Photo Credit: Jonathan Velasquez
This paper is currently under review with Media, Culture & Society titled “I remember, I saw, I knew”: Journalists’ use of first-person storytelling in award-winning podcasts”
Introduction
In 2020, the Pulitzer Prizes began awarding journalism under the category of “Audio Reporting.” Before 2020, podcasts competed alongside print stories and television broadcasts for the industry’s most prestigious accolades. However, podcasting has a unique and independent history that differentiates it from other forms of journalism, even radio broadcasting.
As journalism researcher Richard Berry wrote, “While the economic and regulatory frame of radio restricts many forms of content… no such restrictions exist in podcasting, allowing producers creative, political, and social freedoms… the distinctions are strong enough for us to consider podcasting as a medium in its own right, rather than purely a form of remediation or partial reinvention,” (2019, p. 4).
Because podcasting started as an unregulated, amateur form of media during the digital revolution, storytellers whose voices were marginalized by mainstream media began finding freedom in the medium. Audio storytelling also harkens back to a more ancient form of storytelling. The space between a storyteller’s voice and the listener’s ear is much closer and more intimate than traditional forms of journalism. Podcasting research Mia Lindgren writes, “Reporters self-reflecting on podcast production had become a hallmark of narrative podcast storytelling… It makes the journalist a character of the story with self-reflexivity an additional narrative strand, putting the emotions of the journalist on display,” (2021, p. 4).
By creating a storytelling space for marginalized counternarratives and by subverting traditional news norms, especially through the use of emotion and voice, journalistic narrative podcasts exemplify a unique journalistic culture. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen & Thomas Schmidt “The [meaning-making] characteristics of journalistic storytelling also point to possibilities for audiences and other public actors to resist, reinterpret, and redefine dominant storylines,” (2020, p. 262). Through first-person storytelling, podcast journalists resist, reinterpret, and redefine dominant storylines through their own lived experiences.
What I Wanted to Know
What language do journalists use when engaging in first-person storytelling? How is first-person storytelling used as a journalistic narrative device? What critiques (implicit or explicit) do these devices make about journalism’s institutional norms of objectivity?
What I Studied
Looking at six award-winning podcasts from 2023, I used a grounded theory discourse analysis approach to analyze the serialized season or self-contained episode of each podcast (Figueroa, 2008). I examined the sentences where first-person pronouns were used and assessed what the sentence was trying to accomplish both narratively and journalisticly. Finally, I critically examined how these narrative and journalistic purposes deviated from traditional news norms and what critiques of those norms they might convey.
What I Found
Reflexive Narration
Self-reflection of internal thoughts, beliefs, and feelings of the journalist; Can be voice-over narration or in-the-moment recording.
Example
Verified: The Next Threat: Episode 1, “The Basement”
Mark Greenblatt: “Listening to Karoline, Natasha, I’m having what I call, in investigative reporting, a holy shit moment.”
Natasha Del Toro: “I know I’m… it’s wild. I’m feeling the same.”
Retrospective Reporting
Voice-over narration in which the journalist describes past actions they or their team took in their journalistic process; the voice-over is a later addition of scripted narration, not done through in-the-moment audio recording.
Example
This American Life: “The Pink House at the Center of the World”
Maisie Crow: “I watched as wave after wave of realization hit Shannon in real-time.”
Memory Recollection
Voice-over narration that involves a retelling of a personal memory that is not connected to the host’s role as a journalist. These memories are often from childhood, but can also include the near past.
Example
Un(re)solved: Episode 4, “The Hope”
James Edwards: “That photo was also my introduction to Alberta Jones…and her case — the first one I learned about on the federal government’s list of civil rights era cold cases.”
Translational Storytelling
Voice-over narration where the journalist recounts and summarizes a lived experience that a source relayed to the journalist. These sources are often in a personal relationship with the journalist and the use of “my” both signals this personal relationship and functions as a third-person narration of a first-person experience.
Example
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s: Episode 8, “The Shining Ones”
Connie Walker: “Norlaine told me that Robin stood up to my dad, that he was stubborn, but she was too. She spoke her mind and didn’t back down from him.
Community Alignment
The journalist uses first-person pronouns to indicate their membership and belonging to a particular community, especially one affected by the subject matter; Can be voice-over narration or in-the-moment recording;
Example
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s: Episode 8, “The Shining Ones”
Connie Walker: “But the mission of residential schools failed. Our culture and traditions are what pulled my dad through all of these hardships, and until the end he was still growing and teaching the people around him.”
Metajournalistic Discourse
Voice-over narration discussing the journalistic process, philosophical considerations, institutional norms, and ethical challenges in relation to the journalist’s own actions and experiences in their role as a journalist.
Example
Suave: Episode 4, “The Release”
Maggie Freleng: “I don’t think you guys have really talked about this, but what we have to talk about is your relationship. She is a journalist.”
Eye-Witnessing
Journalists’ narration of their journalistic actions and reportage as they are happening in the moment.
Example
Verified: The Next Threat: Episode 6, “Limits”
Mark Greenblatt: “We are about to talk to some of the top counter-terrorism officials in the United States. Uh, I’m told that this is the only interview that the State Department’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau has given like this.”
Why It’s Important
The use of first-person storytelling in journalistic podcasts seems to be multi-purpose.
- It conveys emotion and intimacy on behalf of the journalist through first-person experience.
- It provides a further level of transparency and authenticity to the journalistic process.
- It creates a space for lived experience as a form of journalistic evidence.
- It provides a contrast to paradigm repair by allowing journalists to critique their own practices as well as institutional journalistic norms.
- It allows journalists to acknowledge counternarratives within society’s collective memory by fully incorporating their lived experiences into their work as journalists, rather than ignore or falsely deny these experiences’ effects.
Perhaps most importantly, this form of journalistic storytelling allows journalists to engage in the process of what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called active forgetting (2011). Institutional journalism holds a seat of power in the collective memory process, and it enacts that power through the regulation of its professional norms and the production of specific narratives (Carey, 2009). But through alternative journalism spaces and practices, like those of narrative journalism podcasts, journalists who have been harmed by colonial institutions such as journalism can begin the “completion of its period of mourning” as a reparative act (Ricoeur, 2011, p. 480). Through first-person storytelling, this reparative work is done not on the terms of those in power, but on the terms of those who uniquely and intricately understand the institution from the inside-out.
Citations
Berry, R. (2019). Podcasts and vodcasts. In T. P. Vos, & W. Hanusch (Eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0182
Figueroa, S. K. (2008). The Grounded Theory and the Analysis of Audio-Visual Texts. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 11(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645570701605897
Lindgren, M. (2021). Intimacy and Emotions in Podcast Journalism: A Study of Award-Winning Australian and British Podcasts. Journalism Practice, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1943497
Ricoeur, P. (2011). From “Memory—History—Forgetting”. In J. K. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, & D. Levy (Eds.), The Collective Memory Reader, pp. 475-480. Oxford University Press.
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., & Schmidt, T. R. (2020). News and storytelling. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies, Second Edition, pp. 261-276. Routledge.