## The Book and the Distance Between Experience and Account
Jonathan Franklin waited six months before approaching Alvarenga, and the delay was deliberate. The journalists who had descended on the story immediately after the rescue in February 2014 had, in Franklin’s assessment, not served either the story or the man particularly well. The combination of speed, the language barrier, the multiple layers of translation, the physical and psychological state of the subject, and the competitive pressure to get something publishable before competitors did had produced a body of reporting that was broad but shallow.
Franklin came to the story with a different set of tools. He spoke fluent Spanish. He had worked on the 2010 Chilean mining rescue story, which meant he had direct experience with both the journalism of extreme survival and the specific cultural and social context of working men in Latin America who find themselves at the center of extraordinary events. He understood, from that experience, that the story that emerges immediately from an event is not the same as the story that emerges after extended, trusted engagement with the people who lived it.
Alvarenga was not immediately cooperative. He had described the press as cockroaches — a metaphor that captured his experience of being descended on by people who wanted something from him before he was ready to give anything. The process of Franklin gaining his trust involved time and repeated contact and the demonstration, through the quality of the engagement, that the journalism Franklin was interested in was not the headline-level sensationalism that had characterized most of the initial coverage.