#238 – Trump’s ‘hurry-up offense’ keeps press corps scrambling

The geography hasn’t changed but everything else about the White House will take some getting used for USA Today reporter Gregory Korte and his fellow White House correspondents.

A few weeks ago, the White House press corps was used to briefings from senior Obama Administration officials before major announcements were made, giving them a chance to digest the information before it was made public.

Gregory Korte is the White House correspondent for USA Today.

“There was a predictability and an orderliness to it that even affected the press operation,” Korte said. “With President Trump, it’s much more fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, spontaneous. They’re scheduling executive order signing ceremonies before they know what executive order the president is going to sign. What we’re going through is not just a 180-degree shift in policy but really a completely different style even of how they deal with the press.”

The Trump Administration has openly called the press the “opposition party,” Korte says, a “political message” he hopes doesn’t impair the ability of the White House press corps to do their job. “Think about this: They’re going to reporters to tell reporters that reporters are the opposition. They are using us as a foil but, at the same time, they are using us as the means to deliver that message. It’s an awkward sort of position.”

Political reporters who find themselves at the White House have dealt with their share of “cantankerous” politicians and staffers along the way but remain dedicated to doing their jobs. Korte likens the press corps inside the White House as the U.S.-equivalent to Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s not an exact likeness —the Prime Minister goes before Parliament weekly to answer their questions and challenges but without a similar arrangement where the president must address Congress weekly, it’s the reporters inside the White House who rely on access to the president to gather information to provide to the public.

“What we’ve seen in the past week of the Trump Administration is that they’re playing this hurry-up offense. Before we can collect the facts, they’ve moved on to a new executive order or a new policy that they’re announcing,” Korte said. “I think it’s a deliberate strategy to keep us off our toes. We’re trying to keep up as best we can. You see it even in press briefings with Sean Spicer — short questions with short answers,” compared with longer, multi-part questions from reporters and longer, more analytical answers from Obama’s press secretaries.

This administration is unlike any the White House press corps has seen before not only because of Trump’s embrace of Twitter as a platform for sharing his “visceral” thoughts at 3 a.m. but the way in which he orchestrates and uses executive order signing sessions. Obama might have signed an order in private and announced the action later, but Trump creates an environment reminiscent of his time on The Celebrity Apprentice, signing orders with staffers behind him and cameras in front of him. Despite this public display of office, the details of those orders often aren’t immediately known.

“Here’s what we’re resorting to. There are photographers taking pictures of these ceremonies, he loves these ceremonies,” Korte said. “He will sign them and he’ll hold them up for the cameras. What we’ve been doing is taking these wire photos and blowing them up as big as we can — if they’re in focus just right, we can read some of the operative language on these before released by WH or posted on WH website.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Gregory Korte, the White House reporter for USA Today, about covering the first few weeks of the Trump administration. He contrasts the more staid Obama White House to the Trump team’s “hurry-up-offense” approach to handling the press corps.

#191 – Campaign 2016: Welcome to the sideshow

#237 – PRX CEO sees positive trends ahead for podcasting

When PRX was started in 2003, Kerri Hoffman wanted to find a way to preserve “great radio shows … being aired once and lost forever.” Now she’s helped to build a thriving network of podcasters through support, innovation and encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit of creative people interested in picking up a microphone and putting on headphones.

“Over time, we created the first mobile app for public radio, created a distribution system for public radio, the first one, that rivals the satellite system,” Hoffman said. PRX, an “early adopter” of podcasting, was a nonprofit media company established to preserve audio and, through a series of what many would believe to be very fortunate events, now helping to distribute some of the biggest names in the format, including This American Life, On Being and Reveal.

Kerri Hoffman is CEO of PRX.

Now PRX — Public Radio Exchange — has a system in place to help young entrepreneurial podcasters get started, which can be a lonely process.

“We’ve been doing this since the early 2000s, we’ve had a front-row seat at the kind of skills required now to be successful,” she says. “You have to be marketers and fundraisers and you have to understand the ins and outs of talking to people at ad agencies and know how to talk to designers. Some have that whole package and they’re like a rocket ship. More commonly, producers are great sound engineers, they’re great interviewers, they’re great sound artists. We take care of all of that technology infrastructure that allows you to be distributed far and wide.”

Hoffman also likes to look forward to remain on the cutting edge of podcasting. So what does she think will be of particular importance in 2017?

Included on a list of trends for podcasts this year, published by Radiotopia, Hoffman suggests that podcast will be more important than ever to encourage lifelong learning.

“The thing about podcasts is that there are so many niches,” she says. “Compared to broadcast radio, (which is) a curated experience for you … think of podcasts as bite-sized books. You can go in a lot, you can go in a little, it’s niche. You can binge. It’s got the intimacy of a real connection of experience.”

Podcasts also are a great way for people to consume information without having to look at a screen, so listeners can learn about any given topic while commuting, grocery shopping or at the gym, Hoffman says.

Another trend to monitor is the role podcasts will play in troubling times. This isn’t necessarily a political statement but rather a comment on the magnitude of shifting perceptions in the world. “One of the great things you can do (with podcasts) is you can match your listening to your mood,” she said. “We all need that variety, we all need a little bit of comedy, a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of broccoli with the ice cream. The real driver is the authentic voices and the intimacy people have with podcast hosts and producers. There’s a real connection that’s very power that listeners have with the shows they listen to and it extends to social media. It’s both short-form and long-form all at the same time.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O’Connell talks to Kerri Hoffman, CEO of the Public Radio Exchange, about a recent PRX release outlining nine trends for podcasting. They also discuss the importance of good audio editing and what makes a successful and sustainable podcast.

#PM16 – Ear Hustle: Podcasting from behind bars

#236 – It’s the moment alt papers were made for

Jason Zaragoza came to Washington, D.C., in the early days of the Obama administration. His journalistic career began during his college years in California while George W. Bush was president.

And now that the Trump administration is starting, Zaragoza is convinced alternative news outlets are more important than ever.

Jason Zaragoza, executive director, Association of Alternative Newsmedia

“I really feel like this is the moment we were made for, that alt papers were built to thrive on,” said Zaragoza, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN). “We do have this need, especially with the cuts that have happened in dailies over the past several years, the need for solid reporting but also from a point of view.

In particular, alternative news outlets have the flexibility to conduct in-depth research and reporting and remind readers of the historical context of an event without necessarily worrying about offending readers by taking a position.

“One of the things that’s been happening over this election, and post-election, is the way the incoming administration changes the narrative in such a way that it completely changes the terms of debate,” he said. “You can’t get sucked into that. The minute you do, we lose, not just as an industry but as a society.”

Alt publications can brandish their positions unflinchingly, he said.

“When reporting on something like transgender use of bathrooms or the right of someone to marry whoever they want, sometimes a daily might call that a controversy. For us, there’s no controversy. There’s one side that’s right and we’re going to come out and say it. There’s no controversy about basic human rights.”

Zaragoza is also gearing up for AAN’s digital conference, scheduled for Portland this weekend (Jan. 19-21) after a long stretch in San Francisco. There are two host papers in Portland, each involved in helping coordinate this year’s event, as well as a partnership with the University of Oregon, which he says could draw young journalists to the conference and help them get started on the right foot.

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Jason Zaragoza, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN), about why the current political climate might be exactly what the alternative press was designed for. He also discusses the AAN’s digital summit, which is taking place this weekend in Portland, Oregon.

#233 – Sacramento alt weekly takes post-election gut check

#235 – Is it ethical for a journalist to go to church?

People can make all the jokes they want about journalism ethics, but it’s something newsrooms take seriously, says Steve Buttry, director of student media at Louisiana State University.

In a new article for www.current.org, Buttry was asked to do a reported piece on editorial integrity and journalism ethics, looking at the issues of private activity compared to public responsibility.

Steve Buttry

The premise was simple, even if the issues are complex: “What are guidelines that journalists need to keep in mind in their personal activities, or if they’re unrestricted in their personal activities, how might what they do affect their work?”

For example, there’s the question of whether journalists who cover local or national politics should vote or get involved in their local party’s efforts. It could just as easily be a question about religion.

“Is it OK to worship wherever you want?” Buttry asked. “Well, of course, virtually everyone agrees with that. But there’s a spectrum within each of the areas I asked the questions about. It’s OK to worship and participate in religious activities in the community. But is it OK to belong to a faith-based group that takes positions on issues you might cover? Many more people had a problem with that issue, with that point.”

Some might be accepting of a person participating in a given house of worship and even holding a leadership role in their congregation, “but not if you’re going to cover it, because religion is sometimes in the news,” Buttry said. “If you’re a religion writer it’s going to affect what you do more than if you’re a political writer, where you just need to take care of those political issues.”

Reporters who restrict their opportunities to become involved in their home communities, whether as a member of the local PTA, homeowners association, congregation, what have you, are shortchanging their own personal life experiences in their community, he says.

“It’s fine to be president of the HOA, but tell the newsroom, ‘I’ve taken on this responsibility, if there are any conflicts we’ll deal with them as they arise,’ and then if they arise, OK, how do we handle it? We need more good conversations about ethics.”

In light of the recent election, Buttry say he wasn’t as involved in this election cycle as closely as in previous years because he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year. Around the time of the election he learned the cancer has spread to his liver and, as a result, he’s stopped treatment.

That doesn’t mean he’s sitting idly on the sidelines and refraining from giving journalists advice on how to conduct themselves.

“Whatever you think about the candidate, there was a repudiation by the voters in this election for the value of fact-based journalism. We, meaning journalists, time and again checked the facts of what the candidates said. Donald Trump was not telling the truth. … The voters kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘OK, but we want him to be president,’” Buttry said. “We’ve got to figure out what is the future for journalism. That independence we talked about, are we regarded, despite our efforts to maintain independence, are we regarded as the liberal media? Should we behave differently to protect our country from this ethic of not caring if people lie? You can like a candidate, but I think if you don’t care whether that person is lying, that’s a pretty serious thing for the country and that’s something journalism needs to work on and figure out. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Steve Buttry, director of student media at Louisiana State University, about a new article he wrote for www.current.org on journalism ethics. They discuss the lines journalists and newsrooms need to draw when it comes to community involvement.

#94 – The New York Times is The New York Times … but

#234 – DIY approach to data scraping bolsters crime coverage

Sometimes the only way to get the tools you need is to build them yourself.

Joshua Vaughn is a criminal justice reporter with the Sentinel in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and two years ago he started thinking about the information contained within the court documents created every time a person is charged with a crime. Working with a friend, he taught himself to code and built a tool to search those dockets, creating a searchable database that can provide statistics about the crime rate across the state.

Joshua Vaughn

“Where it all really started is, we’re like most newspapers, trying to do more with less people,” Vaughn said. “I thought there was a need and there was something there that could help us out. … As journalists, we have our routines, we have our ways of doing things. We have our data set that we look at, whether crime with dockets or education with reporting of Pennsylvania school profiles. There are things we look at all the time that we use in one way. I wanted to find different ways of using it. It was a matter of trying to take a step back and realize this (information) was there if we could find a way to pull it out.”

Now Vaughn has been writing one data-driven criminal justice article each month, led by or sourced with information culled from the data scraping tool he created. He wrote an article about people who were arrested on drug-related charges or found to have drug abuse issues when arrested and what happens to those people when they’re sentenced to jail time. “I was doing some keyword searches in documents and found several people in there who had died of drug overdoses” while in jail, he said.

In December, he wrote an article looking back at what appeared to be a noticeable uptick in the number of dockets opened in Pennsylvania that year, a 500-case increase in a county that normally gets 3,000 to 4,000 criminal filings each year. While it sounds like a big problem and might be cause for concern, Vaughn used the tool he created to determine things weren’t really that bad.

“DUIs are up substantially, drug crime and arrests were up substantially. The largest portion of drug crime arrests were simple possession, small amount of drugs not for delivery, and people getting charged with possession of small amounts of marijuana,” a separate crime in the state, he said. “Those two alone accounted for about 75 percent of the overall caseload increase.”

The underlying reason for this increase, he determined, was due to a shift in enforcement. “One of the chiefs of police made the point that the county is going through a shift in work staff, with older officers retiring. Younger officers tend to spend more time on the road and they have to do more traffic enforcement. More traffic enforcement leads to more people getting pulled over for DUIs.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Joshua Vaughn, a criminal justice reporter at the Sentinel newspaper in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Vaughn taught himself coding and built tools that allowed him to scrape data from public records. He shares how this information has both supported the reporting he had been already doing and led to new stories about the criminal justice system.

#183 – Data journalism by the numbers

Data journalism leads top 10 podcasts for 2016

Welcome to It’s All Journalism’s year-end wrap up. I had a little time and thought it would be fun to look back over the very busy year we had on the podcast and also look ahead to what we’re going to be focusing on in 2017.

In grand year-in-review fashion, I’ve decided to count down our 10 most popular podcasts. That’s one of the nice things about having data analytics, you’ve got all the download information at your fingertips. I’m proud of all 58 episodes we produced this year, but these are the ones that people seemed to like the best.

#10 – Where economic policy and real life meet

This episode came about thanks to Meggan Ellingboe over at American Public Media. We’d done a couple of podcasts before about the radio journalism that they’ve been doing, but she pitched me an interview with reporter Krissy Clark who was launching The Uncertain Hour podcast. This venture focused on the intersection between economics and daily life.

It was fun hearing about how Krissy takes an often dry subject and finds a way to humanize it.

#9 – Solutions journalism: Recipe for engaging local communities

Peter Brown over at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism reached out to me about a new report they were releasing on solutions journalism. It was a topic I wasn’t that familiar with. But, after reading the report, I became really enthusiastic about how journalists could hone in on an issue and foster positive change within a community. He introduced me to Andrea Wenzel, the report’s author, and we had a great talk.

#8 – Diversity makes for better journalism

At the 2015 Online News Association conference in Los Angeles, I saw an excellent presentation on diversity in news media, which was sadly under attended. Diversity should be a top concern for all newsrooms, not to mention the whole country. One of the panelists at the ONA conference was Meredith Clark, an assistant professor of digital and print news at the Mayborn School of Journalism. She was a great guest on the podcast and even invited me to talk about podcasting to one of her classes.

#7 – Campaign 2016: Welcome to the sideshow

I’m not too surprised that this episode was among the most downloaded. The presidential election was on everyone’s mind this year, especially journalists. I met Gabrielle Levy, a political reporter with U.S. News and World Report, at a meet up of journalists hosted by the National Governors Association. We struck up a conversation and when I found out she was covering the presidential race, I invited her to come into the studio. Despite our best efforts, the conversation quickly turned to the antics of one presidential candidate in particular.

#6 – Experiment in local engagement and sustainability

ONA President Josh Hatch, who’s a long-time supporter of the podcast, pointed to Josh Stearns at a conference one time and said that we should interview him about the important work he’s doing. We did and had a great conversation about the Local News Lab, an initiative of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. About a year and a half later, Stearns reached out to us for a follow up interview. We spoke to him and Molly de Aguiar about sustainable solutions for local news outlets.

#5 – How publications can thrive online

Tiffany Shackelford, the former executive director of our media partner the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, told me about how Metro Publisher was helping some of her member papers find success online. Mark Pratt and Michael Romano, the editorial content and provider editor and designer and project manager, respectively, came on the podcast to talk about a series of instructional videos they were producing for journalists. We ended up talking about search engine optimization (SEO).

#4 – This could help you write more clickable headlines

I have a confession to make. This is one of the most blatantly self-serving podcasts we did this year. In my day job as a digital editor at Federal News Radio, I’m constantly looking at web traffic and tinkering with headlines. Chris Breaux, a data scientist and team lead with Chartbeat, wrote a report about which types of headlines perform best among Chartbeat customers. We had a great discussion. Of course, my click-baitey headline for the episode might also have contributed to the number of downloads for this episode.

#3 – Think globally when it comes to reporting

The two types of interviews that work best on the podcast, I think, are the ones that are either flat-out instructional or provide a glimpse into a type of journalism that many of us wish we could pursue. Both types of interviews are represented in our top three most popular podcasts. My interview with Peter Klein, a professor at the University of British Columbia and director of the Global Reporting Centre, is a little bit of both. He provides a peek into the challenges facing a global reporter and describes the skills one needs to pursue that career. It was an informative conversation with a very interesting man.

#2 – Finding stories inside statistics

A work colleague introduced me to Sean McMinn, a data journalist at CQ Roll Call. How to use data to inform stories is something that a lot of journalists are interested in learning, so it’s not too surprising that this is so high up there in the top 10 podcasts of 2016. Sean takes us through his journalist’s journey to becoming a data reporter and shares a few tips.

#1 – Data journalism by the numbers

Although I’m pleased with all 58 episodes we produced in 2016 and the others in our top 10, I’m happy to see my interview with John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist with the Financial Times in London and a lecturer in City University there, made it to the top of the list. Not only is it an instructional interview, but it encapsulates a lot of what we try to do with It’s All Journalism — talk to journalists about how they do their jobs so that we can all learn something new. John shared some secrets and discussed the work behind some of the projects he’s done for the Times. On top of that, John is a listener of the podcast, so it was nice having him be a part of it. We met via social media, where I invited him to participate.

What will 2017 bring?

I wish there were a long list of interviews lined up that I could tell you about, but there isn’t. It’s All Journalism, probably more than it ought to be, has always been a seat-of-your-pants endeavor. Producer Nicole Ogrysko, web editor Amber Healy and I are always on the lookout for potential guests. If you know of one — or are one yourself — drop us an email.

There is no shortage of topics, though, especially in the current political climate.

These days, it’s fashionable to say something like, “Journalism has never been more important than it is now.”

Well, I think journalism — good journalism — has always been important. Maybe people just haven’t appreciated that until now.

What’s important is that we do our jobs, hone our craft, listen and report. Let’s hold truth to power in 2017.

Happy New Year!

Michael O’Connell

#233 – Sacramento alt weekly takes post-election gut check

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Rachel Leibrock woke up feeling sick on Wednesday, Nov. 9. She thought about calling in sick to her job as the editor of the Sacramento News & Review. But after watching Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, she knew that was unacceptable. There was work to be done.

“One of the amazing things about that day was how every single person on my staff came in to talk about what we need to do next, what we do going forward,” she said. “We had these really intense, sometimes teary conversations about what our role was. We got down to brass tacks. OK, we should ditch this story, push it back a week, let’s get an essay in about the election. We ended up ditching our New 1 spread, two full pages, jettisoning that in favor of photos of protests held over the weekend.”

Rachel Leibrock is the editor of the News & Review, an alt-weekly newspaper in Sacramento, California.

Working with a sense of purpose is nothing new to Leibrock, who came to the News & Review after nine years at Sacramento’s daily paper. In 2015, she and her staff developed a project in which philosophers, scientists, reporters and others wrote letters to future generations to address one of two possible actions of the Paris meeting on climate change: Letters reflecting the world if the accord was signed and if it was not.

“We offered our letters up for free to other alt weeklies and invited them to solicit their own letters from their community,” Leibrock said. The letters started publishing just before the meeting took place. Hard copies of many of the letters were also presented to the delegates at the Paris meeting in December 2015 before the accord was signed.

Dozens of letters were received, so many that the paper had to build a designated website to publish them all. Some of the people who were asked to write letters were hesitant at first and weren’t quite sure what they should say. “We’d have a conversation about just how important the accord is and what the future impact could be, whether signed or not, what kind of planet we want to leave for future generations,” she said. “People would get inspired and write these really passionate screeds.”

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Leibrock and her staff decided to revisit that idea, preparing two articles looking at the actions required on climate change both nationally and in California depending on the winner of the election and in light of the Paris accord. While they were “leaning” toward the probability of a Clinton victory, Leibrock asked her reporter, Alastair Bland, if he’d be available the morning after, just in case.

She held off writing an email to Bland throughout election night as the returns came in. Instead, he emailed her around 11 p.m., promising her a revised article the next morning.

“The story has to be revised a couple of times over the next few days because (Donald) Trump was already looking at particular people to run the EPA, someone considered a climate change skeptic. This story in particular, we told other alt weeklies, could run any time between then and the inauguration. So far I think we’ve had 20 papers pick it up.”

— Amber Healy

#228 – Alt weekly, university team up to train young journalists

#232 – Maybe fake news isn’t the real problem

Before pointing too many angry fingers at the supposed phenomenon of fake news, consider the amount of less-than-truthful articles created daily compared to the average amount of stuff on the internet every day.

The verdict? Fake news might draw 8 million clicks in three months, but that’s a small overall percentage of what readers are exposed to during a given time, argues Aram Zucker-Scharff, a developer for Salon and a freelance developer for Press Forward.

Photo courtesy of Aram Zucker-Scharff

“For sure, fake news is troubling. It’s bad that there are people out there telling lies and painting it as the truth. There’s nothing that is incorrect to be worried about that,” he said. “At the same time, the scale is not as concerning as it’s painted to be.”

Buzzfeed estimated that fake news articles had about 8.7 million views over the three months leading up to the 2016 election, but “in comparison to what news organizations and the general internet gets daily, it’s relatively minor,” he said. “I compare it to a John Oliver video which, in the course of two months, gets more than half of that (amount of traffic). Some get more than that. There are John Oliver videos that got more video views, which are more significant than Facebook engagement.”

The bottom line is that fake news isn’t news in and of itself, nor is it the massive problem it’s portrayed.

What is new, or at least a more recent occurrence, is the use of ads designed to look like legitimate newspaper articles. Sometimes, as in a recent New York Times article, an ad for a fake news site is embedded into a real news story.

“If the media had any issues with this election, it came from our own internal decisions,” Zucker-Scharff said. “I think we were too reliant on polls that were not very symbolic of the electorate. This was perhaps a problem unique in this case because there were a lot of issues and many situations in which people were not willing to admit who they were voting for. Also, there’s a big disconnect between media organizations and smaller towns.”

In the past, there were reporters on the ground to call out what was happening from town to town. “We used to have local newspapers out there and now, not so much.” Voters don’t live just in “the media hotspots of D.C. and New York City,” he said.

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Aram Zucker-Scharff about his recent Medium article, The media is a business and journalism is a job. Get it together., which examines the perceived threat of fake news and Facebook’s recent solution — fact-checking by news outlets like the Associated Press.

#122 – Geeks, GamerGate and games journalism with Aram Zucker-Scharff

#231 – Jessica Abel: Words, images, storytelling and beyond

Jessica Abel approaches her work as a cartoonist in the way a writer would approach putting words on a page. Telling a good story in either format, just as writing fiction or non-fiction, requires many of the same skills.

“Good writing is good writing, to a certain extent,” said Abel, an author, cartoonist and podcaster, who started writing comics in college and tried her hand at illustrating a non-fiction strip for the New City paper in Chicago in the early 1990s. She started drawing comics after reading Love and Rockets, which inspired her. “Instead of just being a reader, I wanted to be a maker,” she recalled. “It was the first thing I read that dealt with real people, real stories in the real world.”

That impulse has served her well over the years, leading her to experiment with telling stories combining written words with comics.

Jessica Abel

“Comics, like all art forms, have strengths and weaknesses,” including the ability to compress many concepts and events into a single scene or image. The use of word bubbles can help a reader fall into the pace of a story, speeding up or slowing down in rhythm with the story’s action. On the other hand, if a single narrator is in the middle of a monologue, in comics that could take pages and pages of illustration and the reader could get bored, she says.

There are elements of comics that work really well in prose, however.

When she decided to revisit Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a book she wrote with This American Life host Ira Glass, she wanted to expand on some of the original concepts and get into the weeds a bit more on the secrets of radio producers and how good radio programs are made.

“If you want to make audio that’s as strong as you hear on Radiolab or This American Life, these are the things these people look for,” Abel said.

One of her favorite aspects of writing her recent graphic novel on audio storytelling, Out on The Wire, was “translating this entirely audio medium to images, crafting metaphors for audio things. I think visual metaphors are incredibly instructive on how comics work. I knew I wanted to do this: Embedded in this book is what’s important for narrative, not just audio.”

For example, in one passage, a character she calls “Meta Ira,” named for Glass, pops into a scene in which soundtracking is discussed, the way in which music can be cut out of the background to let an important message stand out.

“Ira pops in front and says, ‘This is amazing. It’s totally true.’ When something’s important, you drop everything else out and you shine a light on it,” she said. “In the panel where he says it’s like dropping a light on it, I drop everything except Ira. The panels above are super busy. It’s very clearly like he’s spotlighted. It’s a way of talking about storytelling in general. How do you translate that to prose? I don’t know but I’m sure you could. Almost everything I do, when I talk about narrative in this way, has analogs in other media. I’m really interested in talking about those analogs and how to do things better.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to cartoonist Jessica Abel about the differences and surprising similarities in audio and graphic storytelling. Abel is the author of Out on The Wire, a graphic novel about the storytelling techniques behind the popular Radiolab and This American Life radio shows.

#143 – Comics create immersive experience

#230 – That timed we killed a beauty pageant …

Every journalist comes to their respective newsroom in a different way, but almost all have a similar starting point: a high school English teacher.

For this week’s podcast, the three producers discussed their trials and tribulations in the newsroom, trying to find the humor and personality in covering the federal government and how to go about covering difficult stories in which reporters are treated as hostile witnesses to painful events.

It’s All Journalism producers Nicole Ogrysko and Michael O’Connell (Photo by Steve Johnson)

But mostly, it’s a discussion of the vast variety of odd news stories they’ve covered over their careers.

There’s the time Michael O’Connell went to a Star Trek collectable card game tournament. “The card company had released a set of new cards a few days before the event. Some of the people, who were very smart card players, realized there was a fault in the mechanism they’d introduced in this set. They were just cleaning up and knocking out all these people who’d spent months and months strategizing how they were going to win this thing. There was all this emotional turmoil going back and forth over this little card game. That was what the story was.”

Or when the Miss Springfield Pageant in Springfield, Virginia, crowned a winner on a Thursday night and, by Friday morning, the winner’s crown was in danger of being revoked. By the time the newspaper’s new issue went out a week later, a different queen was crowned and the pageant never took place again. It’s still one of Amber Healy’s favorite stories to recount.

For Nicole Ogrysko, one of her first journalism projects was covering the efforts to raise money for new cafeteria chairs. The headline on the story, “25 grand? I’d rather stand!” remains a fond memory. In her college newspaper, a series on the school’s cafeteria company may or may not have resulted in the service workers getting a well-deserved raise that she swears is not directly linked to her team’s reporting. “That was a huge learning opportunity for me. At that point, I didn’t know how to go up and talk to people and say hey, can you give me this thing you’re not allowed to give me,” she said.

— Amber Healy

#50 – Podcast Special: Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post

It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.

#238 – Trump’s ‘hurry-up offense’ keeps press corps scrambling

#237 – PRX CEO sees positive trends ahead for podcasting

#236 – It’s the moment alt papers were made for

#235 – Is it ethical for a journalist to go to church?

#234 – DIY approach to data scraping bolsters crime coverage

Data journalism leads top 10 podcasts for 2016

#10 – Where economic policy and real life meet

#9 – Solutions journalism: Recipe for engaging local communities

#8 – Diversity makes for better journalism

#7 – Campaign 2016: Welcome to the sideshow

#6 – Experiment in local engagement and sustainability

#5 – How publications can thrive online

#4 – This could help you write more clickable headlines

#3 – Think globally when it comes to reporting

#2 – Finding stories inside statistics

#1 – Data journalism by the numbers

What will 2017 bring?

#233 – Sacramento alt weekly takes post-election gut check

#232 – Maybe fake news isn’t the real problem

#231 – Jessica Abel: Words, images, storytelling and beyond

#230 – That timed we killed a beauty pageant …