ReportHers

Q&A: Sruthi Pinnamaneni of Reply All
Sruthi Pinnamaneni invited me into her home in Brooklyn almost a year ago for this interview. At that time, I had been toying with the idea of a ReportHers podcast but didn’t have many audio skills to speak of...

Q&A: Sruthi Pinnamaneni of Reply All

Sruthi Pinnamaneni invited me into her home in Brooklyn almost a year ago for this interview. At that time, I had been toying with the idea of a ReportHers podcast but didn’t have many audio skills to speak of back then. I recorded the interview and then spent the next year paralyzed, too afraid to post it. I was convinced that it sounded terrible and it was all my fault. There’s mic handling noise, a room echo and some terrible plosives. I cringe listening to it. And I edited it back then in Premiere Pro, a video editing program, because that’s all I had access to at the time.

Anyway, it turns out that comparing yourself to someone as talented as Sruthi is a bad idea. Instead, you should aspire to make work like hers. Aspiring leaves space to learn and make mistakes.

So, here is the interview, recorded at Sruthi’s kitchen bar. I had to edit it in Pro Tools as one combined track because I no longer have access to Premiere Pro, and I lost some of the original files in a shift to a new computer (ugh). But let’s maybe let the content overshadow the audio quality. Sruthi’s was a pretty interesting interview.

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ReportHers: What was the first story that you were like, ‘This is an interesting scene. I want to record it.’

Sruthi Pinnamaneni: I was studying broadcast journalism at Columbia, which means TV news and documentary stuff. I found out about this girl, she was in high school up in Harlem and she was a dancer. People were talking about how she was doing this incredible African dance stuff and performing. She was deaf and so I wanted to do a story about her. Then I met her teacher and really the story became about the relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher was this incredibly forceful, passionate woman who really believed in this girl and there were moments when I just spent time with them where you were like, ‘Ooh. Is she going a little too far? She’s pretty strict with her.’ But at the same time maybe that’s what the girl needed.

I just shot tons of footage with them. I would just follow them around in class, outside of class and just keep shooting. That was, for me, the first time I felt a sense of, when you get to melt into the wall and you’re really just a part of the scene and just observing the people that you’re filming and trying to understand their relationship and trying to understand kind of the larger story of what was going on. I feel like that’s the first time I had that addictive feeling that you get.

RH: How many stories are you working on at once and how do you stay present in multiple stories over time?

SP: It’s hard because it’s simultaneously a gift and also a punishment to be able to work on a story as long as you need to. Because everybody really just wants to keep working on a story and never to finish it, especially me. So generally I’m working on at least two stories that are bigger, longer-term stories that I’m reporting and then a couple of stories that I’m helping somebody else produce, so either an outside reporter or somebody at Reply All, maybe Alex or PJ.

There’s one story that we finish a couple months ago that I started working on when like the first day I started at Reply All. It was a PJ story and it was funny because like it took two years to complete and that entire time I’d been working on other things, and you always knew that there was a story at the back of your brain that you’re like, I really want to finish that story. But some things just take time. The thing we’ve learned is to let stories sit for a while. So you work on something intensely, or I work on something intensely for a few weeks and then I kind of give it a break and then I work on it again. Generally once a story has been put on our schedule, like we know this is the day that we want to put this out, then I will turn all my attention to that.

It’s hard for me to really finish two stories at the same time so generally in the last month I’m one hundred percent focused on one thing and just trying to get all the pieces together.

RH: How long on average would you say you work on a story?

SP: I don’t have an average. There are stories that I’m really proud of that I reported that I finished in ten days. And then there’s a couple stories that I’ve produced with PJ or Alex where we’ll record it on Thursday one week and then it’s out the following Wednesday. Those are great because somehow you know when you start a story there’s a certain amount of energy and curiosity you have and to finish making the story in a compressed amount of time, you keep that energy. Whereas when you hold on to a story for a long time, often you really start to doubt it. You wonder, what’s the story? I don’t remember. Is this really a thing? You kind of you lose a lot of the original surprise So that’s been the challenge with the stories we’ve sat on here for a while.

The average, I have everything from two years, to one year, to like five days, so the average is really, I have no idea.

RH: Can you talk about the evolution of the show in the couple years that it’s been at Gimlet?

SP: I think the technology angle was always a bit of a skinny tether, you know. For me what a Reply All story is, it really comes down to a certain aesthetic, like a certain feel. It’s a certain looseness that still takes a lot of work to create. It’s never been the technology angle. I think different people at Reply All feel more or less strongly about the tech stuff. We are about to do stories where if we’re really just interested in the thing then well we’re going to do it. And I think that will always upset certain people, but I think a lot of our audience started to recognize that there’s more to Reply All than our so-called technology angle.

I’m perfectly happy to be in the tech bucket. I feel like that’s a nice place to be. There’s tons of great stories in there but I feel like we’ve all grown as journalists in the last few years and if there’s something that we’re really interested in then we’re not going to let that hold us back.

RH: The show to me feels more like it’s a show about being human, which I think is why it’s so compelling

SP: There’s a feeling that you have when you’re doing mindless surfing, like falling into a rabbit hole on the Internet, where you start off with one question and then it takes you to a different question, which pulls you into a totally different question. And it’s this really delicious feeling of falling. I think that’s really what we want the show to be. You can say it’s about the Internet but really we want it to be the feeling of the Internet.

RH: That makes me think of the piece you did about the woman, Hope, who had a medical mystery and the way you reported out that story, it wasn’t like you did all this reporting and then you structured the story with a beginning middle and end. You brought us along with the phone call with Jill, was it? At the New York Times.

SP: Lisa, Lisa Sanders.

RH: Right, Lisa Sanders. We were kind of along with you for the reporting. Can you talk a little bit about that story and how was part of the decision making process of how you would tell the story?

SP: So that one was such a joy to produce, also because that was one of the few that took me ten days from beginning to end. And it started when I’d seen this news article about this website called CrowdMed. In the news article they said this website has an 80 percent rate of success diagnosing people who’ve had no luck through the medical establishment. I found that statistic to be kind of mind blowing to the point where I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure, like, is that real? What does that actually mean to diagnose somebody who hasn’t been diagnosed by these other more formal means? So I reached out to the company. I looked at a few cases that they had in their solved column and I got the contact information for this woman, Hope.

I said to her right off the bat, I don’t know if this story’s going to work. I just want to hear what happened to you. We’ll see, no promises. I didn’t do a pre-interview. I don’t usually do pre-interviews. I just called her up. It was it was such a janky connection. I think I called her on Skype and made her record herself using her iPhone. She was just a beautiful storyteller, one of these people that it took a little bit of wrangling right at the top just to make sure she told the story in a linear way. Most people, but especially people have had long-running medical issues, they tend to really skip through facts because they’re used to abbreviating everything. So she was like, ‘Yes, it started on this day and I had this problem, that problem.’ And I was like, ‘No, slow down. I just want to feel everything that you felt as it happened to you.’ So I had to kind of hold her back a few times. But once she got that rhythm she really just stuck to it. I was riveted. I was like, ‘Go on. What next?’

RH: This was all in the first phone call?

SP: Oh yea. First phone call. The entire time I was like, I don’t know what she’s recording. I don’t know if her phone is dead. I was so petrified because the Skype line was unusable. It was way too crackly and the whole time I’m like, she’s going to send me the recording and it’s going to be just shit and you’ll never get this again. It only happens the first time. So we talked for three and a half hours like that. I kept making her save the conversation on her phone. It was just this heartbreaking story and she was just this amazing, wonderful person. She told it the way you hear it [on the episode].

The way she told the story was, she had this thing and then nobody could figure it out and then she went to CrowdMed and she got this answer and her problems seem to have gone away. So I was like, oh great. Story’s done, with the beginning, the middle and the end. There’s some writing that needs to be done just to patch it all together. But then – I can’t remember why. Why did I call Lisa Sanders? Why did I email Lisa Sanders? Oh right. I was trying to understand the biology of the thing. So I went to the medical science library in New York and I was like looking at different books about muscles and conditions. I had emailed Lisa Sanders just saying, ‘Hey, here’s a story. I’m curious what you think.’ She wrote back this kind of emergency e-mail saying, ‘Hey, this could be something very serious that was missed.’ So I asked Hope to get this test and immediately my whole story, which had this very convenient ending, was just thrown up into the air.

I had a moment where I went to, I think, Tim Howard who is our executive producer, and said I don’t think the story is done. Like, I don’t think we should air it. I don’t even know what it is anymore. And he loved it. He loved that there was confusion and doubt. Any time where most people would kill stories because they seem unresolved, Tim has this wonderful gift where he just leans into discomfort. And he’s like, ‘Great. You thought you had an ending and now you don’t. That just makes the story so much more interesting.’ And so we interviewed Lisa with Hope and then we basically ended with Lisa telling her to go and get this test. And then thankfully it turned out – we did an update on the story – and it turned out that she did not have the thing that Lisa was worried about. All is well.

RH: So is that uncertainty with how stories are turning out something that you have always been somewhat comfortable with, to just have faith in the process? Or is that something you’ve developed at Gimlet?

SP: I’ve always been really stubborn. I think most people who work with me on stories, even before I came to Gimlet will say that I tend to do a lot of interviews. I tend to keep pushing at things. If there’s somebody who doesn’t want to talk to me, I tend to keep trying and emailing them or calling or showing up, and say, ‘Hey, are you sure? Here’s a good reason to talk to me.’ So I think all of that has been put to good use at Gimlet. Whereas before, maybe it was a lot of spinning wheels, here stories can go in directions that you just didn’t expect and that is all for the best.

I think it’s very uncomfortable to be a reporter and think you have a certain ending and at the last minute have the bottom fall out from underneath you. But are Reply All, at least I feel like I have the support with the whole team where they can really step in and help me find a way to turn that non-ending into an ending. Or find ways to articulate why that makes a story a better story.

RH: If you don’t know how a story is ending, or for this example where you thought you had an ending and it completely changed, how are you deciding how to structure these things?

SP: We often tell stories in a pretty linear way. This is the way we discovered it, this is how the story moved on, and this is the point at which it ended. So as long as you keep that reporter perspective I think it’s pretty straightforward. An example is the boy in photo story, the one that I worked on with PJ for two years. We had certain questions and confusions at the very beginning of that story and it was important to tell it so that the listeners were always with us at that point in time. That, I think, buys you a lot at the end because they’re with you at the moment where it ended for you. You don’t have to make any big conclusions. It’s like, if they’re if they’re in your head at that moment, they understand the thing that you see. You don’t have to say, ‘This is a story about blah blah blah.’

RH: You’re not artificially being like, ‘This is the bow I want to put on it.’

SP: Yeah, exactly. The reporting is the story. The challenge is then to not be so meta about the thing. We have to be really careful in stories. How much are we talking about, I mean the boy in photo [story] is a great example where a huge part of the story was PJ’s discomfort in following this random person from the Internet who really just wanted to be left alone. And having me and Tim kind of push him into following him. But you can’t talk about that too much because then it’s a story about a story. I hope we are humble enough to know that just talking about what we’re feeling at any given moment does not a story make. You can use that for a second but then it has to quickly move on.

RH: This is sort of a little bit of a technical question. If you were out in the field, how would you create a little studio if you had to?

SP: I’ve done this before Reply All. I have a very thick duvet, which every radio producer should own, and I sat in my closet and I would record all my narration. As a freelancer without access to a studio, that’s how I did it. It was totally fine. Now I just record interviews out in the field but I’ve never had to record narration outside. I could do it. I could stick to my blanket method. The problem is you have to make sure – especially when you’re doing a long episode, most of the stories I’ve done are over thirty minutes that’s a lot of tracking – and so you have to make sure it all matches in terms of sound. Tracking an 8-minute story is super easy under the blanket. Thirty minutes, you probably might want to get one studio and stick to that one studio.

RH: What was your set up under the blanket?

SP: I had to have a headlamp so I could see my script if it wasn’t on my computer. Oh I didn’t used to have my computer because it would make an annoying fan noise so I’d print out my script to get a headlamp, sit under my duvet, sweat profusely. So I’d have to come out for air every now and then and just do it. I would do it differently, honestly, now if I had to do it. It’s so helpful to have a friend track you. One of the things at Reply All, we almost have another producer in the room. So they can tell you like, ‘Hey, do it again,’ or ‘More conversationally,’ or like ‘Close the computer and just tell me what you want to say.’ So if you want that level of support then get a bigger duvet or maybe even phone in a friend so they can tell you how you sound.

RH: Do you mean get a bigger duvet so your friend can be under it with you?

SP: I know. It’s a ridiculous idea. You know Meghan Tan from the Millennial [podcast]? She has a system, which I think is pretty brilliant, where she has a photo of her best friend with a martini glass, I believe, and she sticks it in the room in the closet where she records. And so when she’s tracking she’s like talking to her friends

RH: I think that’s all the questions that I have. Thank you so, so much for your time I appreciate it so much.

SP: Thank you.

Q&A: Emily Withrow, Bot Editor at Quartz
EMILY WITHROW is editor of the Quartz Bot Studio, and is on leave from Northwestern University, where she holds an appointment as assistant professor of interactive narrative at the Knight Lab and Medill...

Q&A: Emily Withrow, Bot Editor at Quartz

EMILY WITHROW is editor of the Quartz Bot Studio, and is on leave from Northwestern University, where she holds an appointment as assistant professor of interactive narrative at the Knight Lab and Medill School of Journalism. At Quartz, she explores the ways people and bots interact, and how journalists can use bots and emerging technology to connect with new audiences. Previously, she worked as an editor at The A.V. Club. She is based in Chicago. Follow her work at Quartz at bots.qz.com.

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ReportHers: What is a typical day like at the Quartz Bot Studio, and what is your role on the team?

Emily Withrow: I’ll admit that this question made me laugh—there’s really no typical day. Or at least, not yet. The Studio is still in its formative stages. Right now, full-time, it’s just me (editor) and John Keefe (developer). We also have an awesome product intern, Eva Scazzero, working with us. We each have different strengths, and we’re working on several projects at once. Our first year is funded by the Knight Foundation, so we have a mandate to experiment, and to document those experiments as we go. One of those experiments is likely to be for voice (Alexa, Google Home, HomePod), one is likely to be chat-based (like Slack or Facebook Messenger), and one is likely to try to tackle open responses from users (free text, as opposed to options). So we’re running after each of those three individually, and plan to roll out some tools for journalists along the way.

So my days are part exploration—understanding what these spaces are like, what works and what doesn’t—and part trying to build things for those spaces. We’re doing design research to fill in some of the blanks. None of these are truly mature platforms, so we have more questions than answers at this point.

RH: There are a lot of jobs in journalism—and in the world in general—that didn’t exist just a few years ago. How do you think about where you are in your career now, and where you want to be?

EW: My career has taken a number of twists and turns already. The through line of my work is really an attraction to big, messy problems. Easy answers and predictable days never did it for me… so lucky(?) for me, I entered the journalism world right around the time the housing market fell apart, and around the time mobile and social started to come into their own. No one was ready. Cutting and pasting stories from print to web wasn’t working.

I was at The A.V. Club around that time. By all traditional metrics, we were performing well, but we were also going through layoffs, having to cut costs. I wanted to be part of the solution, and for me that meant telling stories that reflected how and when they were being seen. I thought there was a danger in thinking of the website as this Mother Ship to which all traffic must go—especially when our content was being shared and consumed in so many other places. I wanted to be able to build for those new spaces. So I taught myself to code. I started paying more attention to emerging technologies and platforms, and tried to understand what people were doing, and what type of stories would work well there. I ended up teaching nontraditional narrative at Medill, and eventually, that led to bots, and to Quartz. I’m right where I want to be! In the future, I hope to follow the same path—to embrace promising technology that could change how we tell stories and deliver/consume information.

RH: What was the first bot you made?

EW: The first bot I made wasn’t a “real” bot in the purest sense, because it wasn’t really doing much intelligent on the backend. It was scripted, and was only a bot in the sense that it did asynchronous content delivery. (Though, I guess I shouldn’t say it wasn’t intelligent, because we did rely on Amazon for all its NLP smarts.) At the Knight Lab, I was playing around with the idea of a personal news anchor. I’d been using Alexa frequently at home, but was frustrated that all of the news was confined to the Flash Briefing section—this device I spent so much time in dialogue with, when I asked it for the news, just turned on NPR. It seemed like such a disconnect for me.

So I started to toy around with the idea that we could provide additional context for the news. I designed an experience around the idea of a water cooler conversation you might have with coworkers about the news. Alexa (or our “skill”) would float a headline: “An Uber driver is accused of killing six people in Michigan.” If you’d already heard that story, you could ask follow up questions or move on. If you hadn’t, you could ask background questions.

The bot never saw the light of day—really, I’m not sure people want this experience—but we learned a ton about how people talk with bots, how bots should talk, how to prototype and test for voice devices, and what people ask about news headlines. It was a really successful experiment from that perspective.

RH: What is the biggest risk you’ve taken, or boldest move you’ve made to get a job, interview or internship?

EW: Oh, wow. I’m so timid when it comes down to it! I’m getting nervous just thinking about having done bold things. But it’s something that I force myself to do, pounding chest and all. I’m lucky enough to have loved just about every journalism job I’ve had. (Not all pieces of every job, but on the whole.) So leaving has always felt like a huge risk. My career has included some really wild swings. From McKinsey & Company to The Onion, then to wildly stable academia, then to an experimental studio.

I guess one of the boldest things I’ve done has been to write about all of the mistakes I’ve made in that process. At one of those jobs, for example, I didn’t negotiate my salary. So I wrote a piece about all the shame I feel about that—and the lessons I learned for the next time. I believe writing about my failures makes it easy for other people to take risks. It’s certainly not easy for me.

RH: I had a similar experience, and the sting of having not negotiated—and for me this was almost 10 years ago—still motivates me to be super bold with money. At one job, I asked for a pretty big raise after doing some research that led me to believe I was paid under market value. I didn’t get the raise, but I am so glad that I tried, and it’s made me more comfortable talking about money in the future: I asked for a really big raise and no one died.

EW: That’s so incredible! You lived to tell the tale. There are so many things I grew up believing about the way women should behave—and even though I know all that now—it’s incredibly hard to shake off. Wanting to please people and not cause a fuss is my worst enemy #1. I’m working on it all the time! I’ve gotten so much better, and bolder, but it still makes my hands sweat every time I have to speak out. I’m still in the “faking it” part, but I’ve gotten very good at faking being a confident, take-no-prisoners kind of woman.

RH: Yea! I am not sure to what degree we fully leave the “faking it” part, but in my mind, as long as you push through it’ll be ok!

EW: Totally. I’m in my mid-30s, know a ton of incredibly accomplished women, and everyone says they feel the same. Onward!

RH: Speaking of doing something new, what advice do you have for small bot projects can you suggest for people who want to get into bot making? (I am working on this right now. I have a set of circuit boards on their way from Hong Kong as we talk!)

EW: That’s awesome!! One of my huge frustrations in the advice-giving sections of the Internet is that you should “just make something.” It’s the “just” that really bothers me. Making things is absolutely the best way to learn something, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with an idea for a useful project.

The world of bots is so huge—they can include physical sensors and gear, or be as one-sided as automating tweets, like @tinycarebot, which reminds you to take a deep breath or go on a walk. So my advice is to choose one corner to play in—whether that’s Slack, Twitter, etc., and start really small. Can you get just one Tweet to show up? How about five? How about five on a schedule? Where are you pulling the Tweet from? How do you level up from there? Could you scrape it from a site? Pull from a separate JSON file?

Another way to dabble is to fake it! There are tons of prototyping tools out there that allow you to design or build a bot without going deep into code. We’re working on running through many of them at the Studio, and plan to write up our recommendations as we go, as well as projects you can replicate.

RH: That’s great. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat!

EW: Thank you!

Q&A: Elise Hu, Foreign Correspondent for NPR
ELISE HU is the kind of person who moves a toddler, two cats and one dog to Korea, while pregnant, with her husband to open an NPR bureau in Seoul. I bet she is also the kind of person who can navigate...

Q&A: Elise Hu, Foreign Correspondent for NPR

ELISE HU is the kind of person who moves a toddler, two cats and one dog to Korea, while pregnant, with her husband to open an NPR bureau in Seoul. I bet she is also the kind of person who can navigate hilly terrain in a stick shift while eating an ice cream cone. In her first year in Korea, she filed reports about the MERS virus outbreak, hiring fake friends for your wedding, and a deal between Japan and South Korea on wartime sex slaves. Luckily, she agreed to work through the 14-hour time difference to be interviewed here.

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ReportHers: What is it like to rely so heavily on fixers for your reporting since you don’t speak Korean or Japanese?

Elise Hu: Since establishing a rapport with sources is a go-to in my reporting toolbox, having to use a proxy was pretty difficult, at first. I have learned to really trust and rely upon the people I work with who not only do interpretation, but also have to know the premise of the story as well as I do because they set-up a lot of the interviews and logistics to make the stories happen. I’ve also picked up Korean language along the way, so that I can at least nod to the parts I do understand.

RH: Is it the goal that you would eventually not need a translator or fixer, or will that always be a part of the picture?

EH: Based on my progress in Korean, there is zero chance I will be able to work at the level I need without an interpreter. I even used a fixer/interpreter in Taiwan, where folks speak Mandarin. I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but because I never grew up talking about geopolitics or 20th century war history in Mandarin, I STILL use an interpreter in the event there are gaps.

RH: Is it frustrating or are you used to it now?

EH: For the most part, I’m used to it. We do try and get English speakers to engage with us for stories. It was super easy to find English speakers in Malaysia, for instance. And there are often Japanese experts who give their interviews in English. The place in East Asia where it’s been hardest to find English interviewees is Korea, despite the years and years and thousands of dollars the Koreans invest in English lessons and training.

RH: Why do you think that is, that it’s harder to find English interviewees in Korea despite that investment?

EH: Koreans will tell you that even they think that their English language education is broken. It’s heavily reliant on memorization of arcane vocabulary or language rules, they’re tested only in written English and they get very little practice actually speaking in English. So when I try to, say, order a tea in English at a coffee shop, the clerks just freeze up. They are terrified of having to communicate. This isn’t EVERYONE, of course, but I’ve attempted to conduct enough English interviews now that it’s a pretty clear trend that despite years of learning, conversational English still seems to be a barrier for many Koreans.

RH: What are some qualities or skills – both natural and hard-earned – that have helped you get to where you are in your career?

EH: Curiosity is key for journalism, of course. For creating/making things, I think it’s generally important to be open to all sorts of influences, whether it’s strangers you meet at a bar or art or music, and then not being so focused on rigid goals that you don’t leave room for a random insight or inspiration. Career-growth wise, I’ve never had a plan. I have general ideas about what I get excited about and then try to align my work with those things. One other approach of mine is to rarely say no. I know that for time management’s sake, women are always trying to say yes to less tedious stuff or obligations, and I think that makes a lot of sense. So when I say “I rarely say no,” I mean, I pretty much accept any invites I get to go out, or meet a new person for lunch or go on a trip, etc. Even if it’s at the last minute. You have to leave yourself room for discovery.

RH: What about balance? In what ways do you fit in down time of some kind? I was recently talking to my parents about how I want more balance in my life, and they were like, “Balance is overrated.”

EH: Balance is a weird word since it implies that the priorities in your live can achieve equal weight, and that’s not realistic. When people ask me about down time, my first reaction is always to think to myself, geez, I’m not that busy. As I recently read in a piece, and I will quote, “I am the laziest ambitious person I know.” I mean, I have an infant and a preschooler and work as a foreign correspondent that has to be ready to fly off at any moment, and on the face of it that seems like I’d be quite busy, but I guess that’s relative. I control my own schedule since I work from home, my husband gave up his full-time job to be lead parent at home and I work in “intervals,” meaning, sometimes I go really really hard, for a good week or two, and I work 16-hour days or am on the road nonstop. But after going hard, I will just not do much for a few days and have fun, go out with friends, etc, to recharge. Getting to control my schedule has been key to working in intervals.

RH: If I remember correctly, you and your husband, journalist Matt Stiles, seem to alternate parenting and work responsibilities based on what’s happening in your careers. Can you talk a little about that? What kinds of conversations do you have when making those decisions?

EH: Matt was the one who really encouraged this move to Korea. He said it would be invaluable for me since I’ve always been internationally-minded and love to explore, and that it would be an invaluable experience for us as a family. That meant his career had to take a pause, but he still does contract-based projects and is enjoying his time being the lead parent. I expect that when my tour is up, and if he gets a great offer, I’ll do a less demanding job so that he can go heads down on something he’s really passionate about.

RH: I feel like that kind of partnership is rare. Do you feel that way?

EH: Now that I’m part of an expat community, I actually find almost every couple we encounter has a similar structure, in which one spouse made a frictionless sacrifice of his or her individual career to allow the partner to have hers, or his. I think it’s something spouses do for one another a lot, but it will never be easy. When you’re trying to be a good partner, or mother, or friend, while at the same time trying to make your personal dreams a reality, it will always be a challenge.

RH: Can you share an example of when it has been particularly hard for you?

EH: Sure. As the mom, I obviously carried my daughter Eva for nine months, and then gave birth to her, and then breastfed her exclusively for a year, and think our bond is unique and IN MY MIND, I wanted to be the parent she goes to first. Or when she wakes up at night, I sort of expected that she’d call for momma. But this summer, after the birth of my second daughter, and because I am frankly just unavailable during bed time because that’s when I get my NPR stories edited due to the time difference, I noticed a real shift — Eva started calling for her dad, and asking for him first, and only wanting him to read or perform other tasks, like bathe her. This was really heartbreaking for me because of my own built-in expectation. Eva got out of that phase once her little sister got bigger and now I’m not rejected, but she still does like her dad to be the one who calms her at night if she wakes up from a bad dream. I had to learn to be okay with that, and if you think about it, why shouldn’t I be?! He’s the go-to parent in this house, and if I want things to be that way, I have to let go of the notion that I could be the go-to parent, too.

RH: What project or piece are you most excited about right now?

EH: If I told you I’d have to kill you.

RH: You’d have to fly back to the U.S. to do that! Unless you have people to call. Ok how about this one: What at the South Korea bureau are you most excited about?

EH: I’m heading into year two on this beat. That means I’m shifting from “Hey look, a squirrel!” coverage to being able to better understand the nuances of this place and ask more probing questions about it as premises for stories. I intend to spend more time in Japan in year two, since it’s part of my portfolio and I was grounded from flying last summer due to being super pregnant. In Japan, I’m most interested in how that society is dealing with shrinking — there are not enough babies in Japan to replace its workforce and its population. That makes for some fascinating ways society and the economy will have to adapt.

RH: By the way, do they have XTC gelato in Korea? It might just be a Hong Kong brand.

EH: Haven’t seen it. In Korea, the best dessert in my humble opinion, is bingsu. It’s like eating milky snow.

RH: Favorite flavor?

EH: Mango.

RH: Yum. Well Elise, you rock. Thanks so much. I know you have some All Things Considered filing do to. Catch you on the radio.

EH: Thanks for asking me to do this! Take care.

Pub date: Feb 8th, 2016

Q&A: Guardian US Data Editor, Mona Chalabi

MONA CHALABI’s Wikipedia page says she is “considered one of the most influential people in the young field of data journalism” but she gets sheepish when you ask her about the post. (She learned of it when a friend emailed her asking, “DID YOU WRITE THIS??”) The truth is, Mona’s work inspires a level of fandom.

Mona just joined Guardian US as a data editor. Before that, she was a lead writer at FiveThirtyEight, where she penned an advice column called “Dear Mona” that answered personal questions with hard data. She made a documentary about racism in Britain that aired on the BBC late last year. If you Google “Mona Chalabi and tampons” I think you’ll like what you find. Follow her @MonaChalabi. (This interview was conducted towards the end of 2015.)

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ReportHers: Do you time travel? In the last two weeks you wrote several pieces for FiveThirtyEight, had a documentary air on the BBC, published a piece in the Guardian on the doc and spoke with Rachel Martin for NPR’s Number of the Week on Weekend Edition. Am I missing anything?

Mona Chalabi: I’m pretty unhappy when I’m not busy. And it’s an exciting time to be keeping busy!! Data journalism has developed massively online but I still feel like its potential has been neglected on TV and radio, so those other projects are really important to me.

RH: What do you mean when you say the potential has been neglected on those other mediums?

MC: Well, when I think of the way that numbers are used on TV I think about those terrible graphics you see on the news. It’s either a series of bullet points that flash up on your screen (which, yawn, remind me of a terrible lecture at college) or they’re some really bland graphic. Radio tends to avoid numbers since it can be hard to talk about them accurately while not confusing listeners – imagine describing the chart below to someone who couldn’t actually see the chart. If I told you out loud that 100,825,272,791 people have ever died, your brain would be so busy processing that number you wouldn’t really be able to hear what I said next, let alone hear me describing numbers like that for other years.

RH: How did you learn to explain complex things in both your writing and speaking?

MC: I know this is a really boring answer but it’s an honest one: by practicing.

RH: That’s a satisfying answer! If you had said, “Well, I was always good at xyz since I was a child,” I would feel like I could never get there myself. But practice, that’s something within reach.

MC: Absolutely! I think anyone can do what I do! And, just to be clear, by practice I don’t mean trying to sound like some model you think you should sound like. It’s about finding your own voice. I really don’t think there are enough voices in the media that actually sound different from one another. That’s a massive shame.

RH: How did you practice finding your voice?

MC: I did my master’s degree in France where most of your grade is based on presentations you do in class rather than essays. Actually, there are so many different things I could possibly say as reasons why I found my voice! I think I also learned pretty young that if you don’t speak for yourself, someone else might speak on your behalf.

RH: Is there a time you recall when you learned that lesson, that if you don’t speak for yourself, someone else will?

MC: Yeh it’s a really dumb example, though, but it’s the first one that comes to mind. I remember when I was in primary school [in the UK] I got into a fight with a girl in my class who kept telling me to go back to my own country. A teacher later saw me crying and told the headmaster that it was because I had stuff going on at home. Even though I was really upset I knew I needed to get my act together and say something myself to the headmaster, otherwise he would think the teacher was right.

RH: What gets you most excited? What kinds of stories?

MC: Like most journalists I get excited about stories that other people haven’t written about. But being a data journalist is great because you can take a story that other people have written and tell it in a totally different way by using numbers. Like this piece in the Washington Post.

One writer concluded that women should “get married” to “end violence.” I was able to look at the data and reach a totally different conclusion. It can be really rewarding to call something out as BS, but you just have to have a bit of humility when you’re doing it and realize that you, as a totally fallible human, will inevitably write some BS of your own, too.

RH: What was the mistake they made in interpreting the data for the Washington Post piece in your mind? [Note: the WaPo writers’ response to Mona’s response is here.]

MC: Sometimes you find what you’re looking for. They expected the data to show lower violence rates for married women and so that’s what they found. But if they would have gone looking for a connection between say, age and violence, they also would have spotted a pretty strong connection. Why not tell that story? And even worse, they simply assumed that correlation means causation. The original headline actually had the audacity to tell women to “get married”!!!

But there could be lots of things that make a woman more likely to be married (i.e., education level) that might also affect violence rates. And even then I wouldn’t say women with less of an education are more likely to be in violent relationships. It could just be that women with lower education levels have less earning potential, meaning that they don’t have the financial exit routes that other women might have. Basically, there are a bunch of different explanations for one set of numbers and your own political views shouldn’t affect which one you examine.

RH: There’s also data that one of the leading causes of death among pregnant women is violence at the hands of their spouses or partners.

MC: I’ve never seen that study before – thanks for bringing it to my attention!

RH: What can journalists do to check their biases, especially when data is involved?

MC: Partnering is good. Asking someone else, especially someone who might have a very different set of assumptions, to look at the same set of data can be really revealing. Will they find the same things you found? It’s also good to use more than one source where you can. If there aren’t two different data sets on the same topic then see if you can find different years. Was year xxxx an anomaly or have things been this way for ages?

RH: What is your relationship with self-confidence and how does that play out in your work? I think about this a lot myself, when I pitch, when I edit, when I negotiate rates or salaries, etc.

MC: I don’t have a lot of self-confidence. But I don’t think that’s always a bad thing – we’re only constantly told it’s a bad thing because men tend to have a lot of it (or are taught to act like they have a lot of it) and we’re in the bloody patriarchy so it seems like that’s the only way to succeed. I think readers/listeners/viewers can appreciate a voice that’s self-aware, unsure, self-critical.

I think there are times when a lack of self-confidence can be a fucking good thing (I stayed up till 2 a.m. revising for my exams at uni because I lacked self-confidence. The guys who gloated about how good they were and didn’t bother to study didn’t end up doing as well) but what’s hard is channeling that properly. You mention negotiation rates and salaries – that’s no time to be self-deprecating!

RH: Ok, last question. I’m stealing it from your Reddit AMA but it was a good one. What was a time when digging into the data changed your opinion on something?

MC: Ah damn that was the hardest question in the AMA and I’ve been thinking about it ever since! Not because I don’t think data can change people’s minds but because I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly opinionated person. Either I’m very open to the possibility that I’m wrong or I’m just a flake.

I’ve been thinking about stories that I wouldn’t write because I don’t want people to change their minds based on the data, if you know what I mean! Let’s imagine there’s data on what percentage of people who have unprotected sex don’t end up getting an STD. If you just presented those numbers alone it might encourage people to act irresponsibly, you know? And that behavior in itself could change the numbers (i.e., increase the percentage).

RH: Do you try to avoid those stories?

MC: I think those examples are very, very rare – on the whole, it’s not up to me to decide whether or not someone should change their behavior on the basis of the data. I just think that I have to ask myself whether I could write a story like that properly. Would I be able to say what the probability of catching an STD is now AND explain how that probability would change if people’s behavior changed, in a way that makes sure readers get the whole story without just walking away with the first part?

RH: Well, people tend to only read the first couple paragraphs anyway…

MC: Exactly!! I’m always thinking about that – hello anyone who has read this far down, thanks for staying with us!

RH: If you read this far, you are X% less likely to contract an STD! Good for you, informed people. On that note, thank you, Mona, for taking the time to chat!

MC: Thanks for taking an interest in my work! Take care!

Q&A: GIF Illustrator, Rebecca Mock

REBECCA MOCK is an illustrator and comic artist in New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Medium and PCMag and it is gorgeous, full of bright colors, intimacy and layered scenes. They’re pretty cool.

News outlets have been using illustrations forever, of course, but Rebecca takes it to the next level: GIFs. Who knew you could grow up to make animated GIFs for a living? She even has an agent for such things. In addition to one-off illustrations, she also illustrates novels. Follow @RebeccaMock.

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ReportHers: What percentage of your work is making illustrations for news organizations versus ad agencies and – I’m afraid to ask it but – are the rates really different?

Rebecca Mock: I suppose it’s about half-and-half. Lately more ad work, but I think that’s just coincidence. Advertising work does tend to pay more, as I’m dealing more with big-name clients while editorial work is often for non-profit news publications or limited-run magazines. While the pay is less, the circulation is large, and the art directors are often savvy, and pair the illustrator with a subject they know they’ll like. It’s rewarding, in its own way.

RH: That’s how they get you in journalism, right? The pay is less but it’s rewarding in some way. :)

RM: Yes, that and publications use a LOT more illustrations per issue, so they’re splitting their budget between a handful of artists, every day/week/month. It’s good work for illustrators just starting out. Art directors are looking for new names.

RH: Is this what you thought you’d be doing with your skills and talents?

RM: I don’t think I expected to be working in so many different fields at once. My most concrete plan when I started was the comic books. I figured I would be working part-time somewhere to make a living, not doing freelance illustration. But I was lucky to get a few good jobs soon after graduating, which snowballed.

RH: Is there more freelance illustration work now than there used to be, specifically in editorial/news?

RM: It’s hard to say. I was a bit isolated when I was in school and didn’t pay much attention to freelance illustration since it didn’t interest me as much as book/comic book/concept art work, but now it’s a big focus for me. Also, since moving to New York I’ve become much more familiar with the people in my field. The importance of social media has certainly played a key role. If the amount of illustration work has not increased, there is certainly more attention being paid to it. It’s so easy to share great artwork online.

RH: I found your work on a Tumblr roundup of GIF artists, so that’s the proof!

RM: I owe Tumblr so much, oof.

RH: What is the process for making a GIF for a news story, start to finish.

RM: I can tell you about the job I’m working on as we speak. I’m doing a piece for the NYT Sunday Review, I’ve done a few for them before, too. Today I was asked to make an image for print and for the web, with animation. Tonight I’m doing the sketch, and tomorrow and the next day I’ll do the piece. The process is not really different from a regular non-animated illustration assignment, especially with the NYT because they know my work and process. I will include a description of what I plan to animate in my notes to the art director, and they will tell me which idea they like best. Then I’ll create the image for print, and take it back into Photoshop to animate it afterwards.

RH: What are the rates for that kind of assignment? I imagine companies haven’t had standard rates set for GIFs, if they even do now?

RM: Editorial work is often in the $250/quarter page range, sometimes less. But publications will sometimes have larger budgets and can pay $400/quarter page. Also a lot of editorial work is online now, and the rates vary–anything from $100-2,000 for a banner image. I will charge an extra 30 percent for animation, or a little more or less, depending on how complicated/time-consuming it will be. But the specifics vary a lot!

RH: So I imagine something like the animated graphic you did for Medium would be a LOT more labor intensive?

RM: Yes, good example. That image was like, all animation fee. I spent a few days on the animation, after maybe one day with the plain image (spread out over a long time, since I have to schedule my freelance work around comics).

RH: Do you find it hard to set rates or negotiate with something a bit new to the digital news industry? Or are illustrations in news stories and editorial features not that new?

RM: I don’t find it difficult now that I know what my process is, how long something will probably take to make, and how much money I need to live. I base my fees around that. Digital editorial illustration isn’t that new, it was already a healthy industry when I was still in college between 2007 and 2011, at least. The animated illustrations are a bit newer, or at least they’re a fad that’s only newly been re-invented.

RH: What would you want editors who haven’t worked with animation artists, or even illustrators before, know about the process?

RM: A good piece takes time. Especially animation; it’s time-consuming. That’s what the added fee is for. An editor should understand the artist requires a clear and manageable schedule, and enough detail that they don’t need to guess the important stuff.

RH: What was the subject of the first illustration you remember making?

RM: My first illustration job right out of school was doing background art for animations. The first one I did was horrible. It was a cityscape, Hollywood-esque. Lots of buildings, no subjects. I didn’t like images with lots of straight lines, hard edges, back then. But that’s a big part of my work now, so go figure.

RH: What about the very first drawing you remember making? Did you draw as a kid?

RM: I was a huge art nerd as a kid! I don’t remember my first, but I can remember a lot of early drawings of fairies, tracings of Archie Comics, dogs?? It’s a blur. When I got older I went to an arts middle school and high school. So I’ve been an art school kid since I was about 12.

RH: The first piece of writing I remember doing was definitely about mermaids. I was in elementary school.

RM: Yesssss. Fantasy and adventure stories!

RH: For sure! I moved on to Pegasus-related stories. Then I wrote a piece about a city cat that had an adventure in the country. Big stuff.

RM: Wow, you had a wide range of interests. Hitting all the big genres. I remember a short story I wrote about twin sisters who were fairies. And a few about a band of witches.

RH: We would have been best friends, for sure.

RM: Absolutely! You wrote the stories, I would draw the pictures for them.

RH: Well, thank you so much for your time! Is there anything else you want people to know about illustrations or GIFs – or fairy twins?

RM: Thank you! This was quite fun for me. Everyone: read more comic books. Heck, draw more comics. They can teach you a lot about art and yourself. GIFs are fun to make and easy to learn, so try that, too.

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Ed. Note: Speaking of freelancing, here’s a crowd-sourced Google Doc where you can look up rates – and add your own. Plus, Julie Haslanger put out a report about what journalists make broken down by title, years of experience and a few other data points. Fill it out, share it and, if you’re brave, ask your colleagues what they make.