In my first year as a journalist in my hometown of Sacramento, the deadly 2018 Camp Fire broke out and razed the town of Paradise, California, a town where I had also lived as a child. I received a call in the newsroom from a nurse named Tamara, who was one of the last individuals evacuated from the hospital in town. While racing down the only two-lane highway out of town in an ambulance through a gauntlet of flames were able to find shelter in a house that had been protected by a circle of sprinklers.

Toward the end of her story, Tamara said, “I don’t know why I called, but I just needed someone to tell someone my story.” A day later, I was able to track down the homeowner and reunite Tamara, the patient, and the homeowner in front of the house that saved them.

Tamara’s words became a guiding memory for me through my career as a journalist and digital media strategist and now serve as part of the inspiration for how and why I do academic research. Thinking of the power storytelling, I asked myself a question that has become the central thread in my research: What is the purpose of stories in a society constantly in crisis and how do we bring humanity back into the storytelling process?

Media in our modern society acts, in sociologist James Carey’s words, “as the maintenance of society in time.” The narratives we tell within media are the ways a society dialogically passes down histories, builds metaphors to convey values and morals, and creates meaning around the chaos of life. My aim in journalism and media research is to understand the meaning-making utility of narratives and the role that journalism plays as the self-appointed arbiters of society’s collective memory.