Podcast Archives – Page 3 of 48 – It's All Journalism

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.

419. Now is the time to focus on audience engagement

Engagement has long stopped meaning only when two people intend to get married.

For newspapers and media organizations, engagement demands paying attention to their community, building a strong relationship and tending to it in order to make sure it stays strong and healthy.

Fiona Morgan is founder of Branchhead Consulting.

“If you start to do engagement, you’ll realize how much you need the public and how much they have to offer,” says Fiona Morgan, the founder of Branchhead Consulting and author of a recent piece for the American Press Institute on the importance of news organizations serving their communities, while social distancing regulations are in place.

She’s seen several waves of interest in community outreach and engagement among news organizations. Many times, it starts with bringing residents and stakeholders together in a room, divided up at tables and given conversation starters. Reporters and editors are asked to participate both as residents and with their jobs in mind.

The first question is usually one to find out what issues are important to people at the table; the second one asks where they’d go to get information about that particular topic or issue. The third prompt would start the conversation about how the news outlets in that town can cover those issues with the community’s ideas in mind.

People who don’t work in news are still “mystified” about how reporters do their jobs, and increased community engagement helps take some of that confusion away, she says. Reaching out to readers, listeners and the like helps expand a media outlet’s understanding of the people and communities they cover.

But engagement is more than that, Morgan adds.

“One of the coolest things I’ve seen lately is ResolvePhilly, a collaborative in Philadelphia that has a couple dozen newsrooms of different kinds and sizes. They’ve put together a COVID-19 FAQ where you can get access to simple questions about employment, workers’ rights, childcare. You can use text messages, which is a great way to reach people,” she says. “Even if you don’t have broadband at home or access to a computer, you probably have a phone that can text. It’s a great way to reach people.”

Now is the time to find tools like this to reach an audience, Morgan says. It can be simple, but it’s important to be consistent and responsive to the people who sign up.

“If someone asks a question, be sure to respond,” she says. “If you don’t answer, you’re not likely to get more questions. It’s important to be consistent and responsive. Also, start small. Start with something you know you can do and something you can do to let them know you’re listening.”

While in-person events were the way to go in the past, online events can be equally effective now, but organizations need to make sure they’re actively seeking participants, Morgan says. The more divisions between reporters and readers or listeners are removed, the better the communication — and story ideas — will be on both sides of the news.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with consultant Fiona Morgan about the importance of newsrooms rethinking and revitalizing engagement efforts to better understand and reach their communities.

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

418. California City: Secrets of a desert town revealed

Emily Guerin was curious about the boldly named California City, a small town 100 miles north of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert. Something about California City seemed odd from the start.

Emily Guerin is host of the California City podcast, a co-production of public radio station KPCC and LAist Studios.

“At first, it was a simple story about water. Why is this town in the desert wasting so much?” Guerin says. “The answer was this guy had a vision. He built all these water lines and no one came and now they’re breaking.”

Developer Nat Mendelsohn had a vision, all right. He designed a city in the desert, named roads and built them and gave them names like Cadillac Drive and Gold Rush Avenue. He also installed water lines for the city he dreamed would pop up, despite being isolated and in the middle of a desert.

“He sold land to thousands of people, but very few ever came,” Guerin says. “You could tell it wasn’t supposed to be desolate. … The reason it was wasting so much water is that the water lines the developer had laid were unused and rusting and breaking. They were having these crazy pipe ruptures. From the beginning, it intrigued me as an environmental story, the folly of man and this effort to develop the desert that resulted in catastrophic waste.”

Guerin’s interest in this desert town and its unusual history led her to create California City, a new podcast from public radio station KPCC and LAist Studios,

As she started investigating California City and its water waste, driving out and conducting interviews, Guerin started hearing other stories too: Real estate agents were again trying to convince people to buy into this would-be boomtown, selling the promise that this might turn into another Las Vegas.

She interviewed half a dozen people who all told similar stories: Silver Saddle Ranch and Club, California City’s new developer, was targeting people who were Latino, Filipino or Chinese-American. Prospective investors would meet with an agent who “look like you and spoke your language.” They’d show off the vistas and drive up to Galileo Hill and tell the client to imagine sparkling lights and a prosperous city as far as the eye can see, mentioning how they knew someone who bought property in Las Vegas when it was still just a desert, and now that property is the Bellagio or another resort.

“A lot of people I talked to said the company was preying on specific types of people for whom English might be a second language or who just moved to the U.S. recently,” Guerin says. “They were using these high-pressure sales tactics to invest in something they barely understood. I heard this story from half a dozen people and thought, this is bizarre, there has to be something here. Turns out there was.”

Emily Guerin is the creator of California City, a new investigative podcast from LAist Studios and public radio station KPCC. She tells It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell how a promised boomtown in the middle of desert turned into a real estate scam and environmental headache.

#360 New true-crime podcast tackles ‘An American Nightmare’

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

For any website, podcast, print or other outlet that claims to have a difficult time finding women to talk knowledgeably and expertly about sports, Lindsay Gibbs has some advice: Try harder.

The former writer for Think Progress is the founder of the Power Plays newsletter and co-founder of the Burn It All Down podcast, which exclusively has had women and non-binary guests talking about sports for three years now.

“We haven’t had any men on the show so far,” she says. “We’ve never once said we have a ban on men, but we decided we wanted to be purposeful (in finding female and non-binary guests). When looking at topics, if we want an NFL expert to come in or an athlete, we look for women to come in and talk about it. We haven’t had a problem. Sometimes we have to dig a little bit deeper, but … I’m amazed how a little bit of awareness and effort (can) open your world.”

She was a sports reporter at Think Progress, but her task was to write about sports in relation to other broader topics — racism, sexism, homophobia, the environment, politics, etc.

“That’s what I did full time for four years,” she says. “Through it all I’ve gotten more and more into covering women’s sports as a whole, and that’s what I focus on now. Every single story the other reporters were covering … there’s a sports angle to every single topic. Sports doesn’t exist in its own bubble.”

Gibbs was never told to “stick to sports” and was encouraged to do just the opposite. “There was never any pretending that sports was separate from everything.”

Lifelong sports fan Lindsay Gibbs is the co-founder of the Burn It All Down podcast and founder of the Power Plays newsletter. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the importance of including women and non-binary people in sports coverage and why sports is not separate from any other news topic.

#371 NLGJA continues to transform how newsrooms cover LGBTQ issues

416. The story of America’s most corrupt police squad

“I’m always at the front line of news! I gotta get there before everyone else!”

He says this jokingly, but there’s a kernel of truth to Baynard Woods’ statement.

In 2015, he covered the Freddie Gray “uprising” in Baltimore, following the death of a man in police custody, from the time of Gray’s death through the riots and the trial that followed.

But that ordeal, which gained national attention as the city burned, is only part of the story of Woods’ work covering police corruption, missteps and controversy in his home city.

Baynard Woods is co-author of “I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad

Woods has co-authored a book, with Brandon Soderberg, exploring a long-standing and incredibly corrupt unit within the Baltimore Police Department. An elite group of detectives and cops, the Gun Trace Task Force, adopted some mafia-like tactics to profit from both illegal guns and drugs in the city, sometimes stealing drugs from dealers in order to sell them to other dealers and dirty cops. The book, “I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad,” comes out July 21.

“This elite squad of Baltimore police officers were the kind who go around looking for trouble,” Woods says. “Originally, they were supposed to track guns back to people selling guns illegally.”

The team was ultimately found out and indicted in March 2017, just two years after the uprisings.

“What made this the most corrupt squad was they’d all been committing crimes separately (from each other) for years,” Woods says. The book starts in 2016 with the theft of $100,000 from someone’s house along with “two kilos from his house that a white bail bondsman was selling. … He’s stealing large amounts of cocaine and money from dealers. We follow through and one of the other guys is protecting a group of drug dealers he grew up with. … The dealers are selling to white kids in the suburbs and they’re overdosing. They get a tap on a phone and they hear (the dealer) calling the cop.”

The book is paced like a crime novel — because it is — without editorializing, Woods says. They didn’t need to dramatize anything, as this is one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” scenarios.

There’s a documentary of the same name in the works that was originally supposed to premiere this summer at the Maryland Film Festival but that’s been sidelined for the time being.

“We were simultaneously doing long video interviews while doing other reporting,” he says.” It was almost like a confessional.”

They also had the benefit of being in court for various trials from which they were eventually, later, able to piece together previous crimes in which this crime unit was implicated. “We can see all these police officers lying on the stand. Regularly. We were able to piece together scenes,” he says.

Friend of the podcast Baynard Woods talks to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about his new book, coming out next month, exploring an incredibly corrupt special unit within the Baltimore Police Department that led a cover crime spree, undetected, for years.

#165 – Street-level reporting of Baltimore protests

415. Coronavirus is changing how newsrooms work

Everything about our collective daily lives has changed in the past three months, since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, but some of the ways we’ve adapted to meet this challenge were already in the works. Coronavirus might have just sped up the acceleration in evolving technology and work habits that were inevitable.

“COVID has changed the way everything is operating, and not temporarily,” says Mike Donoghue of The Alpha Group. “I think we’re seeing the speeding up of existing trends in consumer behavior. The remote workforce — you’d expect that, over the years, there are cost savings (to having employees work remotely instead of in an office). At this point, you have to wonder what percentage of people are going to go back to the same office environment they left.”

The same might be true for news organizations — many had already started to try and take relationships with their readers and viewers back from social media to create something more valuable to the communities they serve.

“Look at the last 10-15 years,” says The Alpha Group’s David Cohn. “The internet allowed people to form communities outside geography. Media became a national game. Coronavirus is very much a local story.”

Through Subtext, the text-based platform Cohn and Donoghue released earlier this year, people can directly ask reporters questions and get personalized answers about issues pertaining to their hometowns. It’s re-establishing a relationship between reporter and community in a way that has gotten lost, or at least watered down, in the large-scale social media practice.

David Cohn

Coronavirus has also spurred some newsrooms to adopt practices that take them back to a position of providing real community service, Cohn says. He points to the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News in particular: Both provided ways for people in need to virtually raise their hands in looking for assistance in the early days of quarantine, while also providing an opportunity for neighbors to step up and provide help, including simple things like dropping off groceries.

Some news outlets have also seen an increase in subscribers as people want news from their backyards and want access to things that matter directly to them, like finding out locations for COVID-19 testing.

But how will those relationships be sustained going forward, as things start to return to something like normal?

“It’s a real challenge, but for the time being, that’s going to be the thing news organizations are going to have to figure out,” Cohn says. “To leverage that relationship going forward until things like events or ad revenue come back in earnest. Every in-person event is on hold right now. In a world where those don’t come back soon, news organizations are going to have to figure out that service and make it a service.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to David Cohn and Mike Donoghue of The Alpha Group about how COVID-19 has sped up technology-based evolutions that were already starting to take shape and how newsrooms will need to keep those changes coming when things return to “normal.”

394. Improve audience conversations and avoid trolls with Subtext

414. Will local ownership help Baltimore Sun survive?

Local ownership may be the key to keeping the venerable Baltimore Sun a viable part of its community.

Like many other newsrooms, The Sun is facing hard times. Two decades ago, with multiple international bureaus and a large presence just down the highway in Washington, D.C., the paper’s staff numbered in the hundreds. Now it’s down to about 80.

Matthew Gallagher is president of the Goldseker Foundation.

Just weeks after winning a Pulitzer Prize for local coverage for their work investigating a former mayor, many in the city are wondering who will own the paper and what it will mean for the Baltimore community.

“The Sun is vital to the civic life of Baltimore and the entire central Maryland region,” says Matt Gallagher of the Goldseker Foundation, an organization that is trying to assume ownership and responsibility for the Sun. “It really is part of the fabric of this great city. It’s an institution that’s incredibly important to save right now.”

Liz Bowie, a member of the Sun’s staff and of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, says the stretched-thin staff is doing the best it can to continue reporting on the important matters, but admits it’s getting very difficult.

Looming overhead is the knowledge that Tribune Publishing, which has owned the paper for some time, sold one-third stake in The Baltimore Sun to Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund based in New York City. At the end of June, Alden Capital will take a controlling interest in Tribune Publishing.

Liz Bowie covers education for The Baltimore Sun.

“There have been past efforts mounted to try and convince the out-of-town ownership of The Sun to sell to civic-minded owners who are interested in converting The Sun to a nonprofit in the hopes of putting it on more stable footing going forward and position the Sun for more investment,” Gallagher says. “The Goldseker Foundation joined this effort a few years ago because our duty and responsibility is to invest in the people and institutions of Baltimore. We think there’s no institution more worthy of that type of investment right now than the Sun. … A wide cross-section of leaders from the philanthropic, civic and business community have stepped up and expressed interest in being capital partners. We hope to pull it off in the not-too-distant future.”

What would that mean to the Sun’s staff?

“Local owners have a much greater stake in making sure the paper is a vital institution,” Bowie says. “Out-of-town ownership, over the years, has shown that profits are more important than the journalism. As a journalist, I’ve seen, time and again, the company refusing to give raises to the majority of the staff. Anybody who is at the top of the scale hasn’t even been given a cost-of-living increase in seven years. Young reporters do get step increases for the first six years, but those have been hard for the company to justify. They want the union to get rid of those step increases so they can keep wages low. I also think there will be a much stronger sense of community if there’s local ownership in the paper.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to reporter Liz Bowie of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and Matt Gallagher of the Goldseker Foundation to discuss the community-driven efforts to purchase The Baltimore Sun and turn it into a nonprofit organization.

408. Google News Initiative wants to help local news

Better News: How To Forge New Audiences Of Color

The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester New York was facing a big problem. Its primary audience was old, white and dwindling. The newspaper had to figure out how to reach a younger and more diverse audience — and fast.

C.J. Benjamin is the Emerging Audiences Editor at the Rochester (NY) Democrat-Chronicle. (Michael Jackson)

C.J. Benjamin, emerging audiences editor for the Democrat and Chronicle, discusses how the paper successfully developed a strategy to better engage a younger and more diverse audience. She wrote about the experience for American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative. Read her full report 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.

413. Long history of bad police responses to protests

Before covering a protest, remember that no protest is a monolithic event, represented by just one group of people or one action.

More reporters are finding themselves on the streets, walking and talking with protesters as people are demonstrating against the use of force by police officers and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Based in Minneapolis, science reporter Maggie Koerth of FiveThirtyEight wanted to get a better idea of what was happening in her city, as protesters organized demonstrations just blocks from her home. She worked with a freelancer for the Washington Post the night the Third Precinct headquarters for the Minneapolis Police was burned by protesters.

Inspired, she went to Google Scholar to see what had been previously written and researched about police interactions with protesters.

“I ran across a paper talking about 50 years of research and how this had been studied for decades, and researchers kept coming to the conclusion that escalating force did not have the effect police thought it did and, in fact, escalated violence,” she says. “If they’ve known this for this long, and they keep finding the same things, why isn’t it changing?”

Koerth reached out to Jamiles Lartey and The Marshall Project wanting to take another look at police tactics when it comes to interacting with demonstrations.

“I have always recommended and advised for fellow reporters to reach out, especially when the news cycle is moving fast and you don’t have the ability to read everything that’s ever been done and to build every source from scratch,” he says. “We were thrilled that FiveThirtyEight reached out to us and that we were able to put this piece together in the speed that we were and with the degree of acuity we had.”

The piece, published June 1, explores why police essentially handle and respond to protests in the wrong way.

Among their advice for reporters who are being called upon to respond and report from these changing and often volatile situations: Don’t stop asking questions and don’t try to limit the scope of what’s going on.

“I think we, in the media, need to push back on the idea of a peaceful protest vs violent protests vs destruction,” Lartey says. “They’re just protests. There are moments within them and factions within them that are different from one moment to the next and from one person to the next. Their reason for being there can be diametrically opposed. Their tactics while they’re there, that they feel are appropriate to get their point across. They don’t have a purity test before they come to a protest. I don’t think defining a protest by the most dramatic 2 or 5 or 15 seconds, or the most outrageous action that a small minority of people make.”

Koerth added that she met some people who were on board with the police station burning down, but that wasn’t the only action taken that night. Four miles away, they saw “a Black youth organized protest that involved moving through the wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods and it picked up people as it went. You had this happening at the same time people were setting bonfires outside the police station. There’s not one unified thing happening at the same time.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to science writer Maggie Koerth of FiveThirtyEight and Jamiles Lartey of the Marshall Project about their new collaborative piece on how police departments across the country are, historically and currently, wrong in their understanding and approach to protests.

#266 —Democracy in Crisis: How alt newspapers cover national news

412. Critical thinking is an essential skill for journalists

Journalists take their obligations seriously to try and discern the facts from the lies or misinformation, but that doesn’t mean only double or triple-checking sources and bits of data.

What journalists really need are critical thinking skills, says Jonathan Haber, author of Critical Thinking, the 50th title in Essential Knowledge Series from MIT Press.

Jonathan Haber is the author of *Critical Thinking* from MIT Press

“Given the time we’re living through, where you have competing information that can have life-or-death consequences, the need to think independently and critically, rather than believe what we’re told, is more crucial than ever,” Haber says.

Think of the world of science, with its structures and methods for taking a question and driving toward a confirmation or dismissal of a hypothesis. Science is “more of a culture, a culture of ways and ways of checking your own thinking and ways of thinking that diminishes the likelihood that you’ll believe something that’s false,” Haber says.

Journalists, like teachers and people in other skilled professions, have internalized some concepts and facets of critical thinking into their approach to work, but it’s not embraced or necessarily taught on a systematic level, Haber says.

“Facts are the lifeblood of journalism. They’re terrific, they’re important, I’m a big fan of fact checking sites, but facts are not enough,” he says. For example, if someone wrote an editorial arguing that social distancing measures put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19 were not effective because the death toll is still rising, the facts made in the editorial are true: people have been social distancing for a month or more, and the death toll has continued to increase.

“Those two premises are true facts. Fact checking would confirm that the facts are right,” he says. “But if you look at the conclusion, it’s clearly false. Why is it false? It’s false because the facts, the evidence doesn’t prove enough reason to believe the conclusions. Nobody promised us that social distancing would work immediately, we were told it would take time. The argument is invalid, it’s a weak argument.”

No efforts toward fact checking are wasted, Haber stresses, but that’s only one part of the process for truly thinking critically about an argument, a statement or a policy.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Jonathan Haber, author of a new book on critical thinking from MIT Press, about how journalists can use critical thinking to improve their reporting.

391. America has a bad case of truth decay, according to new RAND report