It's All Journalism

It's All Journalism began in August 2012 and ran for twelve years as a weekly conversation about the changing shape of digital media. Michael O'Connell hosts. The premise is unfussy. Find someone doing the work, ask how they do it, and let the specifics carry the episode. That approach produces a catalogue that reads less like media commentary than like a trade archive. Guests are reporters, editors, researchers, event producers and newsroom strategists rather than pundits. Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at Pew Research, appears to walk through a study measuring guest appearances across the top 451 podcasts, and shares the finding that 87 percent of podcast listeners expect the news they hear to be accurate while 31 percent trust it more than other sources. Hannah Ruffet and Megan Murphy of the Online News Association discuss AI, community building, and the annual ritual of reading through the year's best work — much of it, they note, from newsrooms of one or two people. Running alongside the main show is Better News, a co-production with the American Press Institute funded by the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund. Those episodes function as case studies. Amy Zielinski, senior event producer for Vermont Public, describes how a five-month cohort of news organizations learned to design and market live events in their communities. Other installments trace the Henrico Citizen converting newsletter readers into subscribers, and Autumn Phillips, formerly of the Post and Courier, on raising a million dollars for a statewide investigative fund and an education lab. Money is the persistent thread. The show returns again and again to the awkward business of asking audiences to pay, and to a recurring conclusion — that transparency about cost tends to earn support. It is equally candid about the labour involved. In the final episodes, O'Connell and Jill Olmstead of American University discuss how few podcasters last, and how much of the show's longevity came down to a rotating team of producers, editors and bookers rather than any one person. Megan Clordy, who co-founded the show with Jolie Lee and O'Connell and co-hosted its early years, returns for the penultimate episode to compare notes on what changed. They talk about Periscope, blogs and Twitter as once-promising transparency tools, and about a public that remains dissatisfied with how news is made. The closing run is elegiac without being sentimental. What remains is a durable record of a trade in transition, assembled one conversation at a time.