Last September, I had a cool opportunity that also delivered a sharp, difficult and important journalism lesson, so I’d like to tell you about both.

Misinformation has become an existential threat to human health and societies; I doubt I need to go into detail to persuade any of our alumni on that point. Climate misinformation is particularly entrenched, and the communities that are most affected by climate change tend to be the same communities that have a hard time getting a hearing from American news audiences.

So, I was excited to go to Tonga — a multi-island monarchy in the South Pacific with a population roughly the size of Bellingham — to run a workshop about how to tell climate stories and address climate misinformation with young leaders from around the South Pacific. Among others, I was joined by Jeff Shaw, the Planet’s adviser (and my favorite person), WWU alumnus Rhys Logan, and friend-of-the-WWU-journalism-program Laura Wides-Muñoz, who’s a standards and practices editor at NBC News in Washington, D.C. We spent months selecting participants and planning the workshop with community organizers in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga. Planning a good, useful workshop is a fun challenge, but it was a familiar one.

One of the reasons I was particularly excited about this workshop is that I knew I had some things to learn, too. I wanted to hear about (and, ideally, see) the process of talanoa, a process of inclusive dialogue that’s used to resolve community problems. It has a lot in common with engagement journalism, which is one of my primary interests, and the way that journalists can become more effective and build more trust by listening to the everyday people in their communities.

But we missed a step in our communication. Somehow, in all of those planning conversations where we talked about talanoa, we missed a key aspect of cultural competency, which has to do with how a roomful of people introduce themselves to one another in Tonga and around the Pacific. Although we built in space for conversations around culture, and for people to introduce themselves in small groups, we hadn’t built time into our schedule to allow each of the people in the space to individually introduce themselves to the whole group and talk about their work and personal purpose as we formed the group. It wasn’t a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, but it meant that the people who’d traveled days to get their (flights in the Pacific can be tricky) didn’t have the information and mental map of the room that they needed in order to do their best work. It was a significant enough problem that we tore up our schedule to address it as soon as we realized how it was affecting the workshop.

And that’s the first journalism lesson here: Those of us who seek connections beyond our “home” communities and cultures are going to miss things. It’s a huge part of the argument for diversifying journalism’s workforce in the first place. And it can be uncomfortable, embarrassing, and a little stressful to be confronted by your own ignorance and have to correct it in real time, which can be a near-daily experience when you’re working to get to know an unfamiliar culture or community.

The second journalism lesson here is that discomfort, embarrassment and stress are not as important as the work we’re trying to do. The workshop’s participants were generous with their insight, and gracious with our misstep and its effects on our schedule and plans. Now, we all know a lot more about how their communities organize and work with information. They, I hope, have more tools to apply to their work in persuading the rest of the world to listen and learn from their experiences of climate change, and to help their communities sort fact from propaganda.

We’re going to need more solidarity, more cultural fluency, and more journalism as we confront the novel challenges ahead of us. Fortunately, journalism’s standard problem-solving techniques are incredibly effective: get curious, be humble about what you know, and never stop asking questions.

I hope the past year has been kind to you. If you need anything, you know where to find me and I hope you will.