Fenix Presents: The Online World of #Herping
It's got nothing to do with whatever you're thinking about
Hi friends!
Have y’all ever watched this video about how to start a movement?
The key is the first follower — the first person willing to look beyond the craziness of your idea and see its potential. A movement is not about the leader. It’s about the first follower because it takes guts to stand out like that. To say, “Yes, this person’s idea is a good one.”
It’s an underestimated form of leadership.
In a lot of ways, Michelle Delgado was my first follower. When I was rethinking Fenix, Michelle was the first person to take a shot with us. Plenty of people said no, but Michelle saw the potential in our vision and said yes.
Today, I’m so proud to be publishing Michelle’s story:
The Online World of #Herping
In it, Michelle takes you inside the online community that gathers around reptiles and amphibians. They trade tips and tried-and-true advice on social media. But like so many online communities, it’s also susceptible to misinformation. At their worst, social platforms catapult ordinary people into the role of ad hoc experts left to face anxious pet owners and trolls at their own risk.
Below you’ll find an exclusive Q+A with Michelle about her reporting process and what it’s like to get to know sources during a pandemic.
1. You've been thinking about this story for a long time — around two years. What about this topic kept your interest for so long?
I think many writers have their own white whale stories — observations or interests that are always fun to talk about at parties, but that editors don't seem to like much, for whatever reason. When I was originally trying to drum up interest in this piece, a friend asked me, "Do enough people actually care about reptiles?" The question was offered with total kindness and support, and I dwelled on it. It sums up the calculus editors have to do before assigning any subculture story. I wasn't sure I had a definitive answer or a metric that I could offer to say, "See? I'll bring you X number of readers."
But I cared, and I kept following herpers on Instagram. In the piece, I wrote about experiencing a bizarre kind of whiplash. The accounts I followed were a mix of aspirational pet ownership stories and dire dispatches from the front lines of rescues. There was an obvious relationship between the two, and I wanted to tease out how something as pure as a love of animals could quickly become a neglectful or abusive situation. As I learned from the rescues, that line is extra fine when you're dealing with herps. They're fragile in a way that dogs and cats just aren't, and people aren't as attuned to signs that their pets are faring poorly, until it's far too late.
I was so thrilled when you jumped at the chance to work on this with me. You instantly saw the same life-or-death tension that I saw, and the innate appeal of these exotic, colorful creatures. Of course, when I started actually talking to people within the community, my perspective totally changed again and challenged all of my assumptions, which is the absolute best part of reporting.
2. Was there anything about this story that really surprised you once the reporting process wrapped up?
Absolutely. My husband is a kind-hearted animal lover who easily gets sucked into watching viral animal videos and reporting this story ruined most of them for me. I watch "cute" interactions between "unlikely best friends," and I want to scream at the pet owners for being so irresponsible! It's never okay to put predators and prey together for photo ops, unless you're fully prepared for one of them to become lunch.
Just today, we were watching a video of a little girl and her family's ball python. The parents looped the snake around the girl's torso as if it was hugging her while she read a picture book. Pythons are incredibly muscular constrictors — within seconds, that snake could have easily crushed their daughter to death. Animals act on instinct, not reason. It's up to us humans to understand how they operate and keep ourselves out of harm's way.
So yeah, I'm a lot of fun these days!
3. One of the hardest tasks within journalism, in my opinion, is being able to cover a community accurately. This became even harder once the pandemic set in and limited our face-to-face interactions. How did you approach that obstacle?
My sources were so geographically distant from me that I'm not sure I would have approached this story differently, even if I could have done some in-person reporting. I'm actually a big fan of phone interviews. There's something very intimate about reaching someone without being able to see them, just being a voice in each other's ears. I'm pretty introverted, and many of my sources are, too, so it's nice to not worry about how I look or what to wear.
As a reporter, I'm always thinking about what might make a good scene, so as soon as a detail catches my attention I ask lots of follow ups to make sure I can picture everything. I ask about the weather, how specific things felt, if people can remember any sensory details. And then I follow up by doing my own research. Resources like Weather Underground can help you dig up historic weather conditions, and local news outlets sometimes have photos or videos you can use to fully recreate a scene. If there's anything I've learned from doing this story, it's that YouTube is a treasure trove of details. At one point I needed to figure out how to describe an alligator's bellowing, so I went and listened to a bunch of videos until I really had it in my head.
4. Switching gears into journalism more broadly. Our industry is going through a difficult moment, but one of the things that gives me lots of hope is seeing new ways to fund journalism. You recently crowdfunded Summerhouse, a very cool zine for DC's creative underground. What pulled you to crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is such a nerve-wracking, humbling experience. It's a total leap of faith to feel like you've created something worth people's hard-earned money, and then put that hunch to the test in public. But it's also very fast and very direct and very collaborative. If people dig your project, you can pull together the necessary funds within weeks. The time limit on Kickstarter is terrifying, but it also creates an event that gets the word out in a really powerful way.
If you have a vision for a publication you'd like to see in the world, I say go for it! But have a plan, and lean on your community. The "crowd" isn't actually anonymous. It's colleagues, old classmates, friends-of-friends-of-friends. You'll probably be surprised — blown away, even! — by how many people would love to support you. But you definitely have to be intentional about letting them know what you need and why. Isn't that true of life in general, anyway?
When your publication launches, it's even more special, because it's something that you've made with your readers. They have a stake in its creation. No shade to legacy media, but that's such a different experience than reading a magazine that's half paid for by Airbnb or Google ads.
5. What are you reading right now?
I was in a restless mood as we waited for the election results, so I picked up and started a few different books depending on my mood. I'm currently reading Meg Wolitzer's The Wife, which is devilishly funny, and also N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, which I've been saving because I'm so sad to finish the Broken Earth trilogy.
When I'm craving something different, I've been chipping away at a super long manga called 20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa. It's an epic story about a group of childhood friends who have to save the world from an authoritarian ruler and an out-of-control virus. (Sounds familiar, right?) I think a lot of US readers would actually love manga if they realized how much great stuff is out there. In the US, graphic novels tend to be quite short and episodic; even the ones that have a complete story can usually be read in one sitting. (This is not a knock! I love graphic novels and write about them semi-regularly.) By contrast, manga is published serially, often over the course of decades, so authors have time to develop very rich stories (similar to a long-running television series). There's also a wonderful tension between that longevity and the constraints of the form. The storytelling has to leverage art and dialogue equally to create rich characters and worldbuilding in a very efficient way. There are so many layers to appreciate, and when they all come together, it's my favorite way to escape reality — for a few hours, anyway.
That’s it for now! We’re taking a couple of weeks off to get ready for the new year. We’ll be back in 2021 with a story about: a town that’s been fighting fossil fuels for 15 YEARS 👀 👀 👀