Sandra Knispel: sympathizer, dare devil and multimedia extraordinaire

Kristen Stephens

Jour 271

October 15, 2012

Word count: 417 words

Knispel advice

UNIVERSITY, Miss. - She dug her way to success with a shovel of sympathy and a daredevil attitude. Working under a boss tied with many negative names, she, an illegal immigrant, wrote for a German-United States newspaper in New York and posed as a student in order to get her next internship. Years later, Sandra Knispel’s voice is heard on Mississippi Public Broadcasting (MPB) stations.

    A German native, Knispel learned to live a life open to new opportunities and hectic atmospheres. 

    “I had to adapt,” Knispel said.

    Scraping past boundaries such as not having a green card, Knispel gained United States citizenship when she married her husband in 2001. Afterwards, she became the essence of a multimedia journalist, writing for magazines and newspapers and creating radio clips.

    “She’s truly multimedia,” said Joe Atkins, Knispel’s former professor at the University of Mississippi. 

    Presently, Knispel freelances for MPB and National Public Radio. In a presentation for the University of Mississippi’s Meek Week, she shared with budding journalism students a few of her secrets to success: sympathy and the art of storytelling. As Knispel jumps from story to story, she finds sympathy, acknowledging that a story might not be worth making a source feel awkward during an interview, is one of the greatest tools a journalist can use. 

    “We all have human dignity,” Knispel said. “Always remember the ‘do no harm.’ What you gain is so much bigger.”

    When reporting on circumstances that have potential emotionally wrecked sources, Knispel believes it is more beneficial to a journalist’s story to have sources do the majority of the storytelling, while using the journalist more as the story’s guide.

    “I was always taught, ‘show, don’t tell,” Knispel said. “Let [the sources] do the emotional, the heavy lifting.”

    Knispel said journalists need to know how to approach their subjects, their sources and the tone of their stories. As a journalist, people tend to want to leave readers with a positive thought, throwing a positive light on a story otherwise highlighting a disaster she said.  

    On her story about an F5 tornado in Smithville, Knispel gathered the community’s stories and statistics and discovered that the town’s population fell dramatically because many businesses were destroyed by the tornado. Instead of giving false hope to the community, she aimed to approach the story from a realistic viewpoint, that the town would take years to rebuild and mend its wounds. 

    “I think it’s your job as a reporter to overcome that feeling of, ‘oh, it will be okay,’” Knispel said.