San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Searching for voices, setting a tone
Sandi Dolbee, formerly the religion and ethics editor for The San Diego Union-tribune, had already been retired for a long time when Arts & Entertainment Editor Michael James Rocha approached her about returning to the pages of this newspaper as a columnist for the Arts+culture section.
Last spring, the Sunday section had undergone a major change as a result of the pandemic, with the return of faith coverage as one of the priorities. Since then, Dolbee has been writing about faith, spirituality and ethics every two weeks.
Today, she returns to the front page with a story that explores how a nation, wounded by partisanship and cultural division, heals.
Q: Who came up with the idea for this story?
A: President-elect Joe Biden was going to make “America united” a theme of his inauguration. So Jeff Light, publisher and editor, and Lora Cicalo, managing editor, talked to my editor, Michael Rocha about me exploring how that healing might be accomplished and whether it was even the right thing to do.
Q: how
did you start?
A: I made a list of occupations whose job it is to think about human behavior, social issues, political structures and community cohesiveness. I cast a very wide net.
Then I put faces to the jobs. I tried to make the faces as diverse as possible. This was a story about America, and it needed to look like America. List in hand, I began sending emails and making calls.
Q: were they receptive?
A: I am humbled by how many people made time. The day I interviewed San Diego Catholic Bishop Robert Mcelroy, he was also trying to help elderly priests get COVID-19 vaccines.
Marisa Abrajano, in addition to her professor and provost jobs at UCSD, was working on her newest book about American politics. It was 8 p.m. his time when Jim Winkler, head of the National Council of Churches, was able to talk to me.
Q: any rejections?
A: A couple. Suffice to say, some conservatives don’t trust us. We need to work on that.
Q: What did you ask in the interviews?
A: I’m a fan of starting with open-ended questions. Asking too specific a question, at first anyway, risks stifling the responses.
Stories are as good as the voices in them, so those voices need to be let loose.
Q: what were you listening for?
A: Common threads. They became woven into the backbone of the story and guided its tone.
Q: In your story, you talked about community dialogues. What if people don’t want to participate in them?
A: One idea was to borrow a page from focus groups and pay participants cash or give them gift cards.
Q: regrets?
A: I ended up with 37 printed pages of notes. The story was four pages. Ouch. The cutting room floor included interviews with the Rev. Wendy Craig-purcell, founder of the Unity Center in San Diego, and Steven Mintz, a retired Cal Poly professor who writes the “Ethics Sage” blog. While they weren’t quoted by name, they helped provide context and texture — and fodder for future stories.
Q: Memorable comments from them?
A: When Craig-purcell was asked what a healed America would look like, she answered: “It’s not going to look like this.” Mintz, talking about how the ethic of common ground has become a casualty of us-against-them rigidity, said this: “I think the American mind has been closed for too many years, and clearly it’s gone too far.”
Q: Any second thoughts while writing the piece?
A: I reached out to Floyd Thompkins, of the Foundation for Justice and Peace, to double-check whether civil dialogue really could be a vaccine to heal us.
“Imagine how naive MLK seemed when he said that things would change through nonviolent action?” he emailed back. Concepts like it all begin with conversations, he added, and “are often ridiculed and dismissed by the very people with whom they will be most effective.”
Q: You didn’t use any quotes from Wednesday’s inauguration festivities. Why not?
A: It’s already been covered. Remember: 37 pages of notes for four pages of story. However, there were two moments from that day that especially made me think of this project.
One was this excerpt from Amanda Gorman’s poem: “Being American is more than a pride we inherit — it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.” The other came from Bill Clinton as he was huddling with George W. Bush and Barack Obama: “Everybody needs to get off their high horse.”