By Audrey Lopez-Stane
One of the first times journalist Joshua Irvine visited Dubuque, Iowa, he walked into a tiny fur shop downtown.
Striking up a conversation with the woman behind the register, he mentioned he would soon be starting at the Telegraph Herald as a poverty beat reporter. He was scoping out the area before his first day on the job, where much of his work would involve covering homelessness in the heart of the city.
With sheep-skin coats and thousand-dollar rugs on the walls behind her, the woman told him she had “some ideas about what you could do with ‘those people.’”
“That language, that delivery, struck me,” Irvine said.
When Irvine started at the Herald, he said his goal was to show that people experiencing homelessness are not fundamentally different from everyone else.
“There was obvious contempt there, like they had come from someplace else, like they weren’t Dubuquers,” Irvine said. “These homeless folks were not busing themselves in from someplace but had been their friends and neighbors.”
Homelessness in the United States increased 18 percent, to over 700,000 people, in 2024. Shelters and nonprofits report that they are struggling to find space, social workers and affordable housing for the people they serve.
With homelessness on the rise, more journalists will be tasked with finding ethical ways of covering this community and the host of issues they face. To accurately and sensitively do so, journalists must focus on unhoused voices and the political context for the homelessness crisis.
Talk to the experts, people who have lived through homelessness
While officials might be easier to reach than people experiencing homelessness, truthful reporting relies on talking to people with lived experience.
“Some journalists disproportionately quote officials or experts or authorities, people with fancy titles, and leave out people who don’t have that kind of status,” said Anita Varma, author of “Solidarity in Journalism: How Ethical Reporting Fights for Social Justice.” “But what do we gain in terms of truthful reporting when we hear from different types of people… not because they’ve studied it, but because they’ve lived it?”
In traditional, so-called “monitorial journalism,” reporters use officials, such as mayors or police, as sources rather than people experiencing homelessness. Varma said when journalists only quote officials, it reinforces existing power hierarchies and discounts perspectives that could be provided by people experiencing homelessness.
“What passes as objective journalism tends to be journalism that reinforces the status quo, that rejects calls for social change, and reinforces authorities in society as authoritative over society,” Varma said. “There is nothing objective about any of that.”
In the “solidarity journalism” that Varma advocates for, reporters not only talk to those with lived experiences, but also take a position against homelessness.
In Varma’s research on The San Francisco Homeless Project, she studied more than 70 news outlets and 325 articles in San Francisco covering local homelessness, finding that there were more than twice as many articles using a monitorial method than a solidarity journalism method.
Amelia Geis reports on homelessness with the same solidarity lens. As host of Madison Commons’ “Housing Last” podcast, she writes each episode to center voices of people who are homeless in Dane County, Wisconsin, typically honing in on one or two people’s specific experiences.
“The experts are the people who are having these lived experiences, not the people who are supposedly helping them,” Geis said.
And while mainstream journalism prioritizes objectivity by quoting officials, Geis argues that uplifting the story of a person experiencing homelessness is more objective.
“This is a truth for this person,” Geis said. “That’s where journalistic professionalism comes in. You’re facilitating the dialogue about this reality.”
How to find sources
Irvine said the best way to find sources was to “make your face known” at different homeless shelters in the area. Advocates, such as volunteers and staff, can help a reporter navigate this. He also hung out at the homeless shelters during his free time to get to know people, build connections and get more information for his stories.
Geis said she volunteered at The Beacon, a shelter in Madison, for a short period of time to “get immersed in the community.”
“It didn’t last very long, it’s heavy work. But it was super insightful for me to just be alone in this population,” Geis said. After building connections there, she found people who wanted to be featured on the podcast. And the volunteer work at The Beacon also showed her how to conduct interviews while maintaining relationships with her sources.
“It taught me to approach the unhoused population with understanding, care and compassion,” Geis said. “People need you to meet them where they’re at, and come in with openness, just listening and learning.”
Lead with listening
Geis finds the most useful way to conduct interviews is by hosting roundtable discussions with two or more sources.
“These roundtable discussions create a space where the unhoused folks feel comfortable expressing themselves, and they’re in conversation with each other,” Geis said. “I’m just sort of listening in and learning from them.”
She said she “leads with listening first” and then, if she needs clarification, asks questions.
Her first question is always asking her sources what is important to them. While she keeps research and background information in mind, she said she doesn’t prepare specific questions because she builds from what they say instead.
“I don’t know their lived experiences, so I don’t really come in with specific questions,” Geis said.
Making assumptions about what causes homelessness contributes to harmful rhetoric. But when people, including policymakers and journalists, “lead with listening,” they can avoid that harm.
Jack Mason, a person experiencing homelessness in Madison, Wisconsin, said city officials often fail to hear the voices of people who are homeless.
A shelter in Madison, Porchlight, will close one of its overnight locations on Zeier Road and move to Bartillon Drive. But the new location will have 100 fewer beds than the current shelter, a move Mason said isn’t practical.
“Policymakers don’t talk to actual homeless people enough,” Mason said. “There’s gonna be a lot more homeless people out on the street when they do that.”
Do no harm
Journalists must also take multiple steps to avoid extractive reporting when covering the homeless population. They must be careful not to mine the lives of vulnerable people for stories in careless and unaccountable ways.
Irvine said there is a “moral calculus” to reporting on homelessness. While journalists should quote people experiencing homelessness, they shouldn’t include information that could cause harm.
“Journalists, we have an idea of ourselves that our profession is inherently righteous,” Irvine said. “You are not righteous if the story you write is going to f*** up someone’s life.”
People experiencing homelessness already worry about their living situations and surviving, Irvine said. Journalists shouldn’t add further harm, even if the source said everything on the record.
“You don’t want to be the guy who got somebody kicked out of the homeless shelter because you wrote about their drug problem,” Irvine said. “That person could lose a leg or freeze to death.”
On the “Housing Last” podcast, Geis used a pseudonym for her source “Ed.” He wanted to remain anonymous because he didn’t want to be kicked out of the shelters he spoke about in his episodes. Geis also allowed sources to listen to their episode before it aired to avoid any miscommunication that could cause harm.
Geis also avoids pushing sources to talk about difficult topics.
“I don’t need to hear all the details,” Geis said. “Whatever they want to share, I appreciate.”
Avoid sob stories
According to Varma, journalists covering homelessness should focus on political implications, such as the lack of affordable housing, rather than on empathy-driven stories that are not likely to stoke action.
She said coverage focused on creating empathy for an individual person risks disregarding the structural causes of homelessness in the United States. It tends to define homelessness as a personal failure or shortcoming, when the problem lies in factors outside of the individual.
“This is much more than an emotional, empathic journey. This is a matter of collective politics,” Varma said. “Stop treating emotional sadness at being homeless and affordable housing as separate matters. These are intricately related.”
Irvine said journalists can avoid the “sob story” of homelessness by aiming to explain why the problem exists, what can be done and the economic decisions involved. Contextualizing the crisis should be a main priority.
“You can’t just be writing about how tough it is to sleep in your car day in and day out,” Irvine said. “Though it really does suck, you need to be writing about why it is that so many people are sleeping in their car.”
Ultimate goal: Uplift voices
Solidarity journalism relies on journalists uplifting marginalized voices. With homelessness coverage, that means listening to stories of people experiencing homelessness and opposing the factors that cause it.
Geis said she went into journalism with the intent to uplift marginalized communities and to help people who are homeless in Dane County have their voices heard. She actively strays from what she says journalism school taught her: complete objectivity. For Geis, reporting on homelessness without solidarity disregards the injustices of homelessness.
“Why are we controlling the narrative like that?” Geis said. “It felt really wrong to me in the way that I learned journalism, and I feel like I’m doing something completely different now.”
For Geis and Varma, using a solidarity justice method is the ethical choice.
“That’s the very best of what journalism can do,” Varma said. “Ethical journalism will stand up, and we’ll start by standing up for the most vulnerable people.”
Audrey Lopez-Stane is a 2026 fellow at the Center for Journalism Ethics and a sophomore in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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