Our America with Lisa Ling

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Lisa Ling's shows "Our America" tells the stories of people around America in an hour long, documentary style format. 

One of Ling’s qualities I hope to emulate is her ability to tell people’s stories. In this piece you don’t hear from the ‘3AM girls’ or even see their faces.  But by the end you feel a sense of their fears, their secrets and long for them to escape.

Sometimes I forget why I want to be a journalist. My love for people and desire to tell their stories is what drives me in this career path, but I’ve been struggling lately with telling these stories effectively. Watching Ling’s documentaries and short pieces remind me this is the career I want to be in. I love long pieces where the journalist is able to really know the subject and gain their trust. I need to learn how to tell just as effective a story in less than two minutes.

One thing I’ve noticed about Ling and most other great journalists is they let the subject tell the pivotal moments of the story. Ling provides the context but then lets Tina tell her story. When setting up Tina’s first sound bite she tells you just enough for you to understand Tina’s point of view. “For Tina it lasted a year and a half. Until at fifteen years old she found her moment.” Then Tina explains the turning point when she turned herself in. The tone of her voice says just as much as her words.

Another element of the piece that draws the viewer’s attention is the natural sound. The opening of the car garage door, the sirens on the street, the men’s voices  all make you feel like you are with them on the street witnessing it for yourself. Watching it I somehow feel as though I am being exploited with the girls.

Ling also “writes to the corners.” She tells the audience things they wouldn’t have noticed even if they’d been there. As you see girls stepping off the sidewalk in to the street you hear, “When a pimp is present girls are not aloud to walk on the sidewalk.” As a man rides by on a bike you hear, “There is always someone watching….hired watchers make their rounds on bicycles.”

Another area I am working on is being descriptive.  This goes along with writing to the corners, it tells the viewers how it felt to be there; the environment, mood, atmosphere, smell, what they can’t experience from home. “We’d only been out on the streets for an hour and already we were starting to feel like bait in a pool of sharks.”

Ling also uses the element of surprise as Wayne Freedman talks about. She waits to talk about the men who the girls are servicing or ‘the Johns’ as they call them to the end. After you’ve seen the girls, heard about their exploitation, learned their age, you are introduced to the men who provide the funds for it all. “They are from every walk of life. Teachers, lawyers, pastors, police officers and diplomats. Men with baby seats in the back of their cars.”