Migration stories don’t become real until you meet people in the journey: the carpenter carrying photos of his fantasy coffins, or the Libyan city worker burying the forgotten dead, or the Tatar woman watching her livelihood collapse at a militarised border. Following these surprising human threads is the only way journalism can cut through collective exhaustion and make readers confront a crisis they’ve been trained to ignore.
It was August 2020, and the deck of the Open Arms, a humanitarian rescue ship, was crowded with more than 300 people rescued off the coast of Libya. As they tried to recover from a journey that has cost thousands their lives, I watched the scene unfold, trying to figure out how to keep telling this story in a way people would still read. As a freelance journalist, I need to grab the attention of editors who often base a “yes” on what we now call clickbait.
It’s never been easy. Before that 2020 mission, I had covered several others and witnessed, among other things, how interest in these stories had steadily and inevitably declined since those early missions in 2015. New stories generate clicks, so five years after such a bold initiative began, the most obvious hook was how this mission was unfolding in the middle of a global pandemic, at a time when the world was still waiting for the first vaccines. Social distancing among 300 people on a 35-meter deck was a fantasy, but even that wasn’t compelling enough. The global audience had grown numb to these images, to the point where the victims of yet another shipwreck in African waters had become invisible. “I’ve read this story before; I already know how it ends.” That was the prevailing thought in the reader’s mind, the reader we keep losing to the infinite scroll.
Human Stories that Break Through the Noise
Beyond the small media outlets that have supported my work for years, the story that opened the door to a wider audience was about a Ghanaian carpenter who made fantasy coffins and happened to be on that ship. Coffins shaped like giant fish, taxis or even pens, depending on the deceased’s trade, made the story unusual enough, even entertaining, to spark some curiosity. The focus had to shift. The drama had to take a backseat to reach even those readers looking for a quiet morning read. Stephen Donko, that was his name, was travelling with a bundle of photos showing off his work, hoping to attract new clients. The pictures passed from hand to hand among the passengers, who looked at them in amazement. So he became the thread of the story. He was the main character, but everyone on that deck shared a traumatic experience on this final leg of their journey aboard a humanitarian vessel. Stephen’s story, both dramatic and unique, invited empathy. It gave the migration crisis a human face. To humanise it was to remind the audience we weren’t talking about a faceless mass of people or livestock in transit, but individuals, each carrying their own grief and dreams.
I’d already covered the nightmare of crossing the Mediterranean, almost always from Libya. That North African country had long been the launchpad for many of the overcrowded dinghies. The situation in Libya was often reconstructed from the northern coast through a chorus of voices from those who had made it to Europe. The average reader was left with the impression that Libyans, as a whole, were cruel people abusing migrants through a grim repertoire that included torture, slavery and systematic rape. And yes, those things happened. But what share of the population were the perpetrators? What did we know about ordinary Libyans who tried to help? Who was telling the story of the people who opened their homes? Or of those who used their free time to bury the dead with as much dignity as they could? One of them was Sadiq Jiash, a city worker.
Once again, it was necessary to give names and faces to the other side of the story, to the Libyans no one ever mentioned, anonymous heroes, among them taxi drivers, musicians, law students, and lawyers. What would I do if my coastal city woke up to find the sea had brought in dozens of bodies? Would I go on with my life as usual, knowing my neighbour was trafficking people? I had to appeal to the reader’s conscience to help them empathise with someone they never considered part of the migration story. Placing their daily lives on the southern shore of the Mediterranean allowed readers to see the crisis from a different perspective.
A Forgotten Border in Europe’s East
The southern shore, however, isn’t the only gateway into Europe. In August 2021, the Belarusian government began directing a flow of migrants, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, toward the borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. For months, Belarus fast-tracked short-term visas. Many migrants flew to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, only to be escorted to the Polish border. Several reports said Belarusian soldiers helped some cross the fence into Poland, though dozens still died along the way, often from the cold.
Once again, the story drew brief media attention before fatigue set in and the headlines faded. The wall Warsaw built has since slowed the flow of migrants, but the death toll has not been high enough to bring the spotlight back to this corner of Europe. In search of a new angle, I discovered that right where the border wall was built lived a curious historical community in Poland. The Lipka Tatars have been there for over 500 years and are one of the oldest active Muslim communities in Europe.
Their livelihoods depend on agriculture and local tourism, Poles looking to enjoy lush landscapes of forests and lakes and to visit the two oldest mosques in the country, curiously built by Jewish architects two centuries ago. Border tensions and the quarantines imposed by the Polish government were testing the community’s resilience. Dzenneta Bogdanowicz, a Tatar woman who had created a small complex that included a restaurant, guest rooms and a museum dedicated to her people, watched her business model collapse as visitors stopped coming.
But it was never just about Dzenneta, just as it wasn’t only about the carpenter or the city worker. Each of these individuals gives a name and a face to an entire group within a much broader narrative. They are pieces of the larger puzzle of irregular migration, a story that only makes sense when we connect all those pieces. If we reduce it to isolated anecdotes, all we’re left with is a blog post or a footnote. Real journalism demands context. It requires us to frame these personal stories alongside the insights of experts, the work of NGOs focused on human rights, the efforts of organisations involved in migration, and, when needed, information from official sources. That’s how we shift the view from the local to the global.
However, before hitting readers with cold statistics or institutional press releases, we need to catch them off guard and take them to the scene from a path they’ve never taken. “I’m going to tell you this story from a new angle.” That should be the lingering idea behind the first paragraph. A powerful story should build a bridge of empathy between the reader and the people we write about. We want our audience to read until the very end. Only then will they have what they need to form their own opinion about something this complex.
Sadly, there are too many ways into the story of irregular migration, because we already know that reality always beats fiction. Once we know where to look from, though, the only thing left is to keep telling the story.
