Storytelling has never looked the way it does now. For most young people, the days of getting the news from a paper picked up at a local newsstand or sitting down to watch a few hours of nightly news on cable television. Today, short blurbs laid atop eye-catching Instagram graphics or easily digestible minute-long TikTok explainers have replaced long-form text and talking heads. Attention spans are shorter and so are the mediums through which younger generations consume the stories that shape their view of the world around them.
Jeremy Young (00C), senior producer at Al Jazeera’s “Fault Lines”—an investigative documentary series in which each episode tackles a different domestic or international issue—has witnessed firsthand the seismic shift in journalism away from traditional forms of media.
“It’s true that the media landscape, it’s not in a good place,” Young said.
Despite recent changes in media consumption, Young and his team have found success through the documentary-style approach “Fault Lines” employs. Their YouTube channel usually garners over 100,000 views per episode.
However, Young did not immediately hone in on his distinctive journalistic style in his career. Young’s journey — like many Emory University students exploring their studies through a liberal arts lens — was not linear.
“I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,” Young said. “I just knew that I liked to travel and I wanted to use my passport and here was this journalism program that had a trip to South Africa was a component that you would go be able to work in South Africa. So I just applied for the program and got in.”
As a student in Emory’s now-defunct journalism program, Young initially felt unsure of his future in the industry.
“I didn’t work at a school newspaper in high school or anything prior to college,” he said.
However, after an internship at CNN Atlanta, Young landed a role as a production assistant at MSNBC and relocated to New York City. Within a short time of working at MSNBC, Young came face-to-face with national tragedy and the uncertainty of living and working in New York following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“A few weeks later, our team wanted to send a group to Pakistan and Afghanistan to produce documentaries in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001,” Young said. “My recollection was nobody was willing to go. And at the time, I was 23 years old. I didn’t know any better. I certainly didn’t have the experience to take on this assignment. But I was willing to be a warm body and travel over there.”
In line with his longtime aspiration to cover international news, Young ultimately took on the role. During this period, Young saw the importance of covering news for an international audience.
This experience ultimately drew him to Al Jazeera; he began as a Pentagon producer before working on a 25-minute show covering Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008.
“That show ended up being the forerunner to what we launched in 2009, which was ‘Fault Lines,’” Young said.
Since its inception in 2009, “Fault Lines” has followed a similar blueprint to the Obama show. Each episode is around 25 minutes long and delves into the lives of a few people affected by larger issues, like a U.S. farm worker affected by grueling temperatures and a prisoner wrongly convicted of armed robbery.
As Young explains, its structure is not only innovative in the documentary world but also challenges the general public to see the merit of consuming more intensive journalism. Merging for multimedia reporting with in-depth storytelling, “Fault Lines” takes an approach that appeals to people’s new tastes in media.
“If you really want to understand the complexities in this world that are driving major issues, then it takes a little bit longer,” Young said. “There’s just so much value in people turning off a phone and sitting down and watching a 25-minute documentary film and really watching it and paying attention and getting a lot out of it.
With each installment, the “Fault Lines” team tackles an issue through the eyes of one or a few main “characters” — real people living through the crises each episode aims to cover. “Fault Lines,” created with global audiences in mind, spans the globe in its coverage, from episodes on current attacks on journalists in Mexico to the history of forced assimilation of Indigenous people in America.
In his nearly two decades of filmmaking, Young considers the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic some of the most impactful stories he has worked on.
“One of the stories that I worked on during the pandemic that was really important to me personally was about poultry plant workers who were exposed to COVID-19 during the early stages of the pandemic,” Young said.
As is the case in every “Fault Lines” episode, Young and his team viewed the issue of essential worker exploitation in the poultry industry through the personal lens of Reyna, a poultry plant worker whose husband – a worker in the same plant – passed away from complications with COVID-19.
As Young explains, “Fault Lines " is, at its core, about the modern-day challenges people face and how they overcome them.
“A lot of our work deals with trauma and people who are going through traumatic experiences, whether it’s their own health, whether it’s their security situation, whether it’s an addiction, whether it’s losing a loved one,” Young said. “Whatever it is, one of the things that we try and highlight is resiliency.”
Despite the episodes’ emphasis on hardships and injustices, Young wants his viewers to find hope.
“Anybody that we spend time with has the same concerns, struggles, challenges that anyone else has in this life and in this world,” Young said. “There’s a way we can connect viewers to our stories when we do it properly, that allows there to be an exchange of understanding and information that can be really valuable.”
Correction (3/19/25 at 12:00 p.m.): A previous version of the article stated that Jeremy Young (00C) is currently the senior investigative producer at Al Jazeera's "Fault Lines." This is incorrect, Young's title is currently that of senior producer. The article has been updated to reflect this.
Hunter is a freshman from Georgia. He loves writing about music, politics, and public education. In his free time, Hunter plays piano, runs, and spends far too long crafting Spotify playlists.
