Many journalists if pressed might have a hard time giving a quick, easy definition of whatever it is that we do. And The Show recently spoke to a fellow audio journalist about this.
His name is Brian Reed. He worked for many years as a reporter and producer at This American Life. And in 2017, he created a podcast called S-Town. Now I'm speaking personally here, but I think S-Town was kind of a Citizen Kane moment for podcasting. It's a serialized story that starts off as a true crime investigation. But then morphs into this very nuanced portrait of a guy named John B McLemore, a closeted gay man trying in his own mind to save his community.
S-Town was a smash hit. It was downloaded tens of millions of times. It won a Peabody Award, and Brian found himself jetting all over the world giving speeches about the project. And he was often asked the question that I just asked you, what is journalism. Back then, he told me he had a ready answer for a long time.
Full conversation
BRIAN REED: For a long time, I believe that the definition of journalism to me was to reflect reality.
SAM DINGMAN: But then Brian's reality got upended. He got sued by the estate of John B. McLemore. And as part of the lawsuit, Brian found himself legally obligated to prove that S-Town qualified as journalism. Now that suit was eventually settled. But the question haunted Brian. And now he has a new podcast produced in partnership with KCRW called Question Everything. And his goal he told me is to come up with a better definition of journalism.
REED: You know at the time when I got sued for S-Town in 2018, I was reporting my next podcast series, what would become the Trojan Horse Affair with Serial and The New York Times. And I was core reporting it with a journalism student named Hamza Syed. And from the very first week of us working together, we learned that he and I had very different ideas of how journalists should be going about their work and kind of our relationship to a story and, and whether we should be approaching it with detachment or passion.
And, you know, we ended up erupting in kind of big debates about this from again, like our first interviews. And then at the same time, I was dealing with this lawsuit from people I didn't know who were claiming that S-Town wasn't journalism. And so I found myself kind of defending the fact that my work was journalism to these outside opponents while debating the very nature of journalism and how it should be done with my closest collaborator at the time.
And then I just, you know, just like all of us, I think I just saw a widening distance between certain factions of our society over what constitutes truth.
DINGMAN: Yeah, this is gonna sound like kind of a touchy feely question. But can I ask you what that felt like to wrestle with that in stream with, with trying to, to report.
REED: You know, I did what I know to do, which is we put it in the story, you know, like we put the wrestling in the Trojan Horse Affair. We had a co-reported story between two journalists kind of in the style of a buddy comedy with like, you know, me being the “old hand” and Hamza being like the young buck or whatever, even though we're the same age.
DINGMAN: But anyway, you're very much the Danny Glover in that scenario.
REED: Yeah, I know exactly. And so all this to say, how did it feel? It felt crazy making and disorienting honestly, like it was really hard because you're, you're telling a story but trying to tell it a like meta subplot about the experience of telling the story that you're telling, you know. I had this feeling of like, I don't know where my life ends and the story begins anymore.
DINGMAN: And that made me want to ask you, you know, in answering that question, you said, like, well, I did what I know to do, which is, is kind of put that debate in the story, like when necessary put yourself into the story. And where do you feel like for you, you found the idea that putting yourself into the story and letting that be a part of the storytelling was something that could be available to you. It's like a tool in your tool kit.
REED: I can remember the very moment I remember being in one of the first big group edits for S-Town, the way we do edits is like, well, you know, I'll write a draft or, you know, whoever is the reporter will write a draft and we read them aloud and people were talking about the first episode.
And, you know, in the first episode, I talk about how I got contacted by a listener named John McLemore in Alabama who, you know, said that he lived in a town and he wanted someone from our show to come investigate, and I end up going down to investigate, you know, how corrupt the place was basically. And there was just, you know, the editors afterwards were like, why did Brian go down?
Like, like, like that's kind of one of the questions they had from this round of the edits was they didn't understand why I actually, you know, went through with going down, what drew me there. And this like, discussion ensued where I was kind of just sitting there and all of my colleagues were talking about like, what is Brian's character? What is his motivation? Why, why is he going down? And like, at one point I just had to lean and be like, guys, I'm right here. I'm like a real person.
DINGMAN: You can ask me.
REED: Yeah. And it was so bizarre to me. Like I did not think of myself as a character in that story going in. But it became clear to me that I was, there is something about this medium where as a listener, you're listening to someone in your ears for hours on end to talk in depth about a story or a piece of reporting that they've devoted a long time to. And you just wonder about them, as a person, if they don't say why they did it, it's odd in our medium.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Something I thought in listening to Question Everything was that it felt like as I've come to know the character of Brian Reed through S-Town and Trojan Horse Affair and now Question Everything. It actually felt like there was quite a bit of continuity in terms of the amount of yourself that is going into the story.
Because in S-Town, you answer that, that question of why did I go down there? And then there's also other moments that I remember people remarking at the time in conversations about the show, like there's the part where you pretend to take a hit of weed. When you're with some sources who are smoking weed from a bowl made of deer antlers.
REED: It's just an important detail to remember.
DINGMAN: Lest we forget, let we not forget.
REED: Or Elk antlers, maybe that was, that was clarified in the fact checking. It might have been elk antlers anyway.
DINGMAN: Yeah. And then obviously, as you said, you foreground the disagreement about the nature of journalism in Trojan Horse Affair and then now Question Everything. You're, you're really at the center of this. I mean, it is, as you say, it, it is your quest to, to understand this thing and you making yourself really vulnerable in doing so.
The reason that's interesting to me in the context of what you said about our medium is I wondered how much of this kind of crisis of confidence about journalism has to do with the fact that S-Town arrived at such a moment when podcasting was exploding and the narrative potential of this medium was really becoming clear to people. And S-Town was such an intensive character study and was so novelistic in format.
So in addition to the questions that would have been there anyway, about the story, there was also all this attention on the medium more broadly. How much do you think that the question you're trying to answer was a product of the medium as well as the story itself that you were telling.
REED: I think I would have arrived at some sort of crisis about journalism, even if S-Town it never happened. And the reason I say that is because as I've been digging into the reporting for the show, so many journalists are telling me that they're in deep crises of conscience or, or, or faith in the work, you know. I'm gonna keep this kind of vague, shut out.
There's an email I got from someone I really respect who I was trying to, who had an interview actually scheduled with this summer, someone who's been in this field a long time, who wrote me a few days before the interview and said I need to cancel the interview. I feel so lost and that we're living in such a time of radical uncertainty in our field. You know, both in, you know, having to do with journalism, media, democracy facts. I just don't know what to say in an interview.
And that both was incredibly alarming and validating for the premise of the show. You know, like that's like saying, like medicine is falling apart or something in America. Like there's something big happening in journalism right now.
DINGMAN: So you've come to doubt your previous definition or, or of the mission statement, is that because you feel like reality?
REED: Yeah. I wonder if it's not enough, like, I wonder if it's a bit of a cop-out to say all journalism should do is reflect reality, you know? Should we not try to strive for a better reality?
