Podcast Archives – It's All Journalism

428. Fake news, presidential deception and the Civil War

A president decides, in a moment of widespread political unrest, that the best course of action in the nation’s greatest interest is having journalists arrested for sharing a story that contained purposely false information.

A cutting-edge form of instant communication that people dreamed would unite a nation on the brink of disaster proved to be a wedge between the citizenry, driving friends further apart.

Author and writer Elizabeth Mitchel (Ceridwen Morris)

Powerful political leaders writing articles for newspapers and other outlets, under anonymous of false bylines, to garner votes and sway support for their actions of choice.

In researching her latest book, Elizabeth Mitchell found all this and more modern-day chaos — from 1864.

The book, Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House, details a series of incidents that could just as easily — or believably — be happening right now.

Mitchell’s career has included stints at Spin and George, but she admits she tried to get out of journalism classes in college because she wasn’t interested in being a reporter.

“I explained I would never need to get that education because that wasn’t what I was planning on being,” she says. “I was very interested in writing, I loved books.”

Still, Mitchell oversaw political and investigative pieces at Spin for a number of years, including hiring William Vollmann to cover the drug trade in Burma and the Bosnian war, and Elizabeth Gilbert, who landed on Mitchell’s radar after Bob Guccione Jr., the magazine’s founder, mentioned Gilbert wrote pretty interesting short stories. “She went all over the place and handed in perfect copy,” Mitchell recalls.

After working at Spin, Mitchell was headhunted to join the team at George and worked for several years alongside John F. Kennedy Jr.

But it’s the interview process that keeps her writing and reporting and researching.

“Fiction writers say the characters took over and surprised me — I could never get myself to the point of being surprised” when trying to write fiction, Mitchell says. “In non-fiction, people are constantly surprising you. There have been times I’ve interviewed people for many days, hours and hours of long conversation, and just as you’re about to hang up, they’ll say, ‘Oh, well, there’s this one other thing.’ It’s always that (thing) that turns the story in this incredible way. I can’t get enough of that experience. I find it so exciting that you can go in and you have a license to talk to anyone you’d like and you can ask anything you’re curious about and you can tell that story to anyone.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by author and editor Elizabeth Mitchell to talk about the interview process and how 1864 is more like 2020 than most people realize. Mitchell also discusses her new book, Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House

413. Long history of bad police responses to protests

427. Crime reporting: Covering violence and trauma

Some of the most difficult stories reporters write about involve violence and trauma. These are also among the most important stories a journalist will cover.

For a solid decade, Rachel Dissell and fellow reporter Leila Atassi, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, relentlessly sat in on task force meetings while the Cleveland Police Department went through 14,000 untested rape kits, some sitting on shelves for years.

They also covered the case of Anthony Sowell, a man who raped and killed at least 11 women in Cleveland, Dissell’s hometown, while assaulting others who managed to survive.

Later, she and Andrea Simakis wrote another series about Sandi Fedor, a woman who had to continually fight for her rape case to be examined, essentially doing most of the legwork herself.

“Like many reporters, I started out doing crime reporting, being the young person who gets sent out to every horrible thing that happens and is expected to know how to handle these weighty topics,” Dissell says. “A lot of other reporters didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The stories were complicated and difficult to report and I was attracted to it for that reason. Over the years, I kind of took a turn from telling these stories in a way that focused on individual cases to taking an eye more to the system that handled them.”

Over and over again, she and her writing partners found that the Cleveland Police Department just didn’t seem interested in pursuing rape cases, maybe not understanding at the time that rape kits can be used to identify assailiants and bring them to justice.

For the women raped and killed by Sowell, the reporters noticed a pattern among the survivors: They were women who, due to race or socioeconomic status or history of drug use, the police would be less likely to believe if they reported their attack.

When Dissell and Atassi realized that there were rape kits that had been essentially cast aside and ignored, the police were hard-pressed to explain why the kits were left untouched or even how many they had.

“They are still in the process of testing thousands,” Dissell says. “They ended up having people connected to 20 or more cases. The police did not see those kits as an investigative tool, they saw them as a way to prove a case. If they did have a case that was strong enough to make an arrest and go to court, they could use it to say, yes, we’re sure this is the right person.”

Sometime in the next month or so, the department will finish testing the final 200 kits. “Even though I no longer work for the Plain Dealer, I have such a strong urge to use the opportunity to look back,” she says.

Through all this gut-wrenching reporting, Dissell has learned a lot about trauma: That of her interview subjects, that which they cannot leave behind, and that which she carries with her after speaking with them.

She’s adopted an approach that works for her, in which she walks a person through the interview process before they have a single conversation. She lets them talk, undirected and mostly uninterrupted. She sits, listening. Sometimes the person will start with a seemingly uninvolved point, later realizing the person was outlining a life of horrible events.

“I always tell people, if at any point this isn’t working for you, let me know,” she says. “It’s not about me. If it’s causing damage, we can work with it or we can step away. No reporter wants to work for something for six months and have someone say I can’t do this. We have to be able to do that.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for her.

“We had one time, I know Andrea and I were working with Sandi and we left separately and texted each other when we got home that we cried the entire drive home,” Dissell says. “We had to admit it was getting to us… There is not a great way to deal with someone else’s trauma or your own trauma.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Rachel Dissell, a former reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, on her history of covering weighty and emotionally grueling crimes in her home city and the way she addresses the trauma of her subjects. Dissell recently wrote about Trauma Journalism in the Time of Coronavirus for the Dart Center For Journalism and Trauma.

418. California City: Secrets of a desert town revealed

Better News: How to win grants to fund journalism

In the past decade, media organizations have been awarded an estimated $300 million in grants to fund journalists and journalism projects — and the number of funders and dollars continues to grow.

Jane Elizabeth discusses how to win grants to fund journalism..

Jane Elizabeth is the managing editor of The News and Observer and The Herald-Sun in North Carolina. She recently wrote a guide for American Press Institute‘s Better News explaining how newsrooms can win grants to fund their journalism projects. Read the full guide here.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole.Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

426. Building relationships for the next generation of reporters

For 20 years, Doug Mitchell has worked diligently to expand the skill set of young journalists, opening their eyes and tool kits to the power of audio reporting.

His Next Generation Radio was designed to help people with an interest in public media develop storytelling and recording skills by participating in week-long training sessions.

Doug Mitchell of Next Generation Radio (Yunyi Dai)

“We needed to train our next generation to really think about audio interviewing, digital media, tools that are available to share audio,” he says. Students begin the course on Monday and by Friday have completed their research, conducted interviews, edited the material and written accompanying material on the finished story.

“The fundamental point is to find, train, and hopefully bring in to our system people who are either just out of college or less than five years into their career and either give them a refresher or a total immersion in audio,” he says.

Look below the surface and Next Generation Radio is more than that — it’s also about mentoring and developing relationships with students and helping them make choices in their careers that will benefit them in the long run.

“Since 2013, we are now 72 percent women in our cohort and 60 percent women of color,” Mitchell says, of the more than 460 people now affiliated with the group as a student or mentor.

His focus on building relationships and offering services and mentorship to young journalists also provided Mitchell the opportunity to dive more deeply into the idea of dealing with people on a transactional basis versus a relational one.

Next Generation Radio is built on developing relationships, between mentors and students but also students and their sources, he says.

“It’s about getting it done but also about building relationships,” he says. “It’s a long game. I don’t have the expectation — some people get jobs immediately, but a career is a life-long thing. It has to be built on relationships, not transactional.”

Mitchell was asked to contribute a piece to Nieman Reports recently, titled “Diversity, Equality, Inclusion and the Pipeline Problem.” He knows from experience that if the doors aren’t opened, or found, for journalists of color, they will have a much harder time breaking into the business.

“In public media, we need to continue to create new jobs, not just replacing someone who was in it, but replacing new jobs where people have more control over who they’re talking and it’s not just based on a screaming headline,” he says.

Some outlets are found to have a shortage of non-white sources and journalists will say they don’t have time to find a more diverse group of people to contact. “NPR said some 70 percent of its sources are white. How did you find them? You had to find the time to find the people you had, so you can make the time to find the people you don’t have,” he says.

If newsrooms say they’re not able to hire a more diverse team of reporters, the organization should ask why that is.

“Are people not wanting to move to whatever city because they don’t think there are enough people of color,” he asks. “If you really want to truly recruit and develop relationships, there has to be some sort of acknowledgment of individuals you want to empower.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by friend of the podcast Doug Mitchell, founder of Next Generation Radio, to discuss the long-lasting importance of relational approaches to journalism, for today and the future.

405. Former public radio journalist pushes back on ‘objectivity’

425. The crisis in local journalism is real

The number of reporting positions lost in the past few decades puts local journalism on par with the collapse of the coal industry.

“This is a shocking thing for people in the field, but there was a Pew survey last year that said three-quarters of people thought everything was fine for local news and it had plenty of money,” says Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America. “There’s no sense of what a crisis situation it is and it’s such an important part of how democracy works.”

Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America

Report for America is trying to help fix that. There are 225 reporters in the field, their salaries split between their local newsrooms and Report for America, to try and enhance and shore up coverage in local media and mitigate news deserts. The organization’s goal is to have 1,000 reporters placed in newsrooms across the country by 2024.

Newsrooms have until Sept. 30 to apply for a corps reporter, identifying how the journalist would help bolster their coverage and explaining where there’s a lack or weakness in a coverage area or region in general.

There are currently 20 to 30 Report for America journalists covering health care, helping provide information on the COVID-19 outbreak that might otherwise get lost in an ever-growing sea of national news.

The lack of local news coverage might be more apparent during the outbreak, Waldman says, because COVID-19 is ultimately a local news story, as much as it is an international one.

“With COVID, it’s so important to get local information,” he says. People need to know the outbreak rate in their communities, where to find testing locations and the availability of services.

There’s plenty of national coverage on COVID-19 as a whole, but a shortage of local reporters and news outlets makes it harder for people to get good, reliable, non-partisan information about what’s happening where they live.

The situation as it pertains to local news media is so dire, after some initial hesitation and the acknowledgment of an “existential crisis,” Report for America and a coalition of other media organizations is now supporting the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Arizona) and Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Washington), would provide tax credits to businesses and individuals for making charitable contributions or buying subscriptions to a local news organization.

“It also would provide a tax credit to local businesses to buy advertising on local news media,” Waldman says. “We felt that was a really interesting approach. It gets money in the hands of local news, but it’s up to the residents and businesses to decide where to put the money.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America, detailing how the organization is helping local news outlets address their coverage gaps and the group’s support for new legislation that could encourage newspaper subscriptions.

408. Google News Initiative wants to help local news

424. She Votes! recounts struggle for women’s suffrage

Ellen Goodman freely admits she wasn’t terribly well-versed in the history of women’s suffrage when she set out on her latest project.

“If you’d put down the list of suffragettes I knew, it would’ve ended with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” says Gooodman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who broke more than a few barriers early in her career. “Having done the research and interviewing and the thinking with Lynn Sherr, the story is so incredible and so dramatic and the story of the persistence of this diverse and engaged group of women who pursued the right to vote over three generations until they finally, finally pushed their way, it’s remarkable.”

Ellen Goodman is the host of She Votes!, a podcast she produced with Lynn Sherr of ABC News.

Goodman and Sherr, of ABC News, are the powerhouses behind She Votes!, a new podcast marking the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote.

“People say 100 years ago, they gave women the right to vote — they didn’t give women anything,” she says. “They lobbied. They pushed. They campaigned. They went to jail. They were beaten. They were force fed. They struggled for an extremely simple right, the right of full citizenship, which had been denied for so long.”

Goodman and Sherr intended to visit historically significant locations as they produced the series, including Rochester and Seneca Falls, New York, and Tennessee, which became the final state needed to ratify the constitutional amendment in 1920, but the coronavirus pandemic disrupted their travels.

They learned a great deal along the way, including the troubling parallels between the fight for voting rights a century ago and today.

“We really are still addressing the power and who will share it,” Goodman says. “When we think about whether this election will be hacked, whether there will be voter suppression in this election, it’s all about the attempt to maintain power and not to share it. It was true at the beginning of the suffrage movement. It was true in the Jim Crow era, when Black people had the right to vote but they couldn’t exercise it because the state put so many barriers deliberately in order to maintain white supremacy.”

Editor’s note: Goodman recounts how Anthony was arrested for attempting to vote for Ulysses S. Grant for president and how, at the time of this recording, she remained a convicted felon who still wouldn’t be able to vote in some states. On Aug. 18, the anniversary of Tennessee voting to pass the amendment, President Donald Trump announced he was going to pardon Anthony for the crime of voting while female, but this move has been criticized by many leaders and organizations, including Kathy Hochul, New York’s lieutenant governor, and the National Susan B. Anthony House and Museum.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Ellen Goodman about She Votes!, the new podcast she’s produced with Lynn Sherr of ABC News, exploring the women’s suffrage movement and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.

417. Can’t find women who know sports? Try harder

423. Covering Black communities with nuance and purpose

There’s a difference between covering a community from a perspective of highlighting their assets compared with their deficits.

“Deficit framing defines people by the worst possible thing that ever happened to them, and that happens a lot with Black communities,” says Deborah Douglas, a distinguished visiting professor at DePauw University, editorial strategist, and author of the upcoming book, U.S. Civil Rights Trail. “You focus on a negative thing as opposed to, these are full people with full lives and aspirations. I try to balance that with asset framing, which is who they are, their aspirations. … There are positive stories. Where you have Black pain, you have Black joy.”

In a recent article for Nieman Reports, “Meet the New Black Press,” Douglas was invited to contribute a piece in which she looks at how traditional press outlets aren’t always able to connect with Black audiences for a number of reasons — not the least of which is a lack of Black and Brown voices and perspectives in newsrooms.

She highlights a few outlets in particular, including The TRiiBE, TheGrio and Coronavirus News for Black Folks as examples of organizations and individuals doing the hard work of going into Black communities, speaking with people there and getting into the heart of their real lives, priorities, victories and struggles.

Coronavirus News for Black Folks, written by Patrice Peck, is the direct result of a journalist wanting to do better by her community and fix a disconnect that was directly jeopardizing public health.

“She got fed up working in traditional media,” says Douglas. “Her ideas, when they were pegged to the Black community, were viewed with circumspection. She used the opportunity to use everything at her disposal — her intellect, her education and her computer — to start a newsletter to educate people about the disparate impact coronavirus has on Black communities. She has a very powerful voice that’s approachable and has a way of cutting right through whatever the issue of the day is and speaking to you in a way that you feel respected, elevated and deeply understood.”

TheGrio is more video-centric, because, as Douglas says, “People, especially this audience, really engage with visuals. To be able to bear witness and share that experience of how people and businesses were actually working to survive the pandemic were something they could do that legacy outlets couldn’t do with the level of nuance theGrio could.”

Douglas wants to be clear that taking an asset-framing approach to covering Black communities “doesn’t mean you’re a cheerleader for the community. It’s that you pull back the layers and really cover those communities with nuance. There is a role for traditional media here, if it would just get its house in order. We need the resources and we need the deep bench to cover communities with the level of complexities they deserve. We could get this done right if we did it with purpose. There hasn’t been a commitment to get it right.”

Douglas points to her former employer, the Chicago Sun Times, which laid her off some time ago. She held on to her job longer than other members of the newsroom, and longer than other Black and Brown writers in particular. “There was no factor of ‘what if we lose this Black voice, what if we lose this Brown voice and what is that going to do to the quality of product?”

This week, It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Deborah Douglas, a distinguished visiting professor at DePauw University and author of a recent Nieman Reports article on the new Black press.

410. Reporting Latino news during the coronavirus

422. Launching a nonprofit newsroom in a pandemic

It’s a sadly familiar story: Ambitious young journalist works in a promising newsroom, dedicated to serving their community and contributes to a Pulitzer Prize nominated series on government transparency only to be laid off a short time later.

Kelsey Ryan didn’t dwell too long on being let go from the Kansas City Star. She knew there was work to be done and set about combining her journalism chops with her entrepreneurial instinct, creating The Beacon.

Kelsey Ryan

“The writing had been on the wall for a long time,” Ryan says of her departure from the paper. “I was 29-years old and knowing I have an entire career ahead of me, that the traditional newspapers aren’t the answer anymore. I knew about the Texas Tribune and ProPublica on a national level. I really made the decision the day I got laid off to not work for a legacy news organization ever again.”

Instead, she spoke with some other similarly afflicted reporters and decided to launch her own nonprofit news organization, The Beacon, to cover the midwest. The online newsroom was originally set to kick off later this year, but COVID-19 had other ideas in mind — realizing a lack of health care coverage, The Beacon had a soft launch in the spring and will launch a slightly bigger website in the fall.

At The Beacon, Ryan and her team took a slightly different approach before they started publishing. The first hire for the organization was an audience development manager.

“That was a crucial decision — we need to talk to the community and the people who would be consuming this to help shape what it is because it’s the whole, ‘if you build it will they come’ question. You want to make sure you’re not just building something for journalists, for the sake of journalists. You want to build something people will use,” Ryan says.

Some of the early feedback was fascinating: People didn’t want breaking news. They didn’t want opinion pieces. And they wanted an “anti-racist” newsroom, one that focused on diversity of stories, of reporters and in the way communities are covered.

“Kansas was a free state; Missouri was a slave state,” she says. “People (were) acutely aware of when people who look like them are portrayed in mug shots or as athletes. People are aware of that. Their community wasn’t being covered … frankly, it wasn’t an accurate portrayal. … As a start-up, we can make it a focus of ours. We’re being really diverse in our hiring, working on the journalism pipeline. We’re making sure when people are applying for a job with us, we’re not using language that ‘others’ them or makes them feel they can’t do the job.”

Ryan is also the communications manager for LION Publishing, a group of more than 300 local, independent newsrooms who

It’s All Journalism Host Michael O’Connell talks to Kelsey Ryan, founder of The Beacon, a Kansas City nonprofit newsroom. They discuss the challenges of launching an independent nonprofit during the coronavirus and how LION Publishers is helping to foster independent local newsrooms across the country.

#323 — Can nonprofit newsrooms improve local coverage?

421. Teach journalism to expand a kid’s worldview

It seems so obvious — teaching journalism to expand a student’s worldview and help them be better writers.

John Vitti, a 30-year veteran of sports desks in Boston newspapers, was trying to help his daughter write a paper. Like a lot of kids who have to write something for school, she was stumped.

John Vitti is the founder of Headliners in Education.

The problem with writing when you’re new to it is that there isn’t typically one correct answer, unlike math or history.

“If I say, describe my shirt, it’s got spots on it, it’s long-sleeved, it’s rolled up, it’s got a pizza stain. What’s the right answer? They’re all right,” he says. “That’s the hard part. The only way to become proficient is to become comfortable making those 10,000 decisions that go into each sentence.”

If kids, starting at young ages in school, had to write more, or were given the chance to write more, they’d feel more comfortable and be more successful with each assignment. By the time it came around to college admission essays and papers and job applications, the blank page wouldn’t be such a challenge.

“We started a newspaper, the Cunniff Kids News, in 2007, just online. We co-opted a teacher page. Whoever wanted to do it could do it. They could talk about new teachers or broken lockers or school lunches. It’s who, what, where, when and descriptions and quotes. It was fantastic.”

Introducing young students to the concepts of journalism, not just writing, opens up new educational opportunities for them as well. The program has evolved into Headliners in Education, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works with students, teachers, and schools across the country.

“Let’s say you like politics and you’re in high school,” Vitti says. “You’re going to learn about 1776 and the Civil War and the Great Depression. You can write about the 2020 presidential election campaign and #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the school election, town council and the dress code. You have a whole world of different opportunities.”

Another student interested in another topic can approach their lessons in the same way, gaining a richer experience and understanding of the world around them.

“Even at the youngest ages, down to Pre-K, if they’re writing about their soccer team, the writing, the reporting, the picture taking, working with kids, working with boys, working with girls, the please and thank yous and thinking on your feet and asking follow-up questions, those are all wonderful skills that come into play later on,” Vitti continues. “A kid working as a journalist has a much more fulfilling and enriching educational experience.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to John Vitti, a veteran of Boston newspapers, about Headliners in Education, a program that teaches students the basics of journalism as a way to expand their worldview and to become comfortable with writing.

#366 Young women lead the conversation about periods, sexism

420. Hot Pod writer turns Servant of Pod host

As a kid growing up in Malaysia, “talk radio” equated with “morning zoo kind of stuff” for Nick Quah, creator of the Servant of Pod podcast.

He came to the U.S. for college and was introduced to public radio. Curious, he sought out on-demand episodes to learn more, finding iTunes’ podcast section.

Now he’s the author of the Hot Pod newsletter and the new 40-episode Servant of Pod podcast, wondering what will be the next interesting show, host or concept to continue moving the medium forward.

Nick Quah is the author of the Hot Pod newsletter and creator of the Servant of Pod podcast.

As an auditory learner, Quah appreciates the less restrictive, more open and fluid give-and-take of conversations and how they feel less contrived than written material or TV shows, including news. “Audio, for lack of a better word, is hyper-real to me. It feels more like reality than television or text,” he says.

Hot Pod started as a hobby but became a “full-time engagement.” Feeling underutilized in one of his first jobs, right around the same time the first season of Serial was released, Quah wanted to dig deeper into what wasn’t being discussed about podcasts at the time: “How does the business side work? That’s when I started writing the newsletter, just to start writing about it and get thoughts down. I treated it like a blog. These are the things that are interesting to me, this is what I’m thinking about listening to it, this is what I’m listening to. I developed enough of an audience where, after a year and a half or two years, it was enough to jump off and build a business about it.”

He’s now expanded to a new podcast, Servant of Pod, which he produces with LAist Studios. “I didn’t start a podcast to become rich. I wanted to really understand what the process was like and I wanted to make something interesting. I’m just an incredibly restless, bored person who needs to constantly do something.”

Quah found a team to work with in order to help produce the podcast and help navigate the ins-and-outs of what it’s like to actually make a podcast, after years of observing from the outside.

“I’m trying to create a document of, here are several really interesting people, really interesting shows, interesting executives that tell something about the history of podcasting,” he says. “It’s helped me open up the way I think about journalism and performance. It’s a theoretical experiment as much as it is a creative experiment.”

Nick Quah, founder of the Hot Pod newsletter and now host of the Servant of Pod podcast, joins It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell to discuss his introduction to the medium and why he decided to pick up a mic.

1
2
3
…
47
...Next Page