Kill Fee

Raised in Toronto and trained as a business reporter, Karen K. Ho took a chance two years ago when she decided to cover the murder trial of a former high-school classmate charged with plotting to kill her parents. Karen's gripping story about the trial, "Jennifer Pan's Revenge," ended up going viral and helped Karen win a scholarship to the Columbia Journalism School. Jason talks to her about paying her dues as a yo...

Malcolm Burnley was a college student doing a class assignment when he stumbled across a true historical find: A lost audio tape of a Malcolm X speech from 1961. The discovery launched Burnley on a journalism career. Now a freelance journalist who has written for Politico, The Atlantic, and Philadelphia magazine, Burnley talks to Jason about how he broke into magazines (as a fact-checker), his childhood in Staten Island, and his en...

Frank Rizzo was the larger-the-life mayor of Philadelphia from 1972 to 1980, a former cop who did not like journalists. Rizzo promised to bring law and order to the city but left a legacy of racism, poverty, population decline, and high taxes. In this episode, Jason talks to Philadelphia reporter Jake Blumgart about his article "Donald Trump is Frank Rizzo Reborn," about the uncanny parallels between the Philly mayor and th...

How do you handle yourself as a reporter in a world where reporters are pretty widely hated and mistrusted? And how do you start in one genre of reporting and broaden into others? This week, Jason interviews Marin Cogan, contributing editor with New York magazine. Marin used to cover Capitol Hill for Politico and since then she has branched out to report on sports, crime, and justice for the likes of ESPN, GQ, and New York. In this...

Mastering the book proposal: Jason has sold three nonfiction book proposals to major publishers, and in this episode he answers questions that writers tend to have. How do I outline a book that hasn't been fully reported? What if I've never written a book before? Should I even try to write a book proposal, or should I spend my time on other projects? Jason boils down what he has learned about a process that can seem intimid...

Stephen Rodrick is an author and veteran journalist who has written for every prestigious magazine (The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Esquire, GQ) and met every celebrity twice (Lindsay Lohan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Walken, James Corden, J.J. Watt, Andre Braugher). From a Hampton Inn room in an undisclosed location, Rodrick tells stories about his amazing life in journalism -- the moments of despair and...

This week Jason talks to Elon Green, a freelancer in Long Island who has dug up remarkable stories at the New York Public Library and elsewhere: a scoop on the Zodiac Killer, a tale of Edgar Allan Poe's hair, and an unsolved string of murders from the '70s. Elon got his start in journalism as an advertorial writer at the New York Observer in its heyday -- a weekly paper run by a legendary editor, Peter Kaplan -- and he remi...