/ THE ORIGIN
THERE ARE STORIES
PEOPLE LOSE
THE NIGHT TO.
They forget to sleep. They message someone in the morning: you have to read this. I have been trying to build that kind of work for twenty years. I have not always succeeded. But I have never stopped thinking that it is possible — and that it is the most important thing journalism can do right now.
I start with an idea. Then I go to the ground — I travel to the place, meet the people, stay until something shifts. When it shifts, I stop thinking about what to report and start feeling what to transmit.
The audience does not need more information. They have more information than they can hold. What they need is to feel something — to be in the room with the story, not at a distance from it. This is why formats matter. A war reported in five hundred words will not change how someone understands war. But a story that puts you inside a building, that makes you hear the specific sound of a specific place — that can. I build the second kind.
I AM ANGRY.
Not at individuals, but at a media environment that makes it easy to believe things that are not true — and easier still to stop caring whether they are. I think journalism is responsible for democracy. Not as one factor among many. As the primary infrastructure of an informed society. That is a large thing to say. But it is the position I work from.
Every reporter has an Achilles' heel — the thing that breaks them, that makes the abstraction of the story suddenly personal and unbearable. Mine is children. Others break when they see bodies. At the end of the day, we are all human. I think the best journalism is made from that place: from having been broken by what you witnessed, and choosing to make something of it anyway.
STORIES WORTH
STAYING UP FOR.
I want people to look at journalism and see something worth trusting. Work that earns the night it takes from them.
I think that is still possible. I think it might be more possible now than it has ever been — precisely because everything else has become so synthetic, so cheap, so easy to generate. The harder it becomes to tell what is real, the more valuable the real becomes.
CROSSING POINTS
An 8-month multimedia journalism project about migration at the U.S.–Mexico border.
ONE DAY IN
Six Ukrainian cities. Twelve days. The war, seen from the inside. Winner of Paszport Polityki 2022.
MIGRANT MESSAGES
An interactive journalism project presenting migrant stories told via WhatsApp inside a WhatsApp-style interface.
REAKCJA
Stage-based journalism: reporting brought out of the browser and into a shared room, with bodies and breath and the particular attention of people who have chosen to be somewhere together.
VIEW FROM SOMEWHERE
An exhibition asking how journalism justifies its social role: through brand promises, trust claims, and the language institutions use when they need to explain themselves.
Paszport Polityki 2022 · Digital Culture. Presented at INMA World Congress, International Journalism Festival (Perugia), iMEdD International Journalism Forum (Athens), b° future (Bonn), TEDx. University of Warsaw, Journalism. Often between New York and Warsaw.