In a respectable dress and patterned tights, Fernanda Santos looked how she sounded: clever, approachable and excited to be speaking to journalism students. Her shoulder-length hair swung in rhythm with the animated gestures that underscored her messages.
“The details that matter tell the story, not your choice of words,” she told students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the final Must See Monday of the fall semester.
Santos, the Phoenix bureau chief for the New York Times, is writing a book due out next year about the Granite Mountain Hotshots who died in the Yarnell Hill fire in 2013.
Her presentation, “Immigrants, Firefighters and Other Untold Stories,” emphasized the gravity of connecting with sources and audiences through focused storytelling. Santos said she seeks to portray big ideas through a small and detailed lens to give readers stories they remember.
One example was a story out of Elephant Butte, New Mexico, where Santos followed a city council dispute surrounding a stray dog named Blue. Though the article addressed broad topics such as the intricacies of law and the personal side of local politics, the focus never strays from the people (and creatures) Santos is writing about.
Visiting Edith Kinney Gaylord Professor in Journalism Ethics, Peter Bhatia, introduced Santos.
“When reading the paper, you don’t often remember the bylines, but you remember the stories,” Bhatia said. “When you look at Fernanda’s bylines, you say, ‘I remember!’”
Santos moved to America in the 1990s to complete a graduate degree in print journalism at Boston University. As a Brazilian immigrant, she said learning to utilize her unique characteristics rather than hide them was advantageous.
“You start to realize your differences are… something to leverage rather than be self-conscious about,” Santos said.
Santos said understanding what it means to feel different has helped her make many of her subjects feel more comfortable.
She has written about exonerated prisoner Jeffrey Deskovic, as well as border patrol officers in remote desert locations. These people, Santos said, want to be seen as more than a public persona.
According to Bhatia, Santos’s compassion is what makes her a strong storyteller—and that makes her an exceptional journalist.
“There are great reporters… and great writers in our world,” Bhatia said in his introduction. “Rarely do we see the combination of both.”
Santos also emphasized the importance of asking deep questions, and being unafraid to invoke sources’ emotions. Writing about the Granite Mountain Hotshots crew who died in June 2013, Santos said, required an immersive and sometimes painful amount of research and interviews.
“(These men) didn’t begin and end on June 30, 2013,” Santos said. When her research about the team produced more material than she could use in an article, she decided to write a book about the 19 men instead.
“I’m at the New York Times,” Santos said with a laugh as she remembered making the decision. “What can stop me now?”
Public relations student Amy Pantea said Santos helped alleviate some of her boredom with her craft.
Journalism classes, Pantea said, often require students to deliver just the facts and “deplete some of the magic” inherent in their subjects. But Pantea said Santos was the ideal closer for this semester’s Must See Monday series.
“Hearing her perspective really makes me excited as a journalist and motivated to practice my storytelling,” Pantea said.
Contact the reporter at hjhayes@asu.edu
