🎉 50 Podcasts — A Recap
Hello! And welcome to a celebratory edition of Inside The Newsroom. My episode with Hadas Gold of CNN last week marked 50 podcasts, so below is a recap of every single one. If you like receiving this newsletter, consider clicking the ❤️ at the top so other people can find us! Enjoy 🤓
Donald Trump’s presidency has been filled with inflammatory rhetoric toward the media, from calling us “fake news” to “the enemy of the people.” Trump spouts phrases like these so openly and without a care for their consequences. But the consequences for journalists are real. Five journalists at the Capital Gazette in Maryland were killed in 2018, and Hadas’ own organization had mail bombs sent to it the same year. One thing Trump does realize is that other autocratic leaders around the world look up to the U.S., and the likes of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who recently said the “deceitful” media was hyping the wildfires in the his country’s Amazon rainforest, have made this a dangerous time to be a reporter.
#49 — David Armstrong (ProPublica)
David has covered the healthcare industry for more than a decade, so he's somewhat of an expert when it comes to the unfolding opioid crisis. His meticulous reporting at ProPublica has shone the light directly on one of the worst perpetrators of the crisis, Purdue Pharma, which has led to around 3,000 lawsuits filed against the company.
#48 — Scott Brodbeck (Local News Now)
I interned for Scott's network of local news blogs back in 2015, which he built from scratch in 2009. Since then he's developed a sustainable following in northern Virginia, which has withstood the crisis that’s decimated 13,000 local newspapers. Scott and I discussed the events that led to this, and what we can do to solve our local news problem. Just telling people to pay for local news isn't necessarily the answer.
#47 — Ryan Grim (The Intercept, The Young Turks)
Perhaps the Democrats’ biggest challenge heading into the 2020 election will be uniting its progressive and establishment factions. Maybe they should look to the history of progressivism within the Democratic Party, as detailed in Ryan's new book, 'We’ve Got People'. In my opinion, their failure to unite is the reason why Trump is in office, and we could see a repeat if they fail to come together in 2020.
#46 — Christine Brennan (USA Today, CNN, PBS)
Christine has covered sports for almost 40 years, so she’s seen her fair share of injustices. Perhaps no issue gets Christine more fired up is discussing inequality of pay within U.S. soccer, and the USWNT's 4th World Cup win this summer served as the perfect time for Megan Rapinoe and co to stand up.
#45 — James Ball (TBIJ, Wikileaks)
In our podcast, James described the times he private messaged Julian Assange about his progress on the Afghan war logs into the early hours of the morning, and how he could never really trust the man at the centre of everything. They eventually fell out and James went onto write an entire book about his time at Wikileaks, and is thus one of only a few journalists that knows the inner workings of Assange’s mind.
#44 — Sebastian Junger (Tribe, The Perfect Storm)
At school I was always told that wars were fought over for economic and religious reasons. Take the U.S. and UK’s war against various terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s very much a war of different ideas mixed with big economic interests. But what I was never told, until now, was the positive psychological effects war brings — unity, cohesion and meaning. Now, this doesn’t mean I condone war. I do not. But to unpick things you disagree with, you have to dig deeper under the shell to understand the human traits that lead people to do certain things.
#43 — Kashmir Hill (New York Times)
Kash might just be my favorite guest to date, as we talked about her amazing project of cutting out the ‘Big Five’ technology giants — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — from her life for one week at a time, before cutting them all. We’ve become too reliant on these companies, and Kash showed just how hard it is to get away from them, something she described as “hell.”
#42 — Kait Parker (Weather.com)
Kait is not just any meteorologist and our conversation went way deeper than talking about crazy weather. A refreshing highlight was discussing former six-term South Carolina Republican congressman Bob Inglis, who lost his seat way back in 2010 in large part due to his support for climate change. Inglis didn’t even make it out of the GOP primary, but has since set up his own nonprofit, RepublicEn, devoted to getting conservatives to come to grips with climate change.
#41 — Jessica Lessin (The Information)
The prospect of breaking up Facebook has never felt so close. Founder and editor-in-chief of The Information Jessica Lessin joined me to explain just how real the prospects of the tech giant being divvied up if placed in the hands of a Democrat administration, such as one involving Elizabeth Warren. Warren’s groundbreaking proposal caused waves of anxiety within Facebook, so much so that leaked audio caught Mark Zuckerberg slamming Warren to Facebook employees.
#40 — Ben Casselman (New York Times)
Ben is one of the smartest business journalists around and, fortunately for us, he talked me through the truth about the U.S. economy, whether people are really benefiting from a booming stock market over the past couple of years, and just how much credit does Mr. Trump deserve.
After a two-year layoff, Henry and TrueHoop are back. In our discussion, Henry talked about what he learned and how he kept sane during his time away. The lesson: watch a buzzard circle outside the window and take stock of life. Only half kidding. TrueHoop is one of the few sports investigative outlets out there and ESPN made a huge mistake by letting it go as part of its 2017 purge. But that’s the past. Henry and co. are back with more motivation to tell the truth about basketball than ever before.
#37 — Josh Morgerman (Hurricane Man)
Josh is the craziest person I know, in the nicest way possible. The world’s biggest hurricane daredevil and his director, Caroline Menzies, sat down to talk about their new TV series, Hurricane Man. Josh and his crew zip across the world to intercept the largest cyclones, something Josh described as better than drugs.
#36 — Sam Biddle (The Intercept)
Sam and I got into the weeds of a new study showing how Facebook delivers certain adverts to people based on their race and gender, even when advertisers had asked to target a broad audience. Per the researchers: “Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive.”
#35 — Richard Deitsch (The Athletic)
Richard has become the leading voice reporting on the sports media, having started covering the likes of ESPN more than 20 years ago. He now plies his trade at The Athletic, which has revolutionized the sports media industry with its paywall business model. Before that Richard worked for Sports Illustrated, so he had some unique insight into the downfall of one of America’s most lionized sports outlets.
#34 — Dave Weigel (Washington Post)
Dave joined me in person to discuss the rise of the far-right in the U.S. and its influence across the pond in the UK. We also discussed the legacy of Barack Obama in a political world that even he might not recognize anymore. Dave’s forgotten more politics than many of us know, and this episode is more of a history lesson on U.S. politics, and I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or two.
#33 — Lauren Gambino (Guardian US)
Lauren covers Congress and the Democrats for the Guardian in the US, which poses as a unique task in a field crowded by American outlets. We talked about the rise of the increasingly influential progressive faction of the Democratic Party, and what effect the legacy of Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign may have on the 2020 race.
#32 — Giles Robson (Blues Special)
Giles is a British blues musician touring the world with his unique blend of upbeat harmonica. We were also joined by my friend Aaron Philips to talk about how blues started, where it fits in with Mississippi’s history, and how the state is still chained to its troubled past of racism.
#31 — Max Read (New York Magazine)
How much of the internet is fake? That’s the question we answered in my episode with Max Read, former editor-in-chief of Gawker and current writer and editor for New York Magazine. Turns out that a lot of the internet is fake. In fact, we’re approaching something called ‘the inversion’, whereby more than half of internet activity — i.e. views on Youtube, likes on Facebook, account on Twitter — are either computers or trolls. So the next time you think about arguing with some loser on Twitter, just remember that there’s a good chance you’re arguing with a robot.
#30 — Art Markman (University of Texas)
Art teaches psychology and marketing at the University of Texas in Austin, so our chat centered around why people make certain decisions. Specifically, why do the overwhelming majority of people believe human-induced climate change is real, yet that majority isn’t willing to sacrifice anything from their own lives to help solve the problem. This comes down to ‘temporal discounting’, whereby we prefer to focus on short-term problems such as energy affordability, instead of reducing our footprint on the planet in the long-term, which is something we can’t physically see.
#29 — Adam Kelsey (ABC Politics)
Adam is like many of us in that he’s worked his ass off to find a place in the crowded field of covering politics. Our chat touched on what it’s like to cover U.S. politics in such a turbulent time, and how he’s dealing with the relentless schedule of covering a presidential campaign.
#27 — Stefan Szymanski (Soccernomics)
Stefan is the co-author of the book ‘Soccernomics’, which details the economics behind questions such as why the likes of Spain, Germany and Italy win the soccer World Cup, and why the U.S. and even Iraq are destined to win it all eventually. We also talked about what impacts Brexshit may have on English football, specifically, the Premier League restricting the number of foreign players that can play.
#26 — Jacob Bogage (Washington Post)
Jacob and I worked together as student journalists at the University of Missouri. Jacob's since gone on to become a national sports writer at the Washington Post, and covers the intersection of politics, race and society. We made a comprehensive comparison between the seeming prosperous NBA and the gloomy NFL. How does the NFL keep fucking up yet maintain enormous ratings? Is the NFL on the decline? Why is the NBA seen as the 'progressive' professional sports league in the U.S.?
#25 — Alex Hern (The Guardian)
Alex is the Guardian’s UK technology editor, so he kinda has to know what’s going on with the likes of Facebook and the other tech giants. In our episode, we discussed why privacy as we know it is dead, and how companies are making billions of our data without us even knowing.
#24 — Ben Hammersley (Futurist)
Ben has had a pretty fascinating career, ranging from being a war journalist in Afghanistan to covering tech and coining the term ‘podcast’ in 2004. Yes, he is widely considered as the person to think of the word podcast. Ben is now a ‘futurist’, whereby he consults companies and governments on what’s coming next in terms of technology and the internet.
#23 — Michael E. Mann (Penn State University)
Michael has become a leading expert on everything climate change, and is a regular on MSNBC and other networks. We discussed why we’re not doing enough to fight the crisis. We also discussed the things we can do tomorrow to contribute.
Ellen is a morning host for WUSA 9 in Washington D.C. where she has to wake up for work in the early early hours of the morning. We talked about what ‘the grind’ actually means, and how she’s kept on going after her sister was critically injured from a lightning strike. Check out her motivational videos and her new book ‘A Work In Progress’ for some inspiration if you need it.
#21 — Anna Soubry (MP for Broxtowe)
I sent emails to a dozen members of UK parliament and only Anna got back to me. That goes to show the type of person she is. Little did I know that our scheduled date for the podcast would come on the day that the House of Commons would debate Theresa May's notorious Brexit deal. Anna was visibly amped up and her thoughts on Brexshit were as colorful as ever.
Daniel was still working at the Toronto Star when he appeared on the pod, and has since been hired by CNN on the back of his hugely successful project of fact-checking every single statement by Donald Trump. And he’s still going strong: Since Daniel joined CNN 12 weeks ago, Trump has averaged 59 false claims per week. Imagine how insane that is… The President of the United States uttering more than eight false statements a day. Unprecedented.
#19 — Jack Armstrong (Toronto Raptors)
Any die-hard basketball fan will know that Jack Armstrong is synonymous with the Toronto Raptors. But what they might know is that Jack and his wife are parents to three adopted children, who have brought much joy to their lives. I asked Jack about the struggles of raising children that don’t like him, and how that’s impacted his life.
Jody is a podcast producer for ESPN's 30for30, a series of historical deep dives into the most important stories and figures in sports. Jody oversaw the incredible docuseries on Bikram Choudhury, the creator of Bikram Yoga, in which he rose to incredible fame in the early 1970s. Bikram is still one of the most popular forms of yoga today, despite it being revealed that Bikram manipulated and abused his followers.
I sat down with legendary meteorologist James Spann in his studio in Birmingham, Alabama. James has covered the weather for more than 40 years and has become synonymous with tornadoes and other severe weather. We covered James' life from when his father walked out on him and his mother, to when he first saw his father again, to becoming one of the most well-known faces in Alabama.
Atlanta is the centre of the rap and trap music scene, and Rodney has documented its rise to prominence within the culture, with hip hop officially becoming the most popular music genre in the U.S. Rodney welcomed me into his home to talk about why Atlanta, with its deep ties to the civil rights movement, has become the mecca of the south for music, culture and politics over the past half a century.
#15 — Marshall Shepherd (The Weather Channel)
I managed to sit down with Marshall in his office at the University of Georgia in Athens last year to talk about his career in meteorology. Only thing was that Hurricane Michael had just made landfall in the Florida Panhandle about 370 miles away, so instead we talked about the disaster that was unfolding on our doorstep just six hours away.
#14 — Rick Luettich (University of North Carolina)
Rick is a professor and director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina, and the architect behind an amazing tool that calculates predicted flooding and storm surge along the U.S. coastlines. His model became crucial in predicting the damage of several recent hurricanes that made landfall in the U.S. and we got down and dirty and revelled in all our geekiness for severe weather.
#13 — Jonathan Petramala (AccuWeather)
Jonathan is a national weather reporter for AccuWeather covering all types of severe weather. I spoke to Jonathan in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence last year after it had buried parts of Wilmington and Myrtle Beach in an estimated 18 trillion gallons (18 TRILLION!) of water. Jonathan wasn’t after the headlines and stayed in South Carolina telling the stories of the local people long after the cameras of the national outlets had left. Jonathan is a journalist in every sense of the word, and is well worth a follow to gain a sense of severe weather all over the U.S.
#12 — Andrea Jones-Rooy (FiveThirtyEight)
Andrea and I worked together at FiveThirtyEight a couple of years ago and she was always among the most uniquely talented people there, and at a place like FiveThirtyEight, that’s saying a helluva lot. Andrea is a social scientist, standup comic, circus performer and a professor of data science at NYU, and we got pretty deep into what it is about both of us that we have to constantly keep busy and moving in order to stay sane.
#11 — Ewen MacAskill (The Guardian)
Ewen came on the podcast days after he retired from an illustrious 22-year career at the Guardian, where he was best known for his role in publishing Edward Snowden’s explosive leaks on CIA spying. Ewen told the story of when he was sitting in a Hong Kong hotel room in 2013, and right in front of him on the bed was Snowden explaining how exactly the CIA abused its power in the collection of people’s data. In a charming exchange, which perfectly sums up Ewen’s nature, his first question to Snowden was a simple “Who are you?”
#10 — Jared Holt (Right Wing Watch)
Jared is responsible for having the notorious Alex Jones kicked off the internet, after revealing how he had violated several of Spotify's content policies with regards to inciting violence. Soon after Jared's piece dropped, Facebook and YouTube also banned Jones from their platforms, but it wasn't without consequence. Jared is just 25 years old and now receives regular death threats from the right.
Juliette has worked as a journalist for some of the world's leading news organizations, including the BBC, Bloomberg and Sky News. But throughout her career she's been the subject of racist abuse, not only by viewers but also from some of her colleagues. We delved deep into her past and the toll it's taken on her.
Very rarely does someone like Corey Pegues make it out. Born and raised in Queens, Corey sold drugs on the streets of New York from the age of 16, starting on his local block and then working up the ranks of the infamous Supreme Team. In an effort to turn his life around, he joined the NYPD and years later became the highest-ranking black executive in the NYPD, all without disclosing his past. Then in 2014, Corey appeared on the legendary Combat Jack Show and opened up on his drug-selling past. Unfortunately, he’d go on to face a vicious backlash in the months after.
Nadieh is one of the world's leading data visualization specialists, and her award-winning piece for the Guardian on homelessness in the U.S. revealed how cities ship homeless people onto other cities by buying them one-way bus tickets.
B.J. is the author of the book ‘Social Media Is Bullshit’ and if you know anything about me, you’ll know this is right up my alley. Social media has its benefits, of course, but we’ve entered the realm where the negative consequences outweigh the positives. B.J. explains why social media is the cause and/or exacerbates depression and anxiety, and why we’re not ready for its consequences.
#5 — Matt Symons (Harlequins RFC)
Matthew has been a family friend for much of my life, and is working to inspire others after a difficult past. From the divorce of his parents to the death of his step-father, Matt has turned his depression into a positive force, and is helping other professional athletes to do the same.
#4 — Chris Herring (FiveThirtyEight)
Chris is the definition of hard work and has ground his way to the top. He now finds himself jetting across the U.S. to tell NBA stories that nobody else can tell. He covers topics such as ‘Why Kevin Durant’s Shoes Keep Falling Off’ and ‘Kawhi Leonard Is The Terminator’, and is among the most talented NBA writers we have today.
#3 — Walt Hickey (Numlock News)
Walt took me under his wing when we worked together at FiveThirtyEight in 2017. Walt's background is in culture and math, a combination of curiosity that you won’t mind in many places. Walt is now a senior editor at Insider and also runs his own Substack newsletter giving you the most important data stories daily.
Damon has been chief meteorologist for KOCO in Oklahoma City for a decade and thus knows a thing or two about tornadoes. Damon recounted the devastating EF-5 Moore Tornado on May 2013 that killed 24 people and injured a further 212. Damon was on air for multiple hours trying to keep his viewers safe, while also texting his wife who was directly in the path of the monster. We also discussed the history of severe weather in Oklahoma, and the TV ratings war between himself, Mike Morgan and Gary England.
#1 — Scott MacArthur (Sportsnet)
My very first podcast was probably the heaviest I’ve done, as Scott, who was with TSN at the time, delved deep into his doldrum to talk about his chronic depression. As a beat reporter for the Toronto Blue Jays, the unrelenting 162-game schedule and busy offseason left Scott with zero downtime, and his mood deteriorated to the point where his parents believed he was going to kill himself. Two major things have happened in Scott’s life since: Scott moved to Sportsnet to realise his dream job of radio commentator for the Blue Jays. And this year he came out as gay in this heartfelt message.