This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss killing stories, CEO saying wild things, how the OpenAI copyright story came together, and tech-powered shortcuts out of discomfort.
EMANUEL: This week I published a story about Google delisting sites that provided DIY hormone replacement therapy drugs to people who couldn’t get gender affirming care through their regular healthcare provider. At one point, after I already did a fair bit of reporting and started writing a draft, we had fully killed the story. I stopped writing, closed the many tabs I had open related to it, closed the Google doc I was typing in, and fully moved on with my day.
It’s difficult to kill stories because it feels like you’re wasting a lot of hard work, but ultimately it’s a good thing because it shows we’re able to exercise restraint, be critical of our own stories, and decide not to go ahead for a variety of reasons. The problem in this case wasn’t that the story was bad, but that the community we were reporting on is so vulnerable that even uttering the name of the sites could lead to increased enforcement against them and therefore limit their ability to provide care to people.
Emanuel Maiberg
I knew this was a risk going in, so the first thing I did when I started working on the story was reach out to an expert in that community to ask if they thought there was a way to publish the story without causing harm. The expert, who was very generous and knowledgeable, didn’t tell me NOT to publish the story, but basically said that my fears were justified and advised me that the story could cause more harm than good. At that point, the story obviously still had news value. It’s in the public’s interest to know that Google, a huge company with a near monopoly on how people find information online, is complying with UK laws in a way that harms people. But at the same time, if someone in that community tells me the story ends up harming it, it doesn’t feel very productive or ethical to publish.