Amber Healy, Author at It's All Journalism

#307 — Radio Diaries: Personal narratives reveal big stories

No surprise for podcast and radio fans: Relying only on people’s voices, maybe accompanied by music, is an incredibly intimate and personal way to tell stories.

“It’s great for characters. You feel like you get to know people,” said Joe Richman, founder, executive producer and host of the show Radio Diaries, which he created in 1996. “That sense of intimacy that exists when you put the headphones on and someone is speaking to you in your ear, that doesn’t exist in any other medium. We try to use that sense of place, that experiential quality of audio that is the magic of the medium.”

Joe Richman is the founder, executive producer and host of Radio Diaries.

Radio Diaries started with a focus on teenagers in its early days, giving tape recorders to regular, non-famous, seemingly ordinary people and asking them to share stories from their lives. Entries have been made for NPR, the BBC, This American Life and now the podcast.

There’s no trick for finding a compelling storyteller, nor is there one single mold that always works. The key to a good episode is a good story, pure and simple.

“Our philosophy is, let’s take important issues, whether it’s undocumented immigrants or teen moms or a kid with a disease or normal teenage life, and tell it through the story of one person. So often that’s what we seek to do with journalism: humanize big issues,” Richman said. “It’s the Trojan Horse theory – you get the story in, you get people to kind of understand this one person’s life, get who they are, where they’re coming from, and through that, you get to know the issue that maybe, without that kind of storytelling approach, we might think much differently or dispassionately about.”

Not all the stories are easy to tell or share, of course.

In one episode, Radio Diaries revisited the story of “Strange Fruit,” a song Billie Holiday wrote in the 1930s. Her song was inspired by a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a white teacher in New York City, after he saw the infamous photograph of two African American boys who’d been lynched for allegedly beating a white boy. But there was a third boy who was supposed to be lynched that day as well, James Cameron III. He was tied up and raised into the tree’s branches but taken down.

“No one knows why,” Richman says. “He’s considered to be the only person ever to survive a lynching in America. We had an interview with him.”

Additionally, cassettes of interviews taped in the 1970s featuring witnesses of the Marion, Indiana, lynching had surfaced. “Those tapes had been forgotten in a shoe box for decades,” he said. “We were able to use those recordings as well to add texture to the retelling.”

Joe Richman, founder, executive producer and host of Radio Diaries, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explore the intimacy of radio as a storytelling medium, the use of supplemental audio to enrich a story and how good storytellers come in all shapes, sizes and speaking patterns.

#305 — The simplicity and compelling nature of audio storytelling

#306 — Facebook, fake news and fact checking

“Should Facebook even be a place we should think about getting news (from) at all? It may not,” suggests Laura Hazard Owen, a deputy editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

For the past year, she’s been writing a column about fake news, a column she wasn’t sure would have enough activity or topics to discuss to warrant space every single week. How things have changed.

“I’ve gotten really interested in writing about the research being done into fake news, the academic papers, the studies people are doing about it,” she said. “One of the best things about working for Harvard is I have access to all these libraries in digital form. It’s really cool to see the research and circle back around with the people writing it, to see why they’re studying this stuff, what they want to keep working on.”

With so much discussion in the past year alone about the role of fake news in social media, and Facebook in particular, as it relates to the 2016 presidential election, Hazard Owen is curious what will come of Facebook’s promise to opening some of its data to select researchers for study.

The bulk of research on fake news has, to date, been compiled from Twitter information because its records are much more open and accessible, she said. “Facebook is a black box. We don’t really know what’s happening there,” but the stated agreement to slowly and partially open information to outside review “will give us a really interesting focus on what’s happening there.”

It’s also not enough for an article to be fact-checked for validity, because in some politically conservative circles, it’s not deemed an impartial activity, she said.

Laura Hazard Owen, a deputy editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss her weekly column, where she’s been writing, about the spread and use of fake news and its implications in society, the role Facebook and Twitter play in its dissemination and whether Facebook’s pledge to open its records to research will shed any light on the secretive company’s policies and practices.

#279 — Collaboration key to combating fake news

#305 — The simplicity and compelling nature of audio storytelling

“Thinking back on it, I think I’ve only ever made a paycheck in radio.”

Phoebe Judge loves the challenges and the simplicity of working in audio, taping interviews with people using only the sound of their voices to tell stories.

She’s also quick to dispel any assumptions that working in a purely non-visual medium is easier than one in which stories rely on what the audience can see as much as what they hear.

Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer are the co-creators of the Criminal and This is Love podcasts. (Justin Cook)

“A well put-together audio piece is so hard to do,” said Judge, host of two podcasts, “Criminal” and the newly kicked off “This is Love,” who got her start at a small station in Cape Cod covering a murder trial in Nantucket before spending 2 1/2 years in Gulfport, Mississippi.

With audio, because only one sense is utilized at a time when taking in a story, the listener’s ears pick up more of the little details that would be overshadowed by something else in a visual setting. Listeners “pick up on nuance in voice, you can hear a bad edit, you can hear when the music’s too loud. It forces audio producers to try and do a perfect job in creating a sound that won’t trip viewers up. … I love that challenge. The sound of people’s voices, I like so much.”

Her father also worked in radio and Judge’s childhood in Chicago introduced her to some legends of the airwaves.

“I like asking people questions,” she said. “I ask people too many questions. I like to ask the most mundane stuff. I’d much rather ask what is it like when you get up and go to work every day, what’s the drive like, what’s the hardest part of your job? The intricacies of life and work are the types of questions I like to ask.”

Judge said her favorite moment in her new podcast came when she asked a man to describe his wife who had died many years ago.

“You can hear him start to speak and then he stops. He can’t do it,” she said. “I think it’s the idea of having to remember what she looked like and describe her is too hard. It was something about that question. There’s an incredible pause, you can hear him try and he has to stop. It’s two seconds. It’s my favorite thing and it makes me want to keep telling stories and keep working in audio because we can leave that pause and it says so much more than me talking or me summing things up.”

Phoebe Judge, host of the Criminal and This Is Love podcasts, joins producer Michael O’Connell to talk about her love of the audio format, the luxury of keeping silence in recordings and her delight in asking the mundane questions about life and work.

#302 — Do give a damn about your reputation

Five years ago, marketing companies and shops that worked on corporate branding had it easy. They controlled every aspect of their client’s messaging and reputation and what the world knew about the company.

How things have changed.

Carey Hennigar

With a few clicks on social media, a brand’s message or intent or content can be taken out of context and, just like that, someone can “manipulate content along the way and you lose control,” said Carey Hennigar of Storyful. “Brands have to worry about things nowadays that didn’t exist five years ago.”

In the not-so-distant past, everything was spelled out clearly and neatly. “Brand marketers or a communications team, they knew the content they were going to put out, which billboards they were going to put out, what TV commercials, even the social (media) they had more control over. Now there are billions of pieces of content that exist on social and online, that they themselves had nothing to do with creating.”

At the same time, consumers and end-users are so bombarded with information, it’s hard if not impossible to remember where a certain bit of information originated, let alone whether it’s true. “It’s really easy for a bad actor to come in and pose as the Idaho Guardian, a made-up publication, and pose as a news outlet and have fake news,” she said.

Some operations just can’t stay ahead of the curve when it comes to protecting their reputation, either from outside influence and manipulation or resurrecting their good name in a crisis situation.

This is where Storyful’s tactics come in handy.

Storyful has access to different kinds of social media dashboards that can provide valuable insights into where content comes from and how widely it’s being circulated — and within which groups.

Something “might have gotten 100,000 likes, but it’s all the same people, it’s an echo chamber and no one is engaging with them,” Hennigar said. “Without that context, a company’s executive could go to media and make a wrong play or use language that doesn’t resonate because it’s not an issue. They’re putting themselves in a reputational crisis that didn’t exist.”

Storyful works with companies to understand this kind of context and explain relationship and reputation-building practices to build credibility and trust with messages that will resonate with their intended audience. Even though it’s a marketing technique, it’s not all that different from a reporter trying to tell a compelling story, starting with an eye-catching headline that draws readers in, she said.

Carey Hennigar, Global VP, Risk & Reputation at Storyful, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the ever-changing and confusing world of protecting and building brand reputations.

#279 — Collaboration key to combating fake news

#301 — How about a nutrition label for news truthiness?

Imagine this: an unmissable notation on an article identifying all sources used within the story, naming all people involved in the creation process, clearly marking whether the article had a conservative or liberal bent and indicating to what degree the article is verifiably accurate.

That’s the kind of “radical transparency” Amy Webb of The Future Today Institute wants to make real.

“At my core, I’m an optimist. I do believe that we have the ability to create the futures we want. I believe I can do something to help create positive change,” she said. “If journalists can get their acts together and come up with a way to gain trust, then this is the time for our newsrooms to shine.”

Amy Webb is the founder of The Future Today Institute.

It’s an idea she’s been touting at Online News Association conferences for the past few years, building with each year as new ideas and technologies come to light. She first suggested ways and methods to verify journalists and articles at the 2015 conference; in 2016 she floated the idea of using blockchain as a way to make that happen.

“I think the key here is developing a spectrum so that we define, maybe not just news organizations but the credibility of the story itself,” she said. “There are ways to use machine learning, generative algorithms, lots of techniques that exist that would allow you to ask a machine to do a read-through of a story and, assuming the system hadn’t been hacked … it could get a grade at the end, 100 percent verified.”

Even Breitbart, the notorious website formerly run by Steve Bannon, publishes accurate and truthful content “occasionally.” It just might be content that goes directly against a reader’s politics. The same is true of MSNBC – “a lot of people with different political ideologies and complain that the content is inaccurate, but factually it is correct, it just butts up against your political leanings.”

Webb has been calling for a kind of nutrition facts label for articles for some time now. “Every article would have a transparent label: this is where the information came from, this is who touched the story, this is the truthiness, this is the verification,” she said. “It could be automated. The faster we can approach radical transparency within news and make that available to the public, the better off we’ll be and the harder it’ll be to yell fake news.”

The kicker? There’s also a possibility all the data collected from that kind of verification could be monetized. “There’s something called differential privacy, a way of anonymizing data attached. … In the process of creating transparency and data, you can learn a lot from all that data. Somebody might be willing to pay for the privilege of learning from the data, maybe a marketer or activist or a school teacher. As long as that was also transparent – the opposite of Facebook – there’s an opportunity to develop profit centers, possibly even profit sharing, that everyone in the news ecosystem could exploit in a good and meaningful way,” Webb said.

For this week’s milestone podcast, producer Michael O’Connell brings back Amy Webb from The Future Today Institute, to talk about her vision for tools that would help media outlets gain trust with “radical transparency” in the shape of a badge verifying the pedigree of an article.

Editor’s Note: Below is Amy Webb’s presentation at the 2017 Online News Association conference.

#299 — Can journalism survive in a post-truth world?

Discussions of journalism and the news of the day were always staples of Ed Madison’s life. His father was the first African-American to join the editorial staff of the Chicago Tribune after working as a reporter for that publication for many years.

In his new book, Madison, an assistant professor and media partnership coordinator at the University of Oregon, uses that perspective to take a critical glance of the state of journalism today and what went wrong – or what might still be working properly.

Ed Madison is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.

The book, Reimagining journalism in a post-truth world: How late-night comedians, internet trolls, and savvy reporters are transforming news, is the result of two years’ work with Ben DeJarnette.

The original manuscript was due right around the time of the November 2016 presidential election.

They got a six-month extension.

“After that happened, it shifted how we all reimagined journalism at this point,” Madison said. “Some politicians don’t like the watchdog role journalism plays in society, but (the industry has) never been under attack on a daily basis as it has been in this administration currently. It was timely and, perhaps, fortuitous for this to come out now, but it’s a little bit of a different take than we had initially imagined.”

The public isn’t overly fond of journalists and the work they do, he says, citing the statistic that 32 percent of people say trust the media. Still, “when there’s a catastrophe or grave incident that happens, people tend to go to legacy media outlets that are tried and true — the New York Times, CNN, NPR. That continues to be the case.”

In discussions with his students, Madison said he’ll ask them why they repeatedly shop at a certain store, or why they frequent a particular restaurant. It comes down to reliability and consistency, the same reason people return to the same media outlets in times of big developments.

“I think that’s the same way we should look at news and information,” said Madison, who “doesn’t engage” with terms like fake news because it lends itself too easily to “ideological conversations about the legitimacy of mainstream media compared to other types of organizations.”

People turn to legacy media outlets they’ve learned to trust because “there are organizations that have built a track record and there are reasons for that. Their leaders are conscientious about protecting the integrity of what they do,” he said.

Ed Madison, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Oregon and author of a new book, Reimagining journalism in a post-truth world: How late-night comedians, internet trolls, and savvy reporters are transforming news, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain why terms like “fake news” aren’t worth acknowledging and how writing cue cards for Mike Douglas made him a better producer.

#298 — Investigative journalism helps restore lives robbed by injustice

Melissa Segura admits that investigative journalism is not the first thing most people think of when they talk about BuzzFeed. But her work, especially her investigation into the corrupt practices of Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara, is changing that perception.

Segura’s background began in sports. Thanks to an older brother who would muscle his way to the remote after school and keep ESPN on the TV, she went to college with “an inordinate amount of sports knowledge” and an interest in narrative journalism.

Melissa Segura

One piece in particular, written by Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith, told of a nationally watched high school basketball player who was accused of sexually assaulting a disabled woman in a New York City hallway.

“He was the best prospect in the country at the time,” she said. “He served his time, he did what he was supposed to. But when the time came for colleges to recruit him, there was a lot of backlash and he lost all his offers.” Any school that had considered offering him a scholarship or tryout faced criticism and scorn and the young player was left with nothing.

“It was an incredibly human and deep piece, which had me looking at other things he was doing and other things Sports Illustrated was doing,” Segura said. It also fed into her lifelong interest in the justice system.

When Sports Illustrated went through layoffs, she found a fellowship with BuzzFeed for investigative reporting. She’d just had a conversation with an attorney about the plea bargaining and justice system in the United States, including a case where a woman in Chicago denied killing two men she’d been charged with murdering and, after taking a plea deal, the woman was still facing the death penalty.

Earlier this year, Segura won a Polk Award for local reporting for coverage of Guevara, who had been using shady practices for decades, locking up innocent people for years on end for crimes they didn’t commit.

Melissa Segura, a Polk Award-winning journalist with BuzzFeed, joins Michael O’Connell to discuss her journey from unwitting sports nerd with an interest in writing deep, human stories to shining a bright light on a dirty Chicago detective in the name of righting several decades’ worth of wrongs.

#294 — Polk Awards honor gutsy investigative reporting

#297 — Learning, relearning and unlearning the magic of broadcast

Richard Davies, co-host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, fell in love with radio and broadcasting at the ripe old age of nine.

“My dad bought a big Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder,” he recalled. “I started playing around with it. I have a recording of myself doing newscasts, making up stories about people doing various things.”

Journalist Richard Davies is the co-host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast.

Now, after a 30-year career in broadcast, Davies heads up a podcast production company, embracing the new frontier of audio recording.

His career in journalism started in newspapers, which kept him grounded and taught him the discipline that has served him well in his tenure, most of which was spent at ABC News.

Davies laments that journalism has become more of a business, with more care and attention to what drives ratings.

“Journalism has become less interested in issues in issues and more interested in clashes, controversy and celebrities,” he said. “You’re either thrilling people or shocking people or surprising people. I’m not saying all forms of broadcast journalism are like that, but I do think there’s a bias toward over-dramatization in journalism that is perhaps now more pronounced than ever with cable TV news being so prominent in the past 20 years.”

Davies values, more than anything, the power journalism has to stitch communities back together and sees podcasting as a logical continuation of radio’s magic.

“Radio sometimes is on in the background. Podcasts are rarely on in the background. They’re often consumed in headphones at a time when the listener is not distracted by other forms of media on your screen,” he says. Additionally, the voice or voices featured in the podcasts are more likely speaking directly into the listener’s ears, putting them in the listener’s head.

A podcast “demands something a little bit different,” he said. “Radio’s dealing with audio, and podcasting’s dealing with audio, but it’s different in some ways. It’s been that aspect of learning and unlearning that’s been fascinating to me.”

Richard Davies, a self-proclaimed news junkie who started on the path to a career in journalism at the ripe old age of 9, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss his days as a broadcaster with ABC News, the stories that have stayed with him and why he’s enjoying the “Wild Wild West” feel of podcasts with the How Do We Fix It? podcast.

#243 – Solo video journalist emerges as model for most newsrooms

#296 — Cinematic video journalism shakes up old model of visual storytelling

The concept of video journalism is as old as the television broadcast, but it doesn’t need to be predictable or boring.

“It’s been through the ring,” says David Dunkley Gyimah, a video journalist who leads the Innovatory disLAB (UK) and is currently an Asper visiting professor of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.“Video journalism, as a label for whatever this thing is, has been around since the 1950s. It meant something else then. It surfaced again in the 1990s as a way of one person doing video … one person would grab a camera, go out, shoot, do the stand-up and sometimes come back and edit.”

David Dunkley Gyimah

The BBC itself adopted the one-person-band approach to video reporting in the early 2000s and newspapers soon followed, he said.

Reporters are still out there telling stories, finding and searching for the truth in their work, but Dunkley Dyimah compares it to the impressionist painters that came after realists.

“Impressionists came along and say ‘we’re going to do the truth, but this is our impression of it,’” he said. “That’s what happened. The idea of training people still within the (premise) of telling the truth, being honest, letting them tell their stories in a myriad of ways and styles changed. It became something akin to the package,” or the concise ways in which broadcast reporters produce and air their stories.

But therein lies a risk: Now there’s a generation or more of “marketeers and PR people” who can present information in visually the same style and cadence as a reporter’s package because they know and understand how this presentation works.

“The result of video journalism being absorbed into this mainstream idea of oh, it’s just TV journalism, it’s forced a number of people, including me, to look for new ways to define this thing,” he said.

They’re finding inspiration in cinematic elements – not of the big screen Hollywood variety, but of powerful, strong images as a way to grab viewers’ attention and bring the news in more meaningful ways.

Visual storyteller and cinematic journalism expert David Dunkley Gyimah joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss how video journalism has changed, and stayed the same, since its inception in the 1950s.

#290 — What’s it like to report from North Korea?

#295 — Putting sports second, athletes first

Sports fans love their teams. They love to quibble about which player should or shouldn’t have been traded; which general manager or coach deserves to stay or should be kicked out; what the future holds for a team that has identified with a city for generations.

Tim Graham has written about the highs and lows of the sports fans in Buffalo for the better part of 20 years as a writer for the Buffalo News, covering both the NFL’s Bills and the NHL’s Sabres through more valleys than peaks, the bankruptcy and sale of the NHL franchise and the death of an iconic owner that could have relocated the Bills to California or Canada.

Buffalo News Sports Writer Tim Graham. {Photo by Derek Gee / Buffalo News}

Buffalo fans are a passionate breed, as it could be argued are most fans in any city of any team, but Graham prefers to focus on the bigger pictures: What happens after the game is done and real life sets in.

“Once that game’s over, it really becomes a triviality,” said Graham, a writer who first joined the Buffalo News in 2000 and spent seven years there before going to Palm Beach, Florida, before a stint at ESPN before returning to New York’s second-largest city to cover the Sabres and, later, the Bills.

“When you talk about your team going bankrupt (as the Sabres did), or your owner being ushered into a federal court (Sabres again) or serious issues like CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), the brain injuries going on in the NFL, the national anthem demonstrations, all of these thing matter on a much larger scale,” Graham says. “I really get into writing those stories because I know if you do it in a comprehensive way, it’s a story that will stand the test. You can look back on it and – my goal is to have written the definitive story on a subject instead of a game played in November. Nobody goes back to read those stories.”

Graham has profiled some legendary athletes: Bills great Darryl Talley; NHL goon turned soft-hearted good guy John Scott, even Bjorn Nittmo, a kicker who played just a handful of games but caught the attention of David Letterman.

Sports writing is less about the scores, wins and losses as it is about the lives the athletes lead off the field, the struggles they face and the risks they take in pursuit of their dreams and in order to live up to their potential, not just athletically but personally.

When it comes to CTE, the brain injury closely associated with football players who suffer multiple concussions, it resonates with readers because “the prospect of death is universal. We’re all afraid. … When you write about things like CTE, you’re able to humanize these people that wear helmets on Sunday afternoons. They wear these team colors and they go out and fight for your city’s honor and these are the guys we really root for and don’t think about it much more beyond that. I’m certain that’s why NFL rating have slipped … because of what we’re learning about brain injuries and football players.”

Tim Graham, an NFL writer for the Buffalo News for the better part of two decades, joins producer Michael O’Connell to talk about the highs and lows of covering a city whose teams are better known for losing than winning and why, in the big picture, the W/L column is secondary to everything off the playing field.

#215 – Learning from the best of the best in sports

1
2
3
…
5
...Next Page