There’s a thing that Radiolab does – and they do it very well. They’re masters of it, actually. I don’t know that it has a name but it’s a maneuver I’ll call “Host sits down with a reporter.” 

Clip – From “Weighing Good Intentions”  Jad – Okay, to set up this story, this story happens, where? 

Lulu – It’s in a little town in northern Michigan. Called Mio. 

Jad Abumrad is hosting. Lulu Miller is the reporter. This clip comes from a recent episode, Weighing Good Intentions.” It raises the question: How far should we go to protect one species? 

Keep an ear out for the relationship between the host and the reporter – Jad and Lulu. 

LULU (in tape): Seven AM. Just drove through the Delaware water gap.
LULU: That's me on my way out there from New York.
LULU (in tape): The sun is rising, and ...
LULU: It's about an 800-mile drive.
LULU (in tape): ... and it's just gorgeous out here!
JAD: Ooh, listen to you.
LULU: Lush and ...
JAD: All into the outdoors.
LULU: Nauseating.
JAD: Yeah, a little.
LULU: I know. But I'm just one of those people.
LULU (in tape): I open my windows, and ...
LULU: When I get out into nature.
LULU (in tape): Sweet air.
LULU: I feel my place in the world. Anyway ...
LULU (in tape): Just crossed into Mio.
JAD: What was the reason you were going again?
JAD: A life bird?
LULU: Birders wait their life to see it.
JAD: Really?
LULU: Yeah. Only found right here.
JAD: And what's the bird called?
LULU: The Kirtland warbler.
LULU: So now have you seen a Kirtland’s before?
WOMAN: No, I've never seen one. This is my first trip up here.
JAD: And this right here. Where are you?
LULU: We're just outside of town on the edge of the forest about to go in. And I'm standing with about 15 people who've come from everywhere.
LULU: Where are you folks coming from to see this bird?
WOMAN: Toledo.
MAN: I'm from South Carolina.
WOMAN: Yeah.
MAN: We're from Oregon. (fades under)

I think this is a classic example of “host sits down with a reporter.” 

But, is there another way to do it? I mean, you’ve heard this style of storytelling before, right?  Once Radiolab started doing it – though I suspect did it before them – but once Radiolab popularized this method, many, many shows copied it. It’s ubiquitous. 

I recently heard an alternative. A good one. Let’s take a listen. 

(theme music)

Howdy, everyone. Rob Rosenthal here. I make Sound School for PRX and Transom. 

The nuts and bolts of “host sits down with a reporter” are this: 

There’s a host. I know. I’m stating the obvious but walk with me here. 

There’s a reporter. When the reporter finishes reporting, they sit down in a studio and record their story. Often in the order they reported it. A reporter’s journey, if you will.

As they relate what they’ve learned to the host, the host pretends not to know the story. I say pretends because, I mean, come on. They work together. How could the host not know the story? They may have even prepped a lot of their studio conversation together in advance. 

Because of that, they both have to perform. The host has to act like they don’t know anything. The reporter has to act like they’ve never told the story to the host.  This is challenging. I think it fails when the people involved aren’t great actors and it gets worse when the host and reporter are too folksy and chatty.  It sounds phony. 

Radiolab brushes up against that from time to time. But, mostly, like in the case of this Radiolab episode, here’s what the host will do. Ask questions. 

Clip – Sound of Jad asking a question.

Sometimes they offer an opinion. But, more often, they respond emotionally to what they’re learning with disgust or confusion or surprise. Usually surprise. 

Clip – Montage of Jad responding three different times with surprise. 

Even though “host sits down with a reporter” sometimes comes off as performative, there’s value in this approach. 

It’s musical. The short interjections from the host add a different note to the story. 

The host plays the role of surrogate for the listener who may be asking the same questions or having the same responses.

It manufactures a kind-of journey of discovery for the host – and the listener. 

And, telling the story to the host helps the reporter sound more conversational. 

So, there’s a handful of reasons to deploy “host sits down with a reporter.” 

But, how else can it be done? 

Of course, there are two-ways. This might be a third to a half of all the segments NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. 

Two-ways are different than the Radiolab approach. The host interviews the reporter rather than just responding to the reporter telling a story. Unfortunately – and I’ve lamented this before – unfortunately, the reporters sometimes sound like they’re reading a script. So, it’s clear it’s not really an interview. There may be advantages to two-ways – it requires less production and a reporter can get a story on air more quickly. But, let’s be honest. It’s not great radio when there’s no true interaction between the host and the reporter. 

So let me play for you this other version of “host sits down with a reporter.” One I don’t think I’ve heard before. 

Clip – Melissa Townsend (host) - It all started when a man named Eric Roper bought an old house in South Minneapolis. It was March of 2020. 

Eric Roper (reporter) -  We all know kind of what's happening in March 2020. We're all going to be locked in our homes now for quite a while. 

Melissa Townsend (host) It was right at the beginning of the pandemic and he was really curious about who lived there before him. 

Eric Roper (reporter) Because I'm interested in local history. I love going down history rabbit holes. 

Melissa Townsend (host) - So he started Googling. 

Eric Roper (reporter) And at some point, I stumbled across a website and this website had a map showing that there was a group of black families who lived in and around my neighborhood in southwest Minneapolis in the early 20th century. And then by 1940, almost all of those families are gone. And when I look closer at this map, I can see that one of these families lived in my house. Their names were Harry and Clementine Robinson. 

Melissa Townsend (host) - They were a black couple who bought his home back in 1917. For a little perspective, that's just as the U.S. Was entering World War One. Now, Eric is white and he had never really thought about it before, but his neighborhood is pretty white, too. And he started wondering what happened to this black couple and all these black families who disappeared from the map. 

Okay. I’ll pause it there. Eric Roper – the guy with the house – is the reporter. And Melissa Townsend is the host.  

This is the very opening to “Ghost of a Chance,” a podcast from The Minnesota Star Tribune that dropped earlier this year. 

The series reminds me of Isabel Wilkerson‘s book “The Warmth of other Suns.” It’s not nearly as expansive or in depth, but it has the same flavor. A small story about a Black family that illuminates the history of racism in the U.S. and the Black American experience.  

The Robinsons, the Black couple that owned Eric’s home a hundred years ago, moved to the north as part of the Great Migration, people fleeing the Jim Crow south. 

Cutting a long story short, they initially did well for themselves in Minnesota. As Melissa puts it, they made it. The Robinsons bought a home and became the picture of middle class excellence. 

Listen in this next clip for the relationship between Eric and Melissa. Eric sounds VERY much like he’s just talking, just telling the story of the Robinsons. Like Lulu on Radiolab. 

Melissa on the other hand, is not Jad, to keep the comparison going. She’s not responding to what Eric says. Instead her role is anchor and guide –a traditional narrator. 

Along the way, Eric chimes in like he’s talking to the host though, by and large, they don’t interact. And, he’s just one of many voices. Almost like he’s more of a source than a reporter. 

Eric - This is when I started to realize that something significant had happened in the house. They've been sort of scraping by for years, working in jobs, the only jobs that are available to them, which are very limited, and yet they've been able to get this far, which is sort of extraordinary. 

Melissa - But we know that the next year, things would begin to change. The summer of 1919 is also known as Red Summer, red as in the color of blood. It would go down in the history books as one of the most racially violent seasons in the 20th century. Historian Bill Green gave us the details. 

Bill -  I believe there are as many as 40 cities that saw race riots throughout the nation, mostly in the North and in the East and occasionally in the far West, in California. 

Melissa - These cities included Chicago, Omaha, New York, Washington, D.C., among many others. And Bill told us this rioting included something not often seen before. Black people were arming themselves and fighting back. This was just after World War I had ended and black vets had returned to the United States with a new sense of entitlement. Edward Nichols was one of them. He was a black man who grew up in northern Minnesota. In this old recording, he talked about his time in France as part of the U.S. Army and then what happened when he came back to the States. 

Edward Nichols - Well, when we arrived in France, I was a young man, 17 years old. Now here, we were pleasant people and we wanted to be friendly. And these people, they wanted to be friendly too and we had money and we'd buy their wine and fraternize with them. And they liked us very well. Things were pretty good. You could go in any theater or anything. But when I come back from France, I took my girl to the theater and the girl in the ticket booth says, well, you can go in, but you have to sit down front. The front three rows or go up in the balcony in what they called n****r heaven. And I resented very strongly, but these were things that happened while I was gone. Yeah, we had quite a bit of trouble there. 

Melissa -  Bill Green told us there was a widespread sense that people were fed up with this kind of discrimination and they were fed with having to be compliant and polite. 

Bill - And it all sort of contributed to a sense of blacks drawing the line. And that caused a reaction. Blacks standing up created a sense among the white power elite. This is a real threat here. 

Eric - The riots of 1919 did not spread to Minneapolis, but people in the city definitely knew about them. I found an article in the Appeal newspaper and it was reprinted from a Chicago newspaper called the Chicago Herald and Examiner. 

Melissa - It was dated September 27th, 1919. That would be the fall after red summer. 

Eric - Because our time of rioting is over, some people think the sky is clear again. No idea could be more foolish. So long as we have discrimination, unfair treatment, a feeling of brooding injustice between the white men and colored men, we shall have a burning fuse on its way to high explosive.. 

Melissa -  In Minnesota, that high explosive came the next year, in 1920. That's when a mob of white residents in Duluth lynched three black men. 

Eric - This was front page national news across the country, including the front page of the New York Times, because it was a triple lynching in a northern city at a time when a lot of people were sort of wagging their fingers at the south, saying, okay, you guys gotta cut out this lynching. And in a prominent black newspaper in New York, the New York Age, James Weldon Johnson, who was a leader of the NAACP, he said, the truth about this incident is Minnesota has turned out to be as bad as any southern state could be. Which is a very sort of damning accusation about Minnesota at the time.

I wrote to Eric and asked how they pulled this off and here’s what he told me: 

Step one: Melissa, who in addition to being the host was also the producer and writer of the podcast, she reviewed the research Eric gathered over several years. From there, she put together a series outline. 

Step two: Melissa and Eric talked. A lot. Not on tape. Not yet. They talked about the important plot points in Eric’s research. He told me that she wrote those plot points on color-coded Post-it notes and stuck them to the wall. Think of it as a sequence of events for the reporter’s journey. 

Step 3: Melissa interviewed Eric. On tape. She focused on those plot points, the important discoveries in his research. Eric says he answered her questions extemporaneously – which accounts for why he sounded like he was telling the story. He also had his computer handy to pull up details as needed. 

As he responded to Melissa’s questions, she would coach him here and there. Sometimes she guided him on pacing. Other times tone. Sometimes she’d ask him to repeat something. No different, really, than having a voice coach in the studio while tracking. 

Later on, as Eric conducted more research, he and Melissa would head to the studio for additional interviews. And, sometimes, Eric would record his own pick-ups. He’d use a script in those moments but he did his best to improvise – as he put it – around the edges of sentences. It also helped that Melissa was in the room for those moments so he’d have someone to speak to. 

Clip – Melissa -  When it came to Harry and Clementine, we already knew that many of the white residents in Southwest Minneapolis didn't want their black neighbors. But Red Summer had emboldened these neighbors to escalate the situation. 

Eric -  I found this article in the Minneapolis Tribune from November 16th, 1920. And this really is like the bombshell story that puts a fine point on how intense the neighborhood tensions are at that time. 

Reader - The headline, Negro Question Causes Protest, Residents of 13th Ward Object to Members of Race as Neighbors. 

Eric - And I should say that Southwest Minneapolis includes the 13th Ward. 

Reader - It goes on. Protesting against the presence of Negroes or persons of Negro blood as residents of the 13th Ward, 200 men and women held a meeting at 43rd and Pillsbury Avenue last night in the South Central Community Club rooms. 

Melissa -  Eric says this meeting in November of 1920 had a clear objective. 

Eric - So these folks are saying we wanna get rid of this handful of black families who live in Southwest Minneapolis. 

Melissa - After Eric read this, he realized the meeting was just five blocks from the Robinson's house. What's now his house? 

Eric - And this isn't sort of just some random assortment of people. This group was very influential at the time. There were two leaders of the club. One was a man named James McMullen and the other one was a men named Ewan Cameron. 

Ewan Cameron around this period would get elected to the state house. And James McMullin, who is the chairman of the meeting, he is a real estate agent. And this is sort of, just along the lines of what Kirsten said, that real estate agents play a really important role here of sort of driving this segregation. 

Melissa - I can only imagine what it felt like to be singled out like that and targeted by 200 of your neighbors. It's chilling. So what can Harry and Clementine do? That's next time. 

Does their approach work? Yes. I think this is another mostly effective “host sits with a reporter” approach. I say mostly because I still kept wondering who Eric’s talking to. It doesn’t sound like he’s talking to me as a listener. Sounds like he’s talking to someone else in the room with him and he’s reporting back what he learned – which he was but we don’t hear that. It felt like Melissa was missing. Maybe they could solve that by including some of their interaction. 

(theme music)

I’ve been talking about “Ghost of a Chance.” From the Minnesota Star Tribune. Eric Roper has been a reporter at the Tribune since 2009. He’s now a columnist for the paper. Melissa Townsend is the Senior Audio Producer at the paper. She has long worked in public radio mostly for Minnesota Public Radio as well as Minnesota Native News. 

If you want to learn how to make your own radio stories, heads up: the Transom Traveling Workshops are coming to Bloomington, Indiana and Moab, Utah next year. They’re geared for new producers and early career reporters and producers. Details, dates, and applications will be announced soon. Stay tuned over at transom dot org!

PRX and Transom bring you this podcast. I thank them for standing by this podcast for oh-so-many years now. 

Same for Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, Jennifer Jerrett, and WCAI. I’m very grateful for all the support. 

I’m Rob Rosenthal in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe.