Hi, it's Madeline. I'd like to ask for your help with something. We're currently conducting a survey of our audience, and we want to hear from you as a listener of In the Dark. This is one of the best ways for us to learn about what you value as a listener, and it's a chance for you to help shape the future of our podcast. We want to hear from you. As a token of our appreciation, you'll be eligible to enter a

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Hey, it's Madeline.

Since season three came out, we've gotten a lot of questions from listeners about the season.

So we wanted to come to you today to answer some of these questions.

I'm here with Samara Freemark, managing producer for In the Dark.

Hey, Madeline, I am excited to be here.

And thanks to everyone who wrote in, we read all of your questions, and we're going to try to answer as many of them as we can today. We're also going to be bringing in some other members of the In the Dark team to help us out on some of these. So let's dive in. Madeline, I wanted to start with a question about what it was like to report this season.

This question comes from a listener named Stacey, and she writes, as a former journalist, I was astounded by your willingness to plunge into reporting on the military, as the barriers and insular culture seem impenetrable to me.

How did you find reporting on the military different from the previous

long-form projects you've completed? Yeah, it is such a good question. This was very different.

You know, every time we go into some new in-depth story, we are in a way entering a different world.

The world of the military is complicated. And so we've got to do a lot of

work to have it make some sense to us. You know, this could be everything from, there's a ton of

acronyms in the military that we don't understand as outsiders. So even just reading a simple document

is a little bit challenging. Then there's cultural things you need to understand. Then there are

structural things you have to understand as well.

And, you know, all of this when you start out is relatively unfamiliar to you. And so that can be

daunting at first. But as a reporter, you know, this is one of the main skills, I think, of being a

reporter is the ability to quickly immerse yourself and try to understand a world

that you don't belong to. I mean, that is the fundamental task of reporting. And that's also,

...