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Catherine Saint Louis on story editing

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Catherine Saint Louis is the type of person who, when she’s watching TV, is mentally restructuring the plot. She’s moving this scene further back; she’s holding that plot twist until nearer the end.

If you also do that when you’re watching a show – or listening to a podcast, for that matter – then you might have the makings of a great story editor. 

Story editors hold multiple narrative arcs in their head at once. They push their producers to ask difficult questions, are sometimes ruthless in their edits – and above all, are committed to bringing listeners great, flawed characters that feel real.

Catherine Saint Louis is an executive editor at Sony Music Entertainment where she edits narrative podcasts and helps oversee The Binge podcast channel as an executive producer. 

You’ve written previously: “Part of what drew me to being a story editor was not having to leave parts of myself at the door”. What did you mean by that?

I worked at the New York Times for 18 years, and a big part of writing for the Gray Lady was writing in the newspaper’s voice, not from a first person perspective. The point was neutrality and objectivity. And I guess I'm just old enough now to know that that's a farce. 

Say if somebody went through IVF, as a health reporter I was poised to know what the news might be, and know the details of being an IVF patient. So it seems weird that newspapers like the New York Times and others discount someone's lived experience as making them somehow too biased. They take them out of the game, because they think that you can't go through something and then write about it neutrally. I disagree. By the way, I did go through IVF, and I did write about it for the Times. I just never told them I went through IVF, and that reporting was still objective. I was able to talk to families who had made all sorts of different choices, and doctors who offered all kinds of fertility care. 

Now in my profession as a narrative story editor – part of it is that I'm leading the team. When you're leading the team, you can have conversations about bias and subjectivity and objectivity in a way you can't when you're trying to climb the ladder at the New York Times. 

It’s also that I don't think you can make a great podcast without asking tough questions and forcing people on your team to ask the tough questions. And that's just who I am. I don't leave things alone.

When someone says some hifalutin word or abstract concept, I immediately want them to tell me: what are the stakes in that? Like, why does someone who doesn't care about this kind of lending or environmental terrorism or arson or murder… why do they care about your story? It always comes down to great characters; conflict; that we're all human, right? If you don't have a character I'm rooting for, or that I love to hate, like Walter White in Breaking Bad, then you don't have me. My biggest fear is that listeners stop listening.

To be a great story editor, you have to put yourself in the listener's shoes and be listening for clarity so the listener never gets lost. But also to be listening with feeling. I think it's really weird how some podcasts are edited, where you're listening and something big happens and the host doesn't react, or something three quarters of the way through the episode completely conflicts with something that was said earlier.

A story editor is supposed to be holding it all in your head and helping guide the listener. And there are a lot of podcasts that don't do that. I also think it’s obvious which podcasts did not, as a team, have the difficult conversations.

You mentioned listening for clarity but also for feeling – tell me more about that. 

When I was a news reporter, I was always thinking: is this factual, is this fair? But I was never thinking about, is this moment hitting, like do you feel upset? 

When you’re listening to a narrative podcast, when you finally get to the point in the true crime narrative where you’re describing a murder – you’re supposed to feel something. It’s supposed to be haunting, horrible, memorable… something. 

So it’s not just the facts, it’s not just fairness – it’s this other thing. I’ve always had big feelings; it’s something I’ve always had. And I don’t think society is really into that, right? And I feel very much that now, at 50, I lead with my feelings. 

My ability to connect is based on the fact that I’m always trying to figure out where people are at. I’m the person people tell their secrets to. My husband says it’s because I’m always asking questions about people. 

It sounds like you’re saying that your way of existing in the world is really well suited to being a story editor for audio. 

Definitely. And I mean, look, you have to kind of be brutal too. You need to be able to look at an outline and cut things ruthlessly that are not serving your story. People don’t care about a story unless the characters seem real to them, and you can't get the characters to seem real unless you ask a whole bunch of questions in the interviewing process, like uncomfortable questions.

I edited the first season of This Land and Rebecca Nagle did an episode about the [Cherokee] Freedmen. They’re not only Native Americans, but they're also Black people. That podcast, generally, was about all of the Native American history you should have known, growing up and going to high school in America - but we don’t. 

For the rest of the podcast, Rebecca, who is Cherokee – her people were the most downtrodden people. And she wrote this particular episode still with that kind of feeling. I told her the way she wrote that episode made me want to throw my phone across the room and stop listening. And she was like, “Why?!”

I said: Well, if these people are both Cherokee and Black, and you kept them as slaves and treated them like property, then how are you not wrestling with that? For me this is a turning point in the podcast, where up until now, you have been, rightly so, very much in the victim position. But in that moment, your people were perpetrating harm towards other people who were even more misfortunate than you, and you're acting like you're still a victim. 

She was like, I never thought of it that way.

And then she went away and wrote what I think is one of the best parts of the podcast, where she actually got real with the audience, and she kind of broke the fourth wall, talking to the audience directly. It was great. 

So are there elements of cultural sensitivity editing in the role of story editor?

It’s more like knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t know - so that you bring other people into the room that can help. I once did a podcast with Laura Beil called Sympathy Pains about a woman who pretended to have physical disabilities to win sympathy. Myself, Laura and the producer Natalie Rinn were able-bodied and we didn’t want to get it wrong. 

So we hired someone to listen to the mixes, and she was the one to say: In episodes five and six, you suddenly pivot and say that this woman who conned people into believing she was disabled wasn’t actually disabled. But mental health is a disability.

And I was like, oh shit, I should know that: I suffer from depression. But even though I do, I was going to get it wrong in the show. So I wouldn’t say it’s like cultural sensitivity editing, it’s being aware of how certain things are perceived in our culture. It's about holding space for identities that aren't your own. You have to be pretty tuned in. 

Like right now, in a podcast I’m making called Lady Mafia, which comes out  November 1st, we have a character who’s a woman from the OC, and she doesn’t want to be somebody’s trophy wife. She wants to be the boss. She wants to be the breadwinner. And if you say that about somebody in New York, it’s like… well, that's nearly everybody, right? So you need to contextualize it in where she’s from and explain why that’s a big deal when you come from the OC. 

Does being a story editor involve having distance from the story, so that you can ask tough questions of the producer/reporter?

Here’s the thing: in all honesty, you are on a journey together. So yes you have distance in the sense that you weren’t asking the questions in the tape. 

It’s more like you have to be the tough guy who’s always worrying about what’s best for the story, and making sure people are listening until the very end of the episode. When a producer is concerned about asking an upsetting question, or doesn’t want to cut a certain piece of tape, you have to be like: Yeah, sorry!

I mean, we’re all human. You fall in love with bits of tape. You fall in love with certain characters and can no longer see the other side of them. Part of story editing is being like, ‘Well this character could be saying that because she’s altruistic, but she is getting something out of it, right?’ As story editor, you’re the counterpoint.

What keeps you on track; how do you make sure you’re serving what’s best for the story?

In terms of process, the team does the reporting, we write an outline, we revise the outline. Then as episodes come in, I think producers and most of the team get lost in whatever episode they’re trying to make that week. You as the editor are worrying about the whole arc. 

But I definitely second-guess myself.There’s a lot of triage done at the early stage where it’s still on paper. After the outline, there are structural edits where we make big changes, and then a line edit before we go to scratch. I want to hear some things in scratch, to see if  it’ll work. 

I have things that are bothering me throughout the entire production. I have to keep those in the back of my mind to focus on the day’s problem - but all of those bigger things have to be resolved by the end. 

I also work in deep collaboration with Jonathan Hirsch, who's my boss, and I know that there are things he can see that I can't see. And I no longer think of it as, oh you fucked up. It's more like, that's the whole point of making a great podcast. It's like a relay race. You're inviting more and more people into the process to give you a sense, with fresh ears, of whether or not it's on track.

And the truth is, when someone comes in and says, ‘uh oh, why did you do it this way? You need this.’ It's not like you got it wrong. It's just that there's only so much your brain can do, because you have biases, because you're human. 

Jonathan and I agree on editorial decisions probably 85% of the time, but that 15% is what I rely on him for. I'll be like, “I'm stuck, this episode sucks, and I am not sure why”. And then he'll be like, “It's this”.  Those people are like cherished people, because you trust their opinion, and if they're telling you, “This is not working”, then you have to listen.

What skills, prior experience and outlook on life, sets you up to be a good story editor?

I went to Transom in 2018. There were like eight people in my class and I would say I was fifth in terms of talent, producing-wise. But I was helping restructure friends’ stories and asking “Why are you giving that away there? If you held onto that until four minutes in, it would be so much more taut and the stakes would be so much higher.”

So if you’re the kind of person who watches a television show or listens to a podcast and is trying to move things around - then you’re already thinking like an editor.

You have the making of a story editor if you’re good at getting the best out of people. If you’re not a people person, this isn’t a good job for you. You have to understand how people work; who you have to be tough with; who you have to support. People have to trust you. 

They also have to trust that you have a good sense about people. I have edited producers who, it was clear to me, had a really, really good childhood. Their parents loved them and they were supported every step of the way, and in writing, it's like a disability. It's a stumbling block, because if you grew up that way, you spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out why people do horrible things. 

While if you grew up with an unreliable narrator as a parent, the way I did, you've been asking those questions and trying to see through difficult people from day one. So that's why I end up getting to the heart of things with people quicker, because I assume everyone has a dark side. I assume some people don't like their parents. I assume some people are in difficult marriages. 

You need to have a capacity for the full range of what humanity actually is, if you want people to trust your gut as a story editor. 

You need some range in terms of how you're going to guide projects, because the story editor is where the buck stops, and if you don't get your team to think in nuance and really push them, then the podcast isn't going to be half of what it could be. 

Also: someone who is going to excel as a story editor and make a living doing it will be able to juggle three podcasts at once. You have to carry these different universes with you, and hold multiple narrative arcs in your head at once. 

I do think that if you’re a producer who really likes delving into one story and being in that one story for a long stretch, then it's gonna be hard for you to transition to story editing. You have to care deeply, but hold things lighter. 

A new limited-run true crime series drops on The Binge every month; paying subscribers get ad-free access - all episodes, all at once – to that month’s show along with ad-free access to 40+ other true crime shows. Catherine started Editors’ Bootcamp, a rigorous multi-week training to help producers from underrepresented backgrounds become story editors. Catherine lives in Brooklyn even though she worked for L.A.’s Neon Hum Media for years. 

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