#229 – Uncovering fake, clickbait-y and not really ‘news’ news sites

Much noise has been made in recent weeks about the proliferation of “fake” or misleading news during the last election cycle. One professor has decided to try to help her students discern real, reputable sources from less-than-truthful ones and, like the old saying goes, it’s not gone unpunished.

Melissa Zimdars is an associate professor in the department of communications at Merrimack College in Massachusetts and had been talking with her students about not only fake news but articles that were misleading or contained a mix of real and not-quite-real facts.

Melissa Zimdars is an associate professor in the department of communications at Merrimack College.

“In a lot of ways, I was more concerned about a gray area of news that combines elements of truth with exaggeration or other kinds of falsities,” she said.

It’s not just a Republican issue or a Democratic one; something conservatives fall prey to more often than liberals or vice versa.

“It’s an issue across the political spectrum,” Zimdars said. “A lot of news entities have been interviewing creators of fake news sites and they’re saying liberals just don’t circulate fake news in the same way conservatives do, suggesting they were creating information to be circulated by people who identified as conservative.”

That some pundits, talking head and political commenters are pointing to fake or misleading news articles as a factor in this year’s presidential election is purely a matter of good timing, Zimdars says.

To help her students, Zimdars created a list, originally shared with her students via Google Docs, outlining the difference between “outright fake news sites, like 70news.wordpress.com” but also “sites that are generally misleading or may contain a lot of unreliable information, but they generally report on actual news, even if their style isn’t in a news style or relies on clickbait.”

The real risk of misleading information is that it can be shared on social networks by people who are trusted, reliable news professionals.

“Even my liberal friends on Facebook, who are journalists and teach journalism, I was looking at sites they were circulating for years in question.”

“Even my liberal friends on Facebook, who are journalists and teach journalism, I was looking at sites they were circulating for years in question,” she said.

When starting work on what became her list – she originally envisioned a searchable document for her students and other journalists to use— she realized the sites in question generally fell into one of three categories: “The first category is just fake. The ones coming from Macedonia, or maybe being created in the U.S. for various reasons. They basically have no verifiable information (and they) may be directly counter to the facts and evidence reported by other news publications.”

The second category is “gray” sites that combine news and opinion, where it’s “not always clear to readers and watchers of these websites” what’s real and what’s manufactured.

The third category is “clickbait stuff, which can include a lot of mainstream publications and news organizations for various reasons. That’s why, ultimately, the resource needs to span the whole continuum of news organizations. These have verifiable and reliable information, even if it’s coming from a political perspective.”

It’s tough out there for journalists and, possibly, even more so for students just starting out. But fake or misleading information makes it tough for reporters as well as consumers.

“There’s enough truthful stuff happening to be angry or concerned about,” she said. “We don’t really need to also put out false information that, if anything, drowns out what we should be talking about.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, hosts Michael O’Connell and Nicole Ogrysko talk to Melissa Zimdars, an associate professor in the department of communications at Merrimack College, about the online list she created documenting fake news sites. The discuss how the prolifiration truthful website and how the

#213 – Trump tests journalistic traditions of objectivity, balance

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

A city with a strong daily newspaper that doesn’t always prioritize local news; a journalism school full of students living in a thriving city telling stories that might not be read outside their professor’s office.

Problem? Meet solution.

Brooke Van Dam, Associate Professor and Faculty Director of the MPS in Journalism at Georgetown University

Brooke Van Dam, an associate professor and faculty director of the Masters in Professional Studies in Journalism program at Georgetown University, reads the Capstone projects written by graduate students in their final semester of the 30-unit program.

“In the Capstone class, they traditionally worked on enterprise stories, smaller stories that they write for their professor or lecturer. I think that’s super neat. However, I found they’re writing really interesting things (including) a lot about D.C. I thought it was silly I was the only one reading it when they were producing really good content,” she said.

Inspired, Van Dam reached out to Liz Garrigan, the new editor at the Washington City Paper, who was in the process of repatriating to D.C. from Paris after a six-year stretch.

Van Dam’s idea made a lot of sense to Garrigan and the two worked out a system that will begin in January, giving Van Dam’s graduate students the opportunity to have their work published in the City Paper. Not only will it give Van Dam’s students a wider audience, the arrangement will help fill some of the admitted shortcomings in the City Paper’s coverage.

“We’ve had a problem in this industry, and really, if I’m being honest, alt weeklies tend to be a very white workforce,” Garrigan said. “When Brooke first came to me with this idea, among the benefits I thought was to a) recruit young, talented, post-graduated voices, people with a little more seasoning and more maturity, which is always welcome, and to try to nurture that talent and get it in the paper.”

Liz Garrigan, editor, Washington City Paper

The City Paper wants to “reflect more voices, a different generation,” Garrigan added. “This isn’t for the sake of diversity of color on its own. It’s because people who are different, people who are varied in their backgrounds and their lives, can bring different ideas. There are going to be stories I’ll never come across in this city because I’m an aging white woman with two children.”

The stories will be vetted, first by Van Dam and the program at Georgetown, then by the staff at the City Paper.

At a time when journalism is in the crosshairs of a national debate on what’s a reputable, verifiable source of truthful news and not fake “reporting,” it’s crucial that students graduating from journalism programs know how to do the job they’re setting out to tackle, Van Dam said.

“I think J schools have a tough time,” she said. “There’s not as many jobs out there as there once was. The jobs out there look a lot different. The newsroom is changing,” especially as more news desks are relying on freelance reporters or teams that work remotely instead of all working from a centralized location.

The other problem is that “journalists are their worst PR people,” Van Dam said. “We don’t do good enough PR for what we do. I hope we start advocating for ourselves. Look what happens when we don’t have truthful information. People make judgments based on that (bad or false information) that they might not have made if they had good information.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Brook Van Dam, an associate professor and faculty director of the Masters in Professional Studies in Journalism program at Georgetown University, and Liz Garrigan, editor at the Washington City Paper, about a new partnership that will be kicking off in January in which students’ work will be published in the City Paper. They also discuss the recent presidential election and the challenges J schools and alt weeklies face in developing young talent to report on stories that matter.

#227 – Photographer captures faces of DC’s streets

He’s moved from processing his own film in a dark room to creating dream-like, blurry-edged digital images, but Darrow Montgomery’s muse is, was and will remain his hometown of Washington, D.C.

Self portrait of Darrow Montgomery

Now celebrating his 30th anniversary at the Washington City Paper, Montgomery’s relationship with photography began like so many others do: “In high school I had to pick an elective and the girl I was interested in picked photography, so I picked photography too.” With a good-natured chuckle, Montgomery said the relationship went nowhere — with the girl.

“The first roll of film, the magical thing developing under your eyes. That was that,” he said

As a student at the Corcoran School of Art, he needed an internship and, fully enamored with photography by then, Montgomery figured he’d get a gig at the City Paper, which he imagined would look like the newsrooms he saw on TV.

“I went over to it and it was a row house on 6th Street,” he says. “There was no darkroom. There were people sitting in the bedrooms, which were made into offices.” The people in charge at the time gave him a chance and, “next thing I knew I was shooting an assignment and I was shooting a cover story and I was doing it very poorly. I was terrified. I’d bring every camera I had amassed in my young life on assignment with me on a bicycle and a tripod I didn’t use or need, but I figured if I had the tool with me, I could answer the bigger problems.”

Now all he needs is either his smartphone or a camera with a 60mm lens.

Self portrait by Darrow Montgomery

Of course, that’s not all that’s changed in his three decades at the paper. The city he loves so much is changing in a hurry.

“The pace of change seems to have accelerated,” Montgomery said. “It’s had sleepy, bombed-out sections from the riots, places you wouldn’t go at night, places that would be dead at night, to a place that I wouldn’t recognize 20 years ago. The sort of population influx, the development the condo on every corner, the whole character has changed. The old 9:30 Club is a J. Crew.”

He points to a self-assigned project looking at Georgia Avenue from the Maryland line to Howard University in D.C. “It’s one of the few corridors that still looks the same as it did 30 years ago. It’s changing in pockets.” To capture the nature of the avenue, he rode buses back and forth on the strip, walked sections of it, drove himself around. “My intent was to make interesting pictures of that corridor. That was maybe three years ago. If I go back to some of those spots today, they’re gone.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Darrow Montgomery about his 30 years as a photographer for the Washington City Paper. Montgomery talks about how his work evolved as the city he covered changed. He tells how he went from film to digital, from black and white to color, and shares some tricks on how to make a piece of food look amazing in print.

#130 – Conflict through Ben Lowy’s eyes

#226 – Panda love and the federal beat

The road to becoming a Capitol Hill reporter was paved with city council meetings and panda pregnancies for Meredith Somers, a reporter with Federal News Radio.

The native of Columbus, Ohio, got her start in journalism in her home town, writing for a community newspaper after graduating from college in Connecticut. “I was covering my neighbors. … I was going down the street from my high school to listen to city council meetings.” After a while, however, she was ready for a change and, when some friends decided to move to Washington, D.C., for work, Somers packed up and made the move as well.

Meredith Somers is a reporter at Federal News Radio in Washington, D.C.

Working for the Maryland Independent in Waldorf, Somers went from covering city council to reporting on a county commission meetings “for an area where 60 percent of the workforce left every morning to work in DC. You’re dealing with a lot of educated, well-off residents who were federal employees. We were the ones having to do the job of telling them what was going on in the county,” she said.

The scope of her reporting expanded as well. “In Southern Maryland, you’ve got proving grounds and an army base and these beautiful wetlands and tributaries to the Chesapeake Bay and these big long undeveloped expanses of land. You go to the commission meeting with these big black SUVs and there’s a mom and pop store across the street that doesn’t want this big giant building coming in next to them,” she said. After a year and a half, she moved on to The Washington Times, working as a general assignment reporter covering the 2012 Democratic National Convention, the Occupy DC movement and pandas at the National Zoo.

“Panda reproduction is the most complicated thing,” Somers said. “They don’t just reproduce naturally. … These things eat bamboo but there’s no nutritional value in it, they have to eat too much of it because their stomach doesn’t tolerate it. They don’t like to have sex so they never reproduce and when they do, it’s a surprise. Every couple of months it’s she might be pregnant or she might just have gained a little weight. Let’s just hope she doesn’t roll over on it or eat it when it’s born!”

It was kind of exciting to be on zoo duty when Bao Bao was born, a year after the National Zoo’s panda delivered a cub that later died, but seeing people lined up at 3 a.m. to see the new baby panda on the first day it was allowed out for public viewing was a bit much.

Now, at Federal News Radio, she’s making big, complicated and acronym-heavy stories relatable, not just to the federal workforce in Washington but to readers across the country.

For example, the Department of Defense is trying to reconfigure its infrastructure of email servers. “Who cares,” she says. “But then you think, ok, if we went to war or got attacked, or if our family or loved ones overseas got attacked, you’d want to make sure everyone’s on the same page. It’s not always like that. This really does apply and it does impact more than the audience I know is reading this.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to reporter Meredith Somers about covering the inner workings of the federal bureaucracy at Federal News Radio in Washington, D.C. Somers discusses covering community news and the challenges of making a complex subject relatable.

#127 – Mike Causey walks the federal beat

#225 – Investigative podcast sheds light on 27-year-old abduction

For more than 20 years, Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance remained a baffling puzzle.

“Jacob, in 1989, was 11-years old. He lived in a small town, St. Joseph, in central Minnesota. One night, he went with his friend and his brother on a bike ride, around 9 o’clock at night, to get a video,” recounted Madeleine Baran, a reporter on American Public Media’s In the Dark podcast. The ride was short, on a dead-end road, but on the way home, the boys came across a man in the middle of the road. The man forced the boys into a ditch, asked them their ages, then told the other two boys to run away and not look back or he’d shoot them.

Samara Freemark and Madeleine Baran of American Public Media

“The boys ran back to the Wetterling’s house, reported it to the police and the police got there right away,” Baran said. “A massive investigation began, with the National Guard, the FBI, the state’s crime bureau, the sheriff’s office. It was one of the largest missing persons operations in the United States.”

Yet from that day in 1989 until relatively recently, Jacob’s disappearance remained a mystery. The case is the subject of In the Dark, yet Baran and the podcast’s producer, Samara Freemark, didn’t set out to play detective or try to solve the case themselves.

“As an investigative reporter, I wanted to know what really happened here,” Baran said. “This is a case that seems, on the face of it, so simple and had so many resources, but it could not be solved.”

Instead, In the Dark looks at the responsibility to the public owed by first responders, investigators and others that were involved in the investigation of Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance.

“From a production standpoint, it’s an interesting challenge,” Freemark said. “The part of the story that’s most compelling, the plot of what happened, interested us least.” They didn’t want to be exploitative in their work, nor was that the focus of the podcast.

The central theme was whether the investigators, on all levels and from all organizations, lived up to their responsibility to the public.

The biggest challenge to telling that story was the fact that the case was still an open investigation, at least at the beginning, meaning the case file was sealed and unusable.

“There’s a confession, and the case file itself, hundreds of thousands of pages of paper — there’s a whole room in the sheriff’s office for it – none of that’s been released to the public,” Baran said. “We were trying to figure out what went wrong in a case where we did not have access to the files you have in closed cases.”

As a result, their research had to go a little more low-tech – there was no internet in 1989, after all — and involved newspaper clippings from the investigation and, in one case, literally digging through boxes for research.

As Baran was interviewing a former police chief, his wife remembered she had a video of coverage of the investigation into Wetterling’s disappearance. She was about to throw the tape out that week when Baran came by for an interview.

“She recorded everything of the early days, all the stations, all of it on one tape,” she said.

Free mark added: “For the podcast, in terms of production, it helps place you in the scene, but also for facts. Just knowing what was going on at the time. We did a clip review, we went through all the newspapers as well, but being able to see some of that stuff, the way it was covered on TV and radio, it was useful.”

— Amber Healy

On this episode of It’s All Journalism, host Michael O’Connell talks to American Public Media’s Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark about In the Dark, their podcast investigation into the 29-year-old abduction case of Minnesota resident Jacob Wetterling. In the Dark does try to solve the case, rather it takes hard look at why it took authorities so long to solve the crime.

#205 – Where economic policy and real life meet

#224 – David Jackson schools us on podcasting

David Jackson knows how to podcast. He’s been doing it for 11 years, far longer than most fans of the medium have known it existed.

Jackson started his first podcast in 2005,looking up information in a pre-Google internet world and capturing his attention and curiosity. “I uploaded a file and saw it come down in my podcatcher and said this has a huge amount of potential,” he said. As a corporate trainer, he saw an opportunity to teach people vital information while also providing him a paying gig as the latest round of corporate downsizing meant his trainer skills weren’t in high demand for a short while.

David Jackson is the founder of The School of Podcasting.

His first long-term podcast was an audio version of a newsletter he was already writing,The Musician’s Cooler. In April 2005, he launched The School of Podcasting, which has been running ever since.

Podcasting scratched a series of itches for Jackson. “It’s kind of geeky, the whole website, RSS feeds, the whole nine yards,” he says. “You can be as creative as you want. My biggest itch, being a corporate trainer, is I like to help people. I was able to do all of that.”

But what really made up his mind to dedicate so much time to podcasting was a phone call.

“My very first piece of voicemail came from a guy in Germany,” he recalled. “I almost fell out of my chair. When I got my first piece of feedback from a guy in Germany, that was it. I’m podcasting ‘til I die.”

There’s a very strategic approach that Jackson takes to developing the material for his courses, building on a lifelong habit of taking notes.

“When I’m learning a new subject, I write down everything I get stuck on,” he said. “If I get stuck, I know my students will do that. As I was going through and learning Audacity … it was just a matter of writing it down and coming up with a tutorial or something for future students. As my students came in and asked a question, oooh, that’s a really good question, let me come up with a tutorial. I’d answer it and then come up with a tutorial.”

His M.O.? “I’ve always wanted to help you avoid the mistakes I’m going to make,” Jackson said. “Let me be the crash test dummy. I’ll go in and figure out what’s going on and say, ‘OK, this is a really great tool as long as you don’t do this, this or that, and always do this.’ By doing that, I help you avoid headaches.”

But perhaps the most important piece of insight Jackson can offer is how much time podcasting really takes.

“I’ve timed it. It’s a four-to-one ratio,” he said. “If I want to do a 15 minute podcast, it’s going to take an hour,” by the time the subject is determined, research is done, the audio is recorded and edited and the final work posted, both in an audio form and written material used for promotion. “If you want to do an hour-long podcast? Congratulations, you’ve just sneezed away four hours.”

— Amber Healy

On the week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to David Jackson, founder of The School of Podcasting about his 10-plus years as a podcaster and how he uses his experiences to teach others to do the same.

#221 – Follow the golden rule in podcast recording

#223 – Are you part of journalism’s lost generation?

When newsrooms downsize, it’s not just a loss of job opportunities for young reporters. It’s a loss of community history and institutional knowledge, leaving new reporters at a disadvantage in more ways than one.

Scott Reinardy, a professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, explores how the changing state of journalism is influencing reporters at all stages of their careers in a new book, Journalism’s Lost Generation: The Un-doing of U.S. Newspaper Newsrooms.

Scott Reinardy, Professor, News/Info Chair, Journalism, University of Kansas.

His research began more than a decade ago, during his masters and Ph.D. work at the University of Missouri. A veteran reporter of 15 years, Reinardy says he’s always been “fascinated by newsrooms. It’s such an interesting and eclectic mix of people and characters, people who are really committed not only to a profession but almost a calling, to a sense.”

As he started considering research work for his Ph.D., he wanted to look at the pressures placed on journalist in terms of workload, the expectations of their editors and readers.

“That was before layoffs started,” he said.

The layoffs, by the way, have been staggering: In the past 10 years, it is estimated some 20,000 jobs have been lost through cutbacks and layoffs. Some of those journalists lost more than just a job, deciding to turn instead to a different career altogether.

But that’s not the only generation of journalists that have been lost.

“A second lost generation is the older generation of journalists who have been around for many, many years,” he said. “Not only have they lost a lot of their friends in the newsrooms and are now working in diminished newsrooms, their workload has changed dramatically,” having to take on new tasks including photography, videography and social media. “They’re a little lost in terms of trying to find where they belong in this new era of newspapers.”

The new crop of recent college grads is a third component of lost journalists for myriad reasons.

“They’re walking into newsrooms where the norms and the traditions that have been beholden to newsrooms for decades — or centuries, maybe — has really been shattered. They’re coming into an environment where the landscape is completely different from what it used to be.” Older journalists who still populate the newsroom “don’t have the time or inclination to really acclimate these young people into an environment of ‘let’s produce journalism like this, this is the quality of journalism we produce here at this paper.’ They come in with skills, multimedia and social media skills, which is great; however, when you start talking about what are the norms and expectations of what we’re trying to do each day, that becomes a little more murky that it used to be,” Reinardy said.

Each seasoned reporter takes with her the knowledge gained from working a beat, getting to know a community and the issues important to the people who live there, and without having those insights, younger journalists are at a disadvantage, he adds.

Further, newsrooms themselves aren’t what they used to be, as more reporters are working in the field and posting their work directly online, dissipating the camaraderie and sense of team that was once so strong in newspaper offices. It’s unclear what kind of impact that distance is having on news organizations, he says.

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Scott Reinardy, a professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, about his new book, Journalism’s Lost Generation: The Un-doing of U.S. Newspaper Newsrooms. They discuss how a decade of layoffs have affected newspaper newsrooms across the U.S. and what that bodes for journalists of multiple generations.

#222 – 360 digital video puts audience inside a story

Steve Johnson has always had an entrepreneurial streak, starting in high school when he’d take and sell photos of athletes from his school’s football team using a Mac Mini and some basic software. Now he’s a pioneer in the field of 360 digital storytelling, bringing audiences into stories with maneuverable photos giving a spherical view of the setting.

Steve Johnson with his 360 GoPro rig on its stand.

He was a student at the University of Florida and interning at the Orlando Sentinel in 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, unleashing billions of gallons of oil onto the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, most of the paper’s staff had been on assignment in Haiti, so Johnson was asked to shoot photo and video on location.

“I lived in the Gulf of Mexico for two months and realized the power of digital storytelling and feeding back information to your editor throughout the day,” he said. “It was a great experience that led to me teaching at the University of Florida right when I graduated and continuing to freelance for folks all over the place.”

After 3 1/2 years of that work, during which time he also earned a masters in entrepreneurship, Johnson moved up to Washington, D.C., about 13 months ago to work with nonprofit organizations, making documentaries.

Steve Johnson’s 360 video rig is made up of six interconnected GoPro cameras.

In addition to teaching workshops in which he stresses the importance of financial literacy — “I think journalism as a whole needs to be more aware of how much your stories are worth and how much you can charge for them,” he said — Johnson developed a way to use multiple GoPro cameras to capture not just one-directional photos and videos to accompany a story, but literally capture the world around a focal point and give readers and viewers a more complete idea of a story’s setting.

On the advice of a colleague from the University of Florida, Johnson makes all his work available, open source. “Even back in February, when we did the first 360 piece, we brought a climate scientist to Iceland and did the first that had never been done before, this interview on camera,” he says. He asked whether he should keep the technique a secret or share the knowledge. “Their advice was open source it, own it and be the expert. Let’s be honest. I didn’t cure cancer. Someone else will figure it out too.”

His company, Boundless, is centered on the idea of helping people tell better stories, both in text and visually. The difference is, the viewer controls the perspective of the photos and videos related to the piece.

“With 360, you almost want to encourage pedestrian-ness of shots, because you want them to feel like they’re just there, experiencing it with you,” he said. “I think there’s a level of authenticity in that.”

With 360 photography and videography, the level of professionalism is drastically different. “You get to look around and experience it on your own,” Johnson said . “In terms of storytelling, it poses a great challenge. You have to decide, from clip to clip, where do you think the audience is going to be looking. It’s a challenge. I would say it’s one of the hardest things I’ve done in storytelling and it’s one of the most rewarding.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, hosts Michael O’Connell and Nicole Ogrysko interview Steve Johnson, who’s blazing trails with his 360 video storytelling. From the tops of mountains to inside glaciers, Johnson’s work put the audience in the middle of a story. He talks about some of the hardware he uses and some of the thinking that goes into this new type of journalism.

#124 – Oculus Rift and immersive journalism

#221 – Follow the golden rule in podcast recording

It may seem like an obvious point, or counterintuitive, but the key to a good sounding podcast is giving it a listen in different locations.

Chris Curran, a podcast producer and founder of Fractal Recording and the Podcast Engineering School among other endeavors, said that while having content worth listening to is the number one factor when setting up a podcast, it’s important to use the tools at hand, and some common sense, to make a podcast that’s enjoyable to listen to from an audio quality standpoint.

Chris Curran is the host of the Podcast Engineering School.

“A lot of people who are getting into podcasting, especially if they’re a little more technical in nature, they really can go overboard with their audio,” he said. “They can stress over buying a microphone for three months or they can stress about their workflow and their equipment and their mixer. There is a danger of focusing too much in the beginning on the technology and the microphone. … You can have the tools. You can have a hammer and nails, but you can do a really crappy job building something. You have to know how to use the tool.”

Equalization of bass and treble is vital, he said. Some producers want to boost the bass, thinking it’ll add a deeper, “radio voice” quality to a recording but there’s a danger in that approach of making the recording sound “muddy,” he said.

“Most people don’t hear that because they don’t know frequencies,” Curran added. “They don’t know what they’re listening for. The human voice is … a midrange sort of instrument. The really critical part of the human voice is in the midrange. It’s not really in the low end, 80 and 100 hertz. That’s too low.”

Secondly, when possible, podcasters should use separate channels to record guests and mix them together later in the final edit, in order to make sure louder, more booming voices don’t overpower quieter ones. There are services, like Auphonic, that can help tweak recordings to bring loud and soft voices to the same level.

“The golden rule of audio engineering is record it properly the first time. Period,” he said. “Because if you don’t record it properly, then you’re going to have to get into all these fixes and tricks and techniques and plug ins. You’re going to have to jump through nine hoops to make it sound better, but it still won’t sound great.”

And to check your work, he encouraged podcasters to listen to their recordings on a phone, on a wireless speaker, with headphones, with earbuds, in a car.

“If you listen in the car, that’s when you’ll notice the bass. You’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, there’s all this low end. It’s so muddy and it sounds so huge and almost unintelligible,’ because in your car you have big speakers with better bass. … Let’s say for the first 10 episodes, if you take every episode for the first 10 episodes and listen in different places and then make tiny adjustments for the next episode, you’ll dial it in over 10 episodes. You’ll tweak it and then it’ll be really good.”

— Amber Healy

This week on the It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell interviews Chris Curran, a podcast producer and founder of Fractal Recording and the Podcast Engineering School, about what goes into creating a really great sounding podcast.

#187 – How to build a successful podcast

#220 – Potential corruption exposed in NY governor’s office

On the urging of a source, Jim Heaney looked into the request for proposals (RFP) for the construction of a massive solar panel manufacturing plant on an industrial plot of land in South Buffalo, New York. He found in the language a stipulation that any development company interested in submitting a proposal must have been in business in Buffalo for at least 50 years in order to be considered.

The only company that fit the bill was owned by one of the governor’s top campaign contributors. When he called the governor’s office to ask about the language, Heaney was told it was a “clerical error,” a “typo” and nothing more, and that it would be fixed.

Jim Heaney is the founder of Investigative Post.

Two-and-a-half years later, nine top advisers and staff members of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo have been indicted into bid rigging and other potential corruptions in what’s been labeled as the “Buffalo Billion” project, one that Cuomo has touted and flaunted as a benevolent way to help Buffalo get back on its economic feet.

Heaney was a reporter with the Buffalo News for 25 years before taking a contract buyout and starting Investigative Post in 2012. With a team of five writers and staffers and four contractors, Investigative Post is the only news outlet in Western New York focused exclusively on watchdog journalism, and the indictments handed down on Sept. 22 can be tied back to an article Heaney published in December 2012.

The piece Heaney wrote “caught the attention of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who launched a federal investigation” into the “curious bidding procedures,” which has since become a statewide corruption investigation, Heaney said. “This is coming as close to the governor directly as possible without the governor directly being indicted.”

The Buffalo Billion program is a point of pride for Cuomo and the city of Buffalo itself, and “Frankly, there’s been a lot of cheerleading in the local press about this,” Heaney said. “We’ve been the ones pointing out all sorts of problems with transparency, promises not kept, doing the things investigative reporters do. It’s gratifying to see our work has led to an effort by the U.S. Attorney to try to clean up the corruption he’s uncovered during his investigation.”

After taking care of the “clerical error” in the original RFP, Heaney asked the governor’s office for more information on the vetting and review process for the submissions after the sole company that met the 50-year threshold was awarded the contract, even though other development firms submitted lower bids.

“I was dealing with Alain Kaloyeros, the governor’s point guy on this, and said I’d like the paperwork to document the process,” Heaney said. “I was completely stonewalled for six months on it. The state went to ridiculous lengths to deny me information, access to people, etc. I wound up doing a story in December 2014 on the lack of transparency, the 50-year requirement, the great, extraordinary lengths they went to to try and thwart my reporting.”

Heaney, whose team has started racking up awards for their work, stresses that there’s “no magic in what I did, you just do what reporters do. You ask questions and keep digging and when people try to deny you information, you dig in your heels and go after it that much harder.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell and website editor Amber Healy talk to Jim Heaney about launching Investigative Post, a watchdog website sniffing out corruption and speaking truth to power in Western New York. The Post’s 2 1/2-year investigation led to the recent indictments of nine members of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration over bid rigging and other potential corruption.

#208 – BINJ seeks to finance independent, investigative reporting

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It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.

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