Study Hall Subscriber Spotlight: Jem Bartholomew Is Starting A Newsletter

Jem Bartholomew is a recipient of Study Hall’s “Own Your Work” micro-grant. He’s a London-based journalist who covers poverty and social exclusion, and a regular freelancer for The Guardian. He’s also written for Columbia Journalism Review, WSJ, 1843, New York Magazine among other outlets. Last year, he contributed two chapters, one on homelessness and one on the gig economy, both of which involved immersive reporting, to the book Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis. With the funds, Bartholomew has developed a newsletter, “Conversations on Poverty,” which will examine the media’s coverage of poverty and explore how reporters can avoid the often-exploitative dynamics between journalists and their sources. (It also got funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an anti-poverty non-profit.) In February, Study Hall caught up with Bartholomew to discuss his journey as a journalist and reporting on vulnerable communities. 

Subscribe to Conversations on Poverty here. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

How did you get started in journalism?

I’m a freelance reporter from the UK, and I recently moved from New York back to London to start a narrative nonfiction book project about poverty in the UK. I spent my early childhood in public housing, after my family experienced an eviction that left us homeless, so I’ve been drawn to writing about poverty, homelessness and inequity. I fell in love with nonfiction writing through reading Joan Didion, and it really made me want to come to the US and study her kind of style of longform reportage. I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to come over to New York in 2019. 

Can you discuss your newsletter about media coverage on poverty and social inequity? 

First of all, thank you so much to Study Hall for supporting this project and having faith in it. This newsletter was based around my belief that right now we need reporters who document homelessness, chronic poverty and exploitation more than ever. But we also need journalists to be really aware of the inherent risks and complexities of doing that type of coverage.  It can be easy to fall into extractive relationships with sources. The newsletter is intended to be a series of conversations on ethics, craft and representation in journalism.

Who are the journalists who’ve inspired you to cover this topic? 

I’m always inspired by the empathy of someone like Sarah Stillman’s work. The immersion of someone like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I’m also inspired by  the psychological depth of novelists like George Eliot or Leo Tolstoy. Also, the emotional honesty of writers like Annie Ernaux and Elif Batuman. The main inspiration behind this project is a quote from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer which is, “all journalists feel, or should feel, some compunction about the exploitative character of the journalist-subject relationship.” Often as reporters we don’t think about these relationships [enough] particularly for immersion work, about how they play out both during the reporting process and after publication.

With this newsletter, how are you aiming to interrupt that dynamic between the journalist and the source?

It will definitely include [the perspectives of] some of my own sources: people whose lives I’ve reported on, who have seen their experiences in print. It’ll be an opportunity to check in about how that process went: the experience of going through a series of interviews and having someone sort of tag along and follow your life over a number of months, and then see that reflected in a piece of work. I’m really excited about having those conversations and looking back at the start of my career. Hopefully, those conversations are helpful to other journalists as well.

Part of the newsletter will be media criticism. Will you be covering poverty as well? 

There are two parts of my writing practice. One is reporting on poverty and how to build a better society. The other branch is, I’ve been writing for Columbia Journalism Review for a while now, reporting on the media. This is bringing together both sides of that in this newsletter. [I will have] conversations with people working for change, and their views on these topics. I think the thrust of it is to be an exercise in self-examination for journalists. There’s this quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem that I used to be inspired by, which is: “my only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate, that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”  

I reread that quote now, and I think, is that right? Does a reporter’s presence always run counter to a source’s best interests? I don’t think I agree with that anymore. I don’t think writers are always selling someone out. I think great reporting can and should be an opportunity for building empathy and bridging divides. Inhabiting someone else’s reality [can help] show there is a pathway for building a better society. If the project tackles some of those questions, then I’ll consider it a success.