Telling The Story

Last spring, when so many of us were frightened and nervous at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world of journalism and the world as a whole felt chaotic and upended, Reshma Kirpalani leaned in. She cold-emailed a hospital group in south Florida to see if she could obtain access to its COVID unit, through videos shot by its employees. She received that access and embarked on a half-hour documentary ... that ul...

I've done 83 episodes of the Telling the Story podcast and, in the process, interviewed nearly as many talented storytellers and journalists.

Episode 84 is different.

This time, I interviewed someone on the other side of the camera - someone who was the subject on an in-depth story I produced late last fall.

Her name is Emily Chan. She's the co-owner of JenChan's restaurant in Atlanta. I did a five-minute story about the restaurant...

On his first day covering Twin Cities protests after the death of George Floyd, photographer Ed Ou briefly became the news.

Ou says he was set up with a group of journalists as curfew hit. He says state troopers fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades. Ou was hit in the head and received four stitches in the hospital.

That night, he still filed a report for NBC News.

And days later, after many journalists had l...

Quick confession: I honestly don't remember when I first heard about Lynsey Weatherspoon.

It might have been last spring, when one of her photos of the George Floyd protests in Atlanta went viral. It might have been in the fall, when she popped up taking portraits of major political candidates across Georgia.

I'm not sure how she came into my orbit, but I'm glad she did. I've been inspired ever since.

In this past year, Weatherspoo...

After conducting this interview - and then listening back to it - I felt fired up to go out and tell a story.

I wanted to pick up my camera, put on an N95, get in my car, and do something great.

That's the result of 45 minutes chatting with Tomas Hoppough.

He's a solo video journalist with Scripps National, but that hardly describes the variety and quality of his work. He travels roughly every other week, mostly alone, with mirrorl...

There’s a line I sometimes recite when I feel I’ve reached a professional roadblock.

It’s a punchline from an eighth-season episode of Seinfeld, where George Costanza is trying to spin his meager life triumphs amid countless failures into a grand success story.

“You know,” he says, “if you take everything I’ve accomplished in my entire life and condense it down into one day … it look...

The "origin story" is a superhero movie staple: how one everyday individual discovered extraordinary powers and realized her or his destiny of defending the city, country, world, or galaxy.

In the journalism world, Tiffany Liou has one of the most inspiring origin stories you'll hear.

She didn't go in J-school. She took a job in marketing. But she felt a pull towards news. She picked up an internship at a local affiliate but n...

The first time I met Neima Abdulahi, it was her first week at our station, WXIA-TV in Atlanta, and I was asked if she could shadow me for a day.

But I quickly learned: Abdulahi is nobody's shadow.

She grew up in Atlanta and returned professionally three years out of school. As a one-woman crew, she turned daily stories like everyone else, but she kept her eye on a grander goal: becoming a voice for the city she loved, the...

I think many of us are reckoning with our roles as journalists - and questioning some of the supposed set-in-stone practices of the profession.

We're thinking more about representation, and we're examining where we fall short as both individuals and outlets in covering the communities we serve.

I like to think I've been on a constant path of reckoning in this area for many years. I continue to evolve, and so does the world - and th...

For five months, the Telling the Story podcast has been delayed by current events - both external in the world (COVID-19) and internal in my life (the arrival of my second daughter!).

But it returns now - and with an all-star guest.

Chris Hansen is a senior photojournalist at KUSA-TV. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, he was a standard-setter in finding beautiful, innovative, and thoughtful ways of shooting and editing storie...

Best Documentary. Best National Feature Documentary. Best Minnesota Made Documentary. Audience Award. Audience Choice. Best Production Design. Best Director.

Film festivals nationwide last year piled accolades on "Love Them First: Lessons From Lucy Laney Elementary," a feature-length documentary produced primarily by two journalists from one Twin Cities TV station.

Lindsey Seavert and Ben Garvin had each worked at KARE-TV in Minnea...

The most powerful 60 minutes I watched last year came from two storytellers at their best.

John Sharify has won umpteen awards through a reporting career that has spanned decades. Joseph Huerta is assembling an equally impressive resume as a photojournalist, now at WFAA-TV in Dallas. Last year, for their final story together at KING-TV in Seattle, Sharify and Huerta produced an hour-long documentary about a man named Bob.

That man,...

Most of my guests on this podcast are in local news, because most of my audience are reporters, photojournalists, and solo video journalists in local news.

But I was reminded again watching the winners of this year's National Edward R. Murrow awards about the fascinating, compelling work on the digital front.

How does that work come about? Perhaps it comes from a side of the industry that had to re-examine its definitions of storyt...

I think very hard about who to ask as my guest on the Telling the Story podcast, but in recent years I've developed a clear litmus test:

Has this person found a passion within this profession?

Look through my past few interviews, and you'll find a series of journalists who understand what they love about storytelling - and have made conscious decisions to steer their careers toward that love. Forrest Sanders carves o...

If only Sam Raimi were on social media.

Then perhaps the acclaimed director of The Evil Dead, A Simple Plan, and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man series would learn of how one of his earliest movies influenced one of today's most talented journalists.

Forrest Sanders watched The Evil Dead as a student and became enamored with Raimi's shot composition and pacing. He developed a passion for shooting and editing t...

I began to nice it sometime in the last few years. New reporters or interns would arrive at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, meet me, and ask how long I'd been with the station.

"I'm going on nine years."

Eyes would widen, followed by a six-letter word that was either being used as a question or a comment: "Really ..."

I immediately felt the need to defend myself. These days, having reached ten years, I still occasionally get the impu...

If you've read this blog regularly in the past year, you probably already know:

I love being a dad.

We welcomed our daughter nearly nine months ago, and my life has been permanently transformed. So has the desire to balance my time at home with my time at work. I wrote about these subjects in the recent issue of News Photographer magazine.

I didn't realize what would stand alongside my column on the next page.

It was a piece f...

The following podcast episode made me uncomfortable.

I communicate for a living, and my trade is words. I stare frequently at blank cursors on my computer screen because I haven't found the exact word to properly convey an adjective, identifier, or emotion. I wade into controversial waters with caution, because I know how certain words can be interpreted in unintended ways.

So when I invited Noelle Walker, an extraordinary and...

"See the invisible."

Adrienne Broaddus used this phrase early during our interview, and I instantly got it and loved it. She was discussing her approach to covering Hurricane Florence, which she did for a sister station in the Carolinas instead of her home station, KARE-TV in the Twin Cities. The award-winning reporter spoke of the people she met at a homeless shelter and said, "The people who were there, I wanted their voices...