" I'm looking for ways to make history alive and present and relevant and useful to people."
-- Logan Jaffe
If I were to rank favorite jobs among the 200+ people I've interviewed the last five years, Logan Jaffe's at ProPublica would rank up near the top.
Logan is a newsletter writer who has a wide range of assignments, most of which center around using history to relate to current events.
" I like to be slower," she said in an interview on this week's episode of The Journalism Salute. "I've tried to be the reporter who that can go to that day's press conference who can make the phone calls to get the story after some breaking news. It's not quite for me.
"What I do really enjoy is letting that news sink in and processing it. The story under the story is what I really like."
A good chunk of the conversation touched on a story she recently wrote refuting the idea that "no one could have predicted this" with regards to the flooding that killed so many in Kerr County, Texas.
Logan found that the county had an oral history collection, one that featured interviews with many people telling of past floods in that area across decades.
"What I ended up doing is what I tend to do, which is to go look at people in Texas and in this particular county, and how they responded to floods in their own time. How can we connect things the climate change angle and also the disaster response angle in a way that felt at least as authentic as I could be?"
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Another example that Logan shared was one she did in 2016 for WBEZ Chicago about the murder of a Black baseball manager and the questions his descendants had about his death more than 90 years later. Logan (with others as well) went through different archives and was able to solve some of the mystery behind this story.
" At the time that I was investigating this question was at the same time that Michael Brown was murdered by police and the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, were going on," she said. "So for me, reporting this story, which had so many parallels to what was going on in Ferguson, kind of forced me to blur the line of what the past and the present really is, and how these stories overlap in so many ways if you let yourself see them."
We talked about both those stories in the interview, as well as one Logan did for the New York Times on her experience with a racist object that a family member had. She also had a great answer explaining how she views her purpose as a journalist.
As someone who always loves a good rabbit hole on Newspapers.com or newslibrary.com, this seems like such a cool job. And Logan's personality seems well suited for it, which you'll get a better understanding of if you listen to the interview 😊