“For me, it’s not inspiration. It’s just rage.”

This is Lauren Sandler, this year’s James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism’s answer to what inspires her writing. It is the first of many ethical questions she grapples with across her practices and projects. On Sep. 30, 2025, Sandler answered these questions at a Q/A event hosted by President Darrel P. Wheeler.

A veteran journalist, Sandler has used the practice of immersive journalism throughout her career. When she researches a subject, she doesn’t just go through internet archives, schedule an interview, and write from there. Instead, she lives side by side with her subject, fully immersed in their lives and how different circumstances affect it. 

Through such immersion, Sandler has written books “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement,” a look into how the young Christian Right movement began during the Bush Administration, and “One and Only,” a reflection on being and having an only child. Most recently she published “This Is All I Got,” a year in the life of a young homeless mother in New York City amidst an ongoing poverty crisis. 

Sandler’s work is introspective, intimate, and deeply personal. But does getting so close to her subjects betray the journalist ideal of neutrality?

When asked about it by Wheeler, Sandler answered, “I consider it to be neutrality, because I am not steering the ship. That said, I arrive on the ship because I have some pretty strong feelings, right?” For Sandler, neutrality comes not from the point at which she writes about her subjects, but in not being the expert on their experiences, and learning what comes from them. 

Sandler’s current project is another book to be published by Penguin Random House titled “American Prophecy: One Family, Two Nations, And A World On Fire.” Using her immersive practice, Sandler is researching the ideologically divided Joyner family. 

“He’s a major MAGA player. He is someone who was on Trump’s advisory team, specifically for his immigration advisory team, back in 2015 when people thought that Trump was a joke. This guy, Rick Joyner, knew he was the future,” said Sandler on the father and head of the family. “He has five kids who all were raised in his church. They are all leftists. They’re on the other side of the war.”

While Sandler is a third-party observer of the family, she still has her own beliefs, those about which she has been transparent. “Rick Joyner knows how I feel about everything, and honestly, he kind of loves me for it at this point,” she said. “The way that I approach this type of journalism is I feel like if anyone is wanting to give me the privilege of their own stories, their own vulnerability, I’m going to give them my own as well.”

Reporting on subjects in vulnerable situations can make it hard to walk a fine line of neutrality and one’s own human nature. This can be trickier when grappling with financial earnings from this reporting, resulting in questions of exploitation, which Sandler also touched on. 

“Joan Didion said writers are always selling someone out. She’s absolutely right. It’s just inherent in what we do,” Sandler said. 

This dilemma was especially glaring for “This Is All I Got,” about the homeless mother. When asked if she allocated any earnings for her young subject, Sandler answered, “Because I was reporting on her poverty, I couldn’t give her money, because that would change the story I was telling in that moment.” She then expanded on what was done in order to help the woman without changing the story or jeopardizing its integrity. “What we agreed was that she would financially benefit when development into film, TV, that sort of thing would come. And I also said that once I was done reporting, I was going to set up a fund for her, that I would have no access to.” 

There are many questions and dilemmas that one encounters in a career of journalism. What students can take away from Sandler’s approach to questions of neutrality, immersive journalism, and exploitation is that there is no defined “right way” to approach them. The best one can do is follow their ethical code, and write from there. 

In February, Sandler will expand on her ethical dilemmas in journalism with a public talk.