About 10 years ago, New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott dreamed of finding stories like her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning series, “An Imam in America.”
“I really had no idea where those stories would take me,” Elliott said of her days as a journalism student. “But I was ready to go there.”
She spoke Friday to a nearly full McCormick Tribune Center Forum as the first lecturer of the 2008 Crain Lecture Series, tailoring her talk to the aspiring journalists in the audience.
Using the three-part series about Brooklyn-based religious leader Sheik Reda Shata as a case study, Elliott spoke about the process of working on an enterprise journalism project and the challenges of covering Muslims in America – a beat she created for the Times in 2005.
She discussed the series from its roots in 2003 to its publication in March 2006. The story began one afternoon when Elliott drove through Brooklyn’s Little Pakistan neighborhood on a small 500-word assignment. Instead of a simple short story, she found a community worth covering and a wealth of stories in need of exploration.
“For all of this budding curiosity in the years following Sept. 11, many Americans remained mystified by Islam and its followers, in part because the media’s coverage remained fairly superficial,” Elliot said. “The story of Muslims in America was sort of lost.”
The strong disconnect between the media and the Islamic community presented difficulties because many Muslims felt that reporters too often covered the Islamic faith through the prism of terrorism, she said.
“For every person I interviewed, I would say that 10 others refused to talk,” she said.
She decided to focus her series on an imam because of the access those individuals had as religious leaders to the often-concealed parts of the Muslim immigrant community.
“As journalists, we are perpetual outsiders,” she said. “We often go where we’re not invited or where we don’t fit in, and that’s an essential part of our work.”
As a Catholic-raised American, Elliott said she had little in common with Shata, including language. Elliott used a translator to conduct interviews with the Arabic speaker. Still, she found points of connection with the imam.
“There’s often a sense among reporters that in order to protect the integrity of our work, we need to stand at a distance, arms folded and not really reveal our own humanity,” Elliott said. “I don’t think that I really could’ve gotten Sheik Reda and others to open up to me had I not done some of that myself.”
As she spoke, a slideshow of photos of Shata and his congregants ran on a screen behind her. She ended the lecture by answering questions from the audience, which included students, faculty and Evanston residents.
Former Chicago Tribune reporter and 1957 Medill alumnus Al Borcover said he found Elliott’s lengthy reporting process intriguing.
“It’s kind of interesting to learn how a long story like this comes about, and the fact that she thought it would take three to four weeks and it ended up taking eight months,” Borcover said.
Medill graduate student Claudia Pou said she intends to read Elliott’s series after attending the lecture.
“I never really thought anyone would ever consider writing about this,” she said. “It’s so controversial.”
Reach Ashley Lau at [email protected].
