ReportHers

Q&As with non-fiction storytellers

[reporthers]

Q&A: Sruthi Pinnamaneni of Reply All

Sruthi Pinnamaneni invited me into her home in Brooklyn almost a year ago for this interview. At that time, I had been toying with the idea of a ReportHers podcast but didn’t have many audio skills to speak of back then. I recorded the interview and then spent the next year paralyzed, too afraid to post it. I was convinced that it sounded terrible and it was all my fault. There’s mic handling noise, a room echo and some terrible plosives. I cringe listening to it. And I edited it back then in Premiere Pro, a video editing program, because that’s all I had access to at the time.

Anyway, it turns out that comparing yourself to someone as talented as Sruthi is a bad idea. Instead, you should aspire to make work like hers. Aspiring leaves space to learn and make mistakes.

So, here is the interview, recorded at Sruthi’s kitchen bar. I had to edit it in Pro Tools as one combined track because I no longer have access to Premiere Pro, and I lost some of the original files in a shift to a new computer (ugh). But let’s maybe let the content overshadow the audio quality. Sruthi’s was a pretty interesting interview.

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ReportHers: What was the first story that you were like, ‘This is an interesting scene. I want to record it.’

Sruthi Pinnamaneni: I was studying broadcast journalism at Columbia, which means TV news and documentary stuff. I found out about this girl, she was in high school up in Harlem and she was a dancer. People were talking about how she was doing this incredible African dance stuff and performing. She was deaf and so I wanted to do a story about her. Then I met her teacher and really the story became about the relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher was this incredibly forceful, passionate woman who really believed in this girl and there were moments when I just spent time with them where you were like, ‘Ooh. Is she going a little too far? She’s pretty strict with her.’ But at the same time maybe that’s what the girl needed.

I just shot tons of footage with them. I would just follow them around in class, outside of class and just keep shooting. That was, for me, the first time I felt a sense of, when you get to melt into the wall and you’re really just a part of the scene and just observing the people that you’re filming and trying to understand their relationship and trying to understand kind of the larger story of what was going on. I feel like that’s the first time I had that addictive feeling that you get.

RH: How many stories are you working on at once and how do you stay present in multiple stories over time?

SP: It’s hard because it’s simultaneously a gift and also a punishment to be able to work on a story as long as you need to. Because everybody really just wants to keep working on a story and never to finish it, especially me. So generally I’m working on at least two stories that are bigger, longer-term stories that I’m reporting and then a couple of stories that I’m helping somebody else produce, so either an outside reporter or somebody at Reply All, maybe Alex or PJ.

There’s one story that we finish a couple months ago that I started working on when like the first day I started at Reply All. It was a PJ story and it was funny because like it took two years to complete and that entire time I’d been working on other things, and you always knew that there was a story at the back of your brain that you’re like, I really want to finish that story. But some things just take time. The thing we’ve learned is to let stories sit for a while. So you work on something intensely, or I work on something intensely for a few weeks and then I kind of give it a break and then I work on it again. Generally once a story has been put on our schedule, like we know this is the day that we want to put this out, then I will turn all my attention to that.

It’s hard for me to really finish two stories at the same time so generally in the last month I’m one hundred percent focused on one thing and just trying to get all the pieces together.

RH: How long on average would you say you work on a story?

SP: I don’t have an average. There are stories that I’m really proud of that I reported that I finished in ten days. And then there’s a couple stories that I’ve produced with PJ or Alex where we’ll record it on Thursday one week and then it’s out the following Wednesday. Those are great because somehow you know when you start a story there’s a certain amount of energy and curiosity you have and to finish making the story in a compressed amount of time, you keep that energy. Whereas when you hold on to a story for a long time, often you really start to doubt it. You wonder, what’s the story? I don’t remember. Is this really a thing? You kind of you lose a lot of the original surprise So that’s been the challenge with the stories we’ve sat on here for a while.

The average, I have everything from two years, to one year, to like five days, so the average is really, I have no idea.

RH: Can you talk about the evolution of the show in the couple years that it’s been at Gimlet?

SP: I think the technology angle was always a bit of a skinny tether, you know. For me what a Reply All story is, it really comes down to a certain aesthetic, like a certain feel. It’s a certain looseness that still takes a lot of work to create. It’s never been the technology angle. I think different people at Reply All feel more or less strongly about the tech stuff. We are about to do stories where if we’re really just interested in the thing then well we’re going to do it. And I think that will always upset certain people, but I think a lot of our audience started to recognize that there’s more to Reply All than our so-called technology angle.

I’m perfectly happy to be in the tech bucket. I feel like that’s a nice place to be. There’s tons of great stories in there but I feel like we’ve all grown as journalists in the last few years and if there’s something that we’re really interested in then we’re not going to let that hold us back.

RH: The show to me feels more like it’s a show about being human, which I think is why it’s so compelling

SP: There’s a feeling that you have when you’re doing mindless surfing, like falling into a rabbit hole on the Internet, where you start off with one question and then it takes you to a different question, which pulls you into a totally different question. And it’s this really delicious feeling of falling. I think that’s really what we want the show to be. You can say it’s about the Internet but really we want it to be the feeling of the Internet.

RH: That makes me think of the piece you did about the woman, Hope, who had a medical mystery and the way you reported out that story, it wasn’t like you did all this reporting and then you structured the story with a beginning middle and end. You brought us along with the phone call with Jill, was it? At the New York Times.

SP: Lisa, Lisa Sanders.

RH: Right, Lisa Sanders. We were kind of along with you for the reporting. Can you talk a little bit about that story and how was part of the decision making process of how you would tell the story?

SP: So that one was such a joy to produce, also because that was one of the few that took me ten days from beginning to end. And it started when I’d seen this news article about this website called CrowdMed. In the news article they said this website has an 80 percent rate of success diagnosing people who’ve had no luck through the medical establishment. I found that statistic to be kind of mind blowing to the point where I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure, like, is that real? What does that actually mean to diagnose somebody who hasn’t been diagnosed by these other more formal means? So I reached out to the company. I looked at a few cases that they had in their solved column and I got the contact information for this woman, Hope.

I said to her right off the bat, I don’t know if this story’s going to work. I just want to hear what happened to you. We’ll see, no promises. I didn’t do a pre-interview. I don’t usually do pre-interviews. I just called her up. It was it was such a janky connection. I think I called her on Skype and made her record herself using her iPhone. She was just a beautiful storyteller, one of these people that it took a little bit of wrangling right at the top just to make sure she told the story in a linear way. Most people, but especially people have had long-running medical issues, they tend to really skip through facts because they’re used to abbreviating everything. So she was like, ‘Yes, it started on this day and I had this problem, that problem.’ And I was like, ‘No, slow down. I just want to feel everything that you felt as it happened to you.’ So I had to kind of hold her back a few times. But once she got that rhythm she really just stuck to it. I was riveted. I was like, ‘Go on. What next?’

RH: This was all in the first phone call?

SP: Oh yea. First phone call. The entire time I was like, I don’t know what she’s recording. I don’t know if her phone is dead. I was so petrified because the Skype line was unusable. It was way too crackly and the whole time I’m like, she’s going to send me the recording and it’s going to be just shit and you’ll never get this again. It only happens the first time. So we talked for three and a half hours like that. I kept making her save the conversation on her phone. It was just this heartbreaking story and she was just this amazing, wonderful person. She told it the way you hear it [on the episode].

The way she told the story was, she had this thing and then nobody could figure it out and then she went to CrowdMed and she got this answer and her problems seem to have gone away. So I was like, oh great. Story’s done, with the beginning, the middle and the end. There’s some writing that needs to be done just to patch it all together. But then – I can’t remember why. Why did I call Lisa Sanders? Why did I email Lisa Sanders? Oh right. I was trying to understand the biology of the thing. So I went to the medical science library in New York and I was like looking at different books about muscles and conditions. I had emailed Lisa Sanders just saying, ‘Hey, here’s a story. I’m curious what you think.’ She wrote back this kind of emergency e-mail saying, ‘Hey, this could be something very serious that was missed.’ So I asked Hope to get this test and immediately my whole story, which had this very convenient ending, was just thrown up into the air.

I had a moment where I went to, I think, Tim Howard who is our executive producer, and said I don’t think the story is done. Like, I don’t think we should air it. I don’t even know what it is anymore. And he loved it. He loved that there was confusion and doubt. Any time where most people would kill stories because they seem unresolved, Tim has this wonderful gift where he just leans into discomfort. And he’s like, ‘Great. You thought you had an ending and now you don’t. That just makes the story so much more interesting.’ And so we interviewed Lisa with Hope and then we basically ended with Lisa telling her to go and get this test. And then thankfully it turned out – we did an update on the story – and it turned out that she did not have the thing that Lisa was worried about. All is well.

RH: So is that uncertainty with how stories are turning out something that you have always been somewhat comfortable with, to just have faith in the process? Or is that something you’ve developed at Gimlet?

SP: I’ve always been really stubborn. I think most people who work with me on stories, even before I came to Gimlet will say that I tend to do a lot of interviews. I tend to keep pushing at things. If there’s somebody who doesn’t want to talk to me, I tend to keep trying and emailing them or calling or showing up, and say, ‘Hey, are you sure? Here’s a good reason to talk to me.’ So I think all of that has been put to good use at Gimlet. Whereas before, maybe it was a lot of spinning wheels, here stories can go in directions that you just didn’t expect and that is all for the best.

I think it’s very uncomfortable to be a reporter and think you have a certain ending and at the last minute have the bottom fall out from underneath you. But are Reply All, at least I feel like I have the support with the whole team where they can really step in and help me find a way to turn that non-ending into an ending. Or find ways to articulate why that makes a story a better story.

RH: If you don’t know how a story is ending, or for this example where you thought you had an ending and it completely changed, how are you deciding how to structure these things?

SP: We often tell stories in a pretty linear way. This is the way we discovered it, this is how the story moved on, and this is the point at which it ended. So as long as you keep that reporter perspective I think it’s pretty straightforward. An example is the boy in photo story, the one that I worked on with PJ for two years. We had certain questions and confusions at the very beginning of that story and it was important to tell it so that the listeners were always with us at that point in time. That, I think, buys you a lot at the end because they’re with you at the moment where it ended for you. You don’t have to make any big conclusions. It’s like, if they’re if they’re in your head at that moment, they understand the thing that you see. You don’t have to say, ‘This is a story about blah blah blah.’

RH: You’re not artificially being like, ‘This is the bow I want to put on it.’

SP: Yeah, exactly. The reporting is the story. The challenge is then to not be so meta about the thing. We have to be really careful in stories. How much are we talking about, I mean the boy in photo [story] is a great example where a huge part of the story was PJ’s discomfort in following this random person from the Internet who really just wanted to be left alone. And having me and Tim kind of push him into following him. But you can’t talk about that too much because then it’s a story about a story. I hope we are humble enough to know that just talking about what we’re feeling at any given moment does not a story make. You can use that for a second but then it has to quickly move on.

RH: This is sort of a little bit of a technical question. If you were out in the field, how would you create a little studio if you had to?

SP: I’ve done this before Reply All. I have a very thick duvet, which every radio producer should own, and I sat in my closet and I would record all my narration. As a freelancer without access to a studio, that’s how I did it. It was totally fine. Now I just record interviews out in the field but I’ve never had to record narration outside. I could do it. I could stick to my blanket method. The problem is you have to make sure – especially when you’re doing a long episode, most of the stories I’ve done are over thirty minutes that’s a lot of tracking – and so you have to make sure it all matches in terms of sound. Tracking an 8-minute story is super easy under the blanket. Thirty minutes, you probably might want to get one studio and stick to that one studio.

RH: What was your set up under the blanket?

SP: I had to have a headlamp so I could see my script if it wasn’t on my computer. Oh I didn’t used to have my computer because it would make an annoying fan noise so I’d print out my script to get a headlamp, sit under my duvet, sweat profusely. So I’d have to come out for air every now and then and just do it. I would do it differently, honestly, now if I had to do it. It’s so helpful to have a friend track you. One of the things at Reply All, we almost have another producer in the room. So they can tell you like, ‘Hey, do it again,’ or ‘More conversationally,’ or like ‘Close the computer and just tell me what you want to say.’ So if you want that level of support then get a bigger duvet or maybe even phone in a friend so they can tell you how you sound.

RH: Do you mean get a bigger duvet so your friend can be under it with you?

SP: I know. It’s a ridiculous idea. You know Meghan Tan from the Millennial [podcast]? She has a system, which I think is pretty brilliant, where she has a photo of her best friend with a martini glass, I believe, and she sticks it in the room in the closet where she records. And so when she’s tracking she’s like talking to her friends

RH: I think that’s all the questions that I have. Thank you so, so much for your time I appreciate it so much.

SP: Thank you.

[reporthers]

Q&A: Emily Withrow, Bot Editor at Quartz

EMILY WITHROW is editor of the Quartz Bot Studio, and is on leave from Northwestern University, where she holds an appointment as assistant professor of interactive narrative at the Knight Lab and Medill School of Journalism. At Quartz, she explores the ways people and bots interact, and how journalists can use bots and emerging technology to connect with new audiences. Previously, she worked as an editor at The A.V. Club. She is based in Chicago. Follow her work at Quartz at bots.qz.com.

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ReportHers: What is a typical day like at the Quartz Bot Studio, and what is your role on the team?

Emily Withrow: I’ll admit that this question made me laugh—there’s really no typical day. Or at least, not yet. The Studio is still in its formative stages. Right now, full-time, it’s just me (editor) and John Keefe (developer). We also have an awesome product intern, Eva Scazzero, working with us. We each have different strengths, and we’re working on several projects at once. Our first year is funded by the Knight Foundation, so we have a mandate to experiment, and to document those experiments as we go. One of those experiments is likely to be for voice (Alexa, Google Home, HomePod), one is likely to be chat-based (like Slack or Facebook Messenger), and one is likely to try to tackle open responses from users (free text, as opposed to options). So we’re running after each of those three individually, and plan to roll out some tools for journalists along the way.

So my days are part exploration—understanding what these spaces are like, what works and what doesn’t—and part trying to build things for those spaces. We’re doing design research to fill in some of the blanks. None of these are truly mature platforms, so we have more questions than answers at this point.

RH: There are a lot of jobs in journalism—and in the world in general—that didn’t exist just a few years ago. How do you think about where you are in your career now, and where you want to be?

EW: My career has taken a number of twists and turns already. The through line of my work is really an attraction to big, messy problems. Easy answers and predictable days never did it for me… so lucky(?) for me, I entered the journalism world right around the time the housing market fell apart, and around the time mobile and social started to come into their own. No one was ready. Cutting and pasting stories from print to web wasn’t working.

I was at The A.V. Club around that time. By all traditional metrics, we were performing well, but we were also going through layoffs, having to cut costs. I wanted to be part of the solution, and for me that meant telling stories that reflected how and when they were being seen. I thought there was a danger in thinking of the website as this Mother Ship to which all traffic must go—especially when our content was being shared and consumed in so many other places. I wanted to be able to build for those new spaces. So I taught myself to code. I started paying more attention to emerging technologies and platforms, and tried to understand what people were doing, and what type of stories would work well there. I ended up teaching nontraditional narrative at Medill, and eventually, that led to bots, and to Quartz. I’m right where I want to be! In the future, I hope to follow the same path—to embrace promising technology that could change how we tell stories and deliver/consume information.

RH: What was the first bot you made?

EW: The first bot I made wasn’t a “real” bot in the purest sense, because it wasn’t really doing much intelligent on the backend. It was scripted, and was only a bot in the sense that it did asynchronous content delivery. (Though, I guess I shouldn’t say it wasn’t intelligent, because we did rely on Amazon for all its NLP smarts.) At the Knight Lab, I was playing around with the idea of a personal news anchor. I’d been using Alexa frequently at home, but was frustrated that all of the news was confined to the Flash Briefing section—this device I spent so much time in dialogue with, when I asked it for the news, just turned on NPR. It seemed like such a disconnect for me.

So I started to toy around with the idea that we could provide additional context for the news. I designed an experience around the idea of a water cooler conversation you might have with coworkers about the news. Alexa (or our “skill”) would float a headline: “An Uber driver is accused of killing six people in Michigan.” If you’d already heard that story, you could ask follow up questions or move on. If you hadn’t, you could ask background questions.

The bot never saw the light of day—really, I’m not sure people want this experience—but we learned a ton about how people talk with bots, how bots should talk, how to prototype and test for voice devices, and what people ask about news headlines. It was a really successful experiment from that perspective.

RH: What is the biggest risk you’ve taken, or boldest move you’ve made to get a job, interview or internship?

EW: Oh, wow. I’m so timid when it comes down to it! I’m getting nervous just thinking about having done bold things. But it’s something that I force myself to do, pounding chest and all. I’m lucky enough to have loved just about every journalism job I’ve had. (Not all pieces of every job, but on the whole.) So leaving has always felt like a huge risk. My career has included some really wild swings. From McKinsey & Company to The Onion, then to wildly stable academia, then to an experimental studio.

I guess one of the boldest things I’ve done has been to write about all of the mistakes I’ve made in that process. At one of those jobs, for example, I didn’t negotiate my salary. So I wrote a piece about all the shame I feel about that—and the lessons I learned for the next time. I believe writing about my failures makes it easy for other people to take risks. It’s certainly not easy for me.

RH: I had a similar experience, and the sting of having not negotiated—and for me this was almost 10 years ago—still motivates me to be super bold with money. At one job, I asked for a pretty big raise after doing some research that led me to believe I was paid under market value. I didn’t get the raise, but I am so glad that I tried, and it’s made me more comfortable talking about money in the future: I asked for a really big raise and no one died.

EW: That’s so incredible! You lived to tell the tale. There are so many things I grew up believing about the way women should behave—and even though I know all that now—it’s incredibly hard to shake off. Wanting to please people and not cause a fuss is my worst enemy #1. I’m working on it all the time! I’ve gotten so much better, and bolder, but it still makes my hands sweat every time I have to speak out. I’m still in the “faking it” part, but I’ve gotten very good at faking being a confident, take-no-prisoners kind of woman.

RH: Yea! I am not sure to what degree we fully leave the “faking it” part, but in my mind, as long as you push through it’ll be ok!

EW: Totally. I’m in my mid-30s, know a ton of incredibly accomplished women, and everyone says they feel the same. Onward!

RH: Speaking of doing something new, what advice do you have for small bot projects can you suggest for people who want to get into bot making? (I am working on this right now. I have a set of circuit boards on their way from Hong Kong as we talk!)

EW: That’s awesome!! One of my huge frustrations in the advice-giving sections of the Internet is that you should “just make something.” It’s the “just” that really bothers me. Making things is absolutely the best way to learn something, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with an idea for a useful project.

The world of bots is so huge—they can include physical sensors and gear, or be as one-sided as automating tweets, like @tinycarebot, which reminds you to take a deep breath or go on a walk. So my advice is to choose one corner to play in—whether that’s Slack, Twitter, etc., and start really small. Can you get just one Tweet to show up? How about five? How about five on a schedule? Where are you pulling the Tweet from? How do you level up from there? Could you scrape it from a site? Pull from a separate JSON file?

Another way to dabble is to fake it! There are tons of prototyping tools out there that allow you to design or build a bot without going deep into code. We’re working on running through many of them at the Studio, and plan to write up our recommendations as we go, as well as projects you can replicate.

RH: That’s great. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat!

EW: Thank you!

[reporthers]

Q&A: Elise Hu, Foreign Correspondent for NPR

ELISE HU is the kind of person who moves a toddler, two cats and one dog to Korea, while pregnant, with her husband to open an NPR bureau in Seoul. I bet she is also the kind of person who can navigate hilly terrain in a stick shift while eating an ice cream cone. In her first year in Korea, she filed reports about the MERS virus outbreak, hiring fake friends for your wedding, and a deal between Japan and South Korea on wartime sex slaves. Luckily, she agreed to work through the 14-hour time difference to be interviewed here.

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ReportHers: What is it like to rely so heavily on fixers for your reporting since you don’t speak Korean or Japanese?

Elise Hu: Since establishing a rapport with sources is a go-to in my reporting toolbox, having to use a proxy was pretty difficult, at first. I have learned to really trust and rely upon the people I work with who not only do interpretation, but also have to know the premise of the story as well as I do because they set-up a lot of the interviews and logistics to make the stories happen. I’ve also picked up Korean language along the way, so that I can at least nod to the parts I do understand.

RH: Is it the goal that you would eventually not need a translator or fixer, or will that always be a part of the picture?

EH: Based on my progress in Korean, there is zero chance I will be able to work at the level I need without an interpreter. I even used a fixer/interpreter in Taiwan, where folks speak Mandarin. I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but because I never grew up talking about geopolitics or 20th century war history in Mandarin, I STILL use an interpreter in the event there are gaps.

RH: Is it frustrating or are you used to it now?

EH: For the most part, I’m used to it. We do try and get English speakers to engage with us for stories. It was super easy to find English speakers in Malaysia, for instance. And there are often Japanese experts who give their interviews in English. The place in East Asia where it’s been hardest to find English interviewees is Korea, despite the years and years and thousands of dollars the Koreans invest in English lessons and training.

RH: Why do you think that is, that it’s harder to find English interviewees in Korea despite that investment?

EH: Koreans will tell you that even they think that their English language education is broken. It’s heavily reliant on memorization of arcane vocabulary or language rules, they’re tested only in written English and they get very little practice actually speaking in English. So when I try to, say, order a tea in English at a coffee shop, the clerks just freeze up. They are terrified of having to communicate. This isn’t EVERYONE, of course, but I’ve attempted to conduct enough English interviews now that it’s a pretty clear trend that despite years of learning, conversational English still seems to be a barrier for many Koreans.

RH: What are some qualities or skills – both natural and hard-earned – that have helped you get to where you are in your career?

EH: Curiosity is key for journalism, of course. For creating/making things, I think it’s generally important to be open to all sorts of influences, whether it’s strangers you meet at a bar or art or music, and then not being so focused on rigid goals that you don’t leave room for a random insight or inspiration. Career-growth wise, I’ve never had a plan. I have general ideas about what I get excited about and then try to align my work with those things. One other approach of mine is to rarely say no. I know that for time management’s sake, women are always trying to say yes to less tedious stuff or obligations, and I think that makes a lot of sense. So when I say “I rarely say no,” I mean, I pretty much accept any invites I get to go out, or meet a new person for lunch or go on a trip, etc. Even if it’s at the last minute. You have to leave yourself room for discovery.

RH: What about balance? In what ways do you fit in down time of some kind? I was recently talking to my parents about how I want more balance in my life, and they were like, “Balance is overrated.”

EH: Balance is a weird word since it implies that the priorities in your live can achieve equal weight, and that’s not realistic. When people ask me about down time, my first reaction is always to think to myself, geez, I’m not that busy. As I recently read in a piece, and I will quote, “I am the laziest ambitious person I know.” I mean, I have an infant and a preschooler and work as a foreign correspondent that has to be ready to fly off at any moment, and on the face of it that seems like I’d be quite busy, but I guess that’s relative. I control my own schedule since I work from home, my husband gave up his full-time job to be lead parent at home and I work in “intervals,” meaning, sometimes I go really really hard, for a good week or two, and I work 16-hour days or am on the road nonstop. But after going hard, I will just not do much for a few days and have fun, go out with friends, etc, to recharge. Getting to control my schedule has been key to working in intervals.

RH: If I remember correctly, you and your husband, journalist Matt Stiles, seem to alternate parenting and work responsibilities based on what’s happening in your careers. Can you talk a little about that? What kinds of conversations do you have when making those decisions?

EH: Matt was the one who really encouraged this move to Korea. He said it would be invaluable for me since I’ve always been internationally-minded and love to explore, and that it would be an invaluable experience for us as a family. That meant his career had to take a pause, but he still does contract-based projects and is enjoying his time being the lead parent. I expect that when my tour is up, and if he gets a great offer, I’ll do a less demanding job so that he can go heads down on something he’s really passionate about.

RH: I feel like that kind of partnership is rare. Do you feel that way?

EH: Now that I’m part of an expat community, I actually find almost every couple we encounter has a similar structure, in which one spouse made a frictionless sacrifice of his or her individual career to allow the partner to have hers, or his. I think it’s something spouses do for one another a lot, but it will never be easy. When you’re trying to be a good partner, or mother, or friend, while at the same time trying to make your personal dreams a reality, it will always be a challenge.

RH: Can you share an example of when it has been particularly hard for you?

EH: Sure. As the mom, I obviously carried my daughter Eva for nine months, and then gave birth to her, and then breastfed her exclusively for a year, and think our bond is unique and IN MY MIND, I wanted to be the parent she goes to first. Or when she wakes up at night, I sort of expected that she’d call for momma. But this summer, after the birth of my second daughter, and because I am frankly just unavailable during bed time because that’s when I get my NPR stories edited due to the time difference, I noticed a real shift — Eva started calling for her dad, and asking for him first, and only wanting him to read or perform other tasks, like bathe her. This was really heartbreaking for me because of my own built-in expectation. Eva got out of that phase once her little sister got bigger and now I’m not rejected, but she still does like her dad to be the one who calms her at night if she wakes up from a bad dream. I had to learn to be okay with that, and if you think about it, why shouldn’t I be?! He’s the go-to parent in this house, and if I want things to be that way, I have to let go of the notion that I could be the go-to parent, too.

RH: What project or piece are you most excited about right now?

EH: If I told you I’d have to kill you.

RH: You’d have to fly back to the U.S. to do that! Unless you have people to call. Ok how about this one: What at the South Korea bureau are you most excited about?

EH: I’m heading into year two on this beat. That means I’m shifting from “Hey look, a squirrel!” coverage to being able to better understand the nuances of this place and ask more probing questions about it as premises for stories. I intend to spend more time in Japan in year two, since it’s part of my portfolio and I was grounded from flying last summer due to being super pregnant. In Japan, I’m most interested in how that society is dealing with shrinking — there are not enough babies in Japan to replace its workforce and its population. That makes for some fascinating ways society and the economy will have to adapt.

RH: By the way, do they have XTC gelato in Korea? It might just be a Hong Kong brand.

EH: Haven’t seen it. In Korea, the best dessert in my humble opinion, is bingsu. It’s like eating milky snow.

RH: Favorite flavor?

EH: Mango.

RH: Yum. Well Elise, you rock. Thanks so much. I know you have some All Things Considered filing do to. Catch you on the radio.

EH: Thanks for asking me to do this! Take care.

Pub date: Feb 8th, 2016

[reporthers]

Q&A: Guardian US Data Editor, Mona Chalabi

MONA CHALABI’s Wikipedia page says she is “considered one of the most influential people in the young field of data journalism” but she gets sheepish when you ask her about the post. (She learned of it when a friend emailed her asking, “DID YOU WRITE THIS??”) The truth is, Mona’s work inspires a level of fandom.

Mona just joined Guardian US as a data editor. Before that, she was a lead writer at FiveThirtyEight, where she penned an advice column called “Dear Mona” that answered personal questions with hard data. She made a documentary about racism in Britain that aired on the BBC late last year. If you Google “Mona Chalabi and tampons” I think you’ll like what you find. Follow her @MonaChalabi. (This interview was conducted towards the end of 2015.)

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ReportHers: Do you time travel? In the last two weeks you wrote several pieces for FiveThirtyEight, had a documentary air on the BBC, published a piece in the Guardian on the doc and spoke with Rachel Martin for NPR’s Number of the Week on Weekend Edition. Am I missing anything?

Mona Chalabi: I’m pretty unhappy when I’m not busy. And it’s an exciting time to be keeping busy!! Data journalism has developed massively online but I still feel like its potential has been neglected on TV and radio, so those other projects are really important to me.

RH: What do you mean when you say the potential has been neglected on those other mediums?

MC: Well, when I think of the way that numbers are used on TV I think about those terrible graphics you see on the news. It’s either a series of bullet points that flash up on your screen (which, yawn, remind me of a terrible lecture at college) or they’re some really bland graphic. Radio tends to avoid numbers since it can be hard to talk about them accurately while not confusing listeners – imagine describing the chart below to someone who couldn’t actually see the chart. If I told you out loud that 100,825,272,791 people have ever died, your brain would be so busy processing that number you wouldn’t really be able to hear what I said next, let alone hear me describing numbers like that for other years.

RH: How did you learn to explain complex things in both your writing and speaking?

MC: I know this is a really boring answer but it’s an honest one: by practicing.

RH: That’s a satisfying answer! If you had said, “Well, I was always good at xyz since I was a child,” I would feel like I could never get there myself. But practice, that’s something within reach.

MC: Absolutely! I think anyone can do what I do! And, just to be clear, by practice I don’t mean trying to sound like some model you think you should sound like. It’s about finding your own voice. I really don’t think there are enough voices in the media that actually sound different from one another. That’s a massive shame.

RH: How did you practice finding your voice?

MC: I did my master’s degree in France where most of your grade is based on presentations you do in class rather than essays. Actually, there are so many different things I could possibly say as reasons why I found my voice! I think I also learned pretty young that if you don’t speak for yourself, someone else might speak on your behalf.

RH: Is there a time you recall when you learned that lesson, that if you don’t speak for yourself, someone else will?

MC: Yeh it’s a really dumb example, though, but it’s the first one that comes to mind. I remember when I was in primary school [in the UK] I got into a fight with a girl in my class who kept telling me to go back to my own country. A teacher later saw me crying and told the headmaster that it was because I had stuff going on at home. Even though I was really upset I knew I needed to get my act together and say something myself to the headmaster, otherwise he would think the teacher was right.

RH: What gets you most excited? What kinds of stories?

MC: Like most journalists I get excited about stories that other people haven’t written about. But being a data journalist is great because you can take a story that other people have written and tell it in a totally different way by using numbers. Like this piece in the Washington Post.

One writer concluded that women should “get married” to “end violence.” I was able to look at the data and reach a totally different conclusion. It can be really rewarding to call something out as BS, but you just have to have a bit of humility when you’re doing it and realize that you, as a totally fallible human, will inevitably write some BS of your own, too.

RH: What was the mistake they made in interpreting the data for the Washington Post piece in your mind? [Note: the WaPo writers’ response to Mona’s response is here.]

MC: Sometimes you find what you’re looking for. They expected the data to show lower violence rates for married women and so that’s what they found. But if they would have gone looking for a connection between say, age and violence, they also would have spotted a pretty strong connection. Why not tell that story? And even worse, they simply assumed that correlation means causation. The original headline actually had the audacity to tell women to “get married”!!!

But there could be lots of things that make a woman more likely to be married (i.e., education level) that might also affect violence rates. And even then I wouldn’t say women with less of an education are more likely to be in violent relationships. It could just be that women with lower education levels have less earning potential, meaning that they don’t have the financial exit routes that other women might have. Basically, there are a bunch of different explanations for one set of numbers and your own political views shouldn’t affect which one you examine.

RH: There’s also data that one of the leading causes of death among pregnant women is violence at the hands of their spouses or partners.

MC: I’ve never seen that study before – thanks for bringing it to my attention!

RH: What can journalists do to check their biases, especially when data is involved?

MC: Partnering is good. Asking someone else, especially someone who might have a very different set of assumptions, to look at the same set of data can be really revealing. Will they find the same things you found? It’s also good to use more than one source where you can. If there aren’t two different data sets on the same topic then see if you can find different years. Was year xxxx an anomaly or have things been this way for ages?

RH: What is your relationship with self-confidence and how does that play out in your work? I think about this a lot myself, when I pitch, when I edit, when I negotiate rates or salaries, etc.

MC: I don’t have a lot of self-confidence. But I don’t think that’s always a bad thing – we’re only constantly told it’s a bad thing because men tend to have a lot of it (or are taught to act like they have a lot of it) and we’re in the bloody patriarchy so it seems like that’s the only way to succeed. I think readers/listeners/viewers can appreciate a voice that’s self-aware, unsure, self-critical.

I think there are times when a lack of self-confidence can be a fucking good thing (I stayed up till 2 a.m. revising for my exams at uni because I lacked self-confidence. The guys who gloated about how good they were and didn’t bother to study didn’t end up doing as well) but what’s hard is channeling that properly. You mention negotiation rates and salaries – that’s no time to be self-deprecating!

RH: Ok, last question. I’m stealing it from your Reddit AMA but it was a good one. What was a time when digging into the data changed your opinion on something?

MC: Ah damn that was the hardest question in the AMA and I’ve been thinking about it ever since! Not because I don’t think data can change people’s minds but because I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly opinionated person. Either I’m very open to the possibility that I’m wrong or I’m just a flake.

I’ve been thinking about stories that I wouldn’t write because I don’t want people to change their minds based on the data, if you know what I mean! Let’s imagine there’s data on what percentage of people who have unprotected sex don’t end up getting an STD. If you just presented those numbers alone it might encourage people to act irresponsibly, you know? And that behavior in itself could change the numbers (i.e., increase the percentage).

RH: Do you try to avoid those stories?

MC: I think those examples are very, very rare – on the whole, it’s not up to me to decide whether or not someone should change their behavior on the basis of the data. I just think that I have to ask myself whether I could write a story like that properly. Would I be able to say what the probability of catching an STD is now AND explain how that probability would change if people’s behavior changed, in a way that makes sure readers get the whole story without just walking away with the first part?

RH: Well, people tend to only read the first couple paragraphs anyway…

MC: Exactly!! I’m always thinking about that – hello anyone who has read this far down, thanks for staying with us!

RH: If you read this far, you are X% less likely to contract an STD! Good for you, informed people. On that note, thank you, Mona, for taking the time to chat!

MC: Thanks for taking an interest in my work! Take care!

[reporthers]

Q&A: GIF Illustrator, Rebecca Mock

REBECCA MOCK is an illustrator and comic artist in New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Medium and PCMag and it is gorgeous, full of bright colors, intimacy and layered scenes. They’re pretty cool.

News outlets have been using illustrations forever, of course, but Rebecca takes it to the next level: GIFs. Who knew you could grow up to make animated GIFs for a living? She even has an agent for such things. In addition to one-off illustrations, she also illustrates novels. Follow @RebeccaMock. 

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ReportHers: What percentage of your work is making illustrations for news organizations versus ad agencies and -- I’m afraid to ask it but -- are the rates really different? 

Rebecca Mock: I suppose it’s about half-and-half. Lately more ad work, but I think that’s just coincidence. Advertising work does tend to pay more, as I’m dealing more with big-name clients while editorial work is often for non-profit news publications or limited-run magazines. While the pay is less, the circulation is large, and the art directors are often savvy, and pair the illustrator with a subject they know they’ll like. It’s rewarding, in its own way. 

RH: That’s how they get you in journalism, right? The pay is less but it’s rewarding in some way. :) 

RM: Yes, that and publications use a LOT more illustrations per issue, so they’re splitting their budget between a handful of artists, every day/week/month. It’s good work for illustrators just starting out. Art directors are looking for new names. 

RH: Is this what you thought you’d be doing with your skills and talents? 

RM: I don’t think I expected to be working in so many different fields at once. My most concrete plan when I started was the comic books. I figured I would be working part-time somewhere to make a living, not doing freelance illustration. But I was lucky to get a few good jobs soon after graduating, which snowballed. 

RH: Is there more freelance illustration work now than there used to be, specifically in editorial/news?  

RM: It’s hard to say. I was a bit isolated when I was in school and didn’t pay much attention to freelance illustration since it didn’t interest me as much as book/comic book/concept art work, but now it’s a big focus for me. Also, since moving to New York I’ve become much more familiar with the people in my field. The importance of social media has certainly played a key role. If the amount of illustration work has not increased, there is certainly more attention being paid to it. It’s so easy to share great artwork online. 

RH: I found your work on a Tumblr roundup of GIF artists, so that’s the proof! 

RM: I owe Tumblr so much, oof. 

RH: What is the process for making a GIF for a news story, start to finish. 

RM: I can tell you about the job I’m working on as we speak. I’m doing a piece for the NYT Sunday Review, I’ve done a few for them before, too. Today I was asked to make an image for print and for the web, with animation. Tonight I’m doing the sketch, and tomorrow and the next day I’ll do the piece. The process is not really different from a regular non-animated illustration assignment, especially with the NYT because they know my work and process. I will include a description of what I plan to animate in my notes to the art director, and they will tell me which idea they like best. Then I’ll create the image for print, and take it back into Photoshop to animate it afterwards. 

RH: What are the rates for that kind of assignment? I imagine companies haven’t had standard rates set for GIFs, if they even do now? 

RM: Editorial work is often in the $250/quarter page range, sometimes less. But publications will sometimes have larger budgets and can pay $400/quarter page. Also a lot of editorial work is online now, and the rates vary--anything from $100-2,000 for a banner image. I will charge an extra 30 percent for animation, or a little more or less, depending on how complicated/time-consuming it will be. But the specifics vary a lot! 

RH: So I imagine something like the animated graphic you did for Medium would be a LOT more labor intensive? 

RM: Yes, good example. That image was like, all animation fee. I spent a few days on the animation, after maybe one day with the plain image (spread out over a long time, since I have to schedule my freelance work around comics). 

RH: Do you find it hard to set rates or negotiate with something a bit new to the digital news industry? Or are illustrations in news stories and editorial features not that new? 

RM: I don’t find it difficult now that I know what my process is, how long something will probably take to make, and how much money I need to live. I base my fees around that. Digital editorial illustration isn’t that new, it was already a healthy industry when I was still in college between 2007 and 2011, at least. The animated illustrations are a bit newer, or at least they’re a fad that’s only newly been re-invented. 

RH: What would you want editors who haven’t worked with animation artists, or even illustrators before, know about the process? 

RM: A good piece takes time. Especially animation; it’s time-consuming. That’s what the added fee is for. An editor should understand the artist requires a clear and manageable schedule, and enough detail that they don’t need to guess the important stuff. 

RH: What was the subject of the first illustration you remember making? 

RM: My first illustration job right out of school was doing background art for animations. The first one I did was horrible. It was a cityscape, Hollywood-esque. Lots of buildings, no subjects. I didn’t like images with lots of straight lines, hard edges, back then. But that’s a big part of my work now, so go figure. 

RH: What about the very first drawing you remember making? Did you draw as a kid? 

RM: I was a huge art nerd as a kid! I don’t remember my first, but I can remember a lot of early drawings of fairies, tracings of Archie Comics, dogs?? It’s a blur. When I got older I went to an arts middle school and high school. So I’ve been an art school kid since I was about 12. 

RH: The first piece of writing I remember doing was definitely about mermaids. I was in elementary school. 

RM: Yesssss. Fantasy and adventure stories! 

RH: For sure! I moved on to Pegasus-related stories. Then I wrote a piece about a city cat that had an adventure in the country. Big stuff. 

RM: Wow, you had a wide range of interests. Hitting all the big genres. I remember a short story I wrote about twin sisters who were fairies. And a few about a band of witches. 

RH: We would have been best friends, for sure. 

RM: Absolutely! You wrote the stories, I would draw the pictures for them. 

RH: Well, thank you so much for your time! Is there anything else you want people to know about illustrations or GIFs -- or fairy twins? 

RM: Thank you! This was quite fun for me. Everyone: read more comic books. Heck, draw more comics. They can teach you a lot about art and yourself. GIFs are fun to make and easy to learn, so try that, too. 

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Ed. Note: Speaking of freelancing, here’s a crowd-sourced Google Doc where you can look up rates -- and add your own. Plus, Julie Haslanger put out a report about what journalists make broken down by title, years of experience and a few other data points. Fill it out, share it and, if you’re brave, ask your colleagues what they make. 

[reporthers]

Q&A: The Longest Shortest Time Host, Hillary Frank

HILLARY FRANK is the host of The Longest Shortest Time, a WNYC podcast. From the outside, the show seems like a parenting podcast, but really it’s about relationships and facing challenges and feeling alone. It’s good storytelling. Hillary got her start in radio at This American Life, and she writes and illustrates young adult novels. You can follow her at @longestshortest.

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ReportHers: How did you first conceive of the podcast idea for The Longest Shortest Time?   

Hillary Frank: I had a rough childbirth and recovery. Four months after my daughter was born, I moved to a town where I knew *nobody*. Looking around, it seemed like it was easier for everyone else. They were out and about with their babies within weeks, whereas I couldn’t walk for the first two months of her life. I was in desperate need of hearing people say I wasn’t alone, but it didn’t seem possible to just go up to strangers and ask if they were having a hard time.

But I’d been a radio reporter for over a decade, and I knew that if you stick a mic in someone’s face, you can pretty much ask them anything. So I started calling people up and asking them really personal questions. And what I found was that not everyone struggled exactly how I had, but they had different struggles. It made me feel both less alone and also like I had some things easier than other people.

RH: It sounds like part of why you started the show was to find others who had a similar experiences as you did. What were your goals in terms of listeners, or getting the show hosted by a larger company?  

HF: I had NO goals. It was purely selfish in the beginning. I urgently needed to connect. And also, technology was changing all around me while I was on maternity leave. I thought of the podcast partly as my calling card, for the day when I would go in for job interviews. I could point to this project and say, See? I’ve kept up with my work and the changing medium.

RH: How concerned were you about starting to work or freelance again, after taking a break while you were recovering?

HF: I was nervous. I didn’t know how to navigate childcare at first. I didn’t know how to gauge when I’d feel ready to work again, given the fact that I was physically injured. I’d have some preliminary work calls and pretend I didn’t have my baby sucking on my boob through the entire call. I didn’t even know what work would look like because freelancing had always felt very precarious to me and I was yearning for financial stability. I figured I’d probably try to get a full-time job, but I didn’t even know what that would be. For a while I thought about going to social work school.

RH: How did you get the show onto WNYC?

HF: I was making money as a college essay tutor. Which I loved. And I was making the podcast while my daughter was at preschool in the mornings and during her naps. At a certain point, I realized I had to drop either the tutoring or the podcast; I couldn’t do both. The podcast seemed like the obvious thing to drop since I was doing it for free. But it was really hard to let go. So many women seemed to be getting something meaningful from it. So I decided to do a Kickstarter. And I was like, If I don’t make my goal, it’s a sign I need to drop this. And to be honest, I would’ve been sad but I also would’ve been fine with that. But I thought of it as my last chance to make the podcast a job. I made $10K over my goal. And Dean Cappello [Chief Content Officer] from WNYC emailed me, asking if I was interested in partnering.

RH: What tips do you have for someone who wants to make a sustainable podcast, whether that means getting a partnership like this or through other means?

HF: Prove that you can make money without anyone’s help. I had been trying for years to get organizations to support me before the Kickstarter and the answer I kept getting was some version of, We love your show, but you need to build your audience numbers before we can support you. And since I was doing this project for free during my kid’s naps, I was in a situation where I could either spend time making the show OR marketing it to build my numbers—not both. Lots of people told me my Kickstarter goal was too high ($25K), given my audience size. But what I did was, I cold-called a few brands that I felt supported me in motherhood and left voice mails for marketing managers asking if they would do challenge grants. None of them had ever done anything like that before; all of them said yes. So when it came time to partner, I had proof that if I really wanted to, I could do this project solo. Which meant a partner would have to offer me more than what I could do on my own.

RH: I’ve listened to your interview on Tape, the podcast, and hearing you talk about this now – that all the brands said yes even though they had never done something like that before – at first I thought, Man, it sounds so easy or lucky or something. But now I think that you just kept trying different things and were then poised to take an opportunity when you found it. Is that how you would describe the path to where you are now?

HF: Every time I’ve climbed a rung in the career ladder, it has been in a very nontraditional way. I often get the reaction, You’re so lucky. And it makes me really uncomfortable because every time it is due to two things: 1) I’ve been really persistent in finding a creative way in, even following multiple rejections and 2) people in powerful positions taking a chance on me even when I might not be as qualified on paper as other candidates. And I think they’re willing to take those chances because of my creative way in. Luck is being handed something by chance, and that is not what’s happened for me. Ever.

RH: I think the other thing at play, when someone seems to have been very lucky in their career or in anything, is that when they are looking back on how they got to a position of success, it seems like a clearer path to people on the outside.

HF: Yeah, I always try to be sure to throw in the part about the rejections whenever I talk about this stuff. Because I think it’s important for aspiring media folks to know that each time you get rejected is a signal that you need to try it differently next time. Or try someone else.

RH: What are your thoughts on the label “mommy blogger” or podcaster, etc.?

HF: Ugh. I don’t think I get called that very much. But I think it’s really demeaning. It feels like, implied in that label is, All you are is a mommy blogger. I have people constantly telling me they listen to the show even though they’re not in my demographic, or that there’s no reason for them to listen because they don’t have kids. And I’m like, my demo is PEOPLE. So you’re in it.

RH: How do you make a show about parenting – admittedly a specific life experience – feel so universal?

HF: I pick stories the same way I would for any show. I go for ones that are about the human experience, not the “mommy” experience. My producer Joanna and I think of parenthood as a launching pad for talking about everything else: death, illness, relationships, sex, work. And we look for stories that have some element of surprise. I don’t mean a plot twist. Just something that makes me think, Oh, I’ve never heard that before. Or makes me see the world in a slightly different way. We’ve also opened up the show to *all* parenthood, which means grownups can tell stories about their relationships with their own parents. Which all of us can relate to in one way or another.

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NOTE: The Longest Shortest Time is holding an event at BAM in New York City on May 7. Tickets here. The event involves a signature drink called “Sex on the Living Room Floor.” 

[reporthers]

Q&A: Midroll senior producer, Gretta Cohn

Have you noticed? Podcasts are quite the hot topic these days – not just the content but the money behind it, too. GRETTA COHN is a senior producer at Midroll, a podcast advertising company that also has two awesomely-named audio content networks: Earwolf and Wolfpop. Gretta has worked as a producer at Freakonomics Radio and WNYC’s Soundcheck. Follow @grettacohn.

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ReportHers: Ok, can you explain what Midroll does? Is it an ad network first, or a content company? Where do you fit in?

Gretta Cohn: So, it’s both. On the Midroll side, there is a team of ad sales staff who work to do just that -- sell ads for podcasts [both those produced in-house and on other networks]. On the Earwolf/Wolfpop side we create podcasts in-house.

It may seem like an unusual model, but when you think of how public radio supports itself as well -- it is through underwriting. When I was at WNYC, one side of the building housed content producers (making shows like Freakonomics, Radiolab, On The Media), but on the other side of the building were folks working in development and underwriting and sponsorship.

I think it may be unique in the sense that we haven’t seen many podcast networks like this before that are outside of the public radio model.

RH: How involved with the ad side of things are you, being on the content side?

GC: I’m not terribly involved in the ad side of things. As I’m getting to know the shows, I am getting to know how hosts deliver ad reads. I give feedback on the reads in the same way I would give feedback on the show as a whole. So, things like: does this capture my attention? Is the host saying enough? Too much? Do they sound disengaged? Is it funny? Things of this nature. I am listening as a producer.

RH: How is what you are doing at Midroll different than what you have done as a producer in previous jobs?

GC: The first thing is that I am overseeing many shows instead of one. Previously, I worked on Freakonomics, I worked on Soundcheck. My focus was on that one show. Now, I am listening to and thinking about and working with more than a dozen shows. I am also working in content development, to bring new shows to the company.

So on any given day: I’ll spend time listening to raw tape from shows like I Was There Too and Reading Aloud, and I’ll send edit notes back to hosts.  I’m essentially listening to entire back catalogs in order to meet with hosts and give general notes about their podcasts. I’m also working to develop new shows, so that means meeting with potential hosts/partners to talk through ideas and map out strategies to create pilots. So -- I’m keeping one ear on the show roster as it stands and another on possible new podcasts.

RH: How are you identifying those potential hosts?

GC: Some of them approach us, some are people we think could be a great anchor for a new show. Some are established figures, others are less well-known. It’s mostly about: do I think this person can command an audience? Do they have good stories to tell? Are they funny, insightful, do I want to listen?

I’m also very interested in bringing the skills I have in creating narrative, character-driven stories to the network, so I’m looking for people who want to do that too.

RH: How do you determine whether someone, perhaps on the lesser-known side, can command an audience?

GC: I think it comes down to instinct as a producer and listener. And obviously, I am not the only one making this determination. So, as a group, as a company, do we think this is an interesting person with something to say? Yes? Then, great!

RH: Let’s say I have a podcast I’ve been producing out of my basement/bedroom/etc. for like a year or something. What are my options if I want wider distribution? Not just at Midroll, but I mean out there in the marketplace.

GH: There do seem to be more options lately than ever before. There are networks like Infinite Guest and companies like Podcast One. Public radio is starting to make more podcast-only shows. Just this week WBUR launched Dear Sugar, with Cheryl Strayed. It is as competitive a marketplace as for anyone trying to break into any field, though. So just because we have these networks doesn’t mean there are easy ways to break out and find audience. I think that some of the new breakout shows have benefited from being boosted by This American Life. And I often see other small podcasters working together on things, like Pitch and Song Exploder referencing each other.

RH: Let’s talk about story. For narrative, character-driven stories, how do you make decisions about structure, about what comes when in the story?

GC: That is the basic question! I think it comes from years of working with audio. You learn, over time and through trial and error, how to create structure. Structure will change from story to story, although there are some basic rules that you can follow, and then break. Rob Rosenthal (who was my teacher at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies) has a great HowSound episode about finding and creating structure. He’s written it out on napkins. For me: I like to start with a question or a puzzle, build some kind of tension, and then deliver some kind of payoff.

RH: Tell me about a time when you were out in the field and had an equipment malfunction or another kind of issue?

GC: Fortunately, I haven’t had too many instances of equipment malfunction, but there have been times when I’ve had to operate my field recorder under unusual conditions, or have had interviewees who weren’t so happy with me being there. For a Freakonomics radio podcast called The Most Dangerous Machine (about car safety), I ended the episode by taking a ride in a Jaguar at high speed. I have the photo:

RH: That sounds terrifying!  

GC: It was both amazing and terrifying. Mostly because we basically drove around in a circle at high speed over and over and over again. I tried to act tough but I was totally nauseous. So I’m pressed into my chair, zipping around the corners, it’s all zooom zooom zooom and I’m also interviewing the driver at the same time (oh yeah, I was in the passenger seat). So I’m completely distracting the person who has my life in his hands, I think I’m going to throw up, and I’m all: “So, tell me about this, tell me about that.” I think when we finally stopped my legs were total jelly. And then I wanted to do it again.

The other thing that comes to mind is an instance when I overstayed my welcome. I was interviewing the performance artist/architect Vito Acconci for a Studio 360 piece. We had talked for a few hours. But I didn’t have exactly what I needed for the story. So I asked if I could come back to talk again. Part way through he go so frustrated and angry with me for asking “the same questions.” I saved the tape, and even now if I listen back it makes me totally anxious. Luckily he let me continue on, and I was really happy with how the piece turned out. But I almost lost him!

RH: Oh man, I’m cringing listening to this, but he was actually polite about it!

GC: Ha, you weren’t in the room!

RH: Any final thoughts on how the industry is evolving and how reporters/producers can shift as it does?

GC: I do think it’s an exciting time. And hopefully that means more opportunities for talented people. I would just say that it’s important to listen to anything and everything. Be aware of what people are doing. Think about what you can contribute. I think that new models of how podcasting will work are continuing to develop. I’m looking forward to all of it. 

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Recommended: Want to hear a British accent on your podcast? Ashley Milne-Tyte hosts the women-and-workpace podcast, The Broad Experience.

In other news: Melody Kramer is leaving NPR for 18F, what she calls “a skunkworks shop located within the federal government." (FYI, skunkworks is in Urban Dictionary. I'm intrigued.) And Carrie Ching, one of my first interviewees, has an awesome semi-new animated series on Vice about reporters' wild work experiences. It's called Correspondent Confidential.

[reporthers]

Q&A: NYT Video Producer, Zena Barakat

I’ve got three words for you: animated news video. If, when you see a really good video, you think, “Wait, but how?” then read on. I had a lot of questions for ZENA BARAKAT, a senior producer of video at The New York Times who created the Modern Love video series and was nominated for an Emmy for her work. She’s also a 2014-2015 John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where she’s learning how to make watching news videos on a cell phone more engaging and addictive. Follow her at @zena_b.

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ReportHers: Let’s get right into the Modern Love video series. What is involved in producing one video and how long does it take?

Zena Bakarat: My favorite topic! Every month, I’d hire a different animator to work with and so every video has its own artistic style. It would work like this: the editor of “Modern Love,” Daniel Jones, would send me some columns. I’d choose one that I thought had visual potential and I’d ask the columnist if he or she wanted to be featured in an animation. No one ever said “no.” I guess the idea of being in an animation is too fun to pass up.

I’d interview the columnist over the phone and a tape sync would record the audio [on the other end]. The interview would last about an hour. I’d cut the interview down to about 2 minutes (the toughest part of the process for me) and pass off the audio to a brilliant sound designer with a background in radio. I worked with two: Ian Chillag and Jocelyn Gonzales. Then we’d give a beautiful audio story that was 2-3 minutes long to the animator(s). Then the animator would have about a month to bring it to life in a video. I would work with the animator and sound designer throughout the month to shape it into a story that was delightful, moving and surprising. It was a very collaborative process. And for all the radio nerds out there, the person producing the series while I’m on fellowship is Nick van der Kolk, creator of the podcast “Love + Radio.”

RH: So the sound designers are not Times staffers, but contractors?

ZB: That’s right. The backbone of any fantastic animation is the sound design. I knew that I had to find talented sound designers who knew how to tell a story using music, sound effects and the columnist’s voice.

RH: Tangent question here, but do you think the Times will ever get into podcasting or in-house audio work?

ZB: For years, the Times produced podcasts before they became hugely popular. A few years ago, they made the decision to eliminate most of them -- there are a few left. It’s sad for a major podcast fan like me that we aren’t producing as many anymore.

(Animated by Joe Donaldson for Modern Love)

RH: Ok, back to Modern Love. How many people work on one video and how much does it cost, outside of staff resources?

ZB: It used to be at least a team of four of us. I would choose the stories and the animators, conduct the interviews with the columnists, guide the story and oversee production. A sound designer would refine the sound, create sound effects and choose music and evolve that audio bed as the animation was being created. Then Shayla Harris, a senior producer, would come in at different times to give it fresh eyes and ears to make sure we were on the right track. And most importantly, there was the animator. Sometimes it was a team of animators, like Reanimation for this video. Or sometimes it was a single animator, like Freddy Arenas, who created this beautiful, moving animation.

Now that Nick is at the helm, he is doing two of those jobs: he is producing the series and he is the audio designer. He’s doing a great job. So aside from Shayla, it is entirely a project made possible by contractors.

RH: You are on leave from the Times to study at Stanford. How did you get approval to do that? How did you pitch it to your manager?

ZB: I told my editor, Bruce Headlam, before I applied to this fellowship that I really wanted it. I was lucky that he was so supportive and he saw the value of it. A lot of people think these fellowships are a time for journalists to take a break, but this experience has been anything but that. It’s been intensive career training. I feel energized and more prepared to tackle what’s to come.

RH: What have you learned so far about cell phone videos and how people watch them?

ZB: There seems to be something very personal about a phone and that can translate to someone’s content consumption habits. I spoke to someone who spends 2-3 hours a day watching videos on her phone. She is a mom of two and in her thirties. She makes YouTube videos and she is in a community of other YouTubers who share her hobbies online. She considers those online friends her real friends. She even meets up with them in person. And she follows several filmmakers on SnapChat.

This personal connection that she has with others around online video is something that seems to be missing from a lot of content I created before coming here. It is something I think about a lot now -- how can we, as journalists who hate inserting “I” into our content -- have a personal, authentic relationship with our audience and not make it nearly impossible for them to have a conversation with us?

(Animated by Joanna Neborsky for Modern Love)

RH: One way to do that is to help readers/viewers see content as coming from reporters as individuals instead of from The Brand. But how scalable is that, to have content only come from specific reporters? What other ways are you thinking about reaching that personal connection?

ZB: I think we can produce all types of content aside from only the masterful documentaries or articles. I think that content is The Brand, but there is no reason we can’t show part of the process as we go and establish relationships with our audience through SnapChat or Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, that is a little more revealing of the process and show our content makers as who they are -- incredibly creative, dedicated individuals. I think our video journalists use Twitter incredibly well, but what if the audience could seamlessly watch the video and interact with the filmmaker and easily follow him or her along for the ride as he or she puts together the next video? Right now, it takes a lot of legwork for our audiences to find us and follow us, and we can do a better job at carrying a two-way conversation with our audience.

RH: So, you’re thinking about something like a meta mini-series where the reporter shares Instagram shots or something as they shoot and edit the video, not after it's all done?

ZB: Exactly! Again, it happens now almost unintentionally, but I think it can be more intentional.

RH: Mind: blown. Sort of like Alex Bloomberg’s StartUp, in a way.

ZB: You’re a total podcast geek like I am.

RH: Guilty!

ZB: I don’t think we should be making a bunch of “StartUp” videos instead of our videos. I think our work is beautiful and smart and I am so proud to be at the Times. In terms of video and mobile consumption, I’m curious how our audience would change if we made more of an implicit effort to let them in and talk to them in these other ways as well as continuing to produce our core content.

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Recommended: Carrie Ching is cool people. Her animated series, Correspondent Confidential, now appears on Vice.com and her graphic journalism feature, “In Jennifer’s Room,” won a national Emmy. 

[reporthers]

Q&A: Death, Sex & Money Host, Anna Sale

ANNA SALE is the host and managing editor of the WNYC show Death, Sex & Money, an interview-based podcast. Before launching the show, she covered politics in New York City, Connecticut and West Virginia. She's contributed to This American Life, NPR, Marketplace, PBS Newshour, and Slate. You can follow her @annasale. Death, Sex & Money comes out every other Wednesday and is available at deathsexmoney.org.

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1. Can you support yourself as a host of a public radio show? Definitely. I do. I'm new as a host but I've worked in public radio for almost ten years and made enough money while doing it. I think when you're starting a public radio career, you have to ask yourself where you are willing to live, what sorts of work you're willing to do to get close to radio production, and how much money you need to earn to feel like you're supporting yourself. I worked for public radio stations in West Virginia and Connecticut before I moved to New York and WNYC, and while I didn't earn as much money as I do now, housing was a whole lot cheaper. Initially, I covered general assignment news, so I was forced to be out in the field all the time and produce a lot of radio. That allowed me to experiment with story structure and feel what beats felt most exciting to me. I'm a big advocate of starting out in smaller markets. There are fewer people, so you end up learning how to do EVERYTHING, and I got paid and had health insurance while I was doing it.

2. Being a host of a show is probably a long journey – do you think this is a viable career goal for up and coming journalists in the current landscape? By their very nature, hosting gigs are more scarce than producing jobs, so there's that. But with public radio stations and podcast networks supporting more and more digital-only shows, opportunities to host, or to create and lead your own content, are rapidly expanding. For me, my path to being a host started with on-air reporting, then filling in as the local host of Morning Edition or All Things Considered, then guest-hosting talk shows. Getting to try out hosting was important, because I learned that I liked doing it, and when WNYC asked for show ideas in a station-wide contest, I had the confidence to declare that I had a show idea and I wanted to be the host.

3. Can you talk about times in your career when it’s been hard to support yourself on your work and what you did to manage it? The scariest moment for me was when I left my full-time job at WNPR in Connecticut to move to New York City. When I decided to move, I think I knew one person who worked in public radio in New York, and I knew that the city was a place where the supply of talented producers exceeded the demand for paid work. To make matters worse, this was in 2009, when journalism was hemorrhaging jobs. But I needed paying work as soon as I landed in the city. It was a terrifying transition for me. I was leaving a stable job with co-workers I loved and important stories to tell for the unknown. So naturally, I focused on the worst possible outcomes: running out of money and never being on the radio again.

That fear fueled me into doing things I never would've done otherwise. I asked former mentors to introduce me to any New York radio people they knew. Then, I called these near-strangers and shamelessly asked what kind of paid work I might be eligible for. I asked for a lot of advice, bought a lot of people coffee, and applied for any job that had qualifications that remotely matched up with mine. Looking back, I was incredibly productive during that period where all I remember feeling was panic. I was pitching and producing freelance pieces. I helped an independent producer raise money for a documentary. I went to conferences alone and forced myself to walk up to clumps of people I admired and to introduce myself. I was hungry and I was willing to do anything. All that helped get my name out to people were making hiring decisions. I was also lucky and had good timing, and I ended up getting hired for an open producer job at WNYC.

4. Now, for questions about your show. What qualities do you look for in an interviewee? Do you search for them yourself, or with a production team? It's a team effort in pitching, booking and researching guests. We have a running list of our dream gets, and we update that regularly with brainstorming meetings with a special guest star who works somewhere else at WNYC. I want the mix of guests to feel varied and surprising, and for a wide spectrum of life structures and choices to be represented. Listeners also send in a lot of guest ideas, or stories to share. When the show started, we only really knew that we wanted it to be a mix of famous people and ordinary people. It's been fun to color in details beyond that with each episode.

5. When interviewing someone, how closely do you stick to a topic? How do you decide whether to go on a tangent or not? This is where it's so fantastic that the interviews are recorded and edited in post. It gives me the freedom as a host to go around one corner with a guest, and if it leads somewhere magic -- fantastic! If it leads...nowhere, then I know we can cut that section, so I reset in the next question and we move ahead. I go in with a list of questions, but I usually don't read them closely as I listen. But I do always know how I want an interview to start and where I hope it lands.

6. What has been the hardest part about starting a new podcast? For me, the most disorienting part was figuring out a structure. Public radio news pieces generally are some version of a host lede, then an opening, all leading to an outcue. That was what I was used to writing and producing. Figuring out what signposts I wanted in each episode, what I wanted to keep flexible, how much and what kind of music to use, how long each episode should generally be -- all these were questions we had to address to build a frame for the show. That part was scary. Now, the scary part comes around noon on the day that a show launches. I'll feel proud and pleased we finished, and then I'll get a sinking feeling of mild anxiety that the next show needs to be worked out. Who knew that perpetual indigestion would come with my dream job? 7. I thought the word “podcast” was dead. Does it persist because we don’t have a new name for it? I think the word podcast is useful word right now to signal when a show lives only in the digital word, as opposed to airing in a particular broadcast hole. I tend to use it interchangeably with "show" to describe Death, Sex & Money. As listening becomes more and more on-demand, I think those distinctions will fade and people will think of radio shows, podcasts, live streams, etc. as one and the same. Whatever the wording, it'll mean what I want to listen to right now.

[reporthers]

Q&A: NPR Code Switch Reporter, Kat Chow

KAT CHOW covers race, ethnicity and culture for NPR’s Code Switch in Washington, D.C. Her job description includes “sparking conversations online,” which she does with reporting and interactive projects. She has conceived of, produced and/or managed a number of such projects for Code Switch, including a Twitter account that followed the civil rights events of that year in real time, @Todayin1963, and a crowd-sourced reading list of books by and about people of color. Before working at NPR, she worked with WGBH in Boston and was a reporting fellow for The Cambodia Daily, an English-language newspaper in Phnom Penh. You can follow her at @KatChow.

(Note: This interview was conducted entirely in Google Docs. Is this an improvement on previous Q&As? Not really? Tweet at @glazerjessica.)

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ReportHers: You’ve done a lot of innovative discussion-based projects, like running the @Todayin1963 Twitter account. What kind of planning went into that project?

Kat Chow: So @TodayIn1963 was the product of a whole lot of planning! We knew that we wanted to tell the story of 1963 — it was really pivotal for the civil rights movement — and we had that loose idea that we wanted to live-tweet events from that summer/year with Twitter. Once we got the form solidified, we really had to step back and consider the scope of that year. What were the key events? What were the bits and pieces of history that we could “anticipate”?

One key example is the “re-telling” of Nov. 22, 1963 — when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Being, uh… in the present day… we knew this was going to happen. So in the months and weeks leading up to that date, we started tweeting little things: that Kennedy was heading to Texas to start his campaign there, that he was considering (or not considering) re-election in 1964, et cetera.

So we organized ALL THAT STUFF — tweets, links, more links to original documents/sources/et cetera — in one gigantic Google Doc. (You can see time codes there. I came across those time codes from reading CBS’ published transcripts of that coverage, which they have at the Library of Congress.) Lemme find a screen shot…

RD: Wow. How long did it take to plan out, and did you plan it out entirely before starting?

KC: For the President Kennedy assassination, we’d researched and written most of the tweets weeks in advance before the actual day everything was supposed to go live. So we fact checked, we copy edited — the whole nine yards. And the whole process of researching — and this is just for that couple of days of tweets surrounding his death — started late October.

But there were some tweets that just came about randomly because we learned this or that bit of information. For example! Right before Pres. Kennedy was shot, C.S. Lewis (‘member? Chronicles of Narnia) died. But back in 1963, the news of Lewis’ death was kind of buried by Pres. Kennedy’s assassination. So we were able to add that bit in, per a user’s suggestion. (And that was the cool thing: We were able to be really malleable and respond to our users.)

RH: Seems like a TON of planning and time went into this. How did you measure or decide whether it was worth the time, resources and manpower?

KC: Ah. Well. I kind of became obsessed with this project, so it’s really hard for me to measure if it was “worth it.” I’m the sort of person who can really easily get sucked into doing stuff that I find cool. (Luckily, I found this pretty cool.) I think that at the end of the day, it boils down to one thing: Did people learn from this project? And I hope — that yeah, they learned a helluva lot about all the small (and not-so-small) events that made 1963 so important. It was really neat: we had teachers and other people writing in, telling us that they'd used the Twitter account in this or that lesson.

But, ya know, we went into @Todayin1963 not really knowing how it was going to do. We didn’t really care if it didn’t get that many followers — at least, that wasn’t how we were measuring success. I remember talking with my editor, Matt Thompson, one day, and I was like, “Hey, wouldn’t that be neat if we got to, like, 2,000 followers?” And he told me that he didn’t have a target or a goal for the number of followers we should reach. (And then, boom. When we “live-tweeted” the March on Washington in August, and I got to talk about the project on Morning Edition, suddenly we had thousands and thousands of more followers. So that was pretty neat.)

RH: What is your favorite digital tool?

KC: Google Docs. Google Spreadsheets. I love how you can edit stuff real-time in them — like this! I love conducting interviews through this format. I love crowd-sourcing stuff using Google Docs. It’s so simple, but without that sort of collaborative workspace, I don’t know how easily I’d be able to do my job.

But another one of my favorite digital tools — and I kind of don’t want to admit this, because it’s so unsexy, and I feel like I need something reallllllly sexy to balance out that last Google-heavy example — is this chat system thingy called Slack. My editor has been trying to get my entire team to use Slack for weeks slash probably actually months, and we’ve all been like, “Ehhhhhh” with varying degrees of that apathetic “not another chat app” attitude… but, it’s pretty useful. You can search through your chats. You can share article links and it’ll pull out snippets of the story.

RH: You went back to speak at your alma mater, the University of Washington. What did you most want to communicate to the students?

KC: Oh, man. I feel strange about giving advice to people I don’t know. That comes about from my own uncertainty as a young journalist (the worst phrase ever, which I want to delete, but I’m going to leave it there, because it’s true). It’s always that whole, “Am I qualified to be dispensing advice to people?” idea, which I think a lot of people struggle with.

What I told these students was basically about my trajectory: I hustled because I was too scared not to. And reflecting back on it, I wish I’d just not worried so much. I took on internship after internship, not necessarily because I was terrified I wouldn’t get a job (I mean, that was like a cloud looming over my head, and every college senior majoring in journalism is probably scared shitless), but because I was terrified I wasn’t experiencing All The Things. You could call it FOMO.

RH: Have you had a mentor or someone who you’ve been able to bounce things off of, and be your advocate in matters of reporting, but also navigating things like negotiating for a raise or to be part of a project?

KC: Totally. I joined the Asian American Journalists Association when I was in college, and was paired up with an “official mentor” there. My AAJA mentor, Owen Lei, watched so many of my crappy TV stand-ups, coached me through networking situations, and read countless resumes and cover letters. I had no idea what I was doing then, but he was incredibly generous with his time, and still is. I also met a ton of other journalists through that organization and through my internships who’ve helped me figure out the job hunt, how to define my beat, and general job-related things.

RH: What do you want to learn that you haven’t had the time to yet? (Not to induce anxiety!)?

KC: HEART PALPITATIONS RIGHT NOW. Jay Kay.

RH: Sorry!

KC: Hmmmm. I want to become really, really proficient (more than proficient — good, even) at MTE, the audio editing system that NPR uses. Right now, it takes me five minutes to even figure out how to trim a clip. That’s an exaggeration, but yeah, it’s something I’m working on slowly.

RH: What was the scariest part about being a guest on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour radio program the first time, or first few times?

KC: I just recorded an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour today and a little part of me is still terrified that I’ll say something stupendously silly and that the whole world will be like, “Kat, stop. Just stop.” I don’t know if those sort of feelings will ever go away.

RH: What are you reading right now?

KC: Splitting my time between Yellow Peril (Jack Tchen) and Mambo in Chinatown (Jean Kwok). And also spending many late-night hours reading this teen series that’s pretty awful. RH: You have to name it. Please?

KC: (Checking the Kindle. It was free, in the lending library. I started reading it on a flight.) See, I don’t really know its name because it’s one of those quick reads where everything terrible happens to the main character, but she always seems to make the situations worse.

OK, it’s this (The Breathing series). I’m laughing right now. I hope my typing conveys this.

RH: We can call it research for Pop Culture Happy Hour. Ok! Lastly, is there a GIF that describes the way you work?

KC: Tough question. I feel like this is me. Unabashed excitement for a good idea or an awesome project. I get so giddy.

Note: Kat Chow and I worked together at NPR when I was an intern-turned-temp.) 

[reporthers]

Q&A: The New Yorker Staff Writer, Sarah Stillman

SARAH STILLMAN is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a visiting scholar at N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She won a National Magazine Award and Overseas Press Club Award for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on U.S. military bases there. Her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs received a George Polk Award and the Molly National Journalism Prize.

She has written on topics ranging from civil forfeiture to amateur drone-builders, Mexico's drug cartels to Bangladesh's garment factory workers. Before joining The New Yorker, Stillman wrote about America’s wars overseas and the challenges facing soldiers at home for the Washington Post, The Nation, newrepublic.com, Slate.com, and theatlantic.com. She co-taught a seminar at Yale on the Iraq war, and also ran a creative-writing workshop for four years at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Connecticut.

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1. Having a staff writer position for a major magazine is fairly rare these days. What has helped you get to where you are? I feel very lucky to have had great encouragement and access to resources along the route to becoming a staff writer -- and some very fortunate breaks, such as the help of an editor at The New Yorker, Henry Finder, who has supported me at every turn. Starting out as a freelancer, I think it helped that I was driven to report on America's wars overseas from an unconventional angle. I was passionate about covering the obvious elements of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (their daily impacts on civilians, the scourge of traumatic brain injuries faced by U.S. forces, etc.), but the war stories I was most eager to pursue were the ones that existed at the margins of traditional conflict correspondence.

My first piece for The New Yorker, for instance, dealt with the 70,000-some foreign logistics workers who were ubiquitous on most U.S. bases in both war zones, but whose stories rarely made headlines: the Indian cooks, Ugandan security guards and Fijian beauticians who performed the wars' service jobs, and who often faced human trafficking, indentured servitude, sexual assault and other abuses along the way. Other stories I've pursued for the magazine -- about young people killed as confidential informants and, more recently, about civil asset forfeiture -- also dealt with issues that were, in many ways, hiding in plain sight. We can be so harsh on ourselves, as reporters, by shooting down ideas with the thought, "It's been done," and yet, so often, revisiting what seems familiar or even well-trodden with a fresh eye can yield the most interesting, surprising stuff.

I'll also add that it's been invaluable to have good mentors along the way. For me, that continues to make a huge difference and I suspect it always will, not just having other writers and guides to admire in the abstract (or in a check-the-box sense), but really being willing to call upon and engage them.

2. Have you ever negotiated for a higher salary or a raise? As a freelancer, I lived the unsalaried life where negotiating to be paid at all was sometimes part of the equation. I remember doing an embed with an infantry unit in Iraq and then trying to publish the resulting story only to discover that the website where I'd submitted it didn't pay for most of the work it ran. I think situations like that have given way to an important set of conversations by journalists like Annie Murphy and Erin Siegal McIntyre, who recently gave a great talk at the Logan Symposium on how to manage the risks and realities of freelance reporting (financially, but also legally and physically).

Earlier in my career, I was also lucky to live, however meagerly, on journalism fellowships like NYU's Reporting Award, which they created to fund journalism projects in the public interest. That fellowship also came with office space and a whole community of colleagues, which turned out to matter every bit as much as the funding for the reporting did.

3. How do you go about structuring or ordering a longer piece? Every story seems to have its own unique demands. I'm one of those reporters who likes to cast a really wide net, research-wise, and who can veer towards the hyper-obsessive, so having decent tactics for organizing reporting materials acquired across a broad span of time, geographies, sources, and formats feels relevant. I often use a program called Scrivener to lend some order to my otherwise chaotic approach. Since I have a tendency to let my reporting sprawl, I find the most useful way for me to cut it back down to size and organize a longer piece is very simple: to read through all of my material, all of my files, and then to make a very crude list of my top five "here's what's essential" elements, at which point I try to figure out how they're connected. Often, that means starting with what I'm told is the classic Sy Hersh command, "Do the chron," as in, map the chronology.

4. Do you see yourself as more of a writer or a reporter? Reporting, for me, is an incredible joy -- or, at least, a rush of fascination and adrenaline and a sense of how lucky I am to get to do what I do (by that I mean listening to and learning from new people in new places). On the flip-side, I can't really deny that I'm the stereotypical tearing-my-hair-out, thrashing-and-flailing type at the keyboard. I like writing best when it's done. As a reader, of course, I endlessly admire the people who are seamlessly both: Katherine Boo, for instance, who reports fiendishly and writes with vast beauty and imagination.

5. What surprised you about teaching in a correctional facility? For about four years, I facilitated a weekly creative writing workshop at Cheshire Correctional, a maximum security men's prison in Connecticut, and the relationships I built there continue to be some of the most rewarding ones I've had. I learned a lot about what it means to use literature and personal narrative as a means of building trust, across time, in environments built to disassemble it. I learned a lot about politics and the conspiracies that often surround it, since most of the guys in the class spent their days closely following every blip in the news. And I learned a huge amount in the waiting room at Cheshire, too -- about how, for instance, children bear many of incarceration's largest burdens.

6. For your piece, Throwaways, how did you balance getting to know Rachel Hoffman's family and and maintaining objectivity for the piece? One thing that strikes me as rewarding about being a journalist in this particular era is that readers tend to explicitly value fairness, accuracy, and transparency over some version of canned objectivity that sometimes obfuscates as much as it reveals. When reporting on something as inherently traumatic as the murder of a 23-year-old young woman in a drug bust gone wrong, I feel very comfortable acknowledging and connecting with the sorrow and gravity of such a loss, without fearing that such a connection will undermine the truth or legitimacy of the story; I think readers trust writers who bring human instincts to the reporting process. That said, with all of the families I interviewed for "The Throwaways," I always tried to be mindful of what it means to listen attentively and with great care as a journalist, which is different from what it means to listen attentively as a friend or as a therapist or as a court officer or as a relative. The complexity of that distinction is one of the many reasons why I constantly sing the praises of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma to those interested in doing this sort of work.

[reporthers]

Q&A: NPR Digital Strategist, Melody Joy Kramer

MELODY JOY KRAMER is a digital strategist and associate editor at NPR. She juggles various projects that involve analytics, social media, breaking news and daily news production. She often shares what she knows with the whole of the Internet, posting about social media findings on Tumblr (a super useful blog, with tidbits like how to see who someone else follows on Twitter. Such as Jay Carney).

Melody has worked at NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, where she wrote jokes and won a Peabody award. She was also a 2006 Kroc Fellow at NPR. Her work has been featured by the Nieman Journalism Lab, the New York Times, Poynter, Audiophiles and numerous other organizations. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic, NPR.org and Esquire Magazine.

Otherwise, what else? One year ago she quit a medical school program. She wears colorful sneakers to work. She is teaching herself Python, a programming language. You can follow her @mkramer.

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ReportHers: What role do you think analytics should play in the newsroom? Melody Joy Kramer: I think analytics has the ability to improve the way that we reach our current audience, and potentially reach a new audience, because it allows us to learn more about them. Currently, we pump a lot of stuff out there, but we don’t have the time or resources to take a step back and look at things after the fact or before the fact. If you publish a politics story, the audience for that politics piece isn’t everyone in the NPR audience. It’s people who like politics. Are we reaching everyone who likes politics? Is there a better way to reach people? Is there a better way to reach the people who like politics where they are? Probably so.

But we don’t want people in the newsroom to look at raw numbers and think that if one story doesn’t get as much traffic as another story that it’s a failure. There are ways to say, this is what an average politics story received over the past month. Maybe you do a story and it doesn’t reach a lot of people but the people that it does reach are key. Or people learn something from it, which is always a goal here. Or there’s an engaging conversation online. Or it compels people to some kind of action. We would like to know which stories are resonating with the audience in that way so we can learn and understand and think about ways to do that with more stories.

RH: What kind of metrics and actions on social media do you look to? MJK: We haven’t solidified the list yet, but personally I like when there is an engaging conversation, I like when a person who was interviewed talks about the interview, I like when real people are talking about our content and I like making sure that the people in the newsroom know about that in case they’d like to engage with them. A lot of times I think conversations are taking place and because were so time-strapped, it’s hard to figure out where to insert yourself. So if we’re doing a series of pieces and they’re winding up on Reddit, I would like a reporter to know that because that’s an audience that would want to engage with somebody here [at NPR].

I would rather have you know how to use Twitter as a way to report than physically be on Twitter yourself.

RH: What would the reporter do with that knowledge that people on Reddit were engaging with their story? MJK: Maybe they enter the thread. Maybe they continue monitoring that sub-Reddit to find new story ideas. Maybe, if somebody has a really good comment, you interview them on-air. This is a way to find new voices for our journalism, as well.

RH: I’ve heard you speak about there not being just one metric and using a combination of analytics and news judgment. Can you say a little bit more about that? MJK: I don’t think it’s beneficial for us to think in terms of raw numbers because then you migrate towards things like cat videos and coverage of Miley Cyrus’ daily activities and things like that. That’s something that NPR should never do. So I think, find out what metrics are most meaningful for each desk or show in the building. That might be, for a politics story, reaching members of Congress or making sure every member of Congress’ staff heard the story, if that’s the audience they would like to reach. Then maybe reaching 500 people people means it’s success. Certain stories aren’t going to get those numbers and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cover those stories. Having a more holistic view is helpful.

RH: In looking at how people are engaging with stories on various social media like Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, you’ve said that that no one person should be on everything. Basically, you should be paying attention to where there is more conversation and then focus on additional attention there? MJK: Where your stories are. If you’re are a reporter and you notice large conversations happening on one specific place on the Internet, it would be good to go there. I was talking with our health and science blogger and he likes knowing when certain influential health blogs mention his pieces. That is a mark of success for him. That wouldn’t necessarily be a mark of success for someone else. I think personalizing, and I don’t want to call them metrics so much as intelligence, about what to do. We have such a limited time and we are short-staffed and people can’t be everywhere. People have to make their radio and make their web stories. If you are asking them to do something additional, you have to make sure that it’s worth their time and it’s worth their investment and you are going to get something in return.

RH: Some people might see journalism and social media as two separate things. How do you see yourself in your current role? MJK: I think of social media as a reporting tool. I’ve said to people in the newsroom, I would rather have you know how to use Twitter as a way to report on things than physically be on Twitter yourself if you don’t want to. There is a way of geotagging posts so you can see what’s being said in a certain geographic area. There’s a way of finding voices talking about a particular topic that we would want to put on-air. I think that there are ways to find sources, or find people. A good example of that, Planet Money posted a Bat Mitzvah t-shirt online and they tried to track down the person who owned it. Eventually, that person was tracked down through Facebook search.

I think that it is extremely useful as a reporting tool. After you report something, you want people to read it. The way that the news industry works right now, there is a limited amount of space on a homepage. I don’t know whether people start their days going to a homepage. I don’t. I start my day on Twitter, so the way that I get my news is I have a curated Twitter feed and I see what other people find interesting and I read it. I think of it more as a conversation, which is what I think a lot of journalism is. It’s helped me get story ideas.

RH: What project are you particularly excited about right now?  MJK: I am working with the NPR Library on this archive project all year. Where every day we are taking a piece out of the archives and we are putting it on a Tumblr. The idea is that maybe it won’t always live on that Tumblr, that there will be something additional with that. But for now it lives on a Tumblr and we’re just trying to see who’s interested in that, how people are sharing it. Are there particular stories that resonate with an audience? Are there ways that we’re writing about the stories that resonate with an audience? I really enjoy archives. I used to work in an archive in college.

I don’t think I Tweeted at all last night.

RH: Is the content you’re choosing pegged to news?  MJK: Typically, but not necessarily. Sometimes it’s just things that are evergreen. Basically, every Friday I go into the archives in the building and I sit with a box of CDs. I look at every single CD and I think, “Would this story still capture my attention?” I’m only looking at the title of the story.

RH: Can you talk about work/life balance, particularly working in social media, which could be this 24/7 thing?  MJK: My partner is not on any social media. When I’m at home, I’m not really on this stuff. I have a life outside of work and a lot of my really close friends are not on social media. I read paper books before I go to bed. We subscribe to the New Yorker. I read the New Yorker in bed. I like being able to dip in and dip out. I think I’ve set up my life so that I can dip out and not feel like I’m missing anything. I try to be in the present wherever I am.

RH: That can sometimes be hard, when you turn your brain on to share things and to be searching through the feed. You haven’t found that too hard once you get home?  MJK: I turn it off. I make dinner every night. I think that that’s a really good transition. I think if you’re struggling with that, that’s maybe something you can try doing because when you are making dinner, you can’t be looking at a screen. You have to be chopping or sautéing or doing something. Last night I made salmon and salad and zucchini. And I watched a documentary, but I wasn’t in front of a screen all night. I don’t think I tweeted at all last night.

RH: What has learning to code has enabled you to do?  MJK: It’s allowed me to automate a lot of tasks to increase both my efficiency and the efficiency of the people in this building so that people don’t have to do repetitive, automated tasks that could be completed by a computer. So they can focus on more creative things, which is why they wanted to work here in the first place. I think there are many inefficiencies in, probably, every workplace. And there are things people are doing that I don’t think they realize could be automated. And I find it really creatively freeing to write the code. It’s a nice pairing of going around and asking people what really ticks you off about your job and then trying to fix it. As an added bonus, they stay here longer, which means that NPR saves money because they don’t have to go through another hiring process. And I get to work on things that really interest me, and that’s a way to carve out a little spot for yourself within a large company. 

RH: What’s an example of something that you wrote to automate something?  MJK: I haven’t released it yet, but I’ve written a program that puts a Google tracking code on the end of any URL, so that people don’t have to do that manually and it’s done through a bookmarklet on your browser. I also wrote one that automates our internal phone list and adds everyone’s social media handles.

I’m now working on a program that’s going to combine the radiuses of every public radio station in the United States with our scheduling information. A lot of listener services email is like, “I was listening to this piece and I don’t know where I heard it.” Well, if you were in Philadelphia, you were either listening to WHYY or WXPN. And if you can give us a specific time, or a specific range of times, I can say, well you’re either listening to Show A or Show B. That way, hopefully it will cut down on listener mail.

RH: How long have you been studying code?  MJK: I took it in high school. I took AP C++. Then in college, I took a semester of JavaScript. Then I just thought, I don’t know why anyone would use this, this is stupid. And then I started again in January.

RH: What’s the coolest thing you’ve learned in the past week?  MJK: I read one New Yorker article on the train because my commute is exactly the length of a New Yorker article. I was reading about that new movie Noah and how batshit the production process was. I learned that they made Russell Crowe get up at 3 o’clock in the morning to re-film a scene. He was not happy and the director kept appeasing him, but it was false and they they threw water on him at 3 o’clock in the morning, which I didn’t know people did that. I’m glad I don’t work in that field. 

Note: Jessica Glazer currently interns at NPR and works with Melody.

[reporthers]

Q&A: Flavorwire Music Editor, Jillian Mapes

JILLIAN MAPES is an arts and entertainment journalist, currently the music editor of Flavorwire. She’s also a contributor to Pitchfork, Spin and other national culture publications. She recently returned from covering South by Southwest in Austin; the first time she covered SXSW a (not)charming musician used her arm as an ashtray. She pushed on.

Before working at Flavorwire, she was the editor of CBS’s Radio.com, where she managed a small staff that relaunched the music site last year. She’s also served as an assistant online editor at Billboard and a features reporter at the Indianapolis Star. Her criticism, features and news reports have been published by Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, The Onion, The Village Voice, The Hollywood Reporter, Reuters and others. Jillian graduated from Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. You can follow her @jumonsmapes and see learn more about her here.

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1. What is the hardest part about freelancing and what tips do you have? If you have a full-time job like I do (and have been incredibly fortunate to have since moving to New York), the biggest challenges are: a) finding the time and energy to do it on your nights and weekends and still produce writing you’re proud of and b) finding stories that interest you that are obviously different from where you write and edit for your day job.

In a more general sense, the hardest part is negotiating with editors for more money and really steady work. Just convincing them you’re worth it when there are literally a million other people who will not only accept a low rate, they’d do it for free to get a foot in the door. I greatly admire my peers and friends who freelance full time, because it’s an insane hustle, especially if you do it without a net (i.e., some sort steady freelancing gig you do on a weekly or even daily basis).

I have a few basic tips: Never cold-pitch an editor you don’t know from Adam and use the phrase, “Let me know if you need anything!” You need to come equipped with at least three pitches that are relevant to the publication when making first contact with an editor you don’t know. Moreover, those pitches have to show your voice, not just provide information, and convince the editor why you’re the right person for the story. It’s selling the story more than selling yourself, but you need to sell your skills, clips and general professional demeanor, too. Also, understand that editors are not necessarily ignoring you and get a sense of what’s appropriate for following up timelines. If it’s a timely story, maybe you’re following up the next day. If you’ve got a couple months’ lead-time, give it a little time and try hard not to be annoying (you will sense when you’re being annoying). And if you’re just starting out, try your hardest to be self-aware in gauging where you’re at in the freelancing pyramid. I would avoid pitching your ‘dream publications’ if you have very few clips to your name. This industry is smaller than you think. I certainly pitched editors I had no business pitching years back when I was just starting out; I’ll happen upon those clunky follow-ups now in my Gmail and cringe.

The most practical tip that I think works for any freelance writer across all topics and skill levels is: Chase the story no one else is chasing at the publication you’re writing for. Being an expert on a niche topic will get you a lot of work after you get past the initial hump, but if you have hopes of longevity as a more general writer, I’d suggest playing the field and writing about certain topics at a number of outlets. Being the go-to guy on a different topic at every place you write will get you work, but it only works if you’re interested in/knowledgeable about those topics.

This is a more general tip, but it really helps in freelancing: Be kind to your fellow writers and make genuine bonds with people whose work you enjoy. Try not to make everything into a competition because you will need friends to survive in this field, particularly as a freelancer.

Try not to make everything into a competition because you will need friends to survive in this field.

2. How have your coding skills come in handy in your journalism work? My coding skills got me my job as an assistant online editor at Billboard, for sure. I was 21 years old and had a history with the company as a freelancer and an intern, but they certainly could have hired someone with more daily music news writing and reporting experience than me. They needed someone who could do news but also could hand-code custom pages for big features in HTML and basic CSS. I haven’t used any of my CSS knowledge since leaving that job, mostly because my coding skills were something I acquired to be more well-rounded as a journalist, not to eclipse the actual work I’m passionate about (i.e., writing and editing). As a someone who files in a CMS, I pretty much only need basic HTML skills to do my job on a daily basis. But, boy, does it come in handy when an embed code doesn’t work or something looks off. Spending three minutes in the code and understanding what you’re staring at will solve roughly 85 percent of technical problems you may have as a writer and editor working on the web.

3. How do you approach covering a major festival like SXSW, where there are tons of journalists and media? It honestly depends on what your publication wants you to do, but for me, it’s about questioning traditional models of How Things Have Always Been Covered. Music journalists tend to cover festivals like SXSW with daily recaps of their experiences, bands they liked and didn’t like, etc. I’m not saying my coverage is, on a basic level, all that different, but it’s sometimes about repackaging the way you say something. I opted for reporting stories on artists and topics that were relevant to Flavorwire’s audience and were interesting as standalone pieces. I used first-person in a vulnerable kind of way, and when I got back, I put more of a critical cap on and did the kind of music discovery that readers expect from SXSW.

4. How do you get someone who is accustomed to giving interviews to open up or say something fresh? Famous people can get pretty cagey and/or bored by the same ole lazy questions. Vigorous research but not so much that you don’t leave yourself time and space to just go with where the conversation naturally takes you. Sometimes you read Q&As and it’s as though the interviewer wasn’t even listening to the person’s response. And sometimes it’s got to look like that in print due to space constraints, but that’s not how the conversation should actually be, if you can help it. Also, ask your question without over-explaining it. Just because you’re nervous that they won’t get it, doesn’t mean they won't pick up what you’re putting down and at least work with you on it after you spit it out. Overall, just be a human. I find that people who are interviewed often are sort of expecting the worst when it comes to idiocy in interrogation tactics. If you’re reading them (their facial cues, body language, etc.), you can usually tell when you’re not going to get something good out of them on a topic, and just move on to the next thing.

5. Is the track to becoming an editor different than the track to become a reporter? It’s a little different in non-news/blogs/feature-y stuff. From my perspective, the lines are insanely blurred. I’m an editor but I write on a daily basis. The bulk of staff gigs at magazines/cultural publications are as editors rather than staff reporters/writers, so it’s a bit different from the traditional editor versus reporter routes at newspapers. People who only want to write--not do any of the other editorial tasks associated with being a staffer, be it editing or planning or securing talent--tend to stay freelancers in my world. But generally no one is going to hand you an editor job if you don’t seem to have a grasp on writing and reporting. It’s the evolution of things if you want to work full-time at a publication. In general, if you can get editing and assigning experience, I would do it. Being editor will make you a stronger writer and a more nimble idea-generator.

[reporthers]

Q&A: Syria Deeply Founder, Lara Setrakian

LARA SETRAKIAN is Founder and CEO of Syria Deeply, which she launched in 2012 to cover the crisis in Syria. I heard her speak about this project at a Her Girl Friday event (video) in New York, which featured some other incredible women.

Lara spent five years in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent on-air, reporting for ABC News, Bloomberg Television, the International Herald Tribune, Business Insider and Monocle Magazine. She was widely recognized for her work covering Iran’s 2009 election protests and the Arab Awakening in 2011, particularly her groundbreaking use of social media. She was such an early adopter of Twitter that her handle is simply: @Lara.

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1. How does the single-subject site fit into the news ecosystem? The single-subject news site is supplement to the news ecosystem. It’s like an off-site deep dive that gets users more acquainted with a subject, helping them gain a holistic view of the story. Once they’re acquainted with the story it becomes all the more interesting when they see it anywhere else, on TV or in print. Everybody wins when we serve our audience with in-depth information.

2. What affect has Syria Deeply had on mainstream coverage of Syria? We’re glad and grateful to say that Syria Deeply has increased the flow of information into mainstream coverage of the conflict. Our work has been picked up by CNN, NPR, BBC News, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, MSNBC and the Guardian, among others. We have roughly two dozen Syrians working writing for out platform, mostly inside the country, so that their reporting can now reach the world.

The most important part of launching a startup news site is building and maintaining your credibility.

3. In today’s market, is it better for a reporter to have extensive knowledge in one beat, or strong skills in general reporting? One can succeed either way. I personally believe in developing deep domain expertise, as a beat reporter or subject matter specialist, simply so that you can see more of the story. It helps you serve the audience with better knowledge and critical thinking. But strong skills in general reporting are great as well. If you can transition the skills of storytelling across beats that puts you in a place of tremendous value. It’s even more so if your reporter’s toolkit includes digital journalism and design thinking.

4.What are your long-term goals with News Deeply? Our long-term goal is to stand up platforms that respond to a deficit in the news cycle, covering underreported issues and stories that are too complex for traditional media to capture. We’re specifically focused on complex global issues–conflict zones, states in transition, then science, technology and public health. That means we could potentially do anything from Congo Deeply and Myanmar Deeply to Alzheimer’s Deeply to Robotics Deeply. It’s wherever in-depth information, the combination of content plus context, can serve best.

5. What is the most important part of gaining momentum with a new site or blog? The most important part of launching a startup news site is building and maintaining your credibility. There’s no point running an innovative newsroom if no one trusts your content. For that, one can only lean on the core principles of good journalism: making the strongest possible efforts toward objectivity, neutrality and even-handedness in reporting. From there, you’ll find your natural audience. Its momentum will grow based on the quality and relevance of the work itself.

[reporthers]

Q&A: NYT Correspondent Tanzina Vega

TANZINA VEGA is a national correspondent who writes about race and ethnicity at The New York Times. As multi-platform journalist, she was listed as one of NPR’s "Top Journalists of Color to Watch in 2014." She has covered digital media, advertising and online privacy for the Times and before that, she managed and produced large-scale multimedia projects for the business desk. Part of her multimedia work includes the award winning One in 8 Million series. She joined the Times as a stringer and news clerk, where she covered breaking news and crime. Tanzina has been recognized by the National Press Photographers Association and for her multimedia work in the business section of the Times. Tanzina has a Master’s in Urban Reporting from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her at @tanzinavega.

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1. Is America more race-conscious now than in the 1960s, as Clarence Thomas recently suggested? How does this affect your reporting? I’m not sure if we are more or less race conscious, but I can say our consciousness about race has changed. Young people in particular are grappling with race in new ways. In a recent article I wrote about racial incidents on college campuses around the country, we examined the notion of a colorblind or “post-racial” society and found that young people largely rejected that concept. Telling someone you don’t “see color” makes them feel invalidated, particularly when their identity is intimately tied to their racial or ethnic background. There is a growing activist movement among young people of color around the country who are using social media, photos and video in addition to art and more traditional forms of protest to speak out against the racial tensions they say they experience.

The way people define and experience racism has also evolved. Most people I’ve interviewed say that more obvious forms of racism–like supporting the Ku Klux Klan or using racial epithets–are largely considered socially unacceptable, but newer forms of racism are more subtle–like expecting someone to speak for all members of their race or, as one black student described, having their work checked more closely than other classmates because of a perceived, sometimes even unconscious, bias. Those same subtleties can make reporting on race a challenge but infinitely more rewarding when you get it right.

2. What little things do you do that help you gain a source’s trust? What’s an example of when this worked (or didn’t work)? I always say the best compliment a reporter can get is that they were fair and accurate. When you establish that kind of credibility with sources, they tend to trust you more. When I was a business and technology reporter, I dealt with people who were very comfortable with the way media works. They knew how to position and prepare themselves for an interview, so getting past canned responses was sometimes a result of knowing the right questions to ask, which depends on how much you know about your subject matter. When you deal with people who are not as media savvy and don’t have public relations professionals preparing them, often it’s a question of spending time with your subjects and establishing a rapport. Regardless of who the source is, don’t lie about what your story is about. No one wants to be blindsided when they read your piece the next day.

There are as many paths to becoming a journalist today as there are jobs in journalism.

3. How has being a reporter changed your view of the world around you? I see the potential for stories everywhere I go. I constantly jot down notes on scraps of paper, on my cell phone or on my computer. I’m lucky to have a job where I can actually try to get answers to the many questions I have about how and why things work the way they do.

4. What are some stories that were particularly difficult and why? I’ve never had to report in a war zone nor have I feared for my life, so I feel like answering this question is almost quaint, considering the difficult situations many of my journalism colleagues around the world have faced. That said, I did have one grizzly reporting phase when I was a freelance reporter for the Metro section of The New York Times. I often got called to cover breaking news, which included murders, fires and bizarre deaths, people falling in the elevator shaft or getting hit by trains. Sometimes I found myself in the home of a family that had just lost a loved one. The wounds were still fresh, the tears still flowing. Sometimes a photographer was there and two or three other papers. Maybe even local television. So you’re competing with all of that and at the same time you have to tread lightly and be sensitive to the very raw and very real feelings the family is dealing with while under a looming deadline.

Another example was when I was one of the few business reporters on duty during a slow news Friday in July. Just as I was about to head home, at about five in the evening, a story from a competitor crossed the wire reporting that two of the largest advertising agencies in the world had merged, effectively creating the world’s biggest advertising agency. The competitor’s story was very short and was attributed to a single source, something The Times could not do, so we had to be careful and make sure we were able to confirm the news through multiple sources. I spent the next 48 hours pressing every single source I had and working with Times colleagues from Paris to San Francisco. By Sunday afternoon I had already written two 1,000 word articles when I got the call from my editor to write an additional 1,100 words, the “what does this all mean” piece that would eventually land on the front page on Monday. Wrangling sources is tough on stories like these, but doing it on a tight deadline, with a competitive story when most people are on vacation adds to the excitement.

5. What tips do you have for people applying to journalism jobs, at a time when newsrooms are evolving and restructuring? Be nimble. If you’re a writer, that’s great, but also make sure you are comfortable in front of a camera, or at least shooting video on your phone. Be open to experimenting with new technologies. If you like to code, make sure you also know how to tell good stories. Stay open to jobs that may not at first appear to be the job you want. There are as many paths to becoming a journalist today as there are jobs in journalism.

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[reporthers]

Q&A: Filmmaker, Angeline Gragasin

ANGELINE GRAGASIN is a filmmaker, photographer and writer, and the creator of the documentary Web series WOMEN OF THE FUTURE. The series features intrepid, vivacious Renaissance women innovating in traditionally male-dominated fields--and who have not yet been recognized by the mainstream media. Each episode follows Angeline as director, as she travels the world to visit and interview a Woman of the Future over the course of several days at home and at work. The result is an intimate and authentic portrait of a WOTF “in the field.” Angeline is on a personal quest to redefine female celebrity and explore the world through the eyes of the most innovative women alive today.

Angeline is also the founder and creative director of NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS, a Brooklyn-based film production company. Follow her at @AngelineGragzin and see more of her work at angelinegragasin.com. --- 1. How do you balance getting beautiful shots with maintaining journalistic ethics, such as not interfering with the scene too much? I try to balance formal composition with verité storytelling by being transparent about setups with the subjects in real time, inviting them to participate rather than excluding them from the process. There is no way for me to “interfere” with a scene when the scene includes me as a character in the story, as the director/interviewer. I participate openly as myself on-camera, and I think this encourages people to be more open and honest than if I tried to maintain the artifice of whether something is “on” or “off” camera.

If I say, "Oh, the light is perfect right here. Can you say that again as you walk through this light?," I don’t consider this interfering with or disrupting reality because it is the reality of the situation. We are making a film about people in which they are fully complicit in the making the film. It is as much a collaboration with documentary subjects as it is with actors. I don’t see this as unethical. In fact, I think my approach more ethical than the prevailing convention of “reality” television in which fictionalized events are presented as fact. With my approach, what you see is what you get. I’ve just chosen to edit out most of the direction because it’s not as compelling as the results of that direction, which is the whole purpose of direction in the first place.

2. For your web series, what qualities do you look for in a main character? How do you determine if you’ve found the right person? It has less to do with success and more to do with spirit. I think I’ve developed a keen sensitivity to this quality over time by learning to recognize it in others as well as cultivate it within myself. It’s not something that can be understood or articulated by merely analyzing a list of someone’s professional achievements or affiliations. I’ve found that a true WOTF is able to continually and consistently innovate in her (sometimes very esoteric) field, whether or not she has been publicly recognized for her work, or even despite the fact that she may have little support for her work.

I’ve been told my work was too weird. Yet here I am, still creating.

More specifically, I’m looking to feature a subject with radical ideas and whose daily actions support those ideas, not only the actions she takes in the “workplace,” but in other contexts too. The domestic space, for example, which is why I am documenting subjects at home in addition to at work. A WOTF’s private lifestyle must be congruent with the values she promotes in her public work. I guess a more succinct way of answering your question would be to say that I am looking for a main character with character. How do I know when I’ve found a WOTF? It’s a feeling. It’s sublime.

3. What is the thought process behind WOTF's revenue model and how did you arrive there? As of right now, we are offering WOTF as an online subscription service because we wanted to experiment with the VHX platform, and with an online payment system. I wouldn’t say we have a working revenue model yet. We’re still figuring this out. We are still actively fundraising in order to be able to finish postproduction on Episodes 2 and 3 and begin production in earnest on the series as a whole, rather than in the way we have currently been operating, which is the self-funded, piecemeal model. Welcome to the world of indie filmmaking.

4. What resources did you use to learn to build websites? I started hacking my MySpace profile when I was in college, that’s how I learned HTML and CSS. I built my first personal website from scratch on Dreamweaver, which my friend Derek Erdman taught me to use IRL. Then I bounced around between different CMSs (Indexhibit, WordPress, Tumblr) customizing themes and installing plugins until I realized that I was more interested in making content than coding Websites to fit my content.

I retired in 2011 to dedicate myself fully to mastering the craft of filmmaking. I'm a firm believer in the content is king mantra and have observed the most useful and elegant Websites are built swiftly and simply. I'm a minimalist when it comes to design, preferring to use preexisting systems / platforms whenever possible. I know my way around a webpage, enough to know how to collaborate with a designer-developer if given the opportunity. It’s certainly useful for a producer to understand and own the means of production and that includes Website development.

5. Can you talk about how you make a living? I run a business with Producer Rachel Wolther called NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS. We are a film production company with a diverse array of clients. We recently produced a fashion film for a new Swedish-Chinese shoe design brand as well as a narrative Web series to be used as part of a research study for the Yale Center for Scientific Teaching, two very different projects. We’re nimble and versatile, which I think is necessary in order to be competitive in the new digital media marketplace. I’ve also freelanced as a Web designer, ghostwriter, photographer, film editor, actor, model, session musician and chef. My 2014 New Year’s Resolution is to use my skills. It seems obvious, but it’s harder and more useful than you would think. Everybody I know has at least one side hustle; New Yorkers have two or three.

6. What have you learned about audiences as you make web videos? How does this affect the process and final product? I recently saw a photo of a sign in a diner that read, "We can’t please everyone, but we try." I’ve learned that I can’t please everyone, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting or trying, or at least being sensitive and responsive to audience feedback. I’ve learned to look for support from communities whose values are aligned with mine, such as the DIY, sustainable agriculture and feminist communities. I’ve learned to look away from Hollywood and the mainstream media landscape to niche and alternative media publishers and distributors for support and promotion. This means connecting directly with individual journalists, bloggers and fans as opposed to looking for institutional support or support from the establishment.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told my work was too weird, too intellectual, too artsy, too radical, too this or too that to ever really find an audience. And yet here I am, still creating, lucky enough and honored to be interviewed for this blog. The fact that people online continue to watch and encourage me with likes, comments and emails despite the fact that my work has been rejected or neglected by this or that film festival or magazine is what keeps me going, and what tells me that my work contains some unique quality that compels people to watch and share. I’m learning to accept and embrace my role as part of the underground. I’m trying to own that and represent it as honestly and eloquently as I can.

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[reporthers]

Q&A: Video Journalist, Jane Teeling

JANE TEELING is a video journalist and producer working in New York City. Earlier this year I clicked on a tweet linking to a video she made for the Neediest Cases series in The New York Times. I was immediately drawn in and got in touch. Her work has also appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek and GlobalPost.

When we spoke, she talked of her reporting experiences in Lebanon, the challenges of shooting with limited equipment and sensitivities around the term “fixer.”

Jane has won multiple awards, including first place for the Society of Professional Journalists Region 1 Mark of Excellence Awards in the category of Online News Reporting and the Online In-Depth Reporting for “The Doctor Drain,” a multimedia group project about New York’s looming primary care crisis. She also won the Dennis Duggan Award from the Society of Silurians. Jane has a Master’s degree from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. You can see more of her work at janeteeling.com and follow her at @JaneTee.

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ReportHers: What was the goal of your trip to Lebanon and how successful were you? Jane Teeling: I went to Lebanon this past summer with my colleague who was also a CUNY graduate and a Fulbright scholar from Lebanon, Raed Rafei. We were looking at the conflict that was happening in Syria and how it was playing out in Lebanon. We thought, let's go over there and see what kind of stories we can pull, specifically in video, that humanize this political quagmire that Lebanon has found itself in because of the chaos next door. That was our goal. We were in Beirut but we also spent a lot of time in Tripoli. We did that because Tripoli is known as kind of a barometer of political tensions in Lebanon. It has a really strong Sunni population, it's close to Syria and it tends to be affected by what's happening across the border. And we definitely saw that while we were there. Some of the neighborhood street fighting, which has roots in historical grievances, was refreshed with everything that was happening next door. Lebanon, in general, is a really interesting proxy for tensions in the region and Tripoli specifically, which was Raed’s home city. It really showed us how that was playing out, in terms of conflicts between different groups. RH: How did you get to know about what's going on in the region before you went? JT: I've always been interested in Lebanon's role in Middle Eastern politics because it's such a tiny country but it's so heavily impacted by what happens around it. I read some books, Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and a couple other key political analyses of the region. But also I was friends with and lived with Raed. So we were really close and he would tell me a lot about what was going on at home and his insight was invaluable because it was wasn't a Westerner looking in trying to figure things out. He grew up in Tripoli. He remembers that violence. Having that knowledge-sharing happening not only at school but also in our friendship and in our home was really invaluable. And then when I went over there, I loved reporting there because people were so open to talking about conflicts in the country, many of which had affected them personally and you would think would have caused them to hold grudges and not want to talk about the past, but I could get a stellar political rundown from the guy selling fruit next door. People were really open to talking about things and I got a surprising amount of unbiased analysis as well. I didn't talk to everyone in the street but I felt like people were so tired of the violence that had been affecting them back since Lebanon’s civil war, they were more inclined to have a big-picture analysis of things rather than being too caught up in their ideologies. Granted, there were people who were extremely sectarian also, pledge their allegiance to Sunni culture or Hezbollah, but the education I received from the man-on-the-street interviews was invaluable. Every day I was like, Wait a minute, I don't understand this and someone would explain it to me. So I learned a lot on the ground.

I would get a stellar political rundown from the guy selling fruit.

RH: How did you prepare before you went? JT: I would just keep a daily reading list and just sort of jumped in, following all the major events and some of the reports coming out of the UN. I had to really keep track of those reports, as well as news stories. And in terms of selling our stories, Raed and I made a very lengthy list of possible outlets for publication. We just fired off general emails to lots of people and said, Hey, this is who we are, this is the equipment we have, this is what we do, these are the stories we are looking for. A lot of editors were like, Get in touch when you have something. But we had introduced ourselves, so we felt like we had done some of our due diligence before we went over. By the time we got over there we had editors that we were in touch with. RH: Tell me about Stories Near and Far and the role that played in pitching. JT: We started that as a way to share with friends and family–and also editors–things that we were discovering in the reporting process as we were building the stories for publication. I think we probably could've kept up with it a little bit better but it was kind of a good way to enjoy a little bit of the first person experience in a semi-professional platform. We could put ourselves in the story a little bit, talk about what we were seeing. It also gave people a sense of what we were doing and I hope that some editors would get a feel for us as reporters and also as storytellers and then we could also use it as a promotion platform. RH: In your career, what was it like to transition from print to video? JT: I've always been interested in photography and documentaries and visual storytelling but I never really thought that I had the bandwidth to transition. So when I was at CUNY, I took Bob Sacha's video storytelling class and I found that a lot of the tenants of visual storytelling made me a better journalist. In some ways it was tricky. You know, you have to know your camera and you have to understand ways to shoot sequences, compressing action over time. There was a technical learning curve for sure. Also, the things you have to capture in video: It seems to me that it's so less forgiving because you are there and you need to capture what's in front of you and you don't get a second chance a lot of times. You really have to know your story before you dive in and start fire-hosing try and get as much footage as possible. If you've thought about your story and the conflict and the characters and the scenes, then I think you have a better video at the end. The way that transitioned to writing for me was that it really made me think a lot more about the process. It kind of works backwards. I had to learn all the technical skills to do video, but in the end it made me a better writer.

RH: Tell me about making non-narrated videos for The New York Times. JT: I met with Shayla Harris, who was a former professor of mine at CUNY, after Lebanon. I just wanted to check in and say hello and see what opportunities were coming up at the Times. She said to me that she had a series in mind for me. It’s a temporary series about the Neediest Cases Fund in The New York Times, something that the company has funded for number of years. They want to do more video profiles of the recipients. She suggested it to me, if I'm recalling it right, because I really do like intimate human stories. I'd worked on one with a colleague of mine for her class. Maybe that stuck in her head that that's the kind of work I like to do. So I didn't exactly pitch them as much as I did check in with people I knew to see what opportunities were available. Shayla is someone I greatly admire for the work that she's done for the Times. I'm really lucky and really honored that she said, Hey, I have you in mind for this series. RH: When did you start doing video? JT: I took a broadcast class at CUNY. I interned at GlobalPost and did a little bit of video at the end of the internship. Working with Solana Pyne at GlobalPost was really the start of me doing video and that internship was invaluable.

RH: But video was not something that you were doing for a while? JT: Oh no. Not at all. RH: The technical aspects are so challenging as I’m learning video. For some reason, my brain refuses to hold a shot for more than a second. What was the biggest challenge for you when learning video? JT: The biggest challenge was probably thinking about scenes in a storytelling manner. How to show what I wanted my story to say about people. Then actually doing that in a sequence and putting together a series of shots that compressed time. And not only a series like the traditional, BBC five-shot sequence but shots where each of them were pretty. You want to go for something that's visually appealing, too. I would say that that was the hardest part. Literally taking the concept, the technical thing, and being disciplined. And believe me, I definitely screwed up a lot and shot a lot of footage that I never used. But you learn those hard lessons. I worked on a video story about a pit bull trainer. She wanted to be filmed and she was okay with having me follow her around so I got to experiment a lot. That time to be flexible and make mistakes and experiment in the editing suite was really valuable. You need to get out all the kinks and learn to hold your shots and think, Hey, natural sound is really key and I got to think about what scenes I'm grabbing and how I'm going to make that person come to life in b-roll, which sometimes is really boring but can be magic if you do it right.

I definitely screwed up a lot and shot a lot of footage that I never used. You learn those hard lessons.

RH: What setup do you use if you're out on your own? JT: I use a Canon 5D. I have a 24-105 lens, which I like because it's flexible in terms of what I can shoot, but the aperture isn't quite ideal so I also have a 50mm lens that is a 1.4. That has a really low depth of field, which I like to use for interviews. I think it handles light really nicely. I have a zoom H4N. I have a Rode shotgun mic and I always end up borrowing a lavalier mic. I need to buy my own. I don't have any lights. I use natural light a lot. There’s a million things I'd love to buy but I got to piece it together slowly but carefully. Oh, and I have a monopod, which I love. It forces you to keep moving. Well, it encourages you to keep moving. RH: Is it the one that has the tiny legs at the bottom? JT: Yeah, it's got little tiny legs. I actually learned to use that shooting interviews. It's funny the sort of the things you make do with. Yea, a tripod would be great, but I've learned to hold the monopod still enough and peek around the side so that I'm interviewing someone so that they're not looking into the camera. You end up doing this weird ritual where nothing is ever perfect but you survive. RH: That's really the essence of journalism, isn't it? JT: Yea, especially when you have a lot of equipment. You find a workaround immediately. You can't get upset. RH: Is there skill or set of skills that have been indispensable for you? JT: I would say video skills, not only for the doors it's opened, really encouraging me to be more visual and creative with my stories, but also because it has forced me to really operate two sides of my brain at once. It was hard at first but it's really exhilarating to really be focused on what's happening technically. When you're a one-man band and you're interviewing someone, especially if you're interviewing someone for The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which a lot of the stories are heartwarming and sometimes a little bit tragic or you're interviewing someone who lives in a refugee camp or a student from Syria who is trying to get by in Lebanon, or whatever the case, you still have to be a human being. What I like about video is that it's forced me to operate in dual modes. Being technical and being present in the sense that I'm in control of all this data that I'm taking in. But also making eye contact and showing someone that I empathize with them. It's really challenging. Sometimes I do self-deprecating laughs to make them feel more comfortable as I am thinking through the technical things. You always have to be present with someone and let them know that you really are listening to them, but at the same time you also have to think, How my going to make this into a story later. And I like that challenge. RH: What languages do you speak? JT: I speak a good high school French. I speak a couple words of Arabic now but they're mostly fun words like Let’s go or Congratulations. RH: So was Raed the fixer in Lebanon? JT: You know, that's a good question. He translated in a lot of instances. But we would work together to find sources and people and to contact editors, so I hate to use the word fixer for him because we were equals. I look up to him and learned a lot from him while we were working together. RH: I meant that you didn't have to hire a fixer or a translator because you were partnering with someone who had those language skills. JT: Exactly. But it's a good question. It's an interesting word that I've pondered. I worked in Turkey as well and I hired a fixer there and it was a completely different experience. Working side-by-side with someone and sharing story ideas and talking to contacts is a whole different level. It's also an interesting comment on international reporting and how little, I don't want to say how little credit fixers get, but we wouldn't have any stories coming out written by foreign reporters overseas if we didn't have fixers. It's an interesting relationship there. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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