Story highlights Coleen Jose: Kim Wall was the kind of journalist most of us in the industry aspire to be

Her work shone light on the world's troubles, illuminating some of the dark places, writes Jose

Coleen Jose is a documentary photographer and creative strategist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) Kim Wall wasn't just an extraordinary storyteller, she was also one of my beloved friends and a colleague. I found her sense of humor and adventure contagious. And I wasn't the only one.

Coleen Jose

"We would work late on stories, but were always sure to take breaks with cat videos," Annie Zak recalled of her time with Kim at Columbia Journalism School. "Kim always had good ones to share."

Like Annie and so many of our friends, I will miss laughing with Kim. I'll miss her pings and emojis sent on WhatsApp (peace sign, palm tree, two pink hearts), her stories from her latest adventures, her style (I should've asked her how to tie my hair in a messy, cool bun) and her knit sweaters from Sweden. I'll miss how she thought about the world with deep curiosity and a strong sense for our shared humanity.

Coleen Jose and Kim Wall on a reporting trip in Hawaii.

But Kim was also an artist in her reporting. She pieced together memories, or recorded and oral histories, to bring us closer to understanding the stories she was telling. And in our Marshall Islands reporting with Hendrik Hinzel, she humanized a forgotten time and community there, highlighting the displacement, starvation and destruction of ancestral land during the Cold War era.

Kim's passion for storytelling wasn't just limited to her Marshall Islands reporting. It could be seen in her work from Beijing to Port-au-Prince to Coney Island. She traveled to some of the most challenging places on earth and engaged with individuals who many reporters would hesitate to approach. She wrote of the tour buses traversing Sri Lanka's battlefields, Chinese feminists in the D.C. Women's March, and Idi Amin's torture chambers in Uganda, humanizing these and many other stories for a global audience.

Read More