#378 Podcast shares stories of DC’s music scene

Sean Gotkin remembers the last time the DC music scene was as vibrant, connected and supportive as it is now.

He grew up listening to bands like Fugazi and seeing Rollins Band play at the 9:30 Club downtown. He remembers when musicians and fans alike felt the electricity in the air when the lights went down and the sound came up.

Now he’s running the board at the Black Cat, a gig he’s had since Iota, a club in nearby Arlington, Virginia, closed a few years ago.

But like most musicians, that’s not the only trick in his gig bag.

Gotkin recently launched his second podcast, “Sounds Like DC.” The first podcast, Audiobar, had a 12-episode run where bands would play a few songs in his home studio then chat with him for about 45 minutes.

“Sounds Like DC” is a similar-but-related concept: “I was thinking about the fact that I work with musicians who are all my friends, but I never get the chance to talk with them. How cool would it be, with the equipment I have and the friends I have to sit down and have philosophical conversations about life?” Gotkin says.

He tries not to prepare too much for each conversation, preferring instead to let the conversation flow. He wants the listener to feel like they’re sitting in on a chat between two friends.

“We go from anything about upbringing, early influences in art or music, to what’s the meaning of life, what would you do if you were president for a day,” he says. “I always get the impression that we don’t talk on a deeper level like we used to. But that’s how you get to know about another person.”

Now his podcast bridges the gap he felt in some of the few music podcasts he’s listened to: He brings musicians on to talk about their lives and also the DC music scene.

“For the first time in almost 20-odd years, there’s a collective of musicians that are all wonderfully diverse in what they play,” he says. “Everyone knows each other and they all try to help each other. It hasn’t been like that since the early ‘90s. I was lucky enough to grow up in a time when DC was blowing up. I was working at the Bayou (in Georgetown) at 19 and it was great.”

He’s also been able to fulfill an early goal for his podcast, creating episodes in batches and then bringing all six of his first guests together for a live podcast taping.

“If I can have the six people on the same stage, with the audience talking to them, then we can talk about the stuff that matters,” he says. “We can try to make a change for the better.”

Sean Gotkin, the sound department manager at the Black Cat and host of the biweekly podcast Sounds Like DC, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the importance of real conversations between friends and how DC’s music scene is as rich and diverse as it’s ever been.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

#377 Get rid of your ego and be an empathetic journalist

Reporters know well the frustration of going out to report a story, with a clear idea in mind of what’s going on, only to find their interviews don’t support their concept.

The same happens in newsrooms, when leaders determine in advance what their audiences will want.

A different, and perhaps better, approach, is a form of empathetic journalism that puts the audience, or the interviewee, first.

“It’s about really listening and trying to see audiences for who they are, not who we think they are, and letting them direct the coverage a little bit more than we ever have before,” says P. Kim Bui, director of audience innovation for The Arizona Republic. “We used to do pedestal journalism — we know best, let us tell you what the news is. Empathetic journalism takes the other tack: I don’t know about this, please tell me more, we want to hear from you, I want to learn from you, as a reporter, as I do this. It takes the ego out of journalists a little bit.”

Empathetic journalism also involves a deeper level of listening and trying to hear an interviewee’s story not just on the surface, but to try and better understand that person in a particular moment of their life.

“If you’re writing a story about a drug addict who killed two people, try to understand the motivation behind that person, what drove them there, to see them as human, as a character, as a person, and trying to relay that to the audience,” she says. “I think we can sometimes get lost in trying to tell the story we want to tell. Every reporter does that.”

The same goes for newsrooms and which stories get covered. As organizations try to figure out how to cover more with smaller staffs, it’s easy — and common — to go with what’s been done before.

In the process of trying to find their way forward, “we’ve kind of forgotten about the audience, and that we’re not typical consumers of news. You’ll get journalists saying ‘the audience doesn’t want this.’ How do you know? When’s the last time you talked to a regular human? Being able to tell stories that are useful, empathetic and newsworthy in a quick manner on multiple platforms is a challenge right now,” she says.

P. Kim Bui, director of audience innovation for The Arizona Republic, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss empathetic journalism and why listening to “real humans” can help newsrooms better serve their readers, viewers and listeners.

#359 Reporter uses pop-up newsrooms to amplify Philly’s unheard voices

#376 Citizen journalists help CitizenDetroit document public meetings

As newsrooms continue to shrink, communities are losing valuable information when civic boards meet and no one’s there to explain what happened.

Documenters, an organization that started in Chicago a few years ago and has branched out to Detroit, wants to change that, by training and hiring interested and curious citizens and dispatching them to attend public meetings, take notes, and file their observations.

“We’re very intentional about being accurate about facts and trying to get Detroit to be the most civically engaged in nation,” says Vassilis Jacobs, the senior policy analyst at CitizenDetroit and a Documenters manager.

His team is working closely with WDET, Detroit’s NPR station, to expand Documenters deeper into Detroit. Eleanore Catolico, a civic reporter at the radio station, came to Documenters while in Chicago in 2015. She picked up where she left off, taking extensive notes in Detroit’s charter school board meetings and relaying that information to Documenters’ online portal.

“I’ve learned a lot about the civic reporter role,” she says. “It marries the two focal points of the program in an interesting way. We’re training journalists to provide more equitable coverage in the city but also giving people the opportunity to learn skills and attend meetings and get paid for it and learn the importance of city government.”

The notes taken by Documenters are uploaded onto a website and shared for story idea leads and inspiration. Catolico says she sometimes uses information obtained through a Documenter’s notes, building it up with details and insight that would not have been attainable otherwise.

“The program is really about awakening democratic involvement of people here in the city of Detroit, learning about these boards and commissions, and getting the information inside these boards and commissions and authorities out,” Jacobs says. “Getting nuggets of information out, like water shutoffs in the city and the rate that’s happening … or whether boys can wear shorts in Detroit public schools.”

Without fully staffed newsrooms to make those calls and attend those meetings on a consistent basis, people are losing access to vital information they need to live their lives. The Documenters help bridge the gap, giving journalists information on civic meetings while helping people learn how to take good notes and earn money in the process.

Catolico says notes provided from Documenters has helped inform her reporting, especially when she needs to cover a topic she with which she’s not familiar.

“When I’ve talked to other reporters, they’ve been impressed by how easy it is to use the site,” she says. “It fills a need for them.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by WDET civic reporter Eleanore Catolico and Vassilis Jacobs, senior policy analyst at CitizenDetroit and a Documenters manager, to discuss their efforts to train people to take detailed notes at civic meetings to help keep journalists informed.

#375 What does it take to cover hate?

Michael Edison Hayden didn’t have any designs on being a reporter, let alone one who spends his time covering hate groups. He started out as an American playwright who was just looking for work while living overseas.

After several years as a de facto correspondent for U.S. papers in India and Nepal, he and his family moved back to the U.S.

The idea of protecting the safety of immigrants and people of color in the United States is of particular importance to him — in addition to his wife being from India, his mother immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt.

He was covering for someone at ABC News when the 2017 Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville. He’d covered a similar rally earlier in the year, in the same town, and used his contacts there to report in real time the horrors witnessed by activists who saw James Fields run through an intersection at the city’s downtown mall, killing Heather Heyer.

“I was very upset after Charlottesville,” Hayden says, now an editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I wanted to sharpen the reporting on extremism because I felt they had gotten away with too much in the leadup to that rally. Those dapper white supremacist stories about RIchard Spencer.”

With that in mind, Hayden stresses that reporters who want to cover hate groups and white supremacist/nationalist organizations understand what they’re getting into and how to protect themselves while working to report on dangerous people.

“If you want to do it the right way, put a lot of work in,” he says. Coming into a newsroom and accusing someone of being a neo-Nazi isn’t enough to warrant a story. “The more thorough the reporting, the more detail-oriented your report is, the more impactful your reporting will be.” It’s easy to shrug off accusations without evidence or proof to back them up.

“Quoting people, getting as many sources as possible, using the person’s entire online history” is a smarter approach. “Thorough is better. It tends to be that when you come in with ‘someone shared a naughty link,’ it doesn’t work. You have to get really dirty with it and actually go long and spend a lot more time,” he says. “We need fewer stories about far-right extremists but more reporting. … We need deeper reporting on how these things work, where the money flows are coming from, who people are from behind the scenes, how they organize when they’re not being seen.”

Hayden also stresses the importance of knowing what to do and who to contact if a reporter feels under attack or under threat for their work.

He’s recently written a guide on open-source intelligence for the Tow Center that features a detailed section on security and how to keep a reporter — and their family — safe from these types of threats.

“You want to pull all your information off the internet if you’re going to get involved,” Hayden says. “You want to keep your family protected and keep their pictures off the internet. If you feel you’re in an unfamiliar place, you can DM me, you can email me. I’d be happy to hear you out. … If someone’s concerned, you always have time. You don’t need to break scoops and you don’t need to slam a story through. If it could be dangerous to you, slow it down. It’s more important to make sure you’re safe.”

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell sits down with the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Michael Edison Hayden to discuss the dangers of covering white supremacist groups, the lingering ghosts of the Charlottesville rally and why Twitter locked his account for two days due to a photo printed in a Tennessee newspaper.

#373 Media outlets worldwide push for greater climate change coverage

Mark Hertsgaard, environmental reporter for The Nation, grew up with a news anchor father but didn’t intend to go into journalism. He did, however, have an innate understanding of and respect for the environment.

“The environment is a theme I keep coming back to,” he says. “At a fairly young age, I realized if you don’t get that issue right, none of the other issues are going to matter. If we don’t have a livable planet with drinkable water and breathable air and healthy soil, it doesn’t matter what we do about health care or incarceration policies because there won’t be a society to sustain it.”

The United States media has been a decade behind in climate coverage since at least the 1990s.

Considering Al Gore’s work on sounding the alarm about our rapidly heating planet, and that he was vice president of the U.S. at the time, that’s a grave assessment.

But the confusion between talking about the science of climate and taking a political stance when reporting about climate issues has made the topic difficult or scary for some reporters and made news organizations hesitant to write even basic stories about climate-based research.

For one week, starting September 16, that will change.

The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review are spearheading Covering Climate Now, an international push and emphasis on covering climate, leading up to a meeting of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in New York.

The American press “tends to reflect the discussion going on with political elites” when it comes to climate, he says. “In the United States, unlike in Europe, the political elites have essentially tried to ignore or outright deny the science around climate change. This has been evident for many years.”

Even in the ‘90s, with Gore in the White House, the discussion in the American press was about whether climate change was real. In Europe, even in countries whose leaders were “right-of-center,” the argument wasn’t whether climate change was real but what was to be done about it and who would pay for it, Hertsgaard says. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the past 20 years.

Last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a concerning report saying the world as a whole has 12 years to become carbon neutral and slash heat-trapping gas emissions. It was a report that should have caused a greater stir in the media, but it didn’t.

Hertsgaard points to Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist at the The Washington Post, who said this should be the number one issue in American media and should be front-page news every day. Of course, that hasn’t been the case, because some outlets still believe reporting or discussing climate science is taking a political stance, something he vows is not true.

After many emails and months of discussion, news outlets around the world have signed on to devote time and space — online, in print, on broadcast, etc., — to covering the current state of the climate and the dangers therein, leading up to this year’s UN environmental conference.

In all, more than 160 outlets will dedicate a week to climate coverage, outlets ranging from tiny websites in Togo and Rhode Island to the Guardian and Bloomberg News and the Times of India.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Mark Hertsgaard, environmental reporter for The Nation, to discuss next week’s Covering Climate Now initiative, organized by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review. More than 160 outlets of all sizes, around the world, will spend the week highlighting the science of climate change.

#371 NLGJA continues to transform how newsrooms cover LGBTQ issues

Twenty years ago, the media landscape was very different for the LGBTQ community. Years after Ellen DeGeneres became the first mainstream actress to confirm she was gay, the sitcom Will & Grace brought prominent gay characters into American homes on a weekly basis in a way that wasn’t shameful or audacious.

It was also about 20 years ago that Sharif Durhams first started working as a professional journalist and, shortly thereafter, he joined the NLGJA — The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. As an “out” gay man himself, he wanted to learn more about how to be a full participant in his newsroom.

Now president of the organization’s board, Durhams says things have gotten much better in terms both of coverage of LGBTQ issues and of the language journalists use when covering such topics.

“The industry was so different back then,” he says. “A lot of the discussion back then was, would some of these large organizations have policies that recognized they’d treat LGBTQ people the same” on matters of insurance, in particular, as well as other workplace benefits. “That’s a big fight NLGJA led. If you were to google it and find when large companies adopted these policies, it’s because of NLGJA. Since then, things have changed so much. We’re looking at the policies of newsrooms, are they using appropriate language to describe our communities.”

Now the new coverage emphasis is on issues relating to the trans community, but there’s a new challenge here that goes beyond how a person identifies.

“Unfortunately, we’ve been dealing with so much violence against trans people and so many trans deaths, where people can’t speak for themselves,” he says. “We’ve had to school news organizations, making sure they get the terminology right, making sure they deal with issues when the police misgender someone, making sure that they might be diving into a story in a well-meaning way but making sure they have the information they need.”

While newsrooms have received information and stylebook suggestions from NLGJA on pronoun use, sometimes the organization needs to get ahead of the news cycle. They issued a press release immediately when Chelsea Manning affirmed her name and identity, which happened to occur during the organization’s annual meeting. The editor of the New York Times happened to be speaking at the meeting the next morning and confirmed she’d informed her newsroom that the suggestions from NLGJA were immediately adopted as the paper’s official terminology.

NLGJA’s suggestions aren’t taken to heart because of the advocacy of its members alone, but because they’re journalists talking to other journalists about a community of which a reporter might not be a member.

“It’s that kind of ability to connect that’s been very valuable,” Sharif says.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Sharif Durhams, a senior editor for CNN Digital and board president for the NLGJA — The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, discussing how media coverage for the LGBTQ community has changed in the past 20 years and where it needs to go next.

#362 What is the future of LGBT media?

Survey: What tools do you use to do good journalism?

A few months ago, we asked readers to fill out a survey and provide some of their favorite journalism tools.

The good news is, most of them are free and available to anyone and everyone who needs them; the better news is that we have multiple people singing the praises of common tools including Scrivener, Evernote and the omnipresent Google programs.

What tools (apps, programs, etc) do you use to help organize your workflow?

Here, respondents gave us everything from a trusty ol’ reporter notebook to some higher tech, 21^st Century capabilities:

Microsoft OneNote was touted by one person: “Catch all notebooks for project memos, form letters, emails on projects, organized by topics. Coupled with the OneNote add-in for Microsoft Outlook to make it easy to move emails from one inbox to project folder.

Trello project boards were upheld for the ability to “keep action items in the proper priority buckets.”

Scrivener and Evernote appeared multiple times in different answers. “I use them to categorize and organize my folders and sub folders for topics and related content towards my true crime newsletter and my blog focused on local independent pop-punk and punk bands.”

PowerPoint Design’s Ideas feature was praised because it “quickly and automatically creates clean, eye-catching layouts from multiple photos, which you can then export for an alternative featured image.”

And sometimes the simplest answers and tools are best: Email inbox organizing tools, from Outlook to Gmail to Chrome extensions. “I keep emails unread until I am ready to act on them. I use the search function to find what I need and slide stuff to save into a special folder.” Another person sang the praises of If This Than That, calling it “simple and streamlined.”

For something different, try using not a tool but the Airplane mode: “To prevent phone call and Face Time disruptions of recordings during an interview. Airplane mode makes certain that calls won’t stop the recording like it usually does.”

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with your writing?

Here again the responses ran the gamut, including nothing in particular but an organized mind to some simple add-ons.

Microsoft Word Fast Fox Text Expander has been praised for allowing a user to “store repetitive text material and recall it into documents or emails with a few keystrokes.”

There was another vote for Scrivener and Endnote for keeping content in one place, in addition to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Sway to design digital and print versions of newsletters.

For those who have to transcribe their work, two suggestions: Temi.com, which offers “automated transcriptions of audio, 10 cents per minute. Not verbatim but 80-90% accurate, with text synch’d to audio.” This helps to provide “a roadmap to a long interview, helping me go back and quickly find the portions I want to transcribe verbatim to use in a story.” The other tool for transcription suggested is the Rev app, which will “translate a recording in less than 24 hours. It’s great if the interview is an hour long or more,” but here, too, there is a fee for service.

Another person really likes Werdsmith, calling it an “easy app to just pull up a blank page for note taking and easy location later.”

Don’t discredit Notes or email, tools so simple they’re built into most phones as a default.

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with research/collecting data?

Here, again, we’ve got some repeat entries: notebooks, Google tools, OneNote, Scrivener and Evernote.

New entries include Hunter in combination with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator plugin for Chrome and Gmail. Using the two tools in combination can help track and confirm email addresses, while Hunter can help find email addresses which can be verified via LinkedIn. There’s a free version that can do all the work without a payment.

AppleNews+ was suggested for “reading and researching long-form magazine pieces for content and quotes.”

Microsoft Excel was suggested as it assists in “collecting data, creating graphs from that data and it’s easy to copy and paste in other documents.”

One respondent relies on Feedly for managing RSS subscriptions.

Our friends with Pew Research get a nod as well: “One of the best national organizations that collect and observe data.”

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with visualizing data?

Data visualization isn’t quite a big concern or need among our survey respondents yet, but they do have a few suggestions:

Easy Dynamic Charts from Data Wrapper and WordPress tables were mentioned as simple tools for easy integration.

Microsoft Excel also came up for “creating easy to make graphs,” along with Prezi, a plug-in for PowerPoint.

What is one piece of technology you can’t live without?

No surprise here: smartphones are top of the heap here. From voice recording apps to digital notepads and email within a few taps, they can do everything and we rely on them to do just that.

Runners up including Adobe Audition, a recorder, SD card adapter for smartphone (“makes it easy to transfer pictures from a DSLR or other camera to a phone for quickly posting high-quality images on social”), and voice dictation.

Did your favorites make the list or are there other tools you’ve used in your journalism work that might be of help to others? Feel free to add to our online resource by taking our online survey. We’re also conducting an online survey on how we can improve our podcast. If you fill out one of our surveys, we’ll send you an It’s All Journalism mug while supplies last.

#346 Helping journalists decode research

#370 What’s your Credder rating?

Two years after launching TribeWorthy, pegged as a kind of Yelp for news consumers, Chase Palmieri is back with a revised and improved platform.

Credder allows both reporters and readers alike to rate the trustworthiness of an article, publication or reporter, resulting in a ranking that’s posted publicly.

“We believe news should compete for trust, not clicks,” he says. “What we’ve created is a platform where journalists can review articles under a critic category and the public can review articles under a user category. What they’re doing is essentially reviewing how much they trust individual articles. If they don’t trust something, they have to pick out an exact reason why.”

Anyone in the general public who wishes to critique articles can do so, but there are requirements, as journalists, to be accepted as a critic, Palmieri says.

Credder founders, from left, Austin Walter, Chase Palmieri and Jared Fesler

“You need to be working for a publication, you need to be a full-time journalists and you need to be creating and writing articles yourself,” he says. “What we want to do, as soon as we’re able to, is stop deciding who’s in the critic category and just take the top authors from our own Credder leaderboard and let that be the deciding cutoff for who gets to be a critic. The authors themselves that are writing really great articles that are getting reviewed; those authors that get rated and are on the leaderboard, those are the ones that get to review as critics.”

On any given day, there are between 5,000 and 6,000 users on Credder, which is impressive for a platform that launched less than two months ago. “We’re at the point where an article gets posted and, by the end of the day, it’s going to have a rating,” he says.

Chase Palmieri, one of the founders of Credder (formerly TribeWorthy), joins producer Michael O’Connell to talk about the platform that allows journalists and news consumers alike to rate the trustworthiness of articles.

#251 – Tribeworthy wants to be ‘Yelp for news consumers’

#368 Amplifying young international voices to tell stories that matter

Young people have the passion and energy needed to make real change in their communities and to help move the needle, albeit slowly and in fits and starts, for the world at large.

A group of 130 young writers from around the world are getting together to do just that this week, attending The International Congress of Youth Voices in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

This is the second year for the event, which focuses not only on letting these young activists share their stories, but helps them learn how to communicate their concerns and their priorities on a global scale, making their issues resonate on a larger level with people who have very different backgrounds.

The congress grew out of 826 Centers, a writing organization with a presence in 27 countries, where Amanda Uhle worked with the congress’ co-founder and the creator of the centers, David Eggers.

Amanda Uhle

“We believed there was this great power in getting young people together, physically, in the same space,” she says. “We know young people have important perspectives and thought there’d be great power in uniting them.”

The congress is supported in large part by News-Decoder, “an effort to help young people around the world better understand big international issues and become better global citizens,” says Nelson Graves, the organization’s founder. It was created after Graves, a former journalist and teacher, saw many of his international correspondent friends “out to pasture” after taking buyouts. News-Decoder “brings experienced, skilled foreign correspondents together with young people to help broaden their perspective and learn from each other.”

Writers in News-Decoder can help the young congress attendees understand how to portray their ideas in a way that limits bias and preconceived notions, creating persuasive pieces that are suited for an international audience.

Among the central topics of this year’s event: Climate change, immigration and gun control.

Immigration and gun safety are “two issues the young people in our partnership and beyond are very concerned about, primarily because they’re existential issues. Along with climate change, these are existential issues that call into question a young person’s sense of identity,” Graves says. “Immigration has a direct relationship with a young person’s definition of self and sense of identity. … Guns represent a physical threat, particularly in the United States where there have been so many shootings at schools.”

News-Decoder “offers this incredible platform for our students to publish their work,” Uhle says.

Some of the congress attendees from last year worked with News-Decoder staffers to publish their work, both from the United States and internationally.

“It’s such a great match. I think we all see that young people come to us with knowledge and passion,” Uhle say. “It’s true of the youth writing centers. The gap is having young people think about their audience and who they’re writing for and to. Having experienced journalists like Nelson’s organization does is a tremendous asset for a young writer who needs to frame writing in terms of who’s going to read this and how do I sway them to my opinion.”

Amanda Uhle of the International Congress of Youth Voices and Nelson Graves of News-Decoder join producer Michael O’Connell to discuss this year’s conference and why giving young people support when speaking on issues of importance to them is the most important role adults can serve.

#366 Young women lead the conversation about periods, sexism

#367 Investigative reporter exposes injustice in civil rights-era murder case

For three decades, Jerry Mitchell was an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi.

He spent those years digging into crimes so closely aligned with the civil rights era, he little believed it possible there was any stone to be overturned or any clue left to be found.

“I have always been attracted, you could say, to injustices that weren’t being dealt with or corrected,” he says. “Even beyond just civil rights cases.”

One of his first editors had served as a statehouse reporter in Oklahoma who asked Mitchell if he’d ever read “All The President’s Men,” the classic account of the Watergate scandal. “He told me to read the book and study how they use attribution. It was the best advice I ever got in journalism,” Mitchell says. “I began to learn through that book, to see how you can do that (investigative work) and how it evolved.”

Mitchell, now the director of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, started covering civil rights cases in 1989, shortly after watching the movie “Mississippi Burning,” about the deaths of three activists at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. “I saw it with two FBI agents who had worked on the case… and I was intrigued that nobody got prosecuted for murder. There were 20-something Klansmen involved. That blew my mind.”

In particular, he focused on the case of Edgar Ray Killen, a prominent Klan member at the time of the killings. It had been more than 20 years since the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, but he was inspired by small and incremental breaks in other cases from the era, including the death of Emmett Till.

“I believe there’s always hope, there’s always a possibility in a case you look at,” Mitchell says.

In the Killen case, he was leaked an interview with Sam Bowers, who had been head of the Klan in Mississippi during that time. “He talked about the 1967 federal trial (on conspiracy charges). He said he was quite delighted to be convicted, one of seven Klansmen (to be charged and found guilty). The instigator had walked free. I did a story and the authorities reopened the case in earnest in 1999.”

In 2005, Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter. He died in prison in 2018.

Jerry Mitchell, a 30-year investigative reporter who now runs the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain why cold cases and lapses in justice should never be shrugged off and left to history.

#207 – Emory students investigate civil rights-era cold cases

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