Journalists Are My Heroes
20 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 12 ratingsA podcast dedicated to conversations with real journalists at work in their communities. Kyle Munson, who spent 24 years in daily news, interviews the reporters, storytellers and media craftspeople of all kinds who help deliver not just information but meaning to our lives. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/journalistsaremyheroes/support
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Episodes
Billionaires Alone Can't Save Journalism, with Matthew Hansen
September 16, 2019 01:38 - 41 minutes - 94.5 MBThis finale for Season 1 of Journalists Are My Heroes finds me looking in the mirror: Matthew Hansen recently wrapped his tenure as metro columnist at the Omaha World-Herald. Like me, he's a child of the rural Midwest who ended up working as a columnist in his native state's largest newsroom. Also like me, he recently stepped out of journalism to flex his skills in the world of content marketing; he's now managing editor for the Buffett Early Childhood Institute. Like any good journalist give...
Indigenous Journalism with a Capital 'I' and Graham Lee Brewer
September 02, 2019 16:53 - 42 minutes - 96.3 MBGraham Lee Brewer, "a reporter covering criminal justice, the death penalty, and Indian Country," grew up listening to National Public Radio in the back of his parents' car. Today he's a working journalist in Oklahoma with a distinguished resume that blends experience on the radio and in the traditional print headquarters of the Oklahoman, among many other highlights. Brewer, also a board member of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), currently is contributing editor on the tri...
Inside the Partisan Digital Warfare Reshaping Journalism
August 10, 2019 17:26 - 42 minutes - 97.4 MBIn this episode I talk to Laura Dawn, chief creative officer of recently launched news aggregator FrontPageLive.com. The shorthand description is that it's a progressive response to the massively popular Druge Report. But it goes much deeper than that, as you'll hear from our interview. Among the team that launched the site is none other than former Fox News political reporter Carl Cameron. Dawn isn't a journalist by the traditional definition. She's an activist who for years has been a wr...
Caught in the Viral News Vortex With Larrison Campbell of Mississippi Today
July 19, 2019 12:53 - 40 minutes - 91.9 MBLarrison Campbell is a political reporter whose coverage for nonprofit news org Mississippi Today has an emphasis on public health. Her summer, meanwhile, has had an emphasis on viral news. That's because a married male gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi denied her a ride-along to cover him on the campaign trail unless Campbell and her editor agreed to send a male reporter as chaperone; the candidate feared that political opponents might exploit images of the two of them together for att...
From Kansas City to the Iowa Cornfields with Ty Rushing
July 06, 2019 17:14 - 43 minutes - 99.2 MB"I actually enjoy covering public meetings," says Ty Rushing, managing editor for Iowa Information Inc., a family news operation that serves numerous communities in northwest Iowa and whose flagship newspaper is the N'West Iowa Review in the town of Sheldon, pop. 5,100. Rushing, who began his first full-time journalism job in 2013 in Newton, Iowa, grew up reading the Kansas City Star and dreaming of a career covering sports. But he has come to cherish his role and responsibility in a land wh...
Local News, Politics, Rural America, and the 2020 Campaign With Doug Burns
June 06, 2019 03:23 - 54 minutes - 125 MBOur latest guest is dedicated veteran journalist Doug Burns, co-owner and editor of a family newspaper that has delivered quality local news for nearly a century. With the Carroll Times Herald and affiliated newspapers in western Iowa, Burns manages to cover everything from colorful local characters to feisty national politics. (He even has his own interviews and issues podcast on Anchor, Iowa Political Mercury.) This conversation ranges all over the media landscape: the challenges facing mo...
Small-Town Sports Roots of Nick Nurse of the Toronto Raptors
April 27, 2019 18:36 - 33 minutes - 76.2 MBNick Nurse, head coach of NBA's Toronto Raptors, began his sports career as a Catholic-school basketball star in the small town (population < 10,000) of Carroll, Iowa. That hometown connection has given Brandon Hurley, assistant sports editor of the Carroll Times Herald and sports editor of two other affiliated newspapers (Jefferson Herald and Guthrie County Times Vedette), consistent access to Nurse as the Raptors make their impressive run in the NBA playoffs. "Sports is the best reality sh...
What It Feels Like to Win a Pulitzer Prize, With Art Cullen
April 16, 2019 02:44 - 11 minutes - 26.4 MBThe new batch of Pulitzer Prize winners was announced today, with journalists awarded for deep reporting on coverage of presidential finances and mass shootings, among an array of other topics. This year's Pulitzer for Editorial Writing went to Brent Staples of the New York Times -- breaking a two-year streak in which the award was won by Iowa writers. Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times won in 2017. I happened to share a panel discussion with him last weekend, thanks to an invitation from fe...
People Pay This Public Radio Station to Learn How Journalism Works
April 12, 2019 02:48 - 29 minutes - 67.4 MBOne of the undercurrents of this podcast has been that the relationship between the press and the public has gotten so fractured that it's almost as if we need to get reporters and audiences into a classroom to study the problem and find a new consensus on how journalism even works. Well, guess what? St. Louis Public Radio is doing just that with its new "Mini J School." People have paid STLPR good money to "explore the craft of journalism" -- not just for an evening but in an extensive six-...
An American Journalist's Year in the China Daily Newsroom
April 07, 2019 18:23 - 30 minutes - 70.2 MBTyler O'Neil now lives in Austin, Texas, where he's a content marketing entrepreneur with yourbikergang.com and leads people on adventures throughout the city. But here we talk mostly about his year spent in the newsroom of the English-language China Daily in Beijing. O'Neil, who studied journalism and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, talks about how he ended up at China Daily and his role in helping train his Chinese colleagues. He also shares what it was like to e...
2020 Campaign Coverage (Blizzards and All) With Politico's Chris Cadelago
March 26, 2019 03:15 - 37 minutes - 84.9 MBIt was inevitable with this podcast that I would begin to spend a little more time talking with journalists as they stream through Iowa, the site of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, on the 2020 campaign trail. Christopher Cadelago of Politico popped up on my radar after he filed a surprise story from the depths of a furious blizzard that stranded him in the middle of rural Iowa: "My bone-chilling adventure trying to cover Kamala Harris in Iowa." Suffice it to say that Cadelago ...
Hyperlocal Nonprofit Journalism With Stephanie Lulay of Block Club Chicago
March 20, 2019 03:59 - 38 minutes - 87.6 MBWhen billionaire Joe Ricketts of TD Ameritrade and Chicago Cubs fame in 2017 shut down digital news network DNAInfo, Stephanie Lulay and two of her colleagues didn't scatter to other industries. They co-founded Block Club Chicago, a hyperlocal nonprofit news site dedicated to granular coverage of the Windy City's storied neighborhoods. The site launched in summer 2018 after a record-setting Kickstarter campaign that raised $183,000 from 3,000 backers. Lulay, managing editor, trusts her repor...
Collaborative Journalism With Sara Konrad Baranowski
March 09, 2019 21:54 - 31 minutes - 72.9 MBCollaborative journalism has become more of a trend in recent years. Newsrooms, struggling to remain ambitious as they cope with a sour media economy, are launching all manner of projects in which they're colleagues rather than competitors. The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has tracked some 180 such projects in the last year. For this episode we focus on one collaborative series that investigated how some communities across Iowa have been left with scant if any o...
Immigration and Immersive Journalism with Sam Quinones of 'Dreamland'
February 21, 2019 04:05 - 40 minutes - 93.3 MBVeteran journalist Sam Quinones is a self-described "immersive journalist" with the heart of a punk rocker. He began his career as a crime reporter in Stockton, Calif. In the decades since he has roamed around the U.S. and Mexico. He has been a full-time staffer for newspapers such as the L.A. Times but today prefers the life of a freelancer -- without a boss breathing down his neck so that he can spend the proper time investigating each story. The approach has worked out for him, considerin...
How Journalists Get Hooked on Audience and Mission
February 17, 2019 22:27 - 8 minutes - 19.4 MBI was rummaging through my basement this weekend and found early mementos from my journalism career, including copies of my first publication, "6th Grade News Flash." That got me thinking about (1) what gets journalists hooked on this business in the first place, and (2) why they stick around to gut it out despite all challenges. Those are two different things. This quick interlude of a not-really-an-episode roams from "Knight Rider" to Lionel Richie to journalism ethics and, finally, to the...
Who Qualifies as a Journalist in Our Partisan Digital World? With Laura Belin of Bleeding Heartland
February 09, 2019 18:32 - 44 minutes - 102 MBLaura Belin of Bleeding Heartland has spent more than a decade and produced more than 7,000 posts as a progressive political blogger. She's also on the front lines of changing notions of journalism in this scrappy era of digital media. She's a research analyst by training who once covered Russian politics and now sees herself occupying a "no man's land" somewhere between traditional journalism and academia. Some of her staunchest critics tend to be fellow Democrats -- something that can't he...
Journalism's Pivot (Back?) to Podcasting, With Amber Hunt of 'Accused'
February 02, 2019 22:35 - 27 minutes - 62.5 MBInvestigative reporter Amber Hunt of the Cincinnati Enquirer built a news career that led her through Iowa and Detroit before Ohio, where in 2016 with colleague Amanda Rossman she created the hit podcast "Accused." Hunt had no idea how drastically her career would pivot to podcasting, as "Accused" shot to the top of the iTunes charts and spawned sequels. "Aftermath" is a podcast that roamed the nation to report on the lingering trauma that haunts victims of gun violence. Meanwhile, Hunt was ...
3 Sins for National Media to Avoid in 2019 | Nikki Usher
January 13, 2019 22:43 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MBNikki Usher, associate professor of journalism at George Washington University and the University of Illinois, joins JAMH to share some of what she's learned from years of interviewing journalists and studying their industry. She also discusses the "three sins" that she fears national media will continue to commit in 2019, based on her recent article for Nieman Lab. We talk about: the different frustrations audiences have with national versus local media; "horse race" coverage of political c...
Erin Sommers still believes in local print journalism. She staked her career on it.
January 10, 2019 03:43 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBWhether in Indiana or Hawaii or Iowa, Erin Sommers, 37, has loved her lifelong job as a professionally nosy newshound. Now the reporter and driving force behind the Pocahontas Record-Democrat in northwest Iowa, Sommers sat down to talk about: covering her neighbors' tragedies or controversies as a journalist; teaching local officials about how to run open government; cultural pitfalls by fellow journalists who parachute in for campaign coverage; how the "fake news" attitude against journalis...
Journalists Are My Heroes: Preview
December 31, 2018 01:41 - 3 minutes - 3.17 MBThis is a ham-fisted monologue to introduce a new podcast, Journalists Are My Heroes. It's simple: I have good conversations with working journalists in communities of every shape and size. Because the very notion of journalism needs to be rehabilitated in the American mind, and in the minds of many audiences around the globe. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/journalistsaremyheroes/support