Sophia Alexandra Hall is deputy digital editor at the Big Issue and the author of the Media Toolkit for Journalists and Care Experienced People, which shares advice with journalists on how they can positively empower and engage care experienced interviewees in the UK. It also includes advice for care experienced people, on how to protect themselves and their life stories when working with the media. In this blog post during Care Experienced Week, Sophia shares the story of how this toolkit came to be, and why she feels she was the right person to write it.

There’s a lot of pride in my voice when I tell people I’m a journalist. I love my industry, particularly its ability to positively influence mainstream opinions on often underrepresented communities. But I wasn’t always the biggest fan of mainstream news outlets, particularly due to its portrayal of children in care.

Shifting perspectives of care experience

I got into journalism because I didn’t see my community fairly represented in the media. I’m a care experienced person – someone who spent part of their childhood in foster care. Growing up, whenever I typed ‘foster care’ into Google, more often or not there’d be an article from a prominent publication leaning into negative stereotypes about children in care. Negative stereotypes about my community were rife growing up. For many of my friends their only experience of care – aside from knowing me – was watching Tracy Beaker, the fictional book and television character who lives in residential care, in the early 2000s. Despite being a fictional character, she didn’t exactly give our community the best representation.

Like many care experienced people, I realised early on that if I wanted change in my own life, I had to be my own advocate. Similarly, I concluded, that if I wanted change in the media, I should try and make that change myself.

Early on in my career, my breakthrough articles were about care - my first major one being exposing discrimination against care experienced mothers. This piece led to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in England investigating the topic, and it won ‘Exclusive of the Year’ at the Excellence in Journalism awards. Journalists asked how I was finding these ‘scoops’, but most of my topics came conversations I’d had with my friends in care, who’d been living with discrimination for years. These topics had just never been reported on before because our community wasn’t often spotlighted away from policy updates and new charity statistics.

Prior to becoming a journalist, I had built up a small but dedicated social media following of other care experienced people. So, when I began working in newsrooms, many of these followers came to me for advice when telling their stories in the media.

As a trusted care experienced person, friends and acquaintances came to me with stories of interviews with journalists gone wrong. Of ‘poverty porn’ headlines, and misquoting of traumatic details. Subsequently, many of the care experienced people I met had negative associations with the media, and didn’t trust journalists who came to them for quotes around awareness days and human-interest stories.

As both a journalist and a care experienced person who has been interviewed by the media, I understood both sides. Before I became a journalist, I was an interviewee, and still appear in the media from time to time telling my personal story. I have my own horror stories of working with the press. But as a journalist, I know what it’s like to be on a deadline and interviewing someone with little prior knowledge of their background or experiences.

Bringing the idea of a toolkit to life

I wanted to create something that could help care experienced people protect themselves and their stories when working with journalists. I first shared this idea with a trusted friend, Jude Habib, in December 2021. Jude is the founder of Sounddelivery Media, an organisation which strives to address representation and diversity of voice in the media, so she felt like the right person to speak to. She suggested I consider making a ‘toolkit’; a guidebook on how to help care experienced people tell their story safely in the media, AND help journalists tell these stories in a trauma-informed way.

Also, I wanted to dedicate time to this project, but time was something I didn’t have in early 2022. I was working full-time in the radio industry, writing multiple articles – mostly about Arts news – during the day. In the evenings, I would pitch social affairs stories to national newspapers, writing across a range of topics, from the care system to asylum seekers, the environment, and mental health.

If I wanted to commit as much time as I believed this project deserved, I was going to have to find a way to pause work for a short while. It was during this time I learned about the Churchill Fellowship. Every year the Churchill Fellowship funds over 100 UK citizens to travel anywhere in the world for 4-8 weeks to research a topic of their choosing, which has the potential to make a real difference to their community. In late 2022 I applied for the fellowship to travel to America to research my toolkit.

The rest, as they say, is history. My application was successful, and I received funding to travel to Boston, New York and Los Angeles to connect with experts relating to the topic of my toolkit. I connected with organisations that helped young people in foster care write their first opinion articles, universities that taught trauma-informed journalism modules, and hospitals with dedicated units for children growing up in care.

Telling the story – led by the voices involved

Nearly three years on from that first conversation with Jude, my Media Toolkit for Journalists and Care Experienced People was published in August 2024. Its contents have been informed by over 50 interviews I conducted in America with journalists, care experienced people, social workers, therapists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, activists, and trauma specialists.

Notably, it’s only 36 pages long. With many of my interviews lasting over an hour, it could’ve been a much longer document, but I wanted to create something accessible. Something that could be read on the bus to an interview. Something a journalist could read in the 30 minutes of prep before their interviewee arrives. Something that could give a care experienced person comfort when they’re up at 2am the night before a TV appearance worried about what they might say.

The first half of the toolkit is dedicated to journalists, and the second is dedicated to care experienced people. For journalists, the toolkit contains advice on how to conduct trauma-informed interviews, links to opinion pieces and books written by care experienced people, and tips for bringing interviewees - who may be experiencing dissociation - back into the room. For care experienced people there is advice on how to pitch your own story, questions to ask journalists before, during and after interviews with the media, and a personal checklist to help you decide if it's the right time for you to tell your story.

The toolkit is free to access and will always be free to access. Since publishing the guidebook, I’m delighted to say it has found its way into some of the major newsrooms in the UK and beyond. I’ve had wonderful feedback from other care experienced people so far and hope its contents can genuinely help make this industry a safer place for disempowered interviewees.

Download the toolkit

*Some names have been shortened or changed to protect the anonymity of the authors

Sophia will be speaking about the toolkit at a free, online webinar held by the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Social Work and Social Policy on 5 December from 5:00pm-7:00pm. The webinar, ‘Children and Young People in the Media: Positive Representation of Care Experience and Youth Justice’, will also hear from Joe Gibb, Lecturer in Health and Social Care, Glasgow Clyde College, Dr Michael Higgins, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, University of Strathclyde, and Dr Julie Garlen, Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies, Carleton University.

Register to attend the webinar

More information about the webinar

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