It’s All Journalism: Top 10 Interviews of 2022

As the It’s All Journalism team begins making plans for 2023, one of the things we like to do is look back at the previous year’s interviews and see which ones our readers responded to the most.

We don’t get a ton of feedback, either in comments or on social media, about the interviews we do. So, like all good digital journalists, we look at the analytics to see which episodes our listeners downloaded the most and glean what we can from that.

Below are the Top 10 It’s All Journalism Interviews for 2022, in terms of downloads. They cover a variety of topics of interest to journalists working today, including transparency, investigative reporting, funding, and political bias in newsroom coverage.

You’ll notice that the majority of the interviews come from the January-March timeframe. That makes sense because those episodes have been around longer and people have had more of an opportunity to download them. This, of course, exposes the problem of relying on just one metric to measure performance.

However, that doesn’t explain why our interview with Lisa Macpherson of Public Knowledge, which was published on Nov. 10, shot to the top of our most listened-to list for 2022 and also became our most downloaded interview ever.

Gazing deeply into the social media tea leaves revealed that the debate around the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, particularly within conservative media, led to the link being shared among some right-wing news aggregators.

While it’s nice to get the exposure, that is not our target audience. It’s All Journalism has always been about working journalists trying to make sense of the ongoing upheaval in our industry. It’s where we share resources and talk about the challenges we all face and the good things being done by our colleagues.

With mass layoffs at CNN and other news outlets, as well as the disintegration of social media platforms on which many journalists rely, we saw a lot of upheaval in the media landscape in 2022.

One thing I’ve learned in doing this podcast for over 10 years is we’re still experiencing waves of upheaval as a result of the digital disruption journalism has been facing for nearly two decades.

In that time, I also discovered that there are a lot of smart, dedicated people in our industry who are fighting the good fight and working to ensure that our industry evolves in this ever-changing environment. They recognize the need for a free, functioning, and self-sustaining press to fulfill its role as watchdog over the powerful and protector of democracy.

Take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. Protect yourself. There are others in this fight. Bring on 2023.

543. Bill to make online ad revenue more fair may make things worse

Lisa Macpherson, a senior policy analyst at Public Knowledge, explains why the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act may not make competition for ad revenue online more equitable for publishers. In fact, it might make things worse.

493. Inside the US Capitol on 1/6/21 — A reporter’s view

Tia Mitchell of The Atlanta Journal Constitution tells what it was like inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

495. Newsy aims to deliver just the facts without a political spin

Eric Ludgood leads Newsy, a 24-hour news broadcast network that covers the stories of the day without a political slant.

Ed Shanahan and Agnes Lee, the editor and illustrator, respectively, of The New York Times’ Metropolitan Daily.

496. Metropolitan Diary: Where readers share their stories of New York City

Ed Shanahan and Agnes Lee discuss the Metropolitan Diary, a daily column featuring stories about New York City written by readers of The New York Times.

Lacy Starling, president and CEO of OneNYK Alliance

494. Entrepreneur bets on local news site for Northern Kentucky

Entrepreneur Lacy Staring, president and CEO of OneNYK Alliance, is focused on creating a sustainable news platform to cover Northern Kentucky.

497. SmartNews personalizes weather news with Disaster Info Hubs

AccuWeather and SmartNews have partnered to provide readers with more personalized and timely weather reports using Disaster Info Hubs.

Paul Singer leads the investigative reporting team at GBH.

498. Biased awarding of state contracts exposed by GBH investigation

Paul Singer discusses the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting’s successful effort that expose unfair practices at the state and local level in Massachusetts to routinely exclude minority-owned businesses from receiving millions of dollars in government contracts.

500. Halfway To Episode 1,000; Kat Downs Mulder Redux

To celebrate our 500th episode, we’re sharing our first interview with Kat Downs Mulder of The Washington Post from April 2013.

502. How crime reporting plus data leads to greater transparency

Amos Gelb is the founder and publisher of DC Witness and Baltimore Witness, which combine journalism, transparency and data to ensure accountability of the criminal justice system in Washington D.C. and Baltimore.