ethiopian airlines jet, arms waving, green laptop bag and backpack bouncing alongside; to stopping in her tracks when it hit her that a Liberian Ebola patient named Precious Diggs caught the deadly virus because she simply could not bring herself to not touch her ailing two-year-old daughter Rebecca, who later died of the disease.

Health policy and management doctoral student Wei Chang praised Cooper’s compassionate storytelling. “That was by far the best talk we’ve ever attended,” said Chang, who attended the lecture with Mark Pham and a UNC colleague. The two make a habit of attending lectures across the Carolina campus. 

"It’s amazing that Cooper could make her presentation feel so personal in such a large auditorium full of people,” Pham agreed, noting that Cooper’s approach added depth to her “Gathering Global Stories” presentation.

Audience members Jeff and Lynn Edgar, Center for Global Initiative supporters whose daughter Jessica Edgar — a third generation Carolina graduate —graduated with a degree in global studies, were equally intrigued by Cooper’s presentation.

“I’m so glad we came,” said Carolina graduate Lynn Edgar, whose international book club read Cooper’s memoir “The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood” in 2008, when the book was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Edgar noted the wisdom in Cooper’s advice to young journalism students: “The way to do it is to just do it. To go out there and to write. Intern for newspapers, intern for news organizations.”

“Go out there and submit things to digital publications,” Cooper added. “HuffPost will take a lot of submissions.“

Edgar’s husband, Jeff, agreed with Cooper’s insights into how to report a story. Her emphasis on layering what she called “granular level” anecdotes to humanize “high altitude” topics was advice that he found sage.

Jeff said, “What she says is she deals at the granular level down here with anecdotes about people and their experiences, their sadness and their jokes. And the macro level is something else that sometimes she has to elevate.”

“But it’s those stories down here at the granular level that capture imaginations,” he said about how Cooper contextualizes her stories. “Nothing captures most people’s imaginations and understanding of an issue like talking to someone who lives it, who is on the ground, who had this particular experience. And then you can back that up,” with what Cooper called “high altitude” information.

Cooper also advised that young journalists shouldn’t start at The New York Times or The Washington Post. “If you start off in the big metropolitan markets,” she said, “they’re not going to throw you at their best stories.”

“As a young reporter, you want to do as much as you possibly can do. And that’s going to happen in smaller markets,” she said, noting that she herself had started her career at the The Providence Journal in Rhode Island.

A closing question about culling strong sources solicited this advice from the Times reporter:

“It’s about building relationships with people. It’s one of the reasons why I tend to stay on beats for four to five years,” she said. “I talk to people. I don’t just fire questions at people ... that’s performance.”