It's All Journalism

The road to becoming a Capitol Hill reporter was paved with city council meetings and panda pregnancies for Meredith Somers, a reporter with Federal News Radio. The native of Columbus, Ohio, got her start in journalism in her home town, writing for a community newspaper after graduating from college in Connecticut. “I was covering my neighbors. … I was going down the street from my high school to listen to city council meetings.” After a while, however, she was ready for a change and, when some friends decided to move to Washington, D.C., for work, Somers packed up and made the move as well. Working for the Maryland Independent in Waldorf, Somers went from covering city council to reporting on a county commission meetings “for an area where 60 percent of the workforce left every morning to work in DC. You’re dealing with a lot of educated, well-off residents who were federal employees. We were the ones having to do the job of telling them what was going on in the county,” she said. The scope of her reporting expanded as well. “In Southern Maryland, you’ve got proving grounds and an army base and these beautiful wetlands and tributaries to the Chesapeake Bay and these big long undeveloped expanses of land. You go to the commission meeting with these big black SUVs and there’s a mom and pop store across the street that doesn’t want this big giant building coming in next to them,” she said. After a year and a half, she moved on to The Washington Times, working as a general assignment reporter covering the 2012 Democratic National Convention, the Occupy DC movement and pandas at the National Zoo. “Panda reproduction is the most complicated thing,” Somers said. “They don’t just reproduce naturally. … These things eat bamboo but there’s no nutritional value in it, they have to eat too much of it because their stomach doesn’t tolerate it. They don’t lie to have sex so they never reproduce and when they do, it’s a surprise. Every couple of months it’s she might be pregnant or she might just have gained a little weight. Let’s just hope she doesn’t roll over on it or eat it when it’s born!” It was kind of exciting to be on zoo duty when Bao Bao was born, a year after the National Zoo’s panda delivered a cub that later died, but seeing people lined up at 3 a.m. to see the new baby panda on the first day it was allowed out for public viewing was a bit much. Now, at Federal News Radio, she’s making big, complicated and acronym-heavy stories relatable, not just to the federal workforce in Washington but to readers across the country. For example, the Department of Defense is trying to reconfigure its infrastructure of email servers. “Who cares,” she said. “But then you think, OK, if we went to war or got attacked, or if our family or loved ones overseas got attacked, you’d want to make sure everyone’s on the same page. It’s not always like that. This really does apply and it does impact more than the audience I know is reading this.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism (http://federalnewsradio.com) podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to reporter Meredith Somers about covering the inner workings of the federal bureaucracy at Federal News Radio in Washington, D.C. Somers discusses covering community news and the challenges of making a complex subject relatable.

For more than 20 years, Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance remained a baffling puzzle. “Jacob, in 1989, was 11-years old. He lived in a small town, St. Joseph, in central Minnesota. One night, he went with his friend and his brother on a bike ride, around 9 o’clock at night, to get a video,” recounted Madeleine Baran, a reporter on American Public Media’s In the Dark podcast. The ride was short, on a dead-end road, but on the way home, the boys came across a man in the middle of the road. The man forced the boys into a ditch, asked them their ages, then told the other two boys to run away and not look back or he’d shoot them. “The boys ran back to the Wetterling’s house, reported it to the police and the police got there right away,” Baran said. “A massive investigation began, with the National Guard, the FBI, the state’s crime bureau, the sheriff’s office. It was one of the largest missing persons operations in the United States.” Yet from that day in 1989 until relatively recently, Jacob’s disappearance remained a mystery. The case is the subject of In the Dark, yet Baran and the podcast’s producer, Samara Freemark, didn’t set out to play detective or try to solve the case themselves. “As an investigative reporter, I wanted to know what really happened here,” Baran said. “This is a case that seems, on the face of it, so simple and had so many resources, but it could not be solved.” Instead, In the Dark looks at the responsibility to the public owed by first responders, investigators and others that were involved in the investigation of Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance. “From a production standpoint, it’s an interesting challenge,” Freemark said. “The part of the story that’s most compelling, the plot of what happened, interested us least.” They didn’t want to be exploitative in their work, nor was that the focus of the podcast. The central theme was whether the investigators, on all levels and from all organizations, lived up to their responsibility to the public. The biggest challenge to telling that story was the fact that the case was still an open investigation, at least at the beginning, meaning the case file was sealed and unusable. “There’s a confession, and the case file itself, hundreds of thousands of pages of paper — there’s a whole room in the sheriff’s office for it – none of that’s been released to the public,” Baran said. “We were trying to figure out what went wrong in a case where we did not have access to the files you have in closed cases.” As a result, their research had to go a little more low-tech – there was no internet in 1989, after all — and involved newspaper clippings from the investigation and, in one case, literally digging through boxes for research. As Baran was interviewing a former police chief, his wife remembered she had a video of coverage of the investigation into Wetterling’s disappearance. She was about to throw the tape out that week when Baran came by for an interview. "She recorded everything of the early days, all the stations, all of it on one tape,” she said. Freemark added: “For the podcast, in terms of production, it helps place you in the scene, but also for facts. Just knowing what was going on at the time. We did a clip review, we went through all the newspapers as well, but being able to see some of that stuff, the way it was covered on TV and radio, it was useful.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this episode of It's All Journalism, host Michael O'Connell talks to American Public Media's Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark about In the Dark (http://www.apmreports.org/in-the-dark),

David Jackson knows how to podcast. He’s been doing it for 11 years, far longer than most fans of the medium have known it existed. Jackson started his first podcast in 2005,looking up information in a pre-Google internet world and capturing his attention and curiosity. “I uploaded a file and saw it come down in my podcatcher and said this has a huge amount of potential,” he said. As a corporate trainer, he saw an opportunity to teach people vital information while also providing him a paying gig as the latest round of corporate downsizing meant his trainer skills weren’t in high demand for a short while. His first long-term podcast was an audio version of a newsletter he was already writing,The Musician’s Cooler. In April 2005, he launched The School of Podcasting, which has been running ever since. Podcasting scratched a series of itches for Jackson. “It’s kind of geeky, the whole website, RSS feeds, the whole nine yards,” he said. “You can be as creative as you want. My biggest itch, being a corporate trainer, is I like to help people. I was able to do all of that.” But what really made up his mind to dedicate so much time to podcasting was a phone call. “My very first piece of voicemail came from a guy in Germany,” he recalled. “I almost fell out of my chair. When I got my first piece of feedback from a guy in Germany, that was it. I’m podcasting ‘til I die.” There’s a very strategic approach that Jackson takes to developing the material for his courses, building on a lifelong habit of taking notes. “When I’m learning a new subject, I write down everything I get stuck on,” he said. “If I get stuck, I know my students will do that. As I was going through and learning Audacity … it was just a matter of writing it down and coming up with a tutorial or something for future students. As my students came in and asked a question, oooh, that’s a really good question, let me come up with a tutorial. I’d answer it and then come up with a tutorial.” His M.O.? “I’ve always wanted to help you avoid the mistakes I’m going to make,” Jackson said. “Let me be the crash test dummy. I’ll go in and figure out what’s going on and say, 'OK, this is a really great tool as long as you don’t do this, this or that, and always do this.' By doing that, I help you avoid headaches.” But perhaps the most important piece of insight Jackson can offer is how much time podcasting really takes. “I’ve timed it. It’s a four-to-one ratio,” he said. “If I want to do a 15 minute podcast, it’s going to take an hour,” by the time the subject is determined, research is done, the audio is recorded and edited and the final work posted, both in an audio form and written material used for promotion. “If you want to do an hour-long podcast? Congratulations, you’ve just sneezed away four hours." — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On  the week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to David Jackson, founder of The School of Podcasting (http://schoolofpodcasting.com) about his 10-plus years as a podcaster and how he uses his experiences to teach others to do the same.

Editor: Updated with correct audio file. When newsrooms downsize, it’s not just a loss of job opportunities for young reporters. It’s a loss of community history and institutional knowledge, leaving new reporters at a disadvantage...

Steve Johnson has always had an entrepreneurial streak, starting in high school when he’d take and sell photos of athletes from his school’s football team using a Mac Mini and some basic software. Now he’s a pioneer in the field of 360 digital storytelling, bringing audiences into stories with maneuverable photos giving a spherical view of the setting. He was a student at the University of Florida and interning at the Orlando Sentinel in 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, unleashing billions of gallons of oil onto the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, most of the paper’s staff had been on assignment in Haiti, so Johnson was asked to shoot photo and video on location. “I lived in the Gulf of Mexico for two months and realized the power of digital storytelling and feeding back information to your editor throughout the day,” he said. “It was a great experience that led to me teaching at the University of Florida right when I graduated and continuing to freelance for folks all over the place.” After 3 1/2 years of that work, during which time he also earned a masters in entrepreneurship, Johnson moved up to Washington, D.C., about 13 months ago to work with nonprofit organizations, making documentaries. In addition to teaching workshops in which he stresses the importance of financial literacy — “I think journalism as a whole needs to be more aware of how much your stories are worth and how much you can charge for them,” he said — Johnson developed a way to use multiple GoPro cameras to capture not just one-directional photos and videos to accompany a story, but literally capture the world around a focal point and give readers and viewers a more complete idea of a story’s setting. On the advice of a colleague from the University of Florida, Johnson makes all his work available, open source. “Even back in February, when we did the first 360 piece, we brought a climate scientist to Iceland and did the first that had never been done before, this interview on camera,” he said He asked whether he should keep the technique a secret or share the knowledge. “Their advice was open source it, own it and be the expert. Let’s be honest. I didn’t cure cancer. Someone else will figure it out too.” His company, Boundless (http://www.seeboundless.com), is centered on the idea of helping people tell better stories, both in text and visually. The difference is, the viewer controls the perspective of the photos and videos related to the piece. “With 360, you almost want to encourage pedestrian-ness of shots, because you want them to feel like they’re just there, experiencing it with you,” he said. “I think there’s a level of authenticity in that.” With 360 photography and videography, the level of professionalism is drastically different. “You get to look around and experience it on your own,” Johnson said . “In terms of storytelling, it poses a great challenge. You have to decide, from clip to clip, where do you think the audience is going to be looking. It’s a challenge. I would say it’s one of the hardest things I’ve done in storytelling and it’s one of the most rewarding.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, hosts Michael O'Connell and Nicole Ogrysko interview Steve Johnson, who's blazing trails with his 360 video storytelling. From the tops of mountains to inside glaciers, Johnson's work put the audience in the middle of a story. He talks about some of the hardware he uses and some of the thinking that goes into this new type of journalism.

It may seem like an obvious point, or counterintuitive, but the key to a good sounding podcast is giving it a listen in different locations. Chris Curran, a podcast producer and founder of Fractal Recording (http://fractalrecording.com/chriscurran/) and the Podcast Engineering School (http://podcastengineeringschool.com) among other endeavors, said that while having content worth listening to is the number one factor when setting up a podcast, it’s important to use the tools at hand, and some common sense, to make a podcast that’s enjoyable to listen to from an audio quality standpoint. “A lot of people who are getting into podcasting, especially if they’re a little more technical in nature, they really can go overboard with their audio," he said. "They can stress over buying a microphone for three months or they can stress about their workflow and their equipment and their mixer. There is a danger of focusing too much in the beginning on the technology and the microphone. … You can have the tools. You can have a hammer and nails, but you can do a really crappy job building something. You have to know how to use the tool.” Equalization of bass and treble is vital, he said. Some producers want to boost the bass, thinking it’ll add a deeper, “radio voice” quality to a recording but there’s a danger in that approach of making the recording sound “muddy,” he said. “Most people don’t hear that because they don’t know frequencies,” Curran added. “They don’t know what they’re listening for. The human voice is … a midrange sort of instrument. The really critical part of the human voice is in the midrange. It’s not really in the low end, 80 and 100 hertz. That’s too low.” Secondly, when possible, podcasters should use separate channels to record guests and mix them together later in the final edit, in order to make sure louder, more booming voices don’t overpower quieter ones. There are services, like Auphonic, that can help tweak recordings to bring loud and soft voices to the same level. “The golden rule of audio engineering is record it properly the first time. Period,” he said. “Because if you don’t record it properly, then you’re going to have to get into all these fixes and tricks and techniques and plug ins. You’re going to have to jump through nine hoops to make it sound better, but it still won’t sound great." And to check your work, he encouraged podcasters to listen to their recordings on a phone, on a wireless speaker, with headphones, with earbuds, in a car. “If you listen in the car, that’s when you’ll notice the bass. You’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, there’s all this low end. It’s so muddy and it sounds so huge and almost unintelligible,’ because in your car you have big speakers with better bass. … Let’s say for the first 10 episodes, if you take every episode for the first 10 episodes and listen in different places and then make tiny adjustments for the next episode, you’ll dial it in over 10 episodes. You’ll tweak it and then it’ll be really good.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) This week on the It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell interviews Chris Curran, a podcast producer and founder of Fractal Recording (http://fractalrecording.com/chriscurran/) and the Podcast Engineering School (http://podcastengineeringschool.com), about what goes into creating a really great sounding podcast.

On the urging of a source, Jim Heaney looked into the request for proposals (RFP) for the construction of a massive solar panel manufacturing plant on an industrial plot of land in South Buffalo, New York. He found in the language a stipulation that any development company interested in submitting a proposal must have been in business in Buffalo for at least 50 years in order to be considered. The only company that fit the bill was owned by one of the governor’s top campaign contributors. When he called the governor’s office to ask about the language, Heaney was told it was a “clerical error,” a “typo” and nothing more, and that it would be fixed. Two-and-a-half years later, nine top advisers and staff members of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo have been indicted into bid rigging and other potential corruptions in what’s been labeled as the “Buffalo Billion” project, one that Cuomo has touted and flaunted as a benevolent way to help Buffalo get back on its economic feet. Heaney was a reporter with the Buffalo News for 25 years before taking a contract buyout and starting Investigative Post (http://www.investigativepost.org/) in 2012. With a team of five writers and staffers and four contractors, Investigative Post is the only news outlet in Western New York focused exclusively on watchdog journalism, and the indictments handed down on Sept. 22 can be tied back to an article Heaney published in December 2012. (http://www.investigativepost.org/2014/12/22/stonewalling-spending-buffalo-billion/) (http://www.investigativepost.org/2014/12/22/stonewalling-spending-buffalo-billion/) The piece Heaney wrote “caught the attention of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who launched a federal investigation” into the “curious bidding procedures,” which has since become a statewide corruption investigation, Heaney said. “This is coming as close to the governor directly as possible without the governor directly being indicted.” The Buffalo Billion program is a point of pride for Cuomo and the city of Buffalo itself, and “Frankly, there’s been a lot of cheerleading in the local press about this,” Heaney said. “We’ve been the ones pointing out all sorts of problems with transparency, promises not kept, doing the things investigative reporters do. It’s gratifying to see our work has led to an effort by the U.S. Attorney to try to clean up the corruption he’s uncovered during his investigation.” After taking care of the “clerical error” in the original RFP, Heaney asked the governor’s office for more information on the vetting and review process for the submissions after the sole company that met the 50-year threshold was awarded the contract, even though other development firms submitted lower bids. “I was dealing with Alain Kaloyeros, the governor’s point guy on this, and said I’d like the paperwork to document the process," Heaney said. "I was completely stonewalled for six months on it. The state went to ridiculous lengths to deny me information, access to people, etc. I wound up doing a story in December 2014 on the lack of transparency, the 50-year requirement, the great, extraordinary lengths they went to to try and thwart my reporting.” Heaney, whose team has started racking up awards for their work, stresses that there’s “no magic in what I did, you just do what reporters do. You ask questions and keep digging and when people try to deny you information, you dig in your heels and go after it that much harder.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell and website editor Amber Healy talk to Jim Heaney about launching Investigative Post (http://www.investigativepost.org/),

Being new in any job is tricky. Within the first day or so, it’s all about learning where the bathrooms and water fountains are, which vending machine in the breakroom has the better snacks and which coworkers are known to get a little wild at the office holiday party. When you’re a new correspondent in a war zone, there’s the additional need to prove yourself a worthy person to trust and take into dicey territory. Paul Shinkman (http://www.usnews.com/topics/author/paul_d_shinkman), a national security reporter for U.S. News & World Report, and Carlo Munoz (http://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/carlo-munoz/), a military correspondent for the Washington Times, spent most of this summer traveling around warzones, trying to get a better understanding of U.S. military operations on the ground. “In June, I spent two weeks in Ukraine. I started in the West where the U.S. army has a training mission for the Ukrainian army, as far from the border and the Russian army as possible," Shinkman said. After that, he spent a few days in Kiev to see how that city is faring after two years of conflict. July was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan for a NATO summit, and in August he spent time in the Mojave desert at the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, “studying how to incorporate cyber operators into conventional combat units. I was one of the first reporters to go check that out.” Munoz also was in Iraq for just over half a month, trying to get “an on-the-ground understanding of the war on ISIS that the U.S. is kind of participating in.” He split his time between Baghdad and another city, about 35 miles away from the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, interviewing U.S. generals.The environment in which he was working changed dramatically when he was able to gain trust from on-the-ground soldiers. Munoz started his career at a small newspaper in Southwest Ohio, just about as far as a person can get from the Iraq countryside, negotiating with militia members and local soldiers to go to some of the riskier parts of the country. “The further away you are from headquarters, the more control the lieutenant or younger senior officer and enlisted soldiers have over what you get to see and do,” Munoz said. “Especially at the smaller unit levels. A lot of these guys, they get press but not too many reporters nowadays are willing to go with them” out to the more dangerous, volatile areas. That’s the best way to prove you’re a reporter worth trusting and who understands the risk posed by reporting from a war zone — get out there in it with the men and women facing gunfire every day. “When we’re out there in the dust, the dirt, no one really knows what’s going on out there,” Munoz said. “They want their story told. Sometimes that sort of desire to do so, their guard comes down.” There’s more autonomy and respect out in the conflict areas, Shinkman agreed. “You’re not just doing this (reporting) from the comfort of the capital, you’re out with us in the dust and dirt.” To the local soldiers, the mentality seems to be “We’ll take you to what you want to see.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Paul Shinkman (http://www.usnews.com/topics/author/paul_d_shinkman) of U.S. News & World Report and Carlo Munoz (http://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/carlo-munoz/) of the Washington Times about covering the national security beat. Both reporters share their recent experiences, traveling in war zones as they try to keep track of what the U.S. military is up to across the globe.

Most reporters know the pain of having an interview that feels too good to cut down to a soundbyte, but what do you do with a 30-minute interview and a 40-second spot? If you’re Rachel Nania and Jason Fraley from Washington, D.C.’s WTOP radio station, you turn those interviews into a podcast. As the Living editor and the Entertainment editor, respectively, for the station, Nania and Fraley launched the Capital Culture (http://wtop.com/capital-culture/) podcast a few months back as a way to take better advantage of the interviews they conduct for their daily pieces. “We just had all this extra tape and these interviews you can’t really get into,” Nania said. “We were looking for a different medium, a different way to display those interviews.” Fraley, a previous It's All Journalism guest (http://itsalljournalism.com/188-oscars-on-the-horizon-for-wtops-fraley/), often interviews celebrities in town for events at the Kennedy Center or film or TV projects, including recent interviews with Kevin Costner, Tim Meadows and Henry Winkler about new endeavors, all of which only typically have about 20 to 40 seconds worth of content included in his entertainment spots. “It just felt like we were doing a lot of work, getting a lot of cool content from these great people we were talking to, and it seemed like a shame to shoehorn it into a 40-second interview. I post the full article to the web every day, but I’m not sure how many people are reading or listening to the whole thing." The easy part of their new podcast is the interviews, but even that’s been a learning experience for Nania and Fraley. “When I go out on interviews, I’m so used to the mic being more pointed at the subject, because I’m getting their tape for the air” and wrapping her voice in at the beginning and end of the piece. But as Capital Culture kicked off, their editor mentioned the need to make Nania’s voice sound good as well. But perhaps the driving force behind Capital Culture even more than finding a good home for otherwise wasted tape? Showing the world there’s more to D.C. than what they see on CSPAN. “It drives me mad when people just associate this town with politics,” Nania said. “There’s a huge creative community. This city is so much more than just what happens down on Pennsylvania Avenue and Capital Hill and all the lobbying firms in between.” That mindset inspired the podcast’s tagline: “If you think D.C. is all politics and traffic, think again!” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) This week, It's All Journalism host Michael O'Connell talks to Rachel Nania and Jason Fraley of WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., about their new podcast, Capital Culture (http://wtop.com/capital-culture/). They discuss the challenges of coming up with story ideas for the lifestyle and entertainment beats and how podcasting has given them a new platform to go long-form on their previously short radio spots.

Podcasting might not be as ubiquitous in Israel as it is in North America, but that isn’t enough of a challenge to dissuade Ran Levi. Not only is he the host of one of the only professionally produced podcasts in Israel, the Hebrew-languag...

Maybe it’s time local news came full circle: Instead of buying a subscription to a newspaper that might no longer exist, readers can subscribe directly to the person covering what’s going on in their town. Michelle Carter Verna is the creator of Newsfundr (https://newsfundr.com), a crowdfunding site for local news in which subscribers pay for a daily or weekly service and, in exchange, someone within their community gets paid to cover the news. Daily subscribers would get fresh articles in their inboxes each morning; those who choose weekly subscriptions would receive, and be funding, longer, more in-depth investigative pieces. “Instead of subscribing to a news organization where there’s advertisers and editors that are controlling the output, you get to subscribe to journalists, and only the journalists you trust,” Carter Verna said. “As a journalist, you have the freedom to report the news as you see it. You define what your beat is and what stories you write about; as long as you have subscribers that are supporting you, you’re good to go.” Newsfundr requires any journalist that wants to participate to fill out an application to prove that they are “educated, established, experienced journalists,” not bloggers or “corporate hacks,” she said. “As long as you have clips to support that you have experience in the industry, you have at least three years’ experience and you agree to abide by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, we will accept you onto the platform.” Once there, Newsfundr and its journalism board of advisers let the reporters do the work they see fit. Newsfundr provides the platform on which the reporters are published as well as marketing — and training on that marketing — to help the journalists’ promote their work and gain subscribers. “I think it’s up to the journalist to help build an audience around the kind of work they’re doing,” Carter Verna said. The draw of Newsfundr, and what sets it apart from systems like Patreon or Kickstarter, is the promise of local news, written by a local journalist and supported by people in the same community. Local news is “something you can’t get anywhere else,” Carter Verna said. “I think a lot of people are so hungry to find out what’s going on in their community that they’re going to support it, regardless of what platform it’s on.Having it all on one platform where they know how to find it is going to make everybody’s job easier.” The important thing will be building trust with readers. “You can look at the readers and a lot of readers surveyed showed they trust the institution, they don’t necessarily know or trust the individual journalists,” she said. “You can create your own one-off website and it’s wonderful and the news could be great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the readers will recognize that.They have a greater level of trust for a nameless person that’s part of the paper. Part of the goal behind Newsfundr is creating that institution people can trust as a way of allowing you to do your own thing and get your news out there.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalist podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Michelle Carter Verna, founder of Newsfundr (https://newsfundr.com), a crowdfunding site in which subscribers pay for a daily or weekly service in order to support local news coverage. Journalists can join the Newsfundr platform and get paid for covering local news.

In newsrooms, it’s easy to shrug off the sports department. Bats, balls, bases, nets, hoops — that’s not serious journalism. It’s an unfair statement, as there are things to learn about time management, self-control, discipline and psychology that can be gained from talking with athletes, said  Richard Parr, producer and host of the Best in the World with Richard Parr (http://www.richardparr.net/#richardparr) podcast. Parr spent six years, across two assignments, in Qatar with Al Jazeera, during which time he “covered absolutely everything. The thing about working in the sports department of a news channel, you’re not necessarily appealing to a big sports fan. You’re kind of appealing to maybe the casual fan, a news junkie who maybe has a little interest in sport. Yes, we covered football, because it’s massive. We covered cricket, because it’s huge in India and Pakistan. We’d cover American sports. And then you’ve got the big events like the Olympics and the World Cup.” His first stint with EuroSport, in 2005, was with the football department, but he didn’t get many opportunities, so he struck up conversations with people in other departments “who did the random sports.” This led to him editing footage of sports like freestyle motocross, an event about which he knew nothing. Over time, Parr developed an interest in other areas of journalism and news production, like so many, but he didn’t want to branch out into one of the areas in which he had great interest but the landscape is already oversaturated. “I really like the interviews with people who are the best in their field,” he said. “Why not listen to people who are the very best in what they do in sport? I tried to get people who are world or Olympic champions, people who have broken world records in whatever field it is. I tried to get people in all different sports to get a cross-section of ideas.” It’s a simple but eye-opening premise he’s taken. “I want to know what they do different for nutrition, rituals, training, maybe they’ve got different sleep patterns, the kind of financial difficulties they’ve had to go through, how they manage their time, psychology,” he said. “Hopefully, some of my listeners who might be interested in a certain sport, maybe it can help them in their sport or their everyday life. I know when it comes to time management, I could certainly learn from some of these top people.” Among his guests so far are Stephen Hendry, a seven-time snooker world champion, and Richard Faulds, an athlete from the UK who, in the 2000 Olympics, defeated the reigning world champion in shooting. He’s also interviewed Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller, now five-years past a cancer diagnosis, who detailed how her experience with gymnastics helped her through treatment. “What I find is, it’s how people can push the barriers” that make them successful, Parr said. It might seem so easy to give up when trying something, whether an athletic endeavor or otherwise, but these athletes don’t do that. “These people have this mental fortitude. It’s quite interesting to learn all these different things.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) In this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Richard Parr, a journalist who recently covered the sports beat in Qatar for Al Jazeera English. On his podcast, Best in the World with Richard Parr (http://www.richardparr.net/#richardparr), he talks to athletes about the challenges they faced on the way to becoming champions in their particular sports.

When Margaret Brown first saw the iPad, she saw her future. “I have loved magazines since the time I could read,” Brown said. “I’ve subscribed to magazines my whole life. I always read every single magazine my parents subscribed to. That’s my passion, that’s my experience.” With more than 25 years as a magazine publisher on her resume, Brown went to the owner of the publication she was working on at the time and suggested starting a line of digital magazines. He declined because “no one else was doing it.” Without the cost of paper, postage or print, Brown decided to try her hand at digital publishing. She started a digital book review magazine, Shelf Unbound (http://www.shelfmediagroup.com), in 2010 with the intention of building it up and selling it off. Within a few years, Shelf Unbound had built a steady readership of 125,000 with distribution in the U.S. and 75 other countries. “We distribute it for free and make our money by ad sales,” mostly from self-published authors who appreciate the “large audience of people interested in the literature.” Shelf Unbound has been nominated for a Maggie Award each year of its existence and won in 2015. In 2016, Shelf Media, Brown’s company, won another. Like many others, Brown became enamored of podcasts when she first heard Serial. Naturally, she decided to launch a new publication focused on podcasts, called Podster (http://www.shelfmediagroup.com/pages/podster.html), which first published earlier this year. She also launched her own podcast in 2015. “Our magazine is targeted to listeners of podcasts,” she said. “We have a lot of podcast creators who subscribe to Podster, but we’re really following the same model (as the previous publication). We’ll get it out to a large number of listeners, we’re going to curate the best podcasts, large and small, and we anticipate our advertisers are podcasters new to the game.” Each issue of Podster features four “big interviews”: Two known entities in the podcasting world and two relative newcomers. Most of the production is done in-house, but there are some contributors, including Colin Miller from Undisclosed (http://undisclosed-podcast.com), a follow-up podcast to Serial focusing on the criminal justice system. Going with a magazine about podcasts was an easy decision to make for someone with a love of, and experience in, magazines. “I think we bring a quality of design and editorial to (Podster) that some online things don’t have,” she said. “I wanted to retain the magazine experience. I wanted it to feel like you weren’t at a website. We’ve really tried to maintain the feeling of being in a traditional magazine.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's episode of It's All Journalism, Producer Michael O'Connell talks to Margaret Brown, founder of Shelf Media. After 25 years in the print magazine industry, Brown turned to the online environment to launch Shelf Unbound (http://www.shelfmediagroup.com), a review of digital books. Her latest online publication, Podster (http://www.shelfmediagroup.com/pages/podster.html), features reviews of many favorite and unknown podcasts and their creators.

America has needed, desperately, another Edward R. Murrow to come to the forefront now and declare plainly the danger posed by Donald Trump as potential president of the United States. In a compelling argument (http://www.cjr.org/analysis/trump_inspires_murrow_moment_for_journalism.php) for the Columbia Journalism Review, David Mindich, professor of journalism and media studies at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, spells out the need for journalists to stop pulling punches and start speaking clearly to the American people, in as non-partisan a way as possible, about what the country would look like under President Trump. As Murrow said during the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s pageantry trying to “out” members of Congress as communists in the early 1950s, “He didn’t create this situation of fear — he merely exploited it, and rather successfully.” Murrow dedicated a half-hour show to Joseph McCarthy in 1952, using McCarthy’s own words against him. “I’m seeing a similar moment today among journalists today as they’re covering Donald Trump,” Mindich said. Journalists pride themselves on being able to write and report the news in such a way that their audience doesn’t know how the journalist would vote or his or her political leanings. “Typically, a candidate makes a claim and that’s reported dutifully. To balance that claim, journalists might get another claim from the other side,” he said. With the issue of global warming, journalists don’t feel they need to balance it with claims that global warming or climate change is a fabrication. In this election cycle, Trump was such an unusual candidate, journalists wanted to cover him because he was a “novelty,” Mindich said. “Early on in the campaign, the statement about John McCain not being a war hero because he was captured was really an unusual for a mainstream candidate to make.” As things have progressed, and Trump’s claims and statements have gotten further from the accepted and expected norms of political discourse, that has presented a challenge. In the present day, Mindich writes for CJR, “these modern-day Murrow moments carry less impact: Long gone are the days in which a vast majority of eyeballs were tuned into the big-three television news programs. But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.” He outlines a handful of occasions in the past few months in which, during the course of a televised debate or interview, Trump was asked to explain himself, whether for his previous comments about women, a volley of insults about the wives of candidates or implied racism, all of which Trump did his best to deflect, deny, disarm. “It’s very easy to kind of follow that siren call to Trumpland. We’re seeing it today, even post-convention; we’re seeing, for Clinton to make news, she needs to talk about Trump,” he said. — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) In this week's It's All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O'Connell talks to David Mindich, professor of journalism and media studies at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, about his recent Columbia Journalism Review article: "For journalists covering Trump, a Murrow moment (http://www.cjr.org/analysis/trump_inspires_murrow_moment_for_journalism.php)". They discuss how the 2016 presidential race has some journalists re-examining the long tradition of objectivity and balance in covering politics.

America has needed, desperately, another Edward R. Murrow to come to the forefront now and declare plainly the danger posed by Donald Trump as potential president of the United States. In a compelling argument (http://www.cjr.org/analysis/trump_inspires_murrow_moment_for_journalism.php) for the Columbia Journalism Review, David Mindich, professor of journalism and media studies at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, spells out the need for journalists to stop pulling punches and start speaking clearly to the American people, in as non-partisan a way as possible, about what the country would look like under President Trump. As Murrow said during the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s pageantry trying to “out” members of Congress as communists in the early 1950s, “He didn’t create this situation of fear — he merely exploited it, and rather successfully.” Murrow dedicated a half-hour show to Joseph McCarthy in 1952, using McCarthy’s own words against him. “I’m seeing a similar moment today among journalists today as they’re covering Donald Trump,” Mindich said. Journalists pride themselves on being able to write and report the news in such a way that their audience doesn’t know how the journalist would vote or his or her political leanings. “Typically, a candidate makes a claim and that’s reported dutifully. To balance that claim, journalists might get another claim from the other side,” he said. With the issue of global warming, journalists don’t feel they need to balance it with claims that global warming or climate change is a fabrication. In this election cycle, Trump was such an unusual candidate, journalists wanted to cover him because he was a “novelty,” Mindich said. “Early on in the campaign, the statement about John McCain not being a war hero because he was captured was really an unusual for a mainstream candidate to make.” As things have progressed, and Trump’s claims and statements have gotten further from the accepted and expected norms of political discourse, that has presented a challenge. In the present day, Mindich writes for CJR, “these modern-day Murrow moments carry less impact: Long gone are the days in which a vast majority of eyeballs were tuned into the big-three television news programs. But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.” He outlines a handful of occasions in the past few months in which, during the course of a televised debate or interview, Trump was asked to explain himself, whether for his previous comments about women, a volley of insults about the wives of candidates or implied racism, all of which Trump did his best to deflect, deny, disarm. “It’s very easy to kind of follow that siren call to Trumpland. We’re seeing it today, even post-convention; we’re seeing, for Clinton to make news, she needs to talk about Trump,” he said. — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) In this week's It's All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O'Connell talks to David Mindich, professor of journalism and media studies at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, about his recent Columbia Journalism Review article: "For journalists covering Trump, a Murrow moment (http://www.cjr.org/analysis/trump_inspires_murrow_moment_for_journalism.php)". They discuss how the 2016 presidential race has some journalists re-examining the long tradition of objectivity and balance in covering politics.