University of Montana journalism student Ken Rand first met Chris Joyce at the Crown Reporting Fund’s 2014 storytelling dinner. “I knew his voice, I hear him on the radio every week,” Rand recalls thinking when he listened to the NPR science correspondent’s keynote remarks. “It was kind of fun.”
Unbeknownst to Rand at the time, he would get to know Joyce much better in the following months. The veteran reporter became his mentor for the Crown Reporting Fellowship, a program that pairs emerging storytellers with seasoned journalists. The resulting story, a two-part series on the use of eDNA in detecting aquatic invasive species, was published in the Daily Inter Lake in January of 2016.
“The editor was like, man, we’ve never written about invasive species, including environmental data using genetics,” Rand, a student in UM’s graduate program in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism, said. “And they have a really good environmental reporter. So I think it was good to put it there.”
Work on the story began in the spring of 2015, when Joyce visited Missoula as part of the mentorship. He and Rand met for breakfast, and then traveled to Flathead Lake together. That’s when Rand really began to appreciate what the fellowship offered: a window into the work of a nationally known professional journalist. “It was really fun to see him do what he does. He was way deep into my story before I started it. And then he was way deep into like 20 other stories that he just walked by. His eyes and ears are always open.”
Rand remembers being on the lakeside and watching Joyce interact with a researcher. “He’s like, ‘you do underwater sound with sonar and figure out how the waves are moving? I want to talk to you.’ Then he asks, ‘Ken, do you mind if I just do this quick interview over here?’ And he whips out his recorder from his waist belt and says to the researcher, ‘Tell me everything know about sound.’”
“It was kind of neat to see how he works. I mean, I’ve gotten better at asking questions. I mean, how else will you get to see that in action? You don’t get to shadow someone that good very often.”
Rand, whose primary medium is photography, also appreciated the opportunity to sharpen his writing skills as Joyce patiently helped edit his work. “I learned a lot from it,” he said. “There were a lot of drafts. It made me a better writer for sure.”
Over the course of six months, the intimidation factor wore off, at least for Rand. “He’s really fun to hang out with,” he said, teasingly, about his mentor, “because you can see how he’s going to steal all your stories, because he asks so many questions.”
While Joyce didn’t steal any stories, he used the mentor opportunity to find his own: a radio piece on the rescue of Montana’s native cutthroats, which ran on NPR in the summer of 2014.
Links to a version of Rand’s story and photos are below.