I'm sitting at the back of the auditorium at Resonate Festival in Richmond, Virginia. Anna Sale, known for her intimate, raw interviews on taboo topics, has just given the festival’s closing keynote, a talk about "ethical interview practices to move us forward."(1) She’s structured her presentation through a few moments from her career where she let her interviewees down—asked a triggering question, or used a click-baity headline that would haunt the interviewee for years to come—and strategies she's adapted to avoid similar situations in future. When her talk comes to a close, Sale opens the floor to questions. Someone raises their hand and asks, "What do you think about paying documentary subjects?" There's a murmur in the crowd. Clearly the question has struck a chord. Sale recommends we all check out a buzzy 2023 article published in Vulture, in which several filmmakers posit that a profit-sharing model with documentary subjects is a viable way of offsetting some of the craft's long-standing ethics concerns.

I hear this argument a lot. Whenever the question of ethics in documentary comes up, someone invariably says: pay the subject. I’m here to tell you that paying subjects doesn’t solve the ethical problems in the subject-journalist-product ménage-à-trois. Not because paying subjects leads to its own ethical gray area—and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it—but it’s no panacea. Affixing a price tag to a story will never solve the problem of the commodification of personal narrative. It doesn’t address the transactional quandary and unequal power dynamics of telling (or taking) other people’s stories. How do I know? I paid my documentary subjects.

I recently created a five-episode podcast series, Shocking Heartbreaking Transformative, with Radiotopia Presents, which explores whether it’s possible to make the documentary exchange between subject and maker a fair one. On the surface, the show uses the quest format (how else was I going to sell the series?): documentary-maker concerned about the ethics of documentary tries to find a better way of doing things. Production began when I posted an ad on Craigslist, reading: “Does your story need to be told? Tell it in a documentary! Seeking subjects for participation in a documentary series about storytelling, the documentary industry, and media ethics. Audition with a personal experience that has changed your life. Compensation provided.” 

Over two hundred people responded. I auditioned 30 of them, then followed three over the course of a year in an attempt to make documentaries about the personal stories they each shared with me. At the same time, I documented the process, the behind-the-scenes work required to mold their lives into a media product. I paid my subjects $20 per hour for their time, and set about working somewhat collaboratively, intentionally seeking editorial input and guidance throughout.

My first subject, Ernesto, is a 20-year-old Latinx model. At his audition, he told me he wanted to be in a documentary because he believed it would help him land "speaking roles." When I asked him what story he wanted to tell, he suggested two options: one about the poor working conditions for emerging POC models in the cutthroat fashion industry, and another about his long struggle with drug addiction and journey toward sobriety. These choices were calculated, accompanied by comments like "embellishing is important in entertainment" and "I know you want the grimy stuff." During our interviews he often broke from his narrative to ask questions about how to best position himself as a character. Should he talk deeper, slower, faster, "put on a little accent?"; should he “talk about police brutality or how the industry tried to rape [him]?"
 

When I visited his apartment in the Bronx, he made a point of ensuring I captured evidence of the poverty he could see around him, from pointing out sites of gang activity to sounds of domestic turbulence. Although it was clear he was relaying realities of his life, he was also performing for me—a white documentarian—keenly aware of how documentary media thrives on stories of trauma and suffering, especially from racialized subjects. At the same time, Ernesto remained convinced that such a performance was worthwhile as it could enable him to access the visibility, resources, and connections he’d need to escape his cycle of poverty and achieve his dream of becoming a successful artist in his own right. When I paid him for our time together, he accepted the cash gratefully while also noting that, despite working multiple gigs (including being in my series), he was still $500 short for that month's rent. 

Judy, my second subject, is a white woman in her 70s who is unhoused. At her audition, she told me she wanted to be in a documentary to demonstrate that "anyone can become homeless," even people like her who grew up middle class. But when she became embroiled in a legal battle with her former landlord, Judy decided she’d only continue participating in my project if I took an active role in helping her. For the next eight months, I spent countless hours attempting to navigate the Kafkaesque beast of New York's housing authority and social service organizations on Judy’s behalf. But when I eventually played Judy what I had produced with the tape recorded together over those months, she was vehemently opposed. Although, as she noted, she "has had to get used to living life in public," she believed my version of her life story—fact-checked and expanded from the over-simplified one she offered at her audition—would put her at risk. 

She spent years repeating her narrative over and over: “I never would've become homeless if [my husband] didn't die… I'm a grieving widow… I'm a senior person… I feel that I'm deserving of help.” Her attachment to this story offered more than psychological comfort; access to social services demands simplified, repeatable, sympathetic stories exhibiting the ‘right’ elements of suffering, in order to determine one's worthiness of material assistance. By expanding and complicating Judy’s curated version of her life, she felt that my documentary could threaten her access to these precarious resources. Still, she insisted on remaining in my series, which in turn, exposed a deeper motivation for being involved: she desperately needs more support than the welfare state provides, both materially and emotionally. Even as a hail mary, she believed the right kind of representation could prompt audiences to “contribute something” to her.(2)

My last subject, Michael, is a 50-year-old African-American writer and rapper who has been in and out of prison throughout his adult life. At his audition, he told me he wanted to be a professional public speaker, and thought sharing his story with others would "make a difference" in both their lives and his. This idea was cemented for Michael in a months-long workshop he’d recently completed, dedicated to giving formerly-incarcerated individuals public speaking skills. He described the guidance he’d received this way: "They wanted us to keep it short and they wanted to tell us how to start it in the beginning, how to do the middle part, keep the people in suspense, so that way people would be interested." The version of the story Michael was coached to tell pared his life down into the bite-sized format of a redemption-arc-as-motivation speech, with three quick beats and a clean resolution. He tracks how he was “destined to become a criminal," how he reformed himself, and finally got his life back on track (another marketable quest narrative). 

Yet as Michael and I worked together, a deeper motivation for his wanting to be in the documentary began to emerge. For most of the year we spent recording together, Michael was on parole, living in a transitional men's shelter, working shifts at various underpaid and socially isolating jobs, and generally putting his head down to save up enough money to move into his own apartment with his fiancée. At all of our interviews, which tended to take place between his work shifts, he expressed the pleasure of being listened to and asked personal questions, and a growing desire to spend more time with me, "personally, not just business" because he “doesn’t have too many friends… [who] don't want nothing” from him. I came to understand that Michael’s investment in telling his story may have had less to do with changing lives and more with the social isolation produced by his circumstances. 

Ernesto, Judy, and Michael all came to my project expressing unique reasons for wanting to tell their stories in a documentary: to secure future employment, to build a more empathetic world, to build a storytelling brand. Their reasons all stemmed from a belief that personal storytelling is valuable. This is not a coincidence. The notion that storytelling is a means of upward mobility and entrepreneurship, that it can somehow heal its tellers and its listeners, that it can “change the world,” is a lie. It’s a lie that we documentarians often repeat to our subjects as we ask them to spill their guts to us. It’s also a lie with a history. 

In her 2017 book Curated Stories, anthropologist Sujatha Fernandes describes a surge in personal storytelling across media, beginning in the late 90s and reaching a fever pitch around 2008, when Facebook took off and Barack Obama was elected president. (3) Leading up to and during this period, the 70s feminist slogan “the personal is political” was replaced with a new one: “tell your story”— positioning narrative-crafting as a political end in itself. It’s important to contextualize this shift within mounting neoliberalism and an increasingly deregulated market society. Instead of movement-building and political organizing, the goal became individual catharsis and reconciliation. Fernandes goes on to present a series of case studies that demonstrate the manifold ways in which states, non-profits, and culture industries took up the mantle of storytelling as a means of achieving soft power, corporate growth, and marketing success. (4)

The next decade saw the so-called “golden age” of podcasting, creating an unending thirst for personal stories. Inevitably came the sharks— venture capitalists, advertisers, and Hollywood executives—compelled by wide profit margins and cheap intellectual property. All this at the same time as an ongoing recession, the rise of austerity, increasing scarcity, and the emergence of the gig economy. As labor became worth less, stories became worth more.

Writing about the classic “voice to the voiceless” claim of documentary, film and media scholar Pooja Rangan ​​argues that “endangered, dehumanized life not only sustains documentary, but supplies its raison d’être.” With this understanding, it is no coincidence that documentary storytelling is booming while inequality rises and social security nets continue to erode. Indeed, it is the market—not public interest—that determines the kinds of stories that get air time and how they are told. Were you the victim of a crime? Was someone you loved hurt or killed? Have you been in a cult, suffered a disease, been swindled? Have you experienced racialized or systemic violence? Do you want to tell your story? 

We have now mastered mass-production for cookie-cutter stories in which individuals face obstacles and attempt to overcome them. But the product we’re selling is “empathy,” branded as a cure to our disconnected and disenfranchised society. As podcasting’s patron saint Ira Glass once put it, “the most basic thing that a story can do [..] is make it possible to imagine what it would be like to be you.” In turn, audience demand has sky-rocketed, and disenfranchised people are lining up to lend their voices. The insidiousness of commodified empathy is that it lets us off the hook by convincing us that feeling something is the same as doing something. It becomes a means of opting out of holding systems accountable, and one of few viable options for people who lack meaningful material support. When we audio documentarians fail to acknowledge this, we become complicit. 

The subjects of Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative all believed their stories had value. Yet my work with each of them revealed their true motivations for seeking documentary participation were far more complex and desperate than the goals they identified at the onset of the process. While I paid everyone for their time, it was never payment that was the coercive factor here. I could never give any of them enough money to change the material reality of their lives, and how they have been shaped by oppressive structural forces. In pursuit of the oasis of empathy, they (and I) made choices to contort their experiences into product-shaped boxes, palatable to imagined future audiences. What my subjects failed to understand was that the value in question was actually profit. Profit for me, my network, the distributor, the audience—in fact, for everyone but them. 

The title of my series comes from an email that was sent to me by a successful TV producer interested in casting me in her own documentary series. She explained she was looking for people telling their “most shocking, heartbreaking, and transformative” stories. But what does it mean for a story to be transformative? Transforming who? How? To what end? 

Without asking these questions, the market is leaving its mark on us all; documentarians, audiences, and subjects alike. It’s not that we shouldn't pay documentary subjects, but we must understand that paying documentary subjects will never address the larger issues and power dynamics laced through every moment of making audio documentaries. Documentary has always been, and will always be, extractive and capitalist on some level, but paying your subjects merely reifies this idea, rather than attempting to uproot it. 

The other day, I caught up with Michael. He told me that he just got laid off, and that the stress has put a strain on his romantic relationship. On the plus side, he landed a book deal. The publishing company told him he’d written a bestseller, then charged him $7,000. He’s hoping unemployment and disability will cover his costs for a while. This is the grift of storytelling. We are all walking the edge of becoming the grifters.