Welcome to our henhouse. This is Jasmine Singer. And this is Marianne Sullivan. And this week,

Marianne will be speaking with Spencer Roberts, who is one of an extremely important and perhaps

unappreciated group, an independent

journalists, my favorite kind of people. Spencer writes articles, often long-form articles,

about scientific topics that he finds important and interesting, including animals in the

environment, and gets them placed in mainstream

publications. Those publications might have not even known that they wanted these articles

until they were actually written. That's the beauty of being a journalist. And the work he is doing

is really so very important. I am always heartened when I hear

about journalists like this or when I read about that or when I read their work because

independent journalism is like maybe the only thing that could save the world, if anything can.

That's pretty strong. But yeah, I, you know, I kind of never knew that

people did this. We've interviewed Marina Balatnikova, who started out doing that. Now she's working

for Vox, but I wasn't really aware of how this worked, but it must be just really a lot of work.

And you do all of the work on the article, and sometimes I think that you do the whole thing

before you start to try to sell it.

And it's got to be a tough life.

But as a result, so many things I think are getting written that didn't use to get written.

You know, really, really important stuff.

And a lot of that is by, is by Spencer. He's,

he really focuses on animal agriculture. He focuses on fish and, you know, marine animals and

really, really important work. I love this interview. And it just makes me think a lot of the

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