How To Unbreak the News
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About five or six years ago, host Amanda Ripley started noticing that her normal news diet left her feeling depleted and depressed. She tried mixing up her news habits, even avoiding it for awhile, but nothing helped. It felt like a shameful secret. Shouldn't journalists love consuming the news? She began to wonder, is it me....or is it the news itself? On this episode of How To!, the first of two parts, we'll hear from several of our listeners who feel the same way. We'll also talk with Nicole Lewis, Senior Editor of Jurisprudence at Slate, and a longtime reporter on the criminal justice beat; and David Bornstein, co-founder/CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network, and former contributor to the New York Times' Fixes column. Together they'll discuss how the news became so broken, and how we can put it back together again.
Resources:
Fear of Rampant Crime Is Derailing New York City's Recovery by Fola Akinnibi and Raeedah Wahid
I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product? by Amanda Ripley
Do you have a burning question? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Derek John, Rosemary Belson, and Kevin Bendis.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone, I'm Susie Weiss, and I've noticed there's just simply not enough podcasts in the world. So I'm launching my own. Let's go. Let's go, baby. Second Thought is a weekly show about pop culture. The stuff everyone's been binging, arguing about, obsessing over. Here's the thing about heated rivalry. I mean, even the most devoted swifties, I think we can agree, not our best work. We'll be hosting thoughtful conversations with culture's most important figures. Talk about genius. |
| 0:22.6 | Talk about generational talent. |
| 0:23.7 | Coming to headphones near you |
| 0:24.8 | on April 17th with a first guest you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:30.4 | Hello, this is Christine and I live in Traverse City, Michigan. And I'm calling in response |
| 0:36.8 | to a question post at the end of one of your |
| 0:40.0 | podcast asking, how does the news make you feel? And boy, this question really struck |
| 0:47.0 | a chord. The news makes me feel paralyzed. There's so much going on that I would like to |
| 0:53.9 | do something about get involved, |
| 0:57.0 | but I don't know how. Well, Christine, you've come to the right place. This is how to. I'm Amanda |
| 1:06.8 | Ripley. This episode today is very close to my heart. About five or six years ago, |
| 1:13.0 | I noticed that when I was doing my normal news consumption diet every morning, reading a bunch of |
| 1:19.3 | news before I even started the day, I felt depleted afterwards. I felt demoralized. I had |
| 1:26.1 | trouble getting things done. So then I started moving it to the |
| 1:29.8 | afternoon and then evening, after dark, like a vampire, and thinking maybe this is the way to read the news. |
| 1:38.7 | For a long time, I thought the problem was me. Somehow I'd gotten soft. More and more of my journalist friends started |
| 1:46.2 | mentioning that they too were having trouble consuming the news. And we thought it was just that, |
| 1:53.7 | you know, the news was bad. Lots of terrible things were happening in the world. But slowly, |
| 1:58.9 | I've started to ask myself a bigger question, which is, |
| 2:02.7 | in addition to all those things, is it also possible that the way we frame and deliver the news and |
| 2:08.9 | decide what the news is is part of the problem? What if we could redesign the news based on everything |
| 2:16.7 | we now know about human psychology and what we need to make decisions in the modern world? |
... |
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