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Podcast fans from all around - come and nerd out about podcasts and discover new shows along the way!
On Podcast Book Club - a different group of podcast industry pros sit down each week to pour over an episode of a show they admire.
We're a group of podcasting professionals who spend every day scripting, producing, engineering, and promoting podcasts. And in our free time? We’re podcast fans just like you. We love to listen to even more podcasts and figure out what makes the best podcasts so good.
So tune in and join the club - listen to podcast reviews of some of our favorite gems. We’ll give feedback on podcast content but also sound design, production, scripting, storytelling, and more.
Want even more? Catch Podcast Book Club on Twitter: twitter.com/podbookclub
Podcast Book Club is produced by Alex Bennett, Head of Post Production at Lower Street. Alex is a domesticated audio nerd, who has spent the past five years learning about human social conventions via the medium of podcasting. From Edinburgh, Scotland he is an audio engineer that helps produce audio dramas in his spare time. Alex specialises in soundscapes and creative mixing. He has a deep and abiding love for sandwiches, and is the 2nd worst bowler at Lower Street.
Lower Street provides next-level podcast production services for ambitious companies: everything from podcast strategy and creation to growth. We’ve worked with companies like BCG to develop multiple podcasts like Climate Vision 2050, BCG Compliance, BCG Fintech Files, and BCG In Her Element. We’ve also helped produce: Cadence Bank’s In Good Companies; HPE’s Technology Now, Zuhlke’s Data Today, Northern Trust’s The Road to Why, Zoobean’s The Reading Culture; ICR’s Welcome to the Arena and ZeroNorth’s Navigating Zero.
Find out more at https://lowerstreet.co/ and sign up for our newsletter to keep in touch https://lowerstreet.co/newsletter-sign-up
[00:00:00] Alex Bennett: Hi, quick editor's note before we begin this episode. We recorded this conversation back in November of last year and since then James, the wonderful guest on this episode, has started a new job. He's now the executive producer of the New York Times’ The Headlines, which is another daily news audio show.
Congratulations, James, and on with the podcast.
[00:00:26] Jackie Lamport: Hey, it's Jackie Lamport from Lower Street here. This episode was recorded November 14th, 2023, and we all listened to that day's episode of The Daily, The New York Times Daily News Podcast. In this conversation, we're going to talk about daily news podcasting, uh, what we can learn from it.
And that's across all genres. Thanks for listening. Daily news podcasting has different types of storytelling. It has a lot of efficiency and we can learn a lot from how they do things quickly and responsibly and the different formats that are useful for getting information across. I'm going to cut myself off there.
There's a lot in this episode. It's really interesting. I'll let our panelists introduce each other. But first my qualifications, I'm hosting this episode, obviously. Uh, and that's because before lower street, I was actually an audio journalist and I hosted and produced my own daily news podcast in Canada.
So. Yeah, I know a little bit, I guess. Anyway, this is Podcast Book Club. Let's get to it.
[00:01:18] Andrew Ganem: My name is Andrew Ganem. I'm a producer at Lower Street.
[00:01:20] Alex Bennett: My name is Alex. I'm the senior audio engineer at Lower Street.
[00:01:25] Elizabeth Amos: Hi, I'm Elizabeth Amos, and I am the production manager at Lower Street.
[00:01:29] James Shield: I'm James Shield. I'm the Deputy Executive Producer of Stories of Our Times, which is the daily news podcast from the Times of London.
[00:01:37] Jackie Lamport: So let's start off with a simple question, just first reactions. What do you think makes news storytelling different from regular storytelling, if there is a difference? Let's start with Andrew.
[00:01:49] Andrew Ganem: I think news podcasting in general is slightly different than a lot of other media. formats, in part because there is already this kind of huge mechanism of journalism and news media.
And so it always strikes me as a little more defined than other genres. There are more rules, maybe, there's more responsibilities, and yeah, that's mostly what comes across to me when I, when I listen to news podcasts or current events podcasts. Let's go to James.
[00:02:20] James Shield: Well, you're normally telling a story that people know a part of already, and it's usually a story without an ending, and it's often a story that people are a bit confused about, so I sometimes think, sometimes a news event can feel a bit like you're watching Episode 7, Season 12 of a show that you've never watched before.
And suddenly everybody's talking about it, and you want to understand it. And it helps sometimes to go back to the beginning and explain it, or sometimes you zoom in on a particular character, but one way or another, it's a story that people know part of already. And I suppose people feel an obligation to understand it in a way that maybe they don't feel an obligation to engage with every form of podcast.
But maybe it also comes with a certain amount of baggage because it feels like it's, it's a kind of homework. And so your job is to give people what they're there for without it feeling too much like homework, without you feeling like you're kind of lost mid season in a story. But then you, as you say, you've also got this huge responsibility because you're talking about real people, usually people who are living, you're normally not kind of talking about historical stories, and you've got a real danger as well because The conventions of narrative podcasting, as the New York Times has learned a few times, can bend you towards stories that you can be forced to kind of simplify a story in a way that's not actually reflective of the truth.
And so that's sometimes the risk that in bringing all the tools of kind of narrative storytelling, which was kind of the whole point of shows like The Daily that we'll talk about later on, that you start to look for Oh, is this story a rise and fall? And if, if you approach a kind of real person's story as, oh, this is a rise and fall story, well, maybe it's more complicated than that.
And maybe there are other characters and other points of view, and people don't agree on the facts, and The riskiest form of all of this is that the people that you were talking about could be in some form of danger somehow, you know, sometimes you have to, we've had to protect people's identities sometimes that we've spoken to, or we get actors to voice them because they're at so much risk.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Reithian values of the BBC, which I can never quite remember which order they go in, but it's inform, educate, inform, entertain. In that order, in that order, entertainment lasts.
[00:04:35] Jackie Lamport: Hmm.
[00:04:35] James Shield: That's sometimes the, the thing that you're, you're trying to balance.
[00:04:38] Jackie Lamport: Yeah, it is. And it's so interesting too because it's almost like you kind of have a duty to make the education interesting enough that people will actually tune in like that.
You're saying that that's a big part of it is like you want people to actually listen to it and not feel like homework, but Yeah. Like how do you do that? And I think the answer. Is in the format and podcasts have made news a lot more interesting, but I agree. Don't want to turn the conversation into why podcasting is better than journalism, like written journalism, which I don't think it's better.
I think they serve different purposes, but
[00:05:10] Andrew Ganem: reading sucks. We agree. All of us on this call agree.
[00:05:13] James Shield: Well, but when you, when you say the format, I kind of think it's not necessary. I mean, you could do very similar things on traditional radio, but actually I think the format that works, and maybe we can get into, you know, there's a new, range of news podcasts that have come along.
I think narrative podcasting, I know it's kind of a bit 2014 now, but sometimes that can make the news digestible that, okay, it's all very complicated. Israel, Gaza, where do you start? Well, on a narrative show, we start somewhere and we walk you through a series of events. And if you can follow the series of events, and if we've told it well, then hopefully you get to the end and you've understood something in a way that sometimes.
An interview with someone who works at a military think tank might be slightly harder to follow.
[00:05:59] Jackie Lamport: Now, a lot of questions. I have a lot of things that I would love to talk about, but I want to get through the first round. So, let's go to Elizabeth. What do you think makes news storytelling? Unique from just regular storytelling old fashioned.
[00:06:14] Elizabeth Amos: Well, it's interesting when we were talking about entertainment because I do feel there is way less of a necessity to make it entertaining because the value proposition of current event shows is so clear. If you listen to this podcast, you're going to know a little bit more. about what's happening in your world today.
And for many people, I think, as James might have mentioned, that feels, there feels like a sense of obligation to be informed and to be able to participate in discussions about what's happening in your world. That also means that current events podcasts, I think, have to share a lot of context because often by the time something is news.
There's been a lot bubbling under the surface for a long time that hasn't been news yet or newsworthy yet to all audiences. So, I do think there's a lot of legwork to be done on current event shows. Kind of bringing you up to the point that you're at now where something has boiled over and is making headlines.
I think James also mentioned that the narrative is not always complete, you know. We're picking a story up and you have to find some sort of ending in a story that's evolving in the moment that you're telling it.
[00:07:30] Jackie Lamport: It's interesting, I actually think that this is where one of the things, the first things that you can learn from, from like, News stories or current events storytelling that I have taken and used so much in my work and like with any kind of story in general is that the end doesn't need to be like a nice bow, right?
It doesn't need to be the end of an arc. The end can be what the next questions are, right? And that's the thing with news is that there's always going to be more and there's always going to be things that you're still curious about.
[00:08:01] Elizabeth Amos: The other difference, I think, is that with most podcasts I listen to, I never assume neutrality, I always assume, or I even choose to listen to a show because the host has a point of view that I appreciate, or I know what angle they have, that they're going to explore a topic with, but with news, I think that You can run the danger of your audience assuming neutrality, even if they maybe shouldn't these days, especially.
So there is definitely more responsibility to make bias clear, I think, in news podcasting than there is in other genres.
[00:08:37] Jackie Lamport: Totally. And that's just like a news thing in general. Like, your line of like, where something is right and something is wrong. The middle is never the same for anybody else. So for me, it's like, this is morally the middle, but I could be wrong.
I don't know.
[00:08:53] James Shield: I think most of the time our job is not really to tell people where we think things are morally, I think our job is to explain the world and listeners can draw their own conclusions. And But one of the jobs we have to do, because you see globally there's a kind of declining trust in news.
You know, it happens in Britain, I'm sure it happens in America, in Canada, in Germany. But one of the things you have to do, I think, in every episode is do a bit of the behind the curtain. How did we get this information? Where did it come from? Who told us this? What do you need to know about who told you that information?
And show a bit of the working, show the amount of work that goes into some of these stories. And when you do those stories, Then you're kind of doing the right. How do you know this? Where did this come from? Who did you speak to? And even when you're doing the kind of political reporting, it's helpful to go, Who's telling you what?
And how do you know it's true? And how do you weigh these things up? And, you know, I think it's quite rarely that we say this is what we think is right or wrong.
[00:09:53] Jackie Lamport: There feels like there's this expectation that you're going to always give both sides the opportunity to speak and I guess like you deciding what both sides are and also like if both sides are truly equal.
I think that's where the issue for me a lot of the times came in. It's like, okay, so I'm going to talk to somebody who's talking about something socially progressive or whatnot. Does that mean that the person on the other side who is, you know, potentially. socially regressive is, is valid? Because in my opinion, no.
But do I get to decide that? And I mean, that's when I do decide. And I think that's where sometimes you're like, okay.
[00:10:31] James Shield: Well, the BBC had this issue where they have, you know, these two principles of impartiality and balance, which are different things, but they're supposed to approach the world dispassionately and impartially, but then there is also this question of balance and it can sometimes be misinterpreted and they had this issue on climate coverage where for a while the BBC engaged in kind of false balance in giving equivalent weight to experts and people who frankly were not experts and then they kind of issued some internal guidance I think at some point and just said our duty to balance does not extend to Giving equal airtime both to people who know what they're talking about and to people who don't.
But that's a kind of perpetual struggle for the BBC, I think, sometimes.
[00:11:12] Elizabeth Amos: Who you give time to is such an important point because I think with a lot of daily news podcasts, the nature of their structure is to feature one story or one piece of a story more prominently than other headlines or other news.
And Even that selection of like, whose story do we tell today, doesn't necessarily mean that the next day you're going to get the other perspective.
[00:11:42] Andrew Ganem: And I think there's something interesting and really hard about news podcasts and things like The Daily, which are often daily, which is you also have this promise to listeners that you're going to come out every day.
And these are really complex issues. And Sometimes, like James was saying, it's a four or five month process, but that 20, 30 minute episode is coming out every weekday. So I think there is, there's a, an inherent real challenge in production.
[00:12:16] Jackie Lamport: I think there's a lot to take away from there and I want to get to, that's going to be the next focus.
But first let's finish through the round and get to Alex. What do you think is the unique thing about new storytelling?
[00:12:27] Alex Bennett: For me, in my limited experience, I'm not going to come at this from a purely storytelling side. Technically, my processes and workflows when I was working on journalistic stuff in university and then on daily shows after university, it was all so much more tight and the turnarounds were so much tighter as well.
I think a lot of the work we get to do in other kinds of podcasts, we get to take our time. Make a decision, wait 48 hours, and then see if we still like that decision when we come back to it. Whereas with the daily podcasting I've done in the past and some of the new stuff I've done on radio, that was all much tighter, far fewer frills in my experience.
And, yeah, I was just much more process and workflow oriented than I am now.
[00:13:19] Jackie Lamport: I would say. I think that's one of the most difficult things about news storytelling is, is, is just that like the news doesn't wait for you. You have to be on it or it's over. It's gone. Like you need to be fast about it, but then also fast and responsible.
And I want to talk about efficiency and what we can learn from how daily news podcasts operate because it's daily, but then also there's this added responsibility. And then there's also this like, kind of like in journalism, you can't really just get one guest and call that a guest. A well researched story, like a lot of, you know, podcasts can just do a single guest and that's your episode.
You can't really do that. You can do other research to supplement it, but you kind of need two guests at least usually and just like in an article, you should have a minimum two sources. So yeah, there's, and then the daily bit, and then not to mention that at least in Canada, news isn't overly profitable.
So newsrooms are typically. And there's not a lot of people working on it. So you're working really hard and trying to turn things around. I think what I got out of it in the way that I got through is you're kind of asking a question, just a question, and you're answering that one question. Like you don't need to make this massive project out of everything because every question has the ability to be interesting for a long time because there's questions that come from that, like sub questions.
So I think first, for me, my answer to this question that I'm going to say in a moment is focus, like extreme focus is incredibly, incredibly important for efficiency and actually being able to turn things around and do it responsibly. So my question is, What other things like when you're thinking about efficiency and actually being able to turn something around and still be being quality Reflecting on news and I know that this is kind of a harder question for maybe the people who haven't actually produced news podcasts But what do you think is like the takeaway from that?
Like, how do you think that we can compare strategies?
[00:15:12] James Shield: So I tell you how you make stories about times
[00:15:15] Jackie Lamport: Yeah,
[00:15:15] James Shield: and then see if there are things in here that were worth stealing for other podcasts. So we We talk about episodes as being you can kind of either be Quick and simple, or you can be slow and clever, and the episodes that turn out not to be so good tend to be the ones in the middle, where you're neither very quick, nor you being very clever, and the cleverness is often in, as you say, picking an angle, pick an angle on this, so, we did an episode for, uh, the Prime Minister hosted a, uh, Big Summit about AI at Bletchley Park the other week.
And you could do all sorts of stuff about AI. How it's going to change work. Will it destroy the planet. They were worried that it could help terrorists develop bioweapons. And then there's the kind of deepfake angle. But for this one we wanted to talk to a kind of external expert. And then it just depends on the Who's available when because you're up against the deadline and I needed to get the thing recorded kind of within 24 hours The expert who was available was this great guy Henry Ida who was in South Korea for a conference and his expertise was in deep fakes And so then it's like right we're going to make this episode about deep fakes And what's the interesting thing there and then you as you say, you'll just focus on just on that, telling that story, where did these things come from?
What could it mean for democracy? And also just how can we tell people something they don't know about once every 90 seconds? That's kind of my guide is, I think you need to be telling people something that you don't know quite frequently, while also kind of doing the summing up and going, okay, here's what we've learned so far sort of thing.
[00:16:53] Elizabeth Amos: Can I ask James, how much, if at all, do you, um, Actively consider like differentiation from other outlets or podcasts covering the same topics? Is that part of the formula or the thinking?
[00:17:07] James Shield: Yeah, every day. So I subscribe to all of our, well, you can call them competitors, but I don't know how many people are kind of deciding between four or five different daily news podcasts around the world.
But it's, you know, it's just interesting to see what everyone else is doing. And also some other news shows that are not quite the same as us, but. And then you just take a view. Sometimes you think, oh, they've kind of done that already and they've done the best version of it. If it's covering a story that's in a part of the country that doesn't get a lot of coverage and they've gone there and it's beautifully produced and packaged and they've got lots of interviews.
Well, that's kind of hard to beat, but yeah, you are, you're trying to think of. The kind of news diet of your listeners, especially across five days of the week, you know, that's one of the conversations that every news organization would have been having is six weeks into a war. How much coverage should we give that?
How much coverage should we give Ukraine or other stories or domestic stories or weighing kind of light and shade? Because if the news becomes. Just a compendium of here are all of the most distressing things that have happened in the world in the past 24 hours. Then you start to get news fatigue. And people tune out of it, and so we don't want that to happen either, but we also don't want to shy away from telling difficult stories.
[00:18:29] Jackie Lamport: The news fatigue thing is so interesting, because like, the ultimate test to that was the pandemic. And like, how do you continue to cover the pandemic? Because it's still so important, but like, how do you make it so people actually want to listen to it over and over and over again? That was a really, really tough challenge being in the news at that time.
There's a couple things that you said, and I wanna just focus in on them 'cause they're pretty good takeaways. We're talking about following a focus and figuring out an angle, covering new angles. Sometimes you go to the angles based on who's available and whatnot. And that's also like, that's a great advice right there as to just to go based on what's available, because that's gonna be your easiest bet for actually being able to get somebody and turn it around.
But I also think something else that I take away so much. When I'm trying to stand out from, like, other people and what other people are doing, or trying to, like, make something that actually has legs, I very much turn into my own curiosity about a story. And relying on that and trusting yourself in that, like, you are not only the producer of the thing, but you are an audience as well to these things.
If you're in news podcasting, it's probably because you like these things.
[00:19:35] James Shield: Yeah, a huge part of it is just noticing your own reactions to things, you know, noticing your own curiosity, realizing that, you know, there are days when there's a story that we can't stop talking about in the office. And then we realize, Wait, this needs to be, we haven't put this in our big list of ideas that we should be working on.
And so you have to pay attention to your curiosity. And then there's a kind of, is it the Ira Glass thing of when you're editing, you have to learn to pay attention to your own boredom. That when you start editing, when you get bored, you kind of think, Oh, I have to pay more attention and go back and listen to that again.
But actually paying attention to your own boredom, that's how you learn where the cuts are in an episode. And when you're in a studio live recording with people, especially on a deadline, that's kind of paying attention to your own confusion as well. You know, if you're midway through an episode, and you genuinely don't understand something that somebody said, you know, if they've mentioned that Hamas is negotiating with Hezbollah, and you're like, wait a minute, explain that to me, then the listener will have exactly the same response.
Yeah, you're quite right. Kind of being aware of your own, your own reaction to things is so important.
[00:20:42] Andrew Ganem: Yeah, just to note on the kind of sustainability piece, I think building on the idea of using your resources and the path of least resistance, I think one thing that stuck out to me with this episode of The Daily and with other news shows that I've listened to with stories of our times is the use of reporters and the guests being I'm the reporter of the story, and I think that's really interesting, and it's kind of a subtle shift, and I'm not a podcast historian, although dibs on that title, if it exists.
It seems like something that I think The Daily has capitalized on and done really well, is you have this really deep roster of reporters. They have already reported the story, you know, they've done the fact finding, they've done the interviews. You don't have to go re report the story. You can get the person who knows that story best to tell it.
And they are storytellers. They can tell it in a compelling way. And that can be And I think that, that has drawbacks as well, but I think it kind of allows you to be more efficient. It allows for it to be more conversational. I've listened to politicians running for office get interviewed on the radio and there is nothing more boring, I find. They'll say just the, their lines, you don't learn anything.
[00:22:06] Jackie Lamport: Politicians are not good guests.
[00:22:10] CLIP: What's, what's something that you always have with you? Hot sauce. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Really? Are you getting in formation right now? Hot sauce. Hot sauce in my bag swag?
[00:22:21] Andrew Ganem: But you get someone, a beat writer, who's following around that politician, and They're like, here's the stump speech in Iowa.
Here's what they've been focusing on. Here's something that I heard from a guest in the crowd. It can paint a much bigger picture. And then you're a, you're a journalist talking to a Another journalist, there's like some conversational element there. That's, I think, the heart of podcasting is like two people who know each other having a conversation.
[00:22:52] Elizabeth Amos: Do you think that news podcasting has reminded people that journalists are investigators and not just writers? I ask because I think it did for me. I think listening to journalists explain in their voices is And sometimes their, like, unpacking process of investigation is involved in podcasts, too, in a way it isn't necessarily in a news article.
I think it really reminded me of and continues to remind me of, like, the work that goes into journalism and not just the writing of a finished article.
[00:23:27] Jackie Lamport: It's such a good point, actually, because it actually, what it's doing is it's highlighting one of podcasting's greatest attributes, which is its ability to be personable and, like, put you in Directly in touch base.
It's kind of like this like relationship forming experience between you and the host or the host and the guests or whatnot. It's that you peel back the layer and it's not just storytelling. It's kind of storytelling. Of how you tell the story when you're adding the journalist in there. And yeah, to your point, Andrew, like, you know, it's great for efficiency because you're getting somebody who's already done the work.
And yeah, I'm not going to lie. Like that's like one of the easiest, uh, podcast episodes is when you're like, you know, you, you did this story so well, let's, let's reel this back. How did you figure this out? But yeah, it's, it is like, it's very intimate. And you get to see this like behind the scenes and you get to humanize the people who are who are doing it and I think that's something again that you can take into any other work that you're doing is like this is an opportunity to really humanize your guests or to humanize the the host even and it doesn't matter what you're talking about this person's going to be seen in a different way because it's a podcast it's like you're in somebody's brain
[00:24:36] James Shield: speaking of kind of humanizing people I did this story last year with the war correspondent for the Times.
He's been a war correspondent for decades. And he went to Bakhmut, which at the time was really the front line of the war, sort of most horrible, attritional battle of the winter. And he was trying to figure out, how do I get stories right from the front line? Because The Ukrainian army didn't necessarily want Western journalists going to the, to the front line and either putting themselves at risk or seeing things that they didn't want them to see.
And he found that one of the few people who has access to that area are the kind of volunteer rescue drivers for charities. So if you're a Ukrainian and your grandparent is stuck in back moots, And you're hundreds of miles away and you can't get them out. You can ring up this volunteer charity and say, can you go and get my relative out?
And this, this guy goes in. And he figured out that this, he just happened to meet by chance, this guy who's British, who was there, who could have been evacuated right on day one of the war. The UK foreign office would have got him out. And, uh, he just spent a bit of time with him. And if you read the print story, the print story is really compelling, but I think to hear the two of them tell the story together is, is something else, and to hear them on the ground.
I will play you a little bit of this if you want, and you can tell me when to stop if you, if you want to
[00:26:00] CLIP: I had a little workshop in Kyiv. I was making artistic kind of lumps out of, uh, fractured glass, Ukrainian oak, and selling them online. All the way up to the Russian invasion, I was in complete denial.
When they first hit the city Properly, and they were handing out guns should go and get a gun. Should go and get a gun. I'm like, you're gonna get killed.
And so of course the British Embassy offered to evacuate him or whatever and he says, well no, I felt rather indebted and full of a profound admiration for Ukrainians. If people leave, if you run away, you're not okay. You've gotta look after your own safety, blah, blah, blah. But this is the Russians. They have no right to be here.
They have no right to do anything. I'm gonna run away from these bastards.
[00:26:47] Jackie Lamport: I think it's doing such a great job at. Highlighting, again, another thing that podcasting is so good at, which is like putting, it's humanizing, but it's also, it's putting real people to the words that you're reading. Like when you're reading a news article, you read it and you're like, Oh, that person said that you hear it.
And you're like, that could have been my neighbor. Right. It's like reading forums on the internet. You're like, you, somebody posts something on Reddit and you're like, that's me. But if you heard them say it, you probably wouldn't think that.
[00:27:16] Elizabeth Amos: The audio format gives you one more quality of people that make them more specific than when you read a quote from someone in an article, right?
Like, they become more themselves instead of more of a general character. It's like when you watch a movie and you can't unsee the actor even if you read the book version and they look totally different in your head like that person becomes more specific to you when you hear their voice.
[00:27:42] Jackie Lamport: You know, actually podcasting is kind of like the in between of like seeing somebody on screen and reading somebody in a book because like when you read you can picture the characters and they become this thing in your head but when you see it on a tv like that's just what they are like there's no room for imagination but it's kind of it's like listening to the radio and then like wondering, man, I really like this person.
And I feel like I have such a great sense of them. I wonder what they look like. All right. You get this, like, there's still this like imaginative quality to it.
[00:28:08] James Shield: It's kind of active, isn't it? Because you have to imagine. That's why people say radio has the best pictures.
[00:28:13] Alex Bennett: Yeah. I think it's also between the two reading and visual media in terms of speed as well, the speed with which you can move from one location to the other.
Because in that clip there, it's them in the studio, to the interview, and then right back. And it's kind of breakneck pace. I think the only way you could get faster is if you were blasting through it whilst reading it. And I think that's a strength of the medium as well, is the speed with which you can go from location to location.
[00:28:42] Jackie Lamport: There's a lot of different formats. We've talked about talking to reporters and doing just like straight narrative. Here's what's happening or just interview. There are a lot of different shows that do it differently. There are shows that kind of rotate formats like the daily kind of does a lot of different things.
What do you think is the most to your, like, this can be a very personal answer, but what do you think is the most interesting way to get information? Uh, what format for, for news information?
[00:29:06] Elizabeth Amos: I'm a deep dive person, so I like news that zooms in on specific details and explains them fully. I've tried, like, so we have the Daily from New York Times, but they also have now, like, a headline show, and I listened to that for a bit.
It's not for me. I, like, need a deeper dive than the headlines. For me as an audience member, zooming in to a specific topic and explaining it. Thoroughly is really what I need from a news podcast. I can, I can read the headlines in my opinion.
[00:29:39] Andrew Ganem: This probably won't be surprising to any of the Lower Street people, but I need variety.
I think it's important to have different formats and different voices and different ways of telling stories.
[00:29:52] James Shield: It's a trick question, there is no best format for delivering information, but it depends on the moment, and it, I think there can be, depending on where you are and what's going on, there can be a best form for you at that point, so for professional reasons, I'm a kind of news omnivore.
[00:30:08] Alex Bennett: I like the slightly more informal conversation based shows. Because, going back to what you said right at the start, James, people who listen to the show already have some conception of what's going on. I'm not really interested in getting the news of the day from podcasts. I'm interested in hearing them.
in hearing the news of the day kind of re digested, as it were, by other people. I think for me, and this is probably totally a me problem, I'm not interested in depth. I'm listening to a podcast whilst doing something else, so I'm just not taking the information in. And I love to read if I'm going into more depth because I can just stop, go immediately back up a few lines, and consume the piece of information that four or five times is required for it to like lodge into my brain.
I have that problem. I feel like podcasting can't really do that. Yeah. For me.
[00:31:02] Jackie Lamport: We didn't, like, go super in depth to the New York Times The Daily Podcast episode today. Obviously, we used it as a reference throughout. But did anybody have any thoughts on that before we sign off that they wanted to share?
[00:31:17] Alex Bennett: Just how bewildered I was on first contact with the The host's presentation style.
[00:31:22] Elizabeth Amos: This is your first time, right, Alex? It's a wild ride.
[00:31:27] Alex Bennett: Yeah, I think it's interesting. It's almost like a filter. I was like, if I can, I can stick around through this, then I'm in. Like, I'm obviously engaged in what's going on, but.
[00:31:37] Jackie Lamport: I should have started this episode with this. It's podcast book club,
[00:31:43] Alex Bennett: and the emphasis was on all the right syllables.
[00:31:47] CLIP: My colleague, Ben Hubbard has been reporting on that decision and the deliberate calculations that went into it.
[00:31:58] James Shield: See, I think because I've been listening to that show since before it was The Daily, so it started as a show called The Run Up, before the election where Trump was elected, and it was hosted by Bob Arrow, and I think his style has gradually changed over the years that he's been doing that show, so that now I'm just attuned to it.
And I kind of hadn't thought about if you're a brand new listener, how do the barbarisms come across? I find the episode so interesting because we do a very similar thing, because I can kind of imagine the conversations that they have had, which are, you know, six weeks into a war, what's the program that people will want to listen to?
And we made a kind of similar episode, and the title was, Does Hamas Have a Strategy? We did that a couple of weeks ago. But I guess what they've got that's new is, Ben Hubbard, the reporter, has actually been to meet the political leadership of Hamas.
[00:32:51] Jackie Lamport: He did a really good job.
[00:32:52] James Shield: Yeah, and I thought they did a great job of just Like I was saying, every few minutes they tell you something that you haven't heard else elsewhere.
So you know, really good framing, like you were saying, have a question. Early on, they kind of just framed it as, was this a sui suicide attack on itself for Hamas? And then just all those moments of like, you know, the political leadership and not in Gaza, they're in Beirut and Qatar. You can actually go meet them and they have offices.
And the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, he studied Israel from prison, and he wanted to understand Israel so that he could learn how to defeat it. And then the fact that, you know, I don't know if very many people realize that there was this period of kind of, they refer to it as a kind of coexistence between Hamas and Israel, where they thought, Oh right, the Hamas leadership are interested in governing.
So maybe there's, maybe that's what they, they want to do. And maybe that's part of the reason why, I don't know. The Israeli intelligence services were caught by surprise. But they didn't think that they were still in quite a sort of existential struggle with Hamas. Ben Hubbard made that sound easy, and it's absolutely not easy to tell a story like that in such a simple way.
[00:34:03] Jackie Lamport: The way that you just like Laid out all the kind of plot points there. Also just like shows how just like being specific and asking one question and then answering that question doesn't mean that you have to be one note. Like there's a story to tell that no matter what you should still have a beginning, middle, end.
So that's just like yeah, laying that out really highlighted that so that's that's really important to understand. Remember. This has, uh, been our time, so I don't, we can't continue to talk, but James perhaps we'll have you back, um, because there's a lot more we could talk about. There's a lot more we can learn, but I want to thank you all so much right now for your participation in Podcast Book Club.
Thanks, Jackie.
[00:34:38] Alex Bennett: Thank you. You need to end it with, for PBC, I've been Jackie Lamport.