Word: caleb
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What I hadn't realized, though, was how different it would be for Caleb to experience what it was like to have a journalist writing a full profile about him. It wasn't just a phone call for a few quotes. I spent the better part of two days with him. I went inside his apartment to take notes on the magnets on his refrigerator and the peanut-butter-covered spoons in his sink. And then, after all that, I wrote an article about him based on a premise I had come up with before I met him and which...
...still proud of the article I wrote. It engaged the questions I had set out to answer, and I was careful to write in the first person and distinguish what Caleb and others said from my own speculations. I was confident enough in what I had written to submit the article to a journalism contest, where it won first place in a regional round...
...article did no favors to anyone who I interviewed—not Caleb, not the Undergraduate Council hopeful who watched her musings about ambition published just as she was beginning her UC presidential campaign, not the freshmen Oval Office hopefuls whose quotes may have rebounded on them in painful and upsetting ways...
Shortly after the article was published, I told Caleb I was working on a short reflective follow-up—not a correction, but something of a personal apology. This wasn’t something Caleb or any of my other sources had requested; but I felt ambiguous enough about the reporting process that I thought a follow-up might be appropriate. I told my editors about it, but then I stalled. I tried to write, but couldn't get down anything that satisfied me. I wasn't sure what it was that I was trying to apologize...
What I had done to Caleb in being deceptive about the angle of my story certainly wasn't nice. It wasn't nice either to write a story about Caleb—or about any of the others—that I had good reason to think would make them upset. By the standards of personal ethics, it wasn’t particularly virtuous to publicize my classmates’ ambitions in order to further...