Transition from Debate Champion to Journalist

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The chapter follows the speaker's journey from winning a national debate competition and representing the Philippines in England to their unexpected pivot into journalism. It highlights their experiences of starting off in the public eye, grappling with societal expectations, and eventually finding their passion for reporting on hard news issues.

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler, Esquire, and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.

“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”

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