Breaking all the rules 🏴‍☠️

Karen Given on rewriting the script

A couple of years ago I produced a story that broke a bunch of old-school journalism rules. Jamel and Daisy is an audio diary documenting the life of an unhoused person and his beloved dog Daisy.

I collaborated with Jamel over the course of several months to make this piece. He had input on the shape of the story, and he also got paid a fee for his time. All elements that would make my old journalism professor frown sternly at me.

But the traditional rules feel less relevant these days - - especially for character-driven narrative audio. It’s something podcast consultant and showrunner Karen Given was mulling over as she produced her new show What Takes Root. It’s a first-person, non-narrated series featuring changemakers from the Global South. And she says it was an experiment that goes against the grain of everything she was taught in journalism school.

She wrote the following piece in her brilliant newsletter, Narrative Beat, about breaking all the rules - from collaborative storytelling, to compensating sources. Here’s Karen…

From a listener standpoint, there’s nothing too, too revolutionary about this project.

But from a journalism standpoint, this project represents an attempt to shake up the rules of the game. To acknowledge that not every project fits the strict definition of the word “journalism.” And that, in this new-ish podcast space that many of us inhabit, some of the rules of journalism ethics that we were all taught in J-school aren’t actually … ethical.

In fact, sometimes, those rules actually take advantage of the people we’re interviewing.

You’ve heard me talk about this kind of thing before.

When I started in journalism, I learned a set of rules:

• The interview subject must agree to talk about anything, with no questions off limits.

• The interview subject must go into the interview blind, with no prior knowledge of the questions that will be asked.

• Once the interview begins, everything is on the record, unless the interview subject specifically asks to turn off the recording and go off the record.

• The interview subject will have no input into what is used or not used, and they will not be given the opportunity to review the finished product before it’s made public.

• The interview subject will not receive any sort of compensation for their participation.

If you followed these rules, your journalism was deemed “ethical.” And if you didn’t follow them…

Well, good luck in some other career.

But the truth is, I’ve been breaking a lot of these rules for a really long time. I think many of us have!

The old rules of journalism are structured to protect journalists from people in power. They level the playing field so that when a journalist is interviewing a politician, for example, the politician doesn’t hold all the cards.

But what about when the journalist is actually the one who holds the power? Maybe the person being interviewed is from a marginalized community? Maybe they’re fighting back against an unjust system? Or facing the consequences of unjust laws?

What should the rules of interviewing look like then?

The Project

It all started when a friend from college called me up and asked a completely unexpected question. If I were to receive a grant to produce a podcast, what podcast would I want to produce?

Okay, okay. There was a bit more to the whole process than that!

My friend was working with an organization called ORA – the Omega Resilience Awards. And so she preferred that the podcast have something to do with the causes that organization supports.

(All good things, in my estimation. ORA funds fellows in India, Africa and Latin America who are working to combat many of the big evils in the world: racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, global inequities and even climate change.)

And the grant was actually a research grant – which I took to mean that I should be trying to research something. Uncover some sort of new truth.

And so, I proposed a podcast project where I would interview ORA fellows about how they came to do the work that they do. And for the “research” part of this “research” project, I would try to come up with some new rules – a new way of thinking about narrative storytelling that was less extractive and more collaborative.

ORA must have liked the idea...because my grant proposal was approved!

The Inspiration…or is it The Anti-Inspiration?

This idea has been on my mind since listening to the podcast Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. It came out in early 2024 and it made a bit of a splash – at least in journalism circles.

The podcast followed a documentary audio maker who was attempting to address many of the concerns that I’ve brought up here.

Interviewing can be an extractive process. Sometimes we’re asking our interview subjects to relive their trauma and to expose themselves to backlash and consequences. And almost always, we’re offering them nothing of value in return.

But while Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative made a good case for the “why,” but it was less successful when it came to the “how.” No offense intended, but when it came to the “how,” that project it was a bit of a mess.

The host faced setback after setback in her attempt to find a new way to approach documentary audio. And while setbacks can make for an entertaining podcast, they often don’t lead to substantive change.

So my goal was to take the lessons learned from that experiment – and my decades of experience “breaking the rules” – and to see if we could mash them all together into something that actually works.

A Caveat…

Okay, I think this goes without saying, but if you actually are working in traditional journalism, and your goal is to hold people who are in power accountable for their actions, this is not the method for you!

The rules of journalism exist for a reason. I’m not saying we should throw them out entirely. I’m only saying that sometimes…the rules don’t apply.

Step 1: The Workshop

I’m a teacher at heart. That’s actually why I got into journalism in the first place. I love distilling down information and passing it along.

So my first step was to hold a storytelling workshop for my potential interview subjects – and anyone else from ORA who was interested in the process.

Often, at the beginning of an interview, I’ll find myself explaining my goals to the person I’m interviewing. I’ll say things like, “I want to get you telling stories, so I’m going to ask questions in a weird way…to help you do that.” Or even, “I want to tell this story in your words, not mine. So I’m going to ask a lot of questions that I already know the answers to…so that the listener can hear these stories directly from you.”

This time, I took that concept much, much farther. I started with the basics. Why narrative? Why do we want to explain concepts through stories?

And then I went through some of the big concepts, one by one.

Anecdotes. What they are. How they work. How you string together a propulsive set of anecdotes to build a story.

Turning points, signposts, foreshadowing.

It was all very similar to the workshop I teach for journalists, except I was teaching it to the people I would be interviewing.

Step 2: Recruiting

Okay, I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t plan to recruit. I thought the workshop would be enough!

But as I spoke to the fellows who had attended the workshop, I realized that many of them felt their story wasn’t “enough” to be featured on the podcast.

It wasn’t dark enough.

Wasn’t disadvantaged enough.

Wasn’t inspiring enough.

I think we – as journalists – have done a great disservice to people from marginalized communities. By only telling the stories of the poorest, most downtrodden and most marginalized, we’ve missed the opportunity to feature many of the people who are affecting true change in this world.

The people I wanted to interview were some of the most accomplished people I had ever met. And still, they had been socialized to believe that they weren’t “enough.”

So yeah, Step 2 sometimes involved convincing people that their stories were worth telling.

Step 3: Narrowing the Field

Once I had convinced people to participate, I still needed to choose the best stories.

This is always going to be a thing. I would have loved to interview every single ORA fellow. But the grant I received just wouldn’t cover that.

But here – as elsewhere in this project – I really challenged myself to keep an open mind. Just like every other audio maker, I have preconceived ideas of what makes a story worth telling. And I have biases, built on years of experience, on what type of person makes for the best storyteller.

Generally speaking, I’m looking for emotional people, not analytical people. Analytical people can tend to focus on facts and statistics. And I’m really looking for someone who can focus on story and emotion.

And I’m looking for stories with a plot. Excitement. Surprises. Tension.

(Just to be clear, tension is an absolute requirement for this type of storytelling. But there are lots of different types of tension. They’re not all life and death. And some of the most compelling types of tension are internal – invisible to everyone except the person experiencing them.)

But for this project, I was interested in pushing the boundaries of what made for a good story – and a good storyteller. So I pre-interviewed everyone who expressed interest in working with me. And I’m so glad that I did!

Because the one person I was SURE would be terrible actually ended up contributing to one of my favorite episodes.

Step 4: Compensation

Yeah, I know that’s a super scary word for those of us who came up through the journalism world.

Compensation can look like a lot of different things. Every time you promise a book author that you’ll mention their book, that’s a form of compensation.

But “exposure” is not always enough. Realistically, this podcast is not going to inspire dozens of (mostly American) listeners to fly to Chile to buy tickets to see the Teatro La Crisis – an experimental theater company focused on social transformation.

“Exposure” is only valuable if the person you’re interviewing is in a position to benefit from it. And that’s an incredibly privileged position to be in.

So, yeah….we’re talking about money.

One of the lessons that I took from Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative was that an hourly rate was not necessarily the best idea. I want to fairly compensate their time, not give them an incentive to sensationalize their own story. And if you pay someone hourly, they might be tempted to stretch out the process and mold their story into what they think you want, in order to “rack up” more hours.

So a project rate seemed like the way to go.

I based my project rate on five hours of work. I’ve budgeted enough projects to know that would likely cover the amount of time I was asking the fellows to commit.

And I based the actual rate on the rate that I would be getting paid. Because there’s no reason why my labor would be more valuable than theirs.

Originally, my idea was to provide half of that compensation in the form of a microphone and half in cash. It seemed logical, as many of the fellows who were participating were also interested in producing their own podcast someday.

But quickly, I learned that it’s ridiculously expensive to send microphones to the Global South (much more cost effective to purchase locally.) More importantly, not every fellow actually needed a microphone. Some already owned one. Some had no use for one.

It was only my outside lens that made me believe that a microphone was an appropriate element of “compensation.”

So, I sent everyone the full stipend…in cash. And anyone who wanted advice on which microphone to purchase with that money received my enthusiastic – possibly over-enthusiastic – assistance.

Artwork for episode two of What Takes Root, illustration by ORA

Step 5: Planning

Normally, my planning process looks something like this:

1. Find a “subject” who might be interesting.

2. Dig around in the subject’s history, using research and/or a pre-interview.

3. Decide which part of that history will be most interesting to my audience.

4. Interview, focusing only on the parts of the story that interest me.

5. Edit, mix, publish – again, further refining and highlighting the story I want to tell.

6. Send a link of the published piece to the subject.

I feel like I’ve approached this process with the absolute best of intentions – with an ear towards truth, not sensationalism. And it’s worked really well for me, for a long time.

But it’s not very collaborative.

This time around, I flipped that process entirely on its head.