Back in January I told y’all that I would be in touch in two months and it’s uh…December.

Here’s the headline: as you may have guessed, Starting Out is coming to an end. I love this project, but the time off gave me the space to focus on my community in North Carolina. And deepening that connection has become a bigger priority for me. .

I’m writing this from my garden in Durham, as students at UNC finished with the fall semester. I was a first year there a little over ten years ago (oh my God!) and the environment I entered is fundamentally different from the one they’re in now.

Last spring I watched as police employed what local officials described as “aggressive” force on student protesters. The administration closed the campus’ center for social justice (though they’ve recently been allowed to reopen with reduced hours). They recently shuttered the campus’ Diversity and Inclusion office while the student body became less diverse. There are cameras on the quad now, and professors are being surveilled. To be a college student today, especially a student journalist, feels perilous.

Over the last year there’s been plenty of talk about how the students are our future, how they’ll save us. I kind of hate it. Because that’s a lot of responsibility. Students from New York to North Carolina to Gaza to Bangladesh should be able to focus on learning, making mistakes, and having fun with their friends. That they’re being asked to save the rest of us while many are struggling to survive feels like a profound failure on the part of the adults in the room.

The Starting Out newsletter has been a valuable way for me to try and support student journalists, and anyone who is coming into the world of audio with the hunger to learn and take risks. And even though I’m stepping away, I’ll always be committed to that support: I still love talking to college classes, and chatting with people about how to get their foot in the door.

I’m so grateful to everyone who has given an interview, helped with a resource guide, sent me a job posting to share, or a kind note. And of course, I adore the team at Transom who have been my collaborators.

They’ve got some exciting things going on— the Traveling Workshop is back, there’s a one month residency on offer, and a new Transom newsletter. If you’re a total beginner, I particularly recommend the Traveling Workshop!

There’s so much to be said about how we hire and pay interns, the barriers for people switching careers, the importance of collective organizing. But if you read through the archives you’ll see my opinions on all of these topics (Pay people well! Remove the barriers! Start a union!).

And if I had another wish for this industry, after the revolution comes and all our shops are unionized and there’s a clear path for newcomers to make a good living, it’s that people would feel safe enough to take risks. As a judge for Third Coast last year, I was inspired by the off-the-wall things that people were trying. It didn’t all work, and who cares? The most exciting work wasn’t an imitation of a famous podcast’s style. It was intimate, experimental work that only that creator could have made. Make more of that, please. I’ll be listening.

There are some excellent resources out there for people early in their careers, here are a few that I love:

Over the Transom, Transom’s new newsletter on Substack.

All Hear, by the wonderful Talia Augustidis

Mostly Audio Jobs, by the excellent Adrian Ma

The Early Career Audio Collective, a super helpful community

I also wanted to give you a guide to the newsletter archive.

Resources:

• How to produce an interview

• How to prepare for an interview, part one and part two

• What is a pre-interview and how do you do one?

• Advice on job hunting during a recession

• How to pitch like a pro

• What happens in a group edit?

• Understanding contracts

• Managing finances as a freelancer

• How to move from intern to full time

• My best networking advice for interns

• An introduction to unions and what they can do for you

• How to prepare for a job interview

• How to spot a healthy workplace

• My best tips for getting an NPR internship

• How to make sure you’re being paid fairly

• How to learn Hindenburg for cheap

• A guide to podcast/radio jargon

• My best advice for writing a cover letter

All the interviews are on Transom!

Kathy Tu and Tobin Low on the problem with internships

Josh Gwynn: Making the show you want to hear

Keisha TK Dutes: making a career change into audio

Anna Sale: getting started where you are (even if you don’t live in a big city)

Misha Euceph on fighting for ownership over your work

Priska Neely: navigating relationships with supervisors and dealing with layoffs

Noel King on finding that new gig

Chris Steadman: telling stories when it’s personal

Rebecca Ibarra on making tough, professional judgment calls

Rachel Ward, Soraya Shockley, and Meg Driscoll on organizing a union

Daniel Alarcón: dreaming up the ideal audio world

B.A. Parker: getting started without audio experience

Laura Mayer: What hiring managers don’t tell you

Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger: staying fresh while churning out shows

Shima Oliaee: behind the scenes on Dolly Parton’s America

James Kim: Working as an indie creator

Ariana Martinez: standing up for the people behind the mic

Alana Casanova Burgess: working in two languages

Stephanie Foo: The power of a great pitch

Jonathan Menjivar: What people get wrong about being a producer

Kelsey McKinney and Alex Sujong Laughlin on workplace gossip

Mitra Kaboli: red flags and how to spot them

Claire Murishima: life as an early-career broadcast producer

Regina Barber: science communication in audio

Whether you’ve shared this newsletter with your students, forwarded it to a friend, or turned to it for help with your cover letter, I’m so grateful that so many of you have spent time with this work over the years. Thank you for reading.

<3

Alice

This time of year, when there’s not a ton of sunlight, just mud and rain, I dig into my gardening books. I’m rereading Climate Change Gardening for the South right now and came across a passage that resonated with me personally: 

“Many native plants have a built-in system for dealing with drought, which is to go temporarily dormant..they just stay put and wait it out.

This temporary dormancy should be respected rather than challenged, which is what happens when we overwater, fertilize and encourage new unsupportable growth. 

Can we see dormancy as a remarkable example of nature’s ingenuity and appreciate the fact that our plants are taking care of themselves in their own way? When conditions are favorable again, the dormant plants will perk up and look more vibrant.”

The author of this book has definitely been to therapy. This passage hit home because conditions in my life have changed, and I need to attend to those needs rather than trying to push past my limits. That’s meant taking a long walk every afternoon and letting go of routines like doing all the dishes before bed.

It also means that I’m going to pause on publishing this newsletter for a bit. I will be back in your inbox in April with more updates. 

In the meantime, you can find job postings and other opportunities in Transom’s All Hear, and in Adrian Ma’s ever useful Google Doc. And as always, Transom is a goldmine of interviews and resources. 

And hey, here are some of the gardening books I’m loving right now: 

Climate Change Gardening for the South, by Barbara J. Sullivan

Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings, by Mary Siisip Geniusz

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy

The Complete Gardener, by Monty Don

Botany for Gardeners, by Brian Capon

TTYL,

Alice

It’s a digital care package for the overwhelmed college student, but could be useful to anyone dragging themselves over the finish line this year. I’m one of those people, tbh.

I made you a collection of my strategies for hard times, videos to help with focus, advice for stealing food from the dining hall, and permission to put your work down and just go to bed. 

Speaking of which, I’m taking a break and will be back with new issues of Starting Out in February.

There’s still time to share your feedback with me and help shape the next season of this newsletter. I’ve gotten three responses so far (embarrassing for me!). I promise it takes two minutes to fill out and will help me so much!

💌 Your Care Package 💌

Listening

• Videos like these really help me focus. 

• These episodes of Ologies always make me feel better.

• This series from Las Culturistas should win a Peabody, tbh. 

Eating/Drinking

• This collection of easy to read (and make) recipes from Great British Bakeoff’s Ruby Tandoh.

• If you have a meal plan, fill your backpack with tupperware for all your late night meal needs. And swipe in a friend who doesn’t have a meal plan for a year of good karma.

• Don’t go spending $6 on a bag of Doritos! Aldi has the cheapest snack food out there! This is not sponsored, but Aldi CEO, if you’re reading this I would totally do SponCon for you. 

• Skip Starbucks and visit a new-to-you local coffee shop as a study spot! 

Reading 

• You are probably already reading a ton for school, so I’m not going to recommend any Big Serious Books. Read some fan fiction! Revisit a novel you loved as a teenager! 

• Maybe this is showing my age (old) but I love the Ask a Manager Archives, a true collection of bizarre human behavior. 

  ---

Psst, I’m working on a story about what early career people are doing now that many internship programs have ended or been paused. If you’re facing this conundrum, I’d love to talk! Just reply to this email and we can talk!

Watching 

• I love these video essays (bonus points if you listen to these while doing your dishes/laundry).

  • This is a truly wild story: Msscribe: The Harry Potter Fandom's Greatest Con-Artist - When Posting Goes Wrong 

  • This is canon: An appropriately unhinged recap of Pretty Little Liars (Part 1) 

  • I love a post-mortem of a failed TV show: Gossip Girl 2021: What The Hell Happened? 

  • I do not care about Disney but am obsessed with this video: Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History

• 20 Vines That Should Win Popular Film at the Oscars 

Unsolicited Advice

• Download this app to help you stay off your phone 

• My sister gave me this advice when I was a first year and she was so right: Don’t stay up late studying the night before an exam. If it’s 9 pm the night before, you’ve learned everything you’re realistically going to learn. The best thing you can do now is get a good night’s sleep. 

• Try not to get in your head about how well you are doing vs. your friends and classmates. College is already hard enough, your relationships with your friends are more important than grades. You’re all going to be fine. 

• If you think you’re going to need an extension on a paper, ask sooner rather than later. In my experience professors are surprisingly flexible with this if you ask nicely. 

• It’s all going to be fine, C’s truly do get degrees. 

  ---

Classifieds

Internships

Newsroom Intern, The Pulse, WHYY ($15/hr)

Media Arts Education Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Major Gifts & Donor Relations Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Fundraising Operations Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Public Information Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Feet in 2 World Intern (Part-time) ($15/hr)

Fellowships

First Amendment Fellow, Reveal 

Reflect America Fellow, NPR ($36.05/hr)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Editorial Assistant, Higher Ground Audio ($50,000 - $62,400/yr)

Editorial Assistant, Freakonomics, Freakonomics Radio Network ($45,000-$65,000/yr)

Associate Producer, Entertainment, Sirius XM ($42,000 - $48,000/yr)

Associate Producer (Part-time), Fantasy Sports Radio, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)

Podcast Associate Producer, WHYY (No pay information shared)

Bonus!

Producer, Freakonomics, Freakonomics Radio Network ($90,000-100,000/yr). 

Production Assistant, Wonder Media Network ($50,000/yr) 

Junior Producer, Wonder Media Network ($60,000/yr) 

Apply for New Voices Amplify, an 8-week marketing accelerator for independent creators who have an existing podcast and are ready to take it to the next level.

Spooked Story Scout, Snap Judgement ($1500/month plus bonuses for successful pitches)

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Some end of the year reading on the podcast/radio industry: 

• A great “why I left” essay on Pushkin Industries.

• Excellent constructive criticism on a celebrity podcast. See also, this shady (and correct) tweet.

• Alex Sujong Laughlin on why RSS feeds matter.

• I miss the Center for Documentary Studies!

Coming up...

I’m taking a month off, I’ll see you in February!

In this issue I spoke with NPR’s scientist in residence and Short Wave co-host Regina Barber, who made the leap from academia to media. She has a PhD in physics and taught physics and astronomy at Western Washington University. She also led WWU’s efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented students and faculty in STEM. If you’re making a career change into podcasts and radio, you’re gonna want to check this interview out. 

You might also notice that the classifieds section of the newsletter looks a little bit different. In the past, I’ve listed only job postings that were involved in the podcast/radio production process. 

Then I had a conversation with an intern at my job who works in the digital department -- working with Wordpress, writing copy, and doing so many other things that help get stories to listeners. Talking to her I realized that podcast production internships are super competitive, and for a lot of people, any role at a podcast/radio company is a step in the right direction. So I’m listing any internship or fellowship, to encourage as many points of entry into the industry as possible.

Alice: Do you have any advice for academics who are interested in making a podcast or want to dip their toes into that?

Regina: I would tell them your university has resources. There's probably a radio station. There's probably a TV station. 

There are media people at your university that are dying to talk to a scientist. It's the easiest way, and so find them, find the press officer. 

If you want to be on the radio, go talk to the radio people. If you want to make short videos, go talk to the video people. If you want to write, talk to the press officer and see if there is something that he or her or they need for a newsletter. There's so many opportunities at a university.

There's so many resources that you don't know even exist that you have access to. There is a rental place at Western where you can just rent cameras or rent a frickin typewriter. You can rent a sewing machine! You can rent a recorder!

Read more

hi there!

💗 if you’re enjoying this issue, share it with a friend!

💌 and if you want to help shape the future of Starting Out, take this short survey!

Resource

I hope y’all have enjoyed this season of the newsletter’s guide to interviewing! If you missed it, I covered pre-interviewing, writing a prep (this was a two parter!), and producing an interview. 

Of course, none of this is exhaustive, so I wanted to spotlight some of my favorite Transom resources around interviewing: 

• Tips for Interviewing Shy People (Especially Nuns!) feat. Erika Lantz and Elin Lantz Lesser.

• On Interviewing A Racist feat. Reveal’s Al Letson.

• Interviewing with Your Skeptical Brain feat. my beloved former co-worker Sally Helm.

• Treat an Interview Like a Relationship by Anna Sale (a former Starting Out interviewee!) 

• Trauma Informed Interviewing by me! 

• Losing Control in an Interview by Erica Heilman 

• The Burning Question feat. Audie Cornish 

• Leave in the Question feat. Sean Cole

Classifieds

Internships

Newsroom Intern, The Pulse, WHYY ($15/hr)

Media Arts Education Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Major Gifts & Donor Relations Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Fundraising Operations Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Public Information Intern, WHYY ($15/hr)

Intern, Radio Reporter, Minnesota Public Radio, American Public Media Group ($18/hr)

Intern, Media Production and Operations, Minnesota Public Radio, APMG ($18/hr) 

Intern, Programming, The Current, APMG ($18/hr)

D.C. Bureau Intern, Marketplace, APMG ($18/hr) 

U.S. Summer Audio Internship, Financial Times ($16/hr)

Production Intern, Wonder Media Network ($17/hr) 

Fellowships

Fellow, Marketplace, APMG ($18/$23/hr)

Spencer Fellowship for Education Reporting, Columbia Journalism School

Residential fellows receive an $85,000 scholarship for personal living expenses. The scholarship is dispensed in two halves at the beginning of each semester. In addition, each fellow receives $7,500 for the year in project expenses, also dispensed in two halves. Non-residential fellows receive a $43,000 stipend and $7,500 project related expenses, each dispensed in two halves.

Reflect Alabama Fellow, WBHM ($15/hr)

Reveal First Amendment Fellow, (No pay information shared)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Podcast Associate Producer, WHYY (No pay information shared)

Associate Producer, Entertainment, Sirius XM ($42,000 - $48,000/yr)

Associate Producer, YMH Studios, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)

Bonus!

Street Team Assistant, WHYY (No pay information shared)

Partner Manager, Podglomerate ($60,000-$75,000/yr)

KPBS Assistant News Producer/Penner Fellow Intern, ($16.30/hr) 

Production Assistant, Wonder Media Network ($50,000/yr) 

Junior Producer, Wonder Media Network ($60,000/yr) 

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Regina Recommends these Short Wave episodes:

• Star Trek is back. We look at the physics 

• Recurring UTIs: The infection we keep secretly getting

• Beyond Condoms - Why don’t we have Male contraception?

• Venus And The 18th Century Space Race

p.s. I love: Working in the backyard with my dog / Love Island Games was made in a lab for my enjoyment / Wish I could live at the Centa… / I do not love the death of Jezebel but I will celebrate their work! / Not going on Instagram for days at a time 

Next month: The return of my final exam care package, plus the origin story of Starting Out.

I’ve got a fun issue for y’all this month, but first, I have one question and one favor to ask: 

The question: who do you want me to interview for the next season of the newsletter? Is there a producer, reporter, host, sound designer who you think has wisdom to share for early career makers? 

Leave a comment

The favor: if you’re an established audio maker and see your workplace in the classifieds section with a “no pay information included” next to that posting, I’d love it if you would nudge your workplace on that. Pay transparency is important for equity, especially early in your career. TYSM <3

This month I have a guide to producing interviews, and a really fun interview with NPR’s Claire Murashima. 

My interview with Claire has so many firsts for Starting Out: 

• The first in person interview! Claire is from the same part of North Carolina as me, so I caught her on a visit home and we drank tea on my couch while my dog snuggled up to her. A very cozy vibe.

• The first interview with someone who works primarily in broadcast. This is honestly a bit embarrassing for me — broadcast is such a big part of our industry and I can’t believe it took so long for me to talk to a radio person! 

• The first interview with someone who is early in their career! This is the main reason I reached out to Claire. She’s so talented and is doing fresh, fun work. Talking with her helped me understand better what it’s like to be early career today. 

Alice: What are new things that you want to explore or experiment with? 

Claire: For Father's Day, I did my first non-narrated piece, which means that you ask questions, and then you cut out all of the interviewer questions, and it's just the guest talking. 

That was really fun because it felt like someone telling their story in their own way, I kind of want to do more of that. What else? I want to do more short form with NPR, I want to do more editorial TikToks for them. But I also do want to be on the radio. I think a lot of people on our team do, especially the young producers.

Alice: What do you think are the challenges facing early-career producers right now? 

Claire: My gosh. I'm not sure. It's hard to get our ideas heard. Sometimes, someone more senior will say an idea and it'll just automatically go on the radio, which is fair because I definitely don't have decades of experience, but it's just hard getting our things on the radio.

There's also a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves for pitching. Some people on our team are really good at pitching and that can make me feel like if my pitch is not excellent, then why even try?

So, that's hard. Also working overnight shifts. My schedule changes about each month. There's the 9 am shift, the 3 pm shift, the midnight shift, the 3:30 am shift, and the 5 am shift, the 6 am shift, the Sunday 11 am shift and those are the planned ones. Sometimes they need you to start at 6 pm for a day, and it's hard to have a social group and hobbies and just balance in life, but I'm kind of making the sacrifice of: I'm going to do this in my early 20s, and then one day I won't have to do it. 

Read more

Resources

Finally after all this preparation, it’s time to do the interview! 

Before the interview itself you have to do a bit of housekeeping:

First, send the interviewee a reminder about the interview the day before, with all the details they’ll need for the recording. These days there are so many ways to record an interview (in person, via tape sync, in a studio, over video conferencing software) so think through the steps required for whatever method you’re using.

If the interview is happening online, make sure to take into account the source’s comfort level when it comes to navigating the internet. Some might require more coaching, so budget time for that. 

Then, talk with your host/interviewer about how they prefer to be produced in an interview. The methods you’re using to communicate with them will vary based on the medium you’re using for the interview. 

Here are some ways I’ve seen this done over the years: 

In person: 

• The interviewer, who is in a studio, has their laptop in front of them with a Google Doc of questions. The producer communicates with them from the control room.

• The interviewer is in the studio with their laptop and list of questions, but the producer communicates with them via instant message (whether that’s Slack, the chat box in a Google Doc or, God forbid, Microsoft Teams). 

• The interviewer does the interview without much producer intervention, but at the end of the interview, the producer jumps in to give the interviewer additional questions that, for whatever reason, need to be asked. 

• The interview takes place out “in the field” aka not in a studio, where the producer isn’t able to privately communicate with the interviewer. Advance planning is necessary to decide how much time to spend on different topics. At the end of the interview the producer may jump in to ask additional questions. 

Online: 

• The producer communicates with the host in the Google Doc, or via Slack while the interview takes place. This is the only way to do this when you’re producing online. 

Okay but what is the producer doing during the interview? 

Again, it depends on the needs of your production and your relationship with your host. But here’s a list of the kinds of things I might do during an interview: 

• Before an interview starts make sure BOTH parties are rolling tape. The worst can actually happen if you don’t check!

• Cross off questions as the host asks them.

• If the host didn’t ask the guest how to say their first and last name, always make sure at the end to get a pronouncer. And to check in about your guest’s pronouns.

• Take notes on your favorite moments, the ones that are funny, emotional, or otherwise engaging. 

• Keep an ear out for moments where an anecdote or story starts in the middle or end and not the beginning, and gently ask the host or guest to restart that answer. 

• Keep an eye on the time and if we’re running low on time, tell the host to prioritize the “must do” questions. Also, evaluate which questions are “must do.”

• Suggest follow up questions for the host to ask the guest if we need more detail. 

• Nudge the host to move on if the interview is going off track or a tangent has gone on too long. 

• For some interviews, check facts in real time to make sure the host is correct in their questioning. 

• Keep an ear out for anything that might mess with the audio quality (a barking dog, construction, etc). 

• Come up with alternate questions if a particular line of inquiry isn’t working. 

I think about it like being a wingwoman. Your job is to grease the wheels, so that the host and guest have the best conversation possible, but to do it in such a way that the host isn’t distracted or overwhelmed by you, and the guest forgets you’re even there. 

Sometimes a host will go rogue and you are tasked with getting them back on track while the interview is going. This is one of the more challenging parts of the job. Here are some strategies you can employ, featuring some of my favorite producers: 

• Message the host the question you need them to ask, along with the reason you want them to ask it. 

• From producer/host Zakiya Gibbons: “Sometimes if there was time at the end of the interview I’d hop on the mic and join the convo and be like “Hey, producer Zakiya here! Before we totally wrap I just have a couple follow ups,” and then ask the Q’s that weren’t asked just to at least get the tape. If this is a pattern maybe you could build more time into the interview for you to get what you need in the end.”

• From JT Green of Molten Heart: “Post interview, call for a quick post mortem with the host. Bring up that we needed to get TK but I realized we didn’t because of TK tangent (to make aware of the behavior that you would like corrected). Offer a solution (capture in follow interview or assess if the lost questions are necessary for the story and retool).

After the interview

• Make sure you’ve secured the audio files for all parties involved! 

• Inform the guest of the next steps in the process, so they know when to expect to hear from me. 

Thanks to the very talented Amy Pedulla for her help with this resource <3

What’s your best advice for producing an interview?

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Internships

Intern, Radio Reporter, Minnesota Public Radio, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, Media Production and Operations, Minnesota Public Radio, APMG ($18/hr) 

Intern, Programming, The Current, APMG ($18/hr)

D.C. Bureau Intern, Marketplace, APMG ($18/hr) 

Investigative Intern, APM Reports, APMG ($18/hr) 

Podcast Intern, Marketplace, APMG ($18/hr) (You’d be working with me!) 

Fall Internship, Audacy Boston (No pay information shared)

Intern (Latham, NY) (Part-time), iHeartMedia ($14.20 - $15.62/hr)

Intern (Rochester, NY) (Part-time), iHeartMedia ($14.20 - $15.62/hr)

Fellowships

Politics Fellow, Minnesota Public Radio, APMG ($18-$23/hr) 

Fellow, Marketplace, APMG ($18/$23/hr)

Reflect Alabama Fellow, WBHM ($15/hr)

Minow Fellowship in Journalism Excellence, WTTW ($18/hr)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Podcast Associate Producer, Digital Studios, WHYY (No pay information included) 

Radio Production Assistant (Part time), (No pay information included)

Associate Producer (Part-time), Urban View, Sirius XM (No pay information included)

Digital Associate Producer, ESPN Daily, ESPN ($47,800.00 - $64,100.00/yr)

Associate Producer, ABC News Live ($59,100- $81,100/yr)

Part-Time Production Assistant, ESPN (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, iHeartMedia (​​$17.30 - $23.79/hr)

Bonus!

KPBS Assistant News Producer/Penner Fellow Intern, ($16.30/hr) 

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Claire Recommends

• I’m loving NPR’s new Body Electric series. I've been following Manoush Zomorodi's reporting for years on Note to Self, Zig Zag and now TED Radio Hour. I like how she draws interesting conversations out of people and my brain is always pinging with ideas whenever I listen to her things.

• It’s been a very pop-culture heavy summer! I listened to a lot of Into It from Vulture and ICYMI from Slate.

• I've also been listening to a podcast called My Sister's Cancer which I actually wrote about! 

• Embodied from WUNC, The Gray Area from Vox and No Stupid Questions from Freakonomics are also in my current rotation. 

P.S. I love…

🤪 this episode of Like A Virgin on fanfiction

🌸 deadheading dead flowers at public parks to save seeds for spring

🐶 how The 13th Step handled sources with loud pets (affectionately!)

🏃 the new Truth Club record

🌳 this Maren Morris song that encapsulates how I feel about this industry sometimes

🥘 having some friends over to make food for the community fridge

Coming up...

Next month: NPR’s Regina Barber on making the jump from academia to podcasting. 

Starting Out will always be a free resource. If you want to support this work you can donate to Transom. The newsletter is edited by Jennifer Jerrett and Sydney Lewis. Interviews are transcribed with help from Elizabeth Kauma.

Maybe my subconscious is feeling resigned to the waves of bad industry news, but in my waking hours I don’t feel dejected. That’s in large part due to the fight against layoffs at New York Public Radio.

ICYMI: New York Public Radio CEO LaFontaine Oliver announced last week that due to a drop in donations and advertising, 12 percent of staff will be laid off. Staffers will find out if they still have jobs later this week.

Unlike the people in my dream, standing around on the deck, watching water rush in, the NYPR Union has taken action. They’ve launched a petition asking executives to say no to layoffs and explore options that would preserve jobs and ensure the fiscal health of the organization. They also shared this presentation which makes the argument that layoffs will hurt the company longterm.

Here’s why I think you should sign that petition:

• It takes 30 seconds and costs nothing!

• NYPR executives’ annual bonuses are more than I made in a year while I was working at WNYC. They’ve forgone those bonuses this year. But they could do more, like taking a pay cut. Other nonprofit news executives are taking a pay cut, why can’t NYPR’s?

• Seriously, look the executive pay on page nine.

• I often ask people in my interviews what kind of industry they want for people who are just starting out. Here’s my answer: I want the kind of industry that explores every possible option before cutting people off from their income and health insurance.

• I love my former co-workers at WNYC and I want to keep listening to the work they produce.

I hope you’ll take a moment to sign the petition.

Thanks for reading all of this. I’ll be back with a normal issue of Starting Out later this month.

<3

Alice

Lately I’ve been trying to make a habit of reaching out to people when I love their work. Not because I want a job from them or their co-sign on a new project or anything else. Just to say, this was great, it meant something to me. 

I realize that there’s so many times where I privately adore a particular piece of writing or sound design choice, when I could just reach out to that person and say, “Hey, I loved that.” 

This goes for friendships too. I was talking to my friend Jules recently about wanting to express love for my friends on a more regular basis, no big occasion necessary. Just, “I’m so glad we met, you’re the best.”

She said that whenever she gets a text like that from a friend, it somehow comes at the perfect time. A message like, “I’m really proud of you” when she’s feeling particularly self-critical. It works that way for me, too.  And I think that when you send that energy into the world, with no expectations attached, it has a way of coming back to you. 

Anyway, with that in mind, I’m adding a new little feature at the end of the newsletter to highlight things that I love. Read to the end and tell me what you think! 

But first, read this interview with Welcome to Provincetown’s Mitra Kaboli. I love this show, it’s intimate, funny, weird, and doesn’t shy away from the contradictions of its subject. It’s the perfect listen for the last hot days of the year. Mitra and I also talked about making a career as a freelancer, workplace red flags and why you should listen to your tape. 

Alice: You tweeted something like: "I want a panel at a conference where you talk about the red flags for a job." Can you say more about that?

Mitra: There are so many weird, shady companies who don't know what they're doing, want a podcast, and don't even know what that means. I had so many near misses in my career that at the time were devastating because I needed work so bad. But then, I think that was a blessing because there were a lot of red flags. 

Alice: Can you give me some examples?

Mitra: Honestly, when I see a new production company pop up, where none of the people who work there have any sort of radio experience, that's a red flag. Frankly, anything with celebrity is a red flag for me personally because I don't want to manage a celebrity, and celebrities famously won't give you a lot of time. They get paid bazonkas money for an hour of their time, and that's all you get with them. So when I look at the types of shows that they have –– like if they're wanting something doc style, which is what I work on mostly, and all they have are chat shows, that's weird. 

Read more

How to Write A Prep (Part Two)

Welcome back! Last month I published the first half of a guide to writing an interview prep, so if you missed that, I recommend checking it out. 

Now that you’ve written all the questions you can possibly think of, it’s time to start narrowing them down. 

Questions I’d cut:

Any, “yes or no” or other closed ended questions: 

Yes or no questions are self explanatory (“Were you fired?”) but it’s possible to write a close- ended question that is not a yes or no question. 

For example: 

“Did you feel sad after you lost your job?” There’s a chance they could elaborate with a beautiful answer, but it’s more likely they’ll say, “Yeah, I was really sad,” which doesn’t feel very evocative. 

Overly broad questions: 

If you are looking for a broad answer, it’s fine to ask broad questions! But if you want to build a scene or learn something specific about someone, specificity is your friend. 

“How did you feel after you lost your job?” is a broad question. The person answering could talk about their immediate reaction, or how they felt later that night, or how they feel about it a year later. 

“After your boss said you were fired, what kinds of thoughts were running through your head?” is specific. “When did the news of your job loss really sink in?” is specific. These questions place us in a particular time frame. 

Questions that contain the answer in them:

This is my number one pet peeve as a producer! When you give the guest their answer as you ask the question it leaves little for them to do but say, “Yep!”  It may prove to your guest that you did your research, but it doesn’t do much for the audience. 

Here’s an example: 

“The Coffee Shop Union released a statement saying that you wanted your coworker who was fired to be reinstated immediately. Why did you publish that?” 

There’s a good chance that the answer is in the question, they wanted their co-worker to be reinstated. 

You could instead ask: “Your union published a statement after your coworker was fired, what were the main points of that statement?” 

This way they’re putting the statement in their own words. You could even ask them to read the statement aloud and then prompt them to explain more about the process of writing it. 

I know it’s tempting to show the interviewee that you did your homework (you read their statement, you did your research!) but it doesn’t serve the audience or the interview. If you’re worried about coming off as not knowledgeable on the subject matter, you can always tell your interviewee before the start of the interview, “I’m going to be asking you some questions about your work that may seem basic or indicate that I haven’t done my research, but I have. But I also need  to be a surrogate for a listener who might know nothing about this.”

The questions I put in every prep:

After I’ve written and narrowed down my questions, I add in my default questions. These are the ones that I use, but everyone does this differently, so no stress if they don’t work for you. 

My “default” questions/statements: 

• This interview isn’t live, so if you are talking about something and realize you want to rephrase, clarify, or start the sentence over again, go for it. 

• This is to set the person at ease. It may seem obvious to you that the interview isn’t live, but most people don’t do interviews on a regular basis and don’t know that! 

• Depending on the interview, I’ll let people know that if they don’t want to talk about a particular topic or answer a question they can let me know and we’ll move on.

• I do not add this into interviews with people in positions in powerful institutions. Those people are media trained, and will not answer questions perfectly well without my help. If they’re uncomfortable because I asked them a difficult question, that’s okay with me. 

• I do say it when I’m interviewing a regular person, who is speaking about events in their own life that are sensitive. 

• An important note with this question overall is that if you make a promise like this, you have to keep it or you’re going to lose the trust of your interviewee. 

• At the end of the interview I ask if there’s anything we didn’t discuss that they think I should know. 

• I also let them know what the next steps in the process will be, from sending their audio recording to the fact checking process. 

One last quality check before you send off your prep to your editor and colleagues. 

If you have time, I recommend making a rough outline of the story as you imagine it will play out. Obviously you don’t know all the details yet (that’s what the interview is for) but between your research and your pre-interviews, you should have an idea of the general contours. 

Once you have that outline, look at it alongside your prep and make sure that for every big scene you’re hoping to create there’s a question in the prep that will get you the tape you need. That way you don’t end up in the writing stage thinking, “I wish I had some tape to fill out this scene!” 

That’s all I have for now — what’s your best advice for writing a prep? 

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Internships

Digital Content Intern, (Part-time) Kansas City PBS ($15/hr)

Audio Producer Intern, The Washington Post, ($750/week)

Fellowships

Minow Fellowship in Journalism Excellence, WTTW ($18/hr)

Fall Internship, Audacy Boston (No pay information included)

Reflect Alabama Fellowship, WBHM ($15/hr)

Pulliam Journalism Fellowship, IndyStar ($650/week)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, NBA Radio (part-time) ($18/hr)

Assistant News Producer, KPBS ($16.30/hr)

Associate Producer, KFTK St. Louis, Audacy (No pay information included)

Assistant Producer, Audacy Chicago (part-time) (No pay information included)

Production Assistant 

News Production Assistant, (Part-time), KYW, Audacy, (No pay information included)

KNX Part-Time News Production Assistant, KNX, Audacy ($16.78/hr)

Part-time Production Assistant, ESPN (No pay information included)

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Mitra Recommends

• The Girlfriends

• The Dig Presents

• Sounds Gay

• Hang Up

💗 P.S. I love 💗

Phoebe Wang’s sound design on The Retrievals goes crazy / This woman is a genius /  “Ayo and Rachel Are Single” is criminally underrated (the police are on their way!) / Worker owned media is just better / Finally some good podcast merch.

Next month: NPR’s Claire Murishima on surviving the night shift at Morning Edition. 

I’m going to the conference as part of the MJ Bear Fellowship cohort, and am going to be learning a lot about how to make this newsletter more helpful and engaging for all of y’all. If you’re going to be at the conference, come say hi! 

This month’s interview is so much fun: I got to gab with host Kelsey McKinney and producer Alex Sujong Laughlin of Normal Gossip, the hit podcast from Defector. Some things you should know about my relationship with Alex and Kelsey: 

• Kelsey gave me this excellent advice when I got laid off for the first time: if you’re going to drink, don’t drink something you love, because you’ll associate that beverage with this moment in your life. I had some whiskey.

• Alex witnessed a moment of profound digestive distress while on a run around Prospect Park and made me laugh about it instead of clowning me, which she would have been well within her rights to do. 

They’ve seen me through some wild times. We had a lot of fun talking about the success of the show, and the role gossip plays in your early career.

Alice: How has gossip impacted your careers?

Kelsey: I've actually never thought about this in my entire life. My first journalism job in general, if you can call it that, was working as the Life and Arts Editor at The Daily Texan, which was a job.

I went to the University of Texas, and that's the newspaper there. It was a job I got solely because other people were gossiping about a blog I had written for the Harry Ransom Center, which was an on-campus library, and then they just poached me into the paper. So really, it's gossip's fault that I'm here at all. Then, famously, my very dear friend Aleks Chan lied to me: "Yeah, you can be the editor of a 20-person staff for The Daily Texan. It'll only take five hours a week." Lie, it took 35.

It's fine. Whatever. I loved it. It was great. Then I feel like every job I've had has been fake in that they were all startup media companies, and so I had to learn of their existence, which was kind of gossip. I worked at Vox – you had to know about Project X happening to get people even to send you the link to apply. Then I worked for Fusion, which was famously gossipy, and then I was freelance. Then the Deadspin, Gawker universe famously is... What's the phrase? Today's gossip, tomorrow's news. 

Now It's my whole job.

Alex: Yeah, my route has been different from Kelsey's, though parallel, because we both went to big state schools in the south and both applied for the same first job, but she got it and I didn't. That's where the gossip begins. I hated her. 

Kelsey: That's why we're enemies.

Read more

Resource guide

Hey y’all! If you’re new, here’s the deal: this “season” of the newsletter I’m doing resource guides on a theme: interviewing for narrative podcasts. But if you’re not a producer for that kind of show (maybe you work in broadcast, or do a chat show) I hope you’ll still get something out of this, I think that a lot of the same principles apply. 

This month: Writing a prep (jargon for a question list) for an interview! Since there’s sooo much to say on this, I’m splitting up the guide into two parts. All of this is written in first person, because it’s how I approach this, but it’s by no means a complete guide. Share your tips for interview preps in the comments!

Leave a comment

Prepping for your prep

Research

If the interviewee is not a public figure, I’ll do most of my research in the pre-interview. That being said, you may be surprised by the media appearances that an average person might have done. So it’s always worth searching just in case. 

If the person being interviewed is in the public eye, I do my research. That typically goes beyond basic social media and Wikipedia. Here’s a checklist:

• Has this person appeared on a podcast before? Listen to those interviews. 

• Have they given a TED Talk or done other speaking engagements that might be on YouTube? Watch some of those. 

• Read any other interviews findable online. 

Then I ask myself: what do I wish other interviewers had asked about? Are there questions this person seems tired of answering, or answers I’ve heard across several interviews that sound rehearsed? 

The benefit of this research is that: 

1. I won’t ask the guest a question they’ve already been asked a million times. At minimum, I can at least ask it in a different way.

2. I can go into the interview already knowing the basic contours of their story. I’ll get that information because I’ve either pre-interviewed them well or done a lot of research, or some combination of the two. 

Drafting questions

There’s a couple ways to do this. Sometimes I write down as much as I possibly can think of, without much self-editing. The goal is simply to get things on paper. Then, I shape and revise that list.

Other times I’ll make a rough outline of the story as I know it, and reverse engineer questions based on the plot points that will be in the story. 

Think of it like a baking project. I know that at the end of the day I want to bake a cake, but first I have to make sure I have all of the ingredients. In this very clumsy metaphor, the cake is your story. The tape from the interviewee are major ingredients. You can only gather those ingredients by asking the right questions. 

So if I’m hoping to create a vivid scene of two coworkers arguing in their break room I’ll want to ask questions like: 

• Describe the break room, what did it smell/look/feel like? 

• How did you know X was upset with you? 

• What were you saying to each other?

• What thoughts were running through your head when X started to yell?

A few kinds of interview questions

There are three types of questions that can help you get started.

Of course there are infinite types of interview questions, but I’m trying to avoid writing a whole book) soI’m going to give some sample questions here, based on a hypothetical interview with a (fictional) barista who unionized her workplace, which I’m calling Coffee Shop. 

Factual 

Obviously you’re looking for fact-based answers to all your questions — what I mean by this is that these questions help situate you in time and place. 

Examples: 

• When did you start working at Coffee Shop? 

• How many people voted for the union? How many against? 

• When did you feel the tide turn for the union? 

• How often did you meet with management to discuss the contract?

Scene Building

These are questions that put the listener in a place and time and feeling. You can identify potential scenes by looking at your notes on the story (notes from your pre-interview or research) and asking, “What moments are the most action packed and/or decisive? When does a “character” make a decision or have a realization? When does conflict come to a head? When does their perception of a situation change? When do they lose control?” 

Examples: 

• You said you were on break when you heard your hours got cut…can you take me through that moment? 

• What kinds of things would you typically see in the break room? 

  • What did it smell like? 

  • How did you usually feel when you went back there, was it a relaxing space?

• What thoughts were running through your head as you drove to work on the day of the vote?

• What was the first thing you noticed when you got to work on the day of the union vote? 

• How did you feel when you heard [coworker] was thinking about voting no? 

  • How did you hear that news, was it over text, in person?

• Take me through the morning of the union vote in as much detail as you can, I promise I won’t get bored. (This line, “as much detail as you can, I promise I won’t get bored,” is something I learned from Criminal’s Phoebe Judge and I think it’s genius.)

Character Building

These are questions that will help you understand something about the person as a “character.” They illuminate how that person sees the world, themselves and people around them. These questions can also help the listener understand the themes of the story.

Examples: 

• What impact did your parents' jobs have on how you thought about work/labor?

• What kept you going when the organizing process got hard? 

• Union organizing can involve difficult conversations, is that something you were nervous about? 

• How did unionizing change the way you thought about your job? 

• When did you start thinking of yourself as a leader in this process? 

Do you think this guide would be useful for a friend? Share it with them.

Share

Next month: Editing your questions, what not to ask, and the questions I put in every prep. 

Classifieds

Internships

Apprentice News Clerk, AirTalk, American Public Media Group, ($18.66/hr)

Fall Internship, Audacy Boston, (No pay information shared)

Ray Didinger Internship, Audacy Philadelphia, (No pay information shared)

New York Market Intern, Audacy, ($15-$20/hr)

Programming Intern, The Block, Audacy ($15/hr)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, Pipedreams, American Public Media Group ($22.70 - $27.20/hr)

Other opportunities

The Build Grant, Broccoli Productions. This grand funds $1,000 for five individuals looking to build their audio projects and careers. 

Submit to the Resonate Pitch Party for a shot at $10,000 towards making your pilot.

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Alex and Kelsey Recommend

• Scam Goddess

• Classy

• ICYMI 

• Hang Up

• Game of Roses

• Love to See It 

• Who? Weekly

Coming up...

Next month: Welcome to Provincetown host Mitra Kaboli on reporting, sound design, and why you should maybe not be relying so much on Descript.

Starting Out will always be a free resource. If you want to support this work you can donate to Transom. The newsletter is edited by Jennifer Jerrett and Sydney Lewis. Interviews are transcribed with help from Elizabeth Kauma.

Hey y’all! We’ve got a bunch of new subscribers, so I thought I’d do a little housekeeping! 

I’m Alice, a podcast producer in Durham, North Carolina. I write this newsletter in partnership with Transom, the best training ground for radio and podcast makers, no matter where you are in your career.

If you’re new, there’s a huge archive of resource guides to help you build skills and interviews with some of my favorite creators. 

And it’s all free! But if this newsletter has helped you get a job or just made you feel a little more confident, consider donating to Transom to help support this work! 

Also, I’m going to be on an episode of the excellent Work Appropriate, a podcast about (what else!) work, hosted by Anne Helen Peterson and produced by Melody Rowell. We talked about the challenges of being early in your career and why interns should always be paid. Keep an eye on your feed and let me know what you think! 

Okay, on to this month’s newsletter! I spoke with Jonathan Menjivar, a producer/reporter/host (he is very talented!) whose work I love. He was a longtime This American Life producer, known for his scoring and is now a Senior Producer at Pineapple Street Studios, hosting a new show called Classy. It’s all about the uncomfortable and surprising ways that class impacts our lives. 

But before all of that, Jonathan was an unpaid intern, hustling to turn opportunities into an actual job. We talked about how things have changed for early career producers, and how people often misunderstand the role of the producer. 

Jonathan Menjivar knows how hard it is to break into radio

Alice: You started your career when unpaid internships were the norm, and I'm curious, how do you think that changed your trajectory?

Jonathan: It mostly made it so that I was spinning my wheels for a really long time. Podcasting didn't exist. Public radio wasn't as cool as it is now.

I was completely self-taught too. I was doing anything I could. I started at KCRW as a volunteer, and the way you start there is you answer phones at the front desk, or at least this is the way it worked 23 years ago. I worked in events.

I spent days crawling around on my knees helping them network computers. I volunteered on music radio shows. Eventually I got a job at KCRW working as the volunteer coordinator for the pledge drive, and then somebody who worked on the food show showed me how to cut tape.

I was able to get in touch with people — like I saw that Transom was starting, and I wrote to Jay Allison with a pitch for a story. He was like, "Great. We'd love to give you some money to do this." So I got a thousand dollars or something, and some editorial support putting that story together. I made contacts really early with one of my radio heroes, but then how to translate that into an actual job, I didn't know how to do. It was hard, and I really did not know what I was doing. 

Alice: What were you doing to make money and pay rent while “volunteering,” AKA working for free?

Read more

How to approach a pre-interview

I’m trying something new for season four of Starting Out: a theme for resource guides! This is the first in a series on interviewing for narrative podcasts. If you produce a daily news show or a chat show, I think you’ll find this useful too. As is always the case with my resource guides, don’t take this as a complete guide to anything, but rather as a starting point! 

Part One: Pre-interviews

What is a pre-interview? 

Pre-interviewing is a really fun part of the process, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t typically get to do an interview for the actual episode (aka, a producer). You get to sharpen your interviewing skills and help make an important decision for the episode: advising on who will be a good guest. It’s also a way you can build trust with a source ahead of an interview. 

A pre-interview is a conversation you have with a potential source in order to 1) get a better understanding of their story, 2) vet whether they’re a good talker. 

Let’s break those two pieces down a bit. 

Get a better understanding of the story: 

This means that you’re going to understand the contours of their story in more detail, beyond what you found in your research. You want to know the general “beats” of their story (beats is jargon for plot points). 

Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself after a pre-interview. 

• How would you describe this person’s personality? 

• What was their goal? 

• Why was that goal meaningful to them?

• How did they go about accomplishing it? 

• What got in their way? 

• What were the stakes of their story? 

• What happened to them in the end?

• Looking back, how do they think about their journey?

You don’t need to do a whole interview (that will come later) but when you pitch the story it will be important that you can answer your colleagues’ questions about the narrative as they arise.

Vet whether they’re a “good talker” or not:

I’d never heard the term “good talker” before getting into podcast production, and now I think about it all the time. This term is so subjective and someone’s judgment on what makes a good talker can be impacted by their own background and biases. That said, these are some general qualities you might find in a “good talker.”

• They’re speaking with energy and emotion. You can tell that they care about what they’re saying, not just rattling off talking points. 

• They’re reflective. That means that they can look back on the past, for better or worse, and talk about who they were and why they made certain decisions. They can admit where they might have made a mistake, or why they felt a particular way in a particular moment. 

• TL;DR: Imagine your friend shows up late to coffee and says, “You won’t believe what happened to me on the way here.” You put your phone to the side, lean in, and are fully locked in to the story you’re about to hear. You’re hanging onto their every word. That friend is a good talker. 

How I prepare for a pre-interview: 

1. Do solid research on the person. If they’ve done interviews in the past, read or listen to them. 

2. Write a list of questions. I don’t stress too much about them or the order they go in. When it’s time for an actual interview, a lot more thought will go into the order of questions. But for the moment, I’m just having a casual conversation and following my curiosity, while making sure that I get all the information I need to make a strong pitch. 

That said, the way that person is going to (potentially) be used in the story will guide which questions I ask. 

Is the goal finding an expert voice for an episode?:

Then I’m looking for someone who can explain complex ideas in an understandable and engaging way. That can be accomplished by asking them very basic questions about the subject at hand. I love doing this because I get to ask questions that I genuinely want the answer to. And I can find out if they’re able to explain things to a novice.

Is the goal finding a lead “character” in a narrative piece?: 

Then I want someone, who is able to speak in detail about their experiences, who is reflective and engaging. I often  ask someone to explain their story from the beginning and occasionally interject follow up questions. I might also ask how someone was feeling in the moment they made a pivotal decision, to see if they can be reflective about their experiences.

After the pre-interview:

Review the notes you made during the conversation, and add any other big picture thoughts you have on the person. And prepare to report back to your team with your impressions. 

Have advice to share on conducting pre-interviews?

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Internships

Sports Media Intern, Audacy Philadelphia, Audacy (No pay information shared)

New York Market Intern, Audacy ($15-$20/hr)

Intern, The Block, Audacy ($15/hr)

Fellowships

Broadcast Engineering Fellow, Audacy (No pay information shared)

Digital Producer KNX Fellow, Audacy, ($50,000/yr)

Judy and John McCarter Family Fellowship, WTTW, ($18/hr)

Report LA Fellowship, KCRW ($26.93/hour)

Reflect Alabama Fellowship, WBHM, ($15/hr)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, MPR News with Angela Davis, American Public Media Group ($58,822-70,600/yr) 

Associate Producer, Pipe Dreams, APMG ($22.70 - $27.20/hour)

Assistant Producer, Planet Money, NPR ($36.06 - $40.86/hour) 

Associate Producer, Futuro Unidad Hinojosa, Investigative Unit ($58,000-61,000/yr)

Assistant Producer (Part-time), Audacy Chicago (No pay information shared)

Associate Producer, CNN Audio, ($53,144.00 - $98,696.00/yr)

Production Assistant, iHeartMedia (No pay information shared)

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Jonathan Recommends

Bandsplain: The Cure – I never took a chance on this show because it's so long, but then I fell in hard and listened to maybe the longest episode they've ever made. Over seven hours on The Cure. The skill required to be this insightful and funny and smart on a chat show, it's immense. A real model of what you can do with lots of prep work and passion.  

Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's – Is it dumb to recommend a show that won the Pulitzer and Peabody this year? I had avoided listening because I was in a place where I couldn't hear difficult stories, but I think this is maybe the best podcast I've ever heard. Connie Walker is seeking answers to really big questions, but it's all so personal and unfolding in front of the microphone in these incredibly intimate scenes. I know she made it as a podcast, so of course she wants people listening. But I felt privileged to be let in.

This American Life: Jane Doe – Miki Meek is such a powerhorse of a reporter, quietly hitting home runs without ever being showy. She really centers the woman in this story and gives her room to be her full self. 

The Ezra Klein Show: Why This Economist Wants to Give Every Poor Child $50,000 – Super good episode if you listened to episode 1 of Classy and were left wondering, "OK, so what do we do to make things a little more even?"

Heavyweight #46 Dan – My favorite episode of this show ever. 

Coming up… Normal Gossip’s Alex Sujong Laughlin and Kelsey McKinney on how gossip has influenced their careers.

Starting Out will always be a free resource. If you want to support this work you can donate to Transom. The newsletter is edited by Jennifer Jerrett and Sydney Lewis. Interviews are transcribed with help from Elizabeth Kauma.

Leave a comment

That night a troop of friends arrived at my door with food and beer. We climbed the rickety ladder to my apartment’s rooftop — I was lucky to have semi-private outdoor space during quarantine — and commiserated. 

I don’t recommend getting laid off, obviously. It was kind of like getting dumped. I was heartbroken and made some questionable decisions in the heat of the moment. 

That being said, having a really shitty year taught me an important lesson: you have to allow people to show up for you. 

Literally show up, like my coworker Katherine did the next day with cupcakes, or my friends did with pizza and drinks. My union fought for me to get severance, and to ensure I didn’t have to sign any paperwork that would limit my ability to talk about my work experience. Friends from all over immediately helped me find job leads. 

It can be hard to allow other people to help you when your whole job (and identity) is based on being a helper, someone who gets things done. Now I understand that you give people a gift by allowing them to help you when you need it. 

In that spirit, and in the midst of another wave of layoffs, I spoke with star editor (and friend of the newsletter) Priska Neely. She posted an incredible thread of advice after NPR announced their layoffs, and I knew that I had to talk with her in depth. Priska is also a hiring manager (she’s hiring right now, see the classifieds section!), so she has advice on how to get a new job when you’re ready to take that step. 

P.S. This month marks fifteen years of Rob Rosenthal’s Sound School Podcast (FKA SaltCast, HowSound). It has some pretty stellar resources — free and for the taking, that will challenge and inspire you.

Priska Neely’s advice for landing on your feet after a layoff

Alice: What's your advice to people who have just recently been laid off?

Priska: Breathe. Take a breath. It's going to feel like there's this urgency to find and take any job. 

But be strategic. Look at the severance that you have, give yourself a few days to not think about what you're going to do next. Take a beat because there's going to be this urgency to be like: Oh, I have to update my LinkedIn, Oh, I have to do my resume, blah da da.

Try to figure out what you would like to do. Slow it down a little bit in your mind because everything's going to feel like it's so fast and like you have absolutely no time to figure anything out. And sure, the clock is ticking, you need a check, but try to take a day at least. Just breathe and don’t think about it. 

If you're in a situation where you're trying to figure out what to do next, maybe you have some options for what direction you want to go in. Something that's helped me in figuring out what I really love to do is doing an energy audit, which is not an original term. I learned that in a leadership program that I did. Think about what you do in the course of a day in your work, think about what gives you energy and what drains you.

I'm a person who's always weirdly been into meetings. I like talking to people and figuring things out. And there were certain other things, like breaking news, that would really drain me. It helped me to refine: Oh, I really just need to be a manager. I actually just need to be figuring things out, big picture, for other people. 

Read more

Resources

I was in middle school when the great recession started and I was lucky enough to be too young to enter the job market when it felt like everything was falling apart. 

Now it feels like we’re in a similar (though maybe not quite so apocalyptic) time. People are getting laid off so often I might just make a line in my budget for Venmoing my friends money for a conciliatory drink or treat. 

I know job hunting feels really scary right now, so I turned to people who made it through the last recession for their advice on job hunting when things feel bleak. 

Macro economically: In June there was another Fed meeting and for the moment they’ve paused on a new interest rate hike. This will hopefully cause all business sectors to stop freaking out with layoffs. Step one.

Biz advice: generally with big companies their budgets turn over at the fiscal year, which tends to start Oct 1. Often big companies have a deadline for new headcount asks/output (with media) in July. If there hasn’t been another rate hike, and they stop making fetch (the recession that technically isn’t) happen, the panic will stop. Thus, job opportunities for big companies and startups trying to save capital will start opening again. So that’s a version of waiting, but with a timeline pegged to things potentially happening.

Also: we’re getting into an election cycle. That means higher ad spend for news orgs regardless of the economic climate. If you work in journalism, that means more jobs by necessity. 

So my advice may sound like “sit and wait, sit and wait,” which is infuriating advice to receive. Here’s something specific you can do now, other than apply for whatever jobs are out there: Send fan mail. Write to the people who have made things that you honestly love. Audio, writing, TikTok, video games. Think widely about the media that’s stayed with you, find out who (or what groups of who’s — yes, this is a Who? Weekly reference) made these things, and tell them specifically what you liked about the work and why it meant so much to you.

Why? Practicing gratitude (I know, that phrase, right?) makes you feel more grounded. But it also makes makers feel appreciated, which they generally don’t feel — no matter how seemingly successful. And, you never know, if it’s a place to work, if it’s the right kind of place to work, you’ll make an impression. And that impression lasts way longer than a “can I pick your brain?” job hunting request, which can be draining for everyone involved. This small, honest way of appreciation may cause your name to have a positive tinge for life — for the maker you reached out to, but also maybe for the company they made it for (if there is a company involved).

That’s much more likely to get you a job — this honest act of giving praise and appreciation — then networking for networking’s sake. I’ve gotten three of my jobs through the “honest appreciation method.”

Last thing: the job you want is working with people you respect and who respect you. Think of ways you can set up your own litmus tests during these weird fallow times to determine where you want to land next that will be best for *you.*

-Anonymous Girl Boss

I took the first job I could get in media — I really widened my net because all the positions I wanted were not hiring me. I ended up being a receptionist at a radio network, but a couple years later I got a job in TV! So, if you have the ability to afford being in an entry level low paying position, it really does help to get a foot in the door. I had found that first job through the job boards my college had online for alumni.

My TV job was sent to me by a college friend who recommended me, and nearly all of my jobs since, have come from some level of networking. I got laid off during the last recession and took a freelance gig in production because it was offered to me as a fill in for a few weeks. Luckily I liked it enough to start a new track, which I stayed on for a few years until I pivoted to my current career track. 

The position I have now is because of the experience I got on my meandering journey, so I would say to not limit yourself to only your dream positions! Looking beyond your dream career path can be educational and maybe surprise you with opportunities you’d otherwise never have pursued!

-Kelly

Tell everyone you know that you're looking for work. Think about types of skills you'd like to learn/master and what positions would help with that, regardless of industry or if it's your "dream." Set those LinkedIn notifications so you get notified when new stuff is posted, and apply FAST. Consider creative ways of networking and meeting new people — not just professional orgs, but random things like a book club, ultimate frisbee team, volunteering, etc. I made personal business cards that I carried with me everywhere that had a few key words about my skills, because you never know where you might find an opportunity. It's brutal but you will find something eventually!

-Stef

I graduated college in ‘08. It was a rough two years. I fought it for a while.

My advice would be to not treat professional success like a straight line. Instead treat it like a puzzle where you need to get enough pieces put together to see the whole picture.

Answer for yourself right now how much money you realistically need, in what setting, then geographies, etc. Then take any job that checks off enough boxes, any job.

-Sarah

Thank you to everyone who shared their advice!

Share your advice for job hunting

Some other helpful resources

As always, I love “Ask A Manager,” especially these columns on job hunting during a recession. 

Should you switch jobs in a bad economy? 

This advice from back in 2009 (Read this with the caveat that though things are rough right now they’re not nearly as bad as back in 2009)

How to kick off your post grad job search

My job search after grad school has been soul crushing

Classifieds

Internships

News Internship, Houston Public Media, (No pay information given)

Newsroom Intern, St. Louis Public Radio, (No pay information given)

Fellowships

Sports & Culture Reporting Fellowship, The Gulf States Newsroom, ($47,500/year)

The Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Fellowship (up to $20,000)

Report LA Fellowship, KCRW ($26.93/hour)

Broadcast Engineering Fellow, Audacy (No pay information given)

KCUR's Aviva Okeson-Haberman Internship Program ($15/hour)

Marjorie Welch Fitts Louis Fellowship, KERA ($47,000-$53,000/year)

News Fellowship, WVIK ($15/hour)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, Talk Shows, WJCT Public Media

Assistant Producer, Marketplace, American Public Media Group ($28.12-$33.75/hour)

Production Assistant, Voices Radio

News Production Assistant (Part time), KNX 97.1 FM, Audacy

News Production Assistant (Part-time), 1010 WINS, Audacy ($16.84-$18.49/hour)

Production Assistant (Part-time), ESPN (No pay information given)

Lake Effect Production Assistant, WUWM 89.7 – Milwaukee's NPR ($40,000-$50,000/year)

Associate Producer, Talk Show, WJCT (No pay information given)

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Priska Recommends

• The 13th Step from New Hampshire Public Radio

• This episode of Sea Change from WWNO 

• Sugarland from the Texas Newsroom

• The Bag Game from ESPN 

Coming up...

Next month: Jonathan Menjivar of This American Life and Pineapple Street Studios on how class impacted his career. 

Starting Out will always be a free resource. If you want to support this work you can donate to Transom. The newsletter is edited by Jennifer Jerrett and Sydney Lewis. Interviews are transcribed with help from Elizabeth Kauma.

Hey y’all, 

Welcome back to Starting Out, from me and Transom. It’s season four of the newsletter! And my first season of the newsletter on Substack. 

I switched platforms because I want us to be able to connect more — and the comments and chat features on Substack help facilitate that. So please, start using the comments for feedback and questions! As a reminder, the newsletter is and always will be free. 

I’m so excited to start out this season of the newsletter with one of my all time favorite journalists, Stephanie Foo. I’ve been listening to her work since college, when I’d work the night shift at a coffee shop and listen to Snap Judgment to keep me company while closing up the shop alone.

I’m always telling aspiring producers to listen to the credits of their favorite shows, so they can start to learn who is behind the work that they love. I give that advice because I kept hearing Stephanie’s name and gravitating to her work. The stories are irresistible, engaging and thoughtful. I also love her memoir, What My Bones Know, which gives insight into what was going on in her life while she was making these incredible radio stories.

After the interview with Stephanie, there’s a guide to pitching stories. It’s not exhaustive (is that even possible?) but I hope it will help you feel more confident the next time you enter a pitch meeting. 

Okay, let’s get into it. 

Alice: Your experience at Snap Judgment sounds like a really formative early career experience. And I would love to hear what made it special. 

Stephanie: I think what made it special was it was very much a startup culture. I was employee number six or something. It was the beginning of 2010, we were still firmly in the recession. Journalism was not looking good. 

I had dreams of working at This American Life and all of a sudden in Oakland, California, there's a show that's like This American Life, except with better music. and with more people of color, which is like, “What? Are you serious?” And I went in on my first day with 20 pitches because I really wanted them to see that I was serious. I had ideas. I wanted to make stories. And they only took one of those pitches and it was a very bad story, in the end. But from the get go, I got to produce a lot of content. I was producing 40, 50 minutes out of an hour-long episode sometimes. Which is a lot of work!

Because it was so new, they also really allowed me to kind of develop my own voice and say what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it. And with the music that I liked.

I had a Gen X host and manager. The whole idea of the show is that it would get more young people to listen to public radio, and more people of color to listen to public radio. That's why they won the PRX Talent Quest. But it was to reach this audience, that wasn't stuffy, that we hadn't reached before. And as a 22-year-old young woman, they were just very much like, “You're the audience that we want to appeal to. So whatever sounds good to you, what you think is cool, go ahead.”

This was the era where you could score with anything you wanted. It was wild, using all my favorite music and getting obsessed with that, and going to Amoeba and listening in the experimental Japanese music section for an hour of finding all this great music. I mean, it was just really fun.

It was a little crazy because it was startup culture. It was very young. There was a lot of hacky sack happening in the office all the time. I was in for a hard wake up call when I had to join the real workforce, but definitely a fun way to spend my early twenties.

Alice: Does that spirit of giving early career people freedom to explore what they’re interested in still exist? 

Read more

Resources

Here’s a pitch checklist that I use in my job. Keep in mind, I work on a show that typically tells one story over the course of an episode. For broadcast, your pitching process will be pretty different! 

• Strong character(s).

• There’s a beginning, middle and an end to the story. 

• There is a clear conflict in the story.

• Something about the story is surprising. 

• There are stakes — someone has something to lose or gain. Doesn’t have to be life or death, but people want to keep listening to find out how things turn out. 

• There’s a takeaway (a big idea!) for the listener. 

• I’m personally excited about the story. 

Clarifying your pitch: 

When I get excited about a pitch I tend to go a little off the rails, getting into tangents, diving back into history. It’s a lot. One of my first managers, Nick Fountain of Planet Money, used a phrase to get me back on track “Tell it to me like a movie.” That stuck with me and I still use it to help guide my excitable brain into a compelling pitch. 

Let’s use the iconic Erin Brockovich as an example: 

Version One: The Pacific Gas and Energy Company used a rust suppressor called Chromium 6 in their compressor station for natural gas pipelines. They dumped the wastewater into unlined ponds around Hinkley, CA. The chemicals in the water sickened the townspeople over the years until a legal clerk began to investigate and eventually a class action lawsuit was brought against PG&E. 

Why it doesn’t work: First I should say that if this was a typical Alice overly excited pitch it would be like four paragraphs total. I won’t put y’all through all that. This pitch is factually correct, but it doesn’t have a main character for me to latch onto, the impacts of the contamination aren’t front and center. I’m not reading it and asking myself, “OMG, and then what happened?” 

The Movie Version: Erin Brokovich, a single mother of three with no legal training, did something nobody else was able to do. She exposed PG&E, one of the country’s most powerful energy companies, for poisoning residents of Hinkley, a small town in California. In this story, we’ll tell how one small legal dispute led to the opportunity for Erin to change not only her life, but the lives of the Hinkley residents who paid the price for PG&E’s negligence. 

Why it works: Erin as a character is front and center. We immediately root for her. It also makes me ask myself, “How the hell did this woman win this legal battle?” The note about a small legal dispute already tells me that there’s going to be a scene at the top that will create a cascade of events that no one could have foreseen. I want to know more. 

Writing your pitch:

Some shows ask for formal written pitches, others have people deliver them verbally in the pitch meeting. I’m of the opinion that regardless of the format of your show  it’s a good idea to write something, since it will help you refine your idea. 

If you’re on staff at a show, ask your manager for examples of successful written pitches and try to use that format for your pitch. Generally it’s a good idea to use the “Tell it like a movie” strategy and put the story front and center. Then you can give some nitty gritty details. Here’s an outline of a pitch. 

• Grabby lede sentence that makes you want to keep reading. 

• Key narrative details, including character, conflict, and stakes. Basically you want to show that you’ve checked all those boxes that I listed at the top. 

• Details about where you are in your reporting. Have you actually spoken to the main “character” of the piece? Are they enthusiastic about participating? Have you spoken to experts? Will there be field reporting? 

If you want to read about successful pitches, Transom has some great resources, with examples! 

Excellent Transom resources on pitching: 

Notes from a Pitching Novice, Bianca Giaever

“Not only do you need to find the show that fits your story, but also be aware that producers on different shows are looking for different types of pitches altogether. For example, John Haas, the Marketplace editor, said that you should be able to summarize your pitch in about three sentences. On the other hand Julie Snyder, the editor at This American Life, said she actually liked long pitches because the details are often crucial to conveying the type of long-form narrative they’re looking for.”

Pitching Story Ideas, Ari Daniel

“Your pitch can be a few paragraphs long. Keep it pithy and on point. Show that you’ve done your research by writing in some choice specifics. For instance, I wanted to do a story about the Joint Mathematics Meeting when it came to Boston a few years ago. I knew I needed an angle that would make it interesting for listeners. So I called up several mathematicians and the conference organizers beforehand, and learned about a mathematical theater troupe that was performing, a session on the probability of board games, and a workshop focused on the mathematics of dance. Those details helped form the basis of my pitch.

Preparing to for the pitch meeting:

I’m a big fan of the show Survivor (yes, it’s still on) and think that there’s a parallel to be drawn between pitch meetings and tribal council. 

On Survivor the tribe that loses a challenge has to vote off a member, and votes are cast after a group discussion. But the decision of who is going home is very rarely made while contestants are sitting around the fire. It’s made in a series of conversations hours before — people pulling others aside, discussing their options and pledging to vote together. 

I was recently talking with a newcomer to the industry who noted that they were surprised by how many conversations are had about a story idea before a pitch meeting even takes place. That’s when it clicked for me. 

The scramble that contestants engage in before tribal council is a bit like what happens before a pitch meeting. I like to talk over pitches with coworkers, usually one-on-one, and get their feedback early. 

You don’t want to be surprised by someone’s critique of your pitch. It’s better to hear those concerns early on and address them in your pitch. That way, when you’re in the room you have the strongest possible pitch that’s easy to say “yes” to. 

A savvy Survivor player walks into tribal council reasonably confident that their alliances are strong and they know they’re not going home. Ideally, they have such a strong alliance that even if something unexpected happens they’re still safe. 

Obviously nobody is getting sent home in a pitch meeting, but they are nerve wracking, and if you’re an anxious person like me, this strategy is helpful. 

One last note: a great ally in the game of Survivor will be honest with you if they don’t think an idea is good. So if your pitch doesn’t go through, you should link up with the people you trust to get some honest (but constructive) feedback on how to come back stronger next time. 

Classifieds

Internships

Summer Intern, Audacy (No pay information included)

New York Market Intern, Audacy ($15-$20/hr)

Intern, Kansas Stations, Audacy (No pay information included)

Forum Intern, KQED ($18.07/hr)

Arts Editorial Intern, KQED ($18.07/hr)

Podcast Operations Intern, KQED ($18.07/hr)

Newscast Intern, KQED ($18.07/hr)

Creative Intern, KQED ($18.07/hr)

Culture Reporting Intern, KQED ($18.07/hr)

Recording and Archive Intern, Storycorps ($15/hr)

Education Intern, KERA ($16/hr)

Audio Production Internship, The Spark, WITF ($12/hr)

Journalism Intern, Rocky Mountain Public Media, Inc., ($17.29/hr)

Fellowships

Broadcast Engineering Fellow, Audacy (no pay information included)

Arts Access Digital Engagement Fellow, KERA ($45,000-$55,000/yr) 

Eric Von Fellowship, ($41,000/yr)

Newsroom Fellowship, WVIK, Augustana College (No pay information shared) 

Gwen Ifill/PBS NewsHour Journalism Fellow, WETA ($15/hr)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Assistant Producer, Part Time, WBBM-AM, Audacy (No pay information included)

Production Assistant, News, WETA (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, Talk Shows, WJCT (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, What a Day, Crooked Media ($65,000 -$68,000/yr)

Associate Producer, Digital Products, WBUR ($67,858/yr minimum)

Assistant Producer, The Economist (no pay information shared)

Radio Production Assistant, Premier (£24,000/yr)

Junior Video & Audio Content Producer Apprentice, Which? (£21,749/yr)

Video & Audio Journalist, Mediahuis in Belfast (£21,000-€25,000/yr)

For more opportunities check out our sister newsletter, All Hear!

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Stephanie Recommends

• This story is just so creatively told. 

• This radio play sums up falling in love so well

• An example of a personal story, done very well

Coming up...

Next month: Priska Neely on how to make moves after being laid off. 

Starting Out will always be a free resource. If you want to support this work you can donate to Transom. The newsletter is edited by Jennifer Jerrett and Sydney Lewis. Interviews are transcribed with help from Elizabeth Kauma.

I’m hoping that having the newsletter on Substack will allow us to build community through comments, Substack Notes, and chat.

Subscribe now

Hiya!

Welcome back to Starting Out, from me and Transom!

There won’t be an issue of Starting Out next month, since I’ll be hard at work preparing the next season of the newsletter for you. Do newsletters have seasons? When I’m writing them, yes they do!

This newsletter is only meaningful to me if it’s helpful to you, so I’d love to hear your feedback as I’m prepping for season four. The survey has just six questions!

I’m so excited for this month’s interview with my friend Alana Casanova-Burgess, the host and co-creator of Futuro Studios and WNYC Studios’ La Brega. It’s a deeply reported show about Puerto Rico and the diaspora. The show’s second season is airing now — each episode is about a song that says something about what it means to be Puerto Rican. Alana and I talked about what it’s like to make a show in English and Spanish, and how Brian Lehrer made her fall in love with radio.

P.S. Longtime Transom fans know that they used to run an incredible in person story workshop. Like many things, it closed at the start of the pandemic. Transom is now thinking about how to relaunch in-person workshops and wants to hear feedback from you on what those should look like! If you could take five minutes to fill out their survey, that would be amazing.

Photo by Tanya Barrett

Alice: Will you tell me your radio origin story?

Alana: My radio origin story?

Alice: Yeah, like how did you get into this industry?

Alana: Initially I wanted to be in print. In college, I was into print journalism, and even in high school, I very briefly started a zine. Then I graduated college in 2008, which was a really great time to get into the job market.

Alice: An amazing time!

Alana: It was perfect on my part. I ended up going to grad school, which is what you do sometimes when you can't do anything else. I went to what is now the Craig Newmark School of Journalism, and they have this brilliant internship requirement, so it's three semesters. You have a summer internship, and I landed at The Brian Lehrer Show.

I have to say, because I was interested in print, it wasn't my first choice. However, it was so much about writing, and it was so much about writing for Brian's voice, or trying to figure out the arc of an interview in the same way that you would figure out the arc of a story -- also the idea of the callers and just this refreshing community. It was the best summer, and I had such a good time, and then I never left. I became a per diem after that, and then they hired me.

It does feel like a print job to me a lot of the time because so much is written, especially what I do now. It was always such a joy to figure out how to ask a question in the most concise way possible for Brian, or how to deliver copy that he could read cold, which means you haven't seen it before. Brian was why I got into radio.

Resources

Transom has an amazing collection of resources on translation with some really thoughtful ideas on how to use translation creatively and respectfully. Here are some highlights:

Luis Trelles:

“Going through interviews in multiple languages can seem like a daunting process. It all starts with the producer’s ability to select the best tape. In the case of an interview that is not in English, the emphasis should be on finding the most expressive non-verbal moments. What makes a piece of tape great is not only what is said, but the way in which the person talking is expressing herself. Sighs, laughs, rising tones, whispers, sudden moments of silence or hesitation; all of these are universal gestures.”

Eleanor McDowall

“Regardless of language — I think the work that gets under my skin always shows and doesn’t tell. It knows the weight of sound and silence and how to communicate beyond what’s being said. It doesn’t fear ambiguity. When we’re moving voices across borders we need to remember to hold onto the moments beyond words.”

Ann Hepperman

“Nothing irritates me more than what I call “The Duck and Cover.” You know what I am talking about. This is the point in a radio story where you hear a person speaking her native language for two seconds, only to have her voice instantly replaced by an intern who was handed a script and told, “Here, read this. You’re a young woman from Senegal. Go.” In reality, I’m sure the execution is not so thoughtless, but “The Duck and Cover” just sounds so dehumanizing to me.

The voice is intimate. It’s part of what makes us human. When we treat unfamiliar languages simply as words to translate, we create unnecessary distance. It’s hard enough for a listener to cross a language gap and connect with the people in our stories, why put up barriers? So throughout the years, I have compiled a few strategies that I hope help listeners bond with the voices in my stories — even if they don’t understand a word spoken.”

Classifieds

Internships

Production Intern, Crooked Media ($15.50/hr)

Development Intern, Crooked Media  ($15.50/hr)

Audio Production Internship, The Spark, WITF, ($12/hr)

Newsroom Internship, WITF ($12/hr)

Public Radio News Internship, New Hampshire Public Radio ($15.50/hr)

Intern, Council on Foreign Relations ($17/hr)
 

Fellowships

Emerging Voices Journalism Fellowship, Maine Public (No pay information included

Lee Ester News Fellow, Wisconsin Public Radio ($46,000/yr)

Second Century News Fellow, Wisconsin Public Radio ($46,000/yr)

Arts Access Digital Engagement Fellow, KERA and the Dallas Morning News ($45,000-55,000/yr)

Assistant/Associate Producer\

Associate Producer, News and Programming, WBUR (Minimum $67,958/yr)

Associate Producer, Digital Products, WBUR (Minimum $67,858/yr)

Associate Producer, Podcasts, The American Civil Liberties Union ($85,466/yr for New York based employees)

Part-Time Contract Producer, The Boston Globe (No payment information included)

Other opportunities

The Native American Journalists Association and NPR’s Next Generation Radio Project is hosting a five day workshop centering indigenous stories and storytellers.

NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom is also hosting a Next Gen Radio Project, and you’ll get to work with friend of the newsletter Priska Neely! If you live in Mississippi, Louisiana or Alabama, apply!

Apply for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Level’s Up Academy! I spoke at the academy last year and was so impressed by the brilliant students. Level’s Up accepts both adults and high schoolers.

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.

Alana recommends

• I really like 5-4, a podcast about how crappy the Supreme Court is.

• And I like my friend Jesse Brenneman's podcast Tech Talk, which is this parody of a podcast hosted by two dads who are really into tech... it's really just Jesse and his friend Oliver pretending to be these guys Tim and Ted who are really just bumbling through their lives and ideas about fatherhood, and it's very funny and weird and ends up being this critique of masculinity and technology

Hey y'all--

Ariana Martinez has been on my “to interview” list for a while now — they’re an incredibly talented sound designer and make truly delightful stories. But what most excited me was how they push this industry to do right by people who aren’t often in front of the mic — engineers, designers, producers, interns.

I remember finishing our interview back in August and feeling like I’d had an “aha” moment about what’s missing in mentorship for early career podcast and radio makers. I think you’ll love our interview too.

Also in this issue: how to approach your first “group edit" without stressing over trying to seem like the smartest person in the room. Plus — my job is hiring an intern! Several of the applicants we interviewed last time around were readers of this newsletter (and all of them were brilliant and very qualified, not to brag) and I’d love to continue that tradition.

Alice: Would you describe yourself as first a sound designer or an engineer?

Ariana: In the audio world, I would say I'm a sound designer who had to be an engineer by default because those two roles are honestly almost always tied. But in my life in general, professionally, I actually always identify as a multimedia artist first — before I even say that I'm a sound designer, even in audio circles. I do that because I feel very strongly that maintaining the artist part of my professional identity gives me more flexibility and more grounds on which to demand a certain kind of creative freedom in the projects that I take on.

I don't want to be perceived as a hired gun, and I think that can happen, especially with technical skill. You can be denied a kind of agency over projects, so I think by naming myself as an artist first, the people who approach me to work with me have to contend with that part of who I am and what I do before they think about hiring me. Maybe in an ideal world, that's what's happening. Maybe people aren't thinking about it that much, but that's how I'm thinking about it.

Resources

I can’t speak to every method of running a group edit (every place does it differently!) but I want to start by walking you through how group edits worked at one of my first jobs, WNYC and ProPublica’s Trump, Inc. This format came together as a collaboration, people on the team proposed different parts of it as we went. Here’s how we did group edits:

• Everyone received a copy of the script. For us, it was a printed copy. When working remotely, it can be a shared Google Doc, but we didn’t make comments in the document in real time. That was saved for after the edit.

• Just before this began, someone set a timer on their phone, so we could have an idea of how long the draft was.

• The person voicing the episode read their “tracking” and a producer would play cuts of tape (the recordings from interviews, on-the-ground reporting, clips of news footage, etc).

• While the script was being read, some people looked at and made notes on their physical copy of the script. Others preferred to just listen, to simulate the experience of someone actually listening to a finished story, and they made notes on a blank sheet of paper. The types of notes varied from person to person. I noted down where I was confused, bored, where I laughed, or was curious and excited.

• After we finished listening to the draft being read, we started giving our edits. Everyone got two minutes to give their feedback (again, using a timer) and the rule was that you had to start by saying two things that you liked or thought worked well before launching into edits. It’s good for morale, and also lets the team behind the episode know what to keep when they’re making revisions.

• We did the two minute rule to ensure that everyone had the same amount of time to give their feedback, whether they were the intern or the executive producer.

• We would occasionally invite someone from a totally different team to join the group edit, so we could get feedback from a pair of blank slate ears. I love this practice.

• During the feedback period, the host and producer were taking notes on all the feedback given. After everyone had their two minutes, we had a more free flowing conversation, where the writers of the episode could dig in and ask more questions, and the team could debate revisions.

• Later that day (or the next) the producer would meet with the host/reporter and sometimes the editor to rewrite more intensively. If I’m a producer on an episode that’s just been edited, I like to take a nice long walk or have lunch after the group edit. I personally need time to decompress (you get a lot of feedback, much of it conflicting!) before debriefing with the host. That means taking a break, getting a coffee, zoning out somehow.

I was nervous during my first group edits; I felt like I needed to give the smartest, most perceptive feedback, but when I heard my coworkers drafts I would think, “That was so good, I could never do that, so how can I possibly improve it?”

If you’re an intern or fellow in a group edit, remember that no one is expecting you to “fix” a story or offer the most profound feedback. Your real strength in this position is your inexperience.

You’re not coming in with baggage around how the show works or the politics of that particular workplace. You probably don’t know the whole history of the story that the producers/reporters have worked on. You’re a proxy for the actual audience of the show. So if you’re at a loss for what kind of feedback to give, you can always note moments where you were confused or felt your attention drift. Tell people how you felt at different points of the story. When were you delighted or angry on behalf of a character? Were you surprised? On the edge of your seat? That’s all valuable feedback.

I think it makes sense to spend most of your time in group edits listening and picking up on what kinds of notes others give. It’s the best place to learn about how each member of your team approaches the story. I love getting to hear how my colleagues' minds work, how we can all listen to the same thing and come away with different reactions and ideas.

In that spirit, I asked around for my colleagues’ advice on providing feedback in a group edit. Here are some of my favorite responses:

Ann Hepperman: Have people say what is happening in the story and what the takeaways are. This works for fiction and non-fiction. That way the person being edited hears what listeners are coming away rather than feeling judged from the start.

Katherine Brewer: Identify what is working and what isn’t working and realize there may be several different solutions to what isn’t working. There is no one way a script “should” or could be. Also, is the pacing syncopated or monotonous? It should be syncopated.

Ben Brock Johnson: Compliment sandwiches = good way to deliver criticism. You don't NEED to give input. It's not about proving how smart you are; it's about making it better.

Kalli Anderson: Get really clear on what stage the story/piece is at and which kind of edits and comments they're looking for at this stage. Make note of what you love. Focus on your reactions to how something is hitting/working/sounding more than immediately jumping to proposed "fixes"

Sarah Geis: Oh I have thoughts... maybe the 1 thing is feel free to note what WORKS & what you love. Sometimes it feels like yr supposed to be really critical to show yr smart? But supporting folks recognizing & building on their successes is super smart & useful & man does it help the vibe.

Martín H Gonzales: Compliments don't always need to be sandwich condiments!!! big proponent of sprinkling positive reinforcement throughout in the form of "lol", "omg", "love this", "great writing here!"

Tim Howard: Don't try to solve problems with your initial notes. first thing is to articulate how you felt when you listened...the places where you were confused, bored, happily surprised. the feelings are gold & the fixes can come later.

To read all the wonderful advice I got (including advice for when you are the one being edited) check out my original call for advice.

Classifieds

Internships

Intern, Production, Marketplace, American Public Media Group ($18/hr)

Intern, Audio, APM Studios, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, Programming, The Current, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, Investigative, MPR News, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, This is Uncomfortable, Marketplace, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, Make Me Smart, Marketplace, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, Radio Reporter, MPR News, APMG ($18/hr)

Intern, LAist, Southern California Public Radio, APMG ($18.66/hr)

KCUR’s Aviva Okeson-Haberman Internship Program is hiring summer interns for a variety of positions. ($12.50/hr)

Newsroom Intern, WITF, ($12/hr)

Intern, Feet in 2 Worlds, ($15/hr)

Fellowships

Community Colleges Fellow, Southern California Public Radio, APMG ($18.66/hr)

Assistant/Associate Producer

Associate Producer (Part-time), Southern California Public Radio, American Public Media Group ($26.76-$33.85/hr)

Assistant Producer (On Call),  AirTalk with Larry Mantle, APMG ($23.90/hr)

Associate Producer, WBUR News and Programming, Boston University ($67,858/yr)

Part Time Associate Producer, The California Report, KQED ($36,200-38,300/yr)

Other resources

Lori Mortimer just launched a newsletter for aspiring sound designers!

Starting Out has a sister newsletter! Talia Augustidis recently launched All Hear, a newsletter chock full of audio opportunities — including lots of international ones. Subscribe!
 

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.

Ariana recommends

Shade Podcast, specifically their Interludes Series (produced by Axel Kacoutié): It's one of the best podcasts about contemporary artists I've heard in recent years.

Telling Stories: This is a podcast about audio craft that I think is invaluable to beginners and, honestly, anyone wanting to hear how great audio minds listen, think, and create. Produced by Phoebe McIndoe and Redzi Bernard.

I have some good news

I've talked with many of my guests this season about how hard it sometimes feels for original work, without any celebrities attached, to get made. We're craving weird, personal, fun work in the podcast/radio world. I've talked with many of you about how it frustrating it feels to try again and again to get your foot in the door, especially if you're making a career transition. 

The team at Transom feels that way too, so they're launching an open call for Transom Specials — an opportunity to finish and share stories that might not fit anywhere else. They're paying between $2,000-$8,000 for selected short works. Plus, you as a producer will retain the rights to your work. Hell yeah.

I hope you'll submit your weirdest, most delightful work. 

Are you on the fence about submitting? Worried what you have to offer isn't good enough?

Writer Zack Akers gave me some great advice as a college student when I was having the same anxiety: make them tell you "no." As in, you definitely won't get selected if you don't submit. So why not take the chance? This opportunity was made for you. 

<3

Alice

Hey y'all!

As longtime readers of the newsletter know, I’m a gardener. Which means I have a tough time in January. It’s too early to start my seeds for spring, most of my fall crops have been knocked out by the cold weather (especially this year) and there’s not much to do but plan.

Stay with me — I swear this has something to do with building a career in this industry! Since I can’t do much in the soil right now, I’m turning to my library of gardening books. Right now I’m reading Botany for Gardeners, and learning more deeply about how things grow.

There are many reasons to feel pessimistic about job hunting right now: January is a notoriously slow hiring month, NPR just canceled their summer internship program, and then there’s the potential of a recession. It definitely feels like the dead of winter.

If that’s how you’re feeling right now, let me share two things that I’ve learned about botany that I think apply to this moment.

• Though twigs look bare and lifeless during wintertime, new growth is happening below the surface.. Which means that the moment the days get longer and temperatures start to rise fresh growth will burst out. I know it sounds corny, but it helps me to reframe moments of being “stuck” as moments of quietly building strength for the next good thing.

• Plants have so many ingenious ways of growing to ensure that every leaf gets as much precious sunlight as possible. They can fan out around a stem, they grow on alternate or opposite sides. All connected to the same body, arranging themselves with the collective in mind. It’s solidarity in action. It’s tempting to go into scarcity mode, gathering all the sunlight and leaving others to fend for themselves. But (corny, again!) I really believe that we can make it through lean times while lifting others up.

Okay, I’m off my plant-covered soapbox. And I’m so excited for y’all to read this interview with James Kim. James is the full package: a writer of fiction and nonfiction, a producer, a composer, a generous and kind person. We talked about the price of hustling hard, what it takes to make a fiction podcast as an indie creator. I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Alice: How’d you get into radio and podcasts?

James: I fell into it by happenstance. I actually never listened to NPR -- didn't even know what it was until after college. In college I was studying documentary films. I was also doing anthropology and I was studying music and sound design. It was just a random mess of a thing. It's like going to a buffet and just putting everything on the plate. When I left, I thought I was going to do documentaries and that was the thing I was gravitating towards, and for various reasons it just wasn't for me. But one of the editors there -- they were the ones who introduced me to the public radio.

They were like: "Have you heard of this station out in LA called KPCC?" And I was like: "I have no idea what you're talking about, but the thing that I have heard is This American Life." And they were like: "Yeah, they have a local show once a week, and it is kind of like This American Life. It is slice of life stories."

I'm like, “I know what that is! Documentaries for the ear!" Luckily I applied and got that internship. And it was this “Ah-ha” moment where I'm like, “Holy crap! Now this thing that wasn't making any sense, it just completely makes sense." After doing my first pieces, I was hooked.

Alice: I really am a fan of your scoring. It’s so dreamy, it makes me feel like I’m back to being a teenager walking around my neighborhood aimlessly. I'm obviously not a music critic, but when I listen to it, that's how I feel.

James: That's amazing. I don't know where it came from, I will just say that [the] first time I knew how integral the score was to storytelling, it was in a movie called The Virgin Suicides. I was still in middle school at the time, but me and the video rental people were homies by then, so they were just like: "I don't care what you rent." It was rated R, and I was struck by the image on the VHS/DVD. The band Air, who did the score, is really the one who ushered me into thinking about music for film in a different way.

Resources for your New Year's resolutions

Learn a new DAW

ProTools Overview

How to Edit on Hindenburg

How to Use REAPER for Radio and Podcasting

How to Make a Podcast in Adobe Audition
 

Experiment with new formats

This episode of Sound School on audio essays

Poetry As Narration

Magical Realism in Radio
 

Play with sound design

Effective Sound Effects

Sound Design with Haley Shaw

Sound As The Protagonist

Spatial Audio

Notes On Muxture
 

Grapple with power dynamics

The Ethics Of Trespassing And Secret Recordings

Navigating Tricky Story Dynamics

Who Am I To Be Here?

Walking In The Margins Of Journalism Ethics
 

Learn more about how podcasts get made

Getting Honest About the Relationship Between Producer and Editor

Here's What It Takes To Produce A Story At Any Level

How to Build Your Editorial Muscles

Digital Editing Basics

Classifieds

Internships

Spring Intern, Proximity Media, (No pay information shared)

Variety of internships, WJCT (No pay information shared)

Podcast Production Intern, WITF ($12/hr)
 

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, (Part-time), The California Report, KQED (No pay information shared)

Associate Producer, (Part-time), Southern California Public Radio, American Public Media Group ($26.76-$33.85/hr)

Assistant Producer,  AirTalk with Larry Mantle, APMG ($23.90/hr)

Associate Producer, Various roles, WBUR ($67,958/yr minimum)

Associate Producer, Faction Talk, Sirius XM ($40,000-$55,000/yr)

Associate Producer, (Part-time), MLB Network Radio, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)

Audio Production Assistant, Sirius XM, ($46,000-$70,000/yr)

Associate Producer, At Liberty, American Civil Liberties Union  ($85,466/yr)

Other jobs and opportunities

Apply for the Next Generation Radio Project. And watch this video for extra tips on applying.

Operations and Executive Assistant, Slate ($48,000 - $55,000/yr)

The climate podcast Inherited is seeking pitches for their third season.

Snap Judgement is hiring story scouts for their spinoff show Spooked ($1,500/month retainer, plus bonuses for successful pitches).

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.

James recommends

• 30 for 30: Pink Card

• Shameless Acquisition Target

• Birds of Empire 

Hey y'all,

I bet many of you reading this are preparing for final exams, writing papers, or otherwise trying to stagger through the finish line of this year. Years ago, when I was making a weekly version of this newsletter, I would put together digital finals care packages for subscribers.

Whether you’re studying for exams, or are counting the days until you have time off from work, here are some things that have helped me in the past. Most of them are free or under $5!

• Cold call a friend to check in and let them know you’re thinking of them. If being on the phone makes you anxious, send a postcard! I have been on the receiving end of this and it really makes me feel loved.

• Print copies of favorite photos (it costs like 50 cents at places like Walgreens and CVS!) to put up around the house.

• During early quarantine I discovered that corny YouTube dance workouts really do the trick when it comes to endorphins and stress.

• Stream your favorite album from when you were 10 years old. It’s kind of terrifying that I still know all the words to Avril Lavigne’s first album. I’m very punk rock.

• Wander around your local library. Paging through cookbooks and gardening guides always calms me. It’s also fun to look at the children’s books and remember old favorites.

I’ve got some real treats for y’all in this very newsletter, too. There’s an interview with reporter/producer/all around talent Shima Oliaee. She has a new series out with ESPN’s 30 for 30 on Iranian women who are fighting for the right to watch soccer. It’s part memoir, part sports drama. You’ve gotta listen. Plus, Shima gave me a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the WNYC podcast Dolly Parton’s America.

And!! I am excited to share an interview with lawyer (and journalist) Jordan Fletcher on how to read and understand employment contracts before you sign them. Obviously this interview is not legal advice, though you can totally hire Jordan.

Okay, let’s get into it.

Alice: Tell me about what you’re working on right now!

Shima: I have four miniseries in the pipeline right now. The first [premiered] at ESPN 30 for 30 on December 8, 2022, called Pink Card. I think it’s the best and hardest thing I’ve ever made. I’m deeply appreciative [of] my extraordinary production team: Homa Sarabi, Sayre Quevedo, Marisa Bravo, Ramtin Arablouei, and Nesa Azadikhah. Megan Rapinoe also joined in to support!

My next series will come out in the fall of 2023, which I’m also very excited about. There are two other projects I’ve reported –– one almost in its entirety. At this time, every skill I learned the past six years, running a podcast company, reporting, producing, editing, sound designing, pitching –– it all culminated for this time. I make mistakes, but I try to dust myself off, learn more, and improve quickly. I just launched my own company, Shirazad Productions. The name is a play on Scheherazade, the protagonist in 1001 Nights. She tells stories in order to save both herself and the lives of the women who will come after her. The premise is that a sultan, after being betrayed by the woman he loves, decides he will marry a virgin each night and behead her by morning. Scheherazade offers herself up, and eventually through her stories, she reforms even the sultan himself.

I love that Octavia Butler quote, “I began writing about power because I had so little.” I started an audio company reporting stories on power because I had so little. Stories keep us alive when we are losing hope. On a side note, my mom pointed out to me that “shir-azad” in farsi translates literally to “free the lion.” That was a happy accident. For each series, I’m working with people who are a dream to collaborate with. This is also my opportunity to create a new culture in how we work in audio, even if it's one project at a time.

Classifieds

Internships

Intern, Performance Today, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern, Marketplace Tech, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern (Part-time), Performance Today, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Spring Intern, Proximity Media, (No pay information shared)
 

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, (Part-time), The California Report, KQED (No pay information shared)

Associate Producer, (Part-time), Southern California Public Radio, APMG ($26.76/hr)

Assistant Producer,  AirTalk with Larry Mantle, APMG ($23.90/hr)

Associate Producer, Branded Podcasts, Audacy (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, News and Programming, WBUR ($67,958/yr minimum)
 

Other jobs and opportunities:

Statewide Education Reporter, Indiana Public Broadcasting, Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($50,000/yr)

Apply for the Next Generation Radio Project. And watch this video for extra tips on applying.

Operations and Executive Assistant, Slate ($48,000 - $55,000/yr).

Snap Judgement is hiring story scouts for their spinoff show Spooked ($1,500/month retainer, plus bonuses for successful pitches).

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.

Resources

Many of you have requested a resource on understanding contracts. And I thought that was an excellent idea. I’m no expert on contract law, so I called on attorney Jordan Fletcher to get the basics on contracts. 

Jordan: I am the owner of Fletcher Law PLLC, which is a law firm based in New York City. I do a mix of intellectual property (“IP”) and commercial counseling for clients in creative, media, tech, and arts fields. That includes trademarks, copyrights, licensing and also IP and business disputes.

I often work as an outside general counsel for creative businesses, which means helping folks organize and run their businesses, and drafting and negotiating their contracts.

Alice: Can you run me through the anatomy of a contract? When someone gets a contract for a freelance gig what should they expect to see?

JF: There are many different kinds of contracts in the world, so I’ll limit this question to what you might see in an independent contractor agreement for creative services. (And, of course, big lawyer caveat: this isn’t legal advice! Find a lawyer if you have questions about your own situation!)

I should also say that there are well-written and not-so-well-written contracts out there. Just because an agreement should have a certain provision in it, doesn’t mean it actually does, or doesn’t mean that the terms are clearly spelled out. I’m going to talk about the things you’ll typically see in a contract that is sufficient, but still relatively simple.

At the very top, there's usually a paragraph that tells who the parties to the contract are, and the date the contract begins. You’ll want to make sure that information is all correct, and, for example, if you’re working through an LLC as opposed to as an individual, the contract should identify the right counterparty. After that, there may be some paragraphs called recitals, which often start with the word “whereas.” They give context and background for the contract. Strictly speaking, though, they’re usually not binding obligations.

The meat of the contract will often begin with a section on services and deliverables, which is basically, “What's the scope of the engagement, what is being expected of you?” There may be a timeline for producing deliverables. There may be provisions around client acceptance and review of the deliverables, whether revisions are going to be requested and how many rounds of changes there will be. Sometimes, the services and deliverables will be defined in a separate exhibit or schedule. Regardless, my main suggestion is to be clear about the scope of the agreement, know exactly what is being asked of you, and know whether you feel comfortable providing the specified services, and whether it all makes sense to you.

There should be another section on fees and expenses. How much will you be paid? What's the payment schedule? [Note: last month’s newsletter has more on this topic!] Will payments be made upfront? (Down payments are always a good thing!) Will the payments be after delivery? With some contracts, it could be 30 or 60 days after delivery.

There should hopefully be a section on the term of the agreement, which is how long the contract lasts, and there may also be provisions about termination, meaning can you get out of the deal early, and if so, how and what are the consequences? Ideally, it should lay out how much the service provider will be owed if the client terminates early, especially if work has already begun. Those are important things to consider.

Another key section of the agreement concerns ownership of the work product or the intellectual property that goes into the work product. Typically, this is either going to be a license arrangement or else it will be work for hire. A license agreement means that the contractor retains ownership of the intellectual property, and they're allowing the client to use that IP for some period of time. If it's a license, there should be a defined scope to the license, meaning what property is being licensed, for how long, in what geographical region, and in what  kinds of media, and whether the license is exclusive to the client (meaning the client is the only one with those rights to use the IP) or nonexclusive (meaning the contractor is free to license the IP to others).

Alternatively, many contractor agreements are framed as “work for hire” agreements, which means that all rights to the IP are being transferred to the client. In a contractor agreement, the contract must use the magic words “work for hire” or “assignment” — basically the agreement has to specifically say that the IP is being transferred from the contractor to the client for the IP to be transferred. Technically, work-for-hire only applies to certain kinds of work product made for certain purposes, which is why well-written contracts often use the terms “work-for-hire” and “assignment” together.

It's not necessarily bad to do work for hire agreements. Many clients are probably going to want or insist on work for hire, but again, as someone running a creative business, you want to know what you are providing and what you will retain in terms of rights to the content. And, if possible, you can price your services accordingly. Also, it’s great if you can get the client to agree in writing that the IP transfer is contingent on payment in full… that way, if there’s any problem with payment (it happens!), you can argue that the client isn’t permitted to use any of your work product until you get paid.

Moving on, there may be a section on credit (how you will be credited for your work, if at all), and perhaps also confidentiality terms depending on what the nature of the arrangement is and the nature of the client. There will probably also be a section probably called representations and warranties and indemnification. That sounds like a lot of legalese, but it's actually very important from a risk perspective. What's going on in there is the parties are making specific commitments to each other. And the result of those commitments being violated is that the breaching party will have to cover the other side's damages and legal fees if a third party comes and makes a claim against the other side.

A simple example would be if the service provider says that the intellectual property they're providing is original to them or fully licensed. The client will make you represent that that content does not infringe anyone else's intellectual property rights, that you didn't incorporate content from someone without permission. And if a third party comes out of the woodwork and says to the client, “Hey, that's mine,” you, the service provider, will be liable for all the damages and liable to pay for all the attorney's fees that flow from it. So there's a lot of risk shifting that ends up in the reps and warranties and indemnification clauses. And again, the main thing is, be clear about what you are committing to, especially around the originality of content that's being delivered. The promises can be really thin, or there can be a lot that gets stuffed in there. It depends on the context, but you just want to be really clear about what you're getting yourself into and make absolutely sure you can commit to it, and that it feels reasonable for you to cover that risk. And finally, there will be a section at the end that contains a bunch of miscellaneous provisions. These will include a  range of interpretive provisions saying how the agreement should be interpreted, what state’s law governs, how to handle disputes if they arise, whether the contract can be enforced in court or must be submitted to arbitration, and where that must occur.

AW: What are the legal differences between contractors and employees?

JF: You may be aware there's a big shift these days to try to push as many things towards contractor relationships versus employment relationships. Part of that is the expense of health insurance and benefits, but part of that is that employees under federal law, and generally state law, get a whole host of protections that contractors do not get by default automatically, that can't be waived. Those are things like entitlement to minimum wage and overtime, protection against discrimination, protection against retaliation in the workspace, entitlements to be paid within a certain time and in a certain manner. And those are things that employees automatically get and that contractors, generally speaking, don't get.

AW: Wait contractors aren't entitled to minimum wage?

JF: Nope. You're entitled to the fee as stated in the contract. I will caveat that in a second, but generally, no, minimum wage and overtime for more than 40 hours a week is required by state and federal law for employees for an employment relationship. The big takeaway is that employees are entitled to a number of protections that independent contractors typically don't get. There are some local laws that have changed that. In New York City, for example, there's something called the Freelance Isn't Free Act, which gives some additional protection to contractors that aren't available elsewhere, but even that is more limited than an employee’s rights under employment laws.

The other thing I'll say though is there are a lot of agreements where the parties agree that they're independent contractors, but under the law that does not automatically make them an independent contractor. It’s actually a very fact specific thing based on the day-to-day reality of the relationship. There’s a huge area of law –– and there are many disputes that end up in court –– that deals with whether someone is an employee entitled to minimum wage and overtime, or a contractor. Usually those people all had quote-unquote “contractor agreements,” but in fact, the courts have held that they were employees and they were entitled to a variety of legal benefits.

AW: What are red flags people should look out for when reading their contracts?

JF: You know, it's hard to talk about red flags without context, and without understanding what the power dynamic is between the parties. But I think the key is just to make sure that you understand the deal that you're signing up for and to go in with your eyes open.

As a person starting out, you may not feel like you have much leverage in the negotiation process. And you don't have to feel bad about that. That's kind of the reality of starting out in a new field, needing work, and trying to get your foot in the door. The main thing is to see each new opportunity as a chance to make a different choice about how you want to run your business.

That said, I think there are some important provisions that you should understand. What is the nature of the services you're being asked to provide? What are the specific deliverables you're being asked to provide? What is the timeline? You want to understand how much and when you're getting paid, and terms that would affect how you get paid. Like, can the client object to certain things and then you don't get a final payment until you fix X, Y, or Z? And what if there’s a disagreement over acceptance of the final product?

You want to understand the IP rights, understand what you're gonna own or not own at the end of the day. As I mentioned above, when I'm writing contracts for clients who have even minimal leverage, I will often try to insert language that says “transfer of IP rights is contingent upon prior payment.” It's an awesome thing to have in there in a typical work-for-hire agreement, especially given how many creatives I meet who are having trouble getting paid. Basically it means that if you've delivered the IP and three months later the client hasn't paid you, then the IP ownership rights actually haven't transferred. Now you don't just have a payment dispute, you have potential copyright infringement claims on your hands.

Another note about IP: in an employer/employee relationship, the IP automatically gets transferred to the employer, assuming that the work is within the scope of whatever the employment is. If it’s completely outside of the scope and you’re not using the employer’s tools to create it, then you're probably not transferring rights to your employer. (Though you always need to read your employment agreement to know for sure.)

What that means is that, for example, if you're a line producer for a show, and you've got an employment agreement with the show, it's likely that any pitches that you're pitching to the show, including the ideas and any work product created that relates to those pitches, could belong to the show. The simplest thing to do in this situation is to get a written consent from the client or the employer that confirms that if a project doesn’t get produced by the employer, you can take the idea and the work product elsewhere.

AW: How do you know when an issue with a contract is worth taking to a lawyer?

JF: So that's a hard question to answer. I am a lawyer, and I will be the first to tell you that lawyers can be expensive. Big questions to consider are: How much is this worth to you? How much risk are you willing to take on? How much can you afford to spend on legal? And how much can you afford to lose by signing an agreement that you didn't understand, or that didn’t cover everything it should have?

It's not a decision that's easily made for everyone. In a perfect world, you’d have a lawyer look at everything before you sign it… but that’s not most folks’ reality. There are legal services organizations and nonprofits and bar association helplines that will give you free consultations, so there are places you can go to get a bit of free-ish legal advice. At a minimum, you can use those services to educate yourself and figure out whether you really should be hiring a lawyer.

One thing I will say, though: when you find yourself with a lawsuit or even a potential lawsuit on your hands, that’s a moment when you should definitely be speaking with a lawyer. And not just any lawyer… find someone who regularly handles the kind of dispute you’re facing.

AW: You mentioned leverage earlier, when do you know that you have leverage?

JF: Leverage is a feeling and it's an appearance. It's not always a fact. If you're willing to walk away from a deal, then you've got leverage. The key is to know what you're willing to accept; to be willing to walk if you're being pushed to go beyond your bottom line.

People bluff leverage all the time. It’s kind of like playing poker. And then there are also people who have been in an industry for 20 years and they don't know they could ask for more… or simply don’t feel comfortable making the ask.

So I think the answer is: it might feel scary to ask for more. But you can usually ask for anything if you’re polite about it. And the more you do it, the more confident you will become.

I would start out by taking some time to identify for yourself what would be amazing, like what's pie in the sky for you. And then consider what a great deal would look like; then a good deal; then what's a bad deal, but you'll still take it. And finally, identify your line in the sand: at what point do you say, “Actually, I would rather go do something else with my time?” And, of course, it helps a lot to have some context: what prices and terms are other people getting for similar deals? If the market doesn’t align with what you’re looking for, maybe your expectations are off, but also maybe you’re playing in the wrong sandbox.

In terms of approaching the negotiation, often, if it’s a situation where the other side has –– or is acting as if they have –– more leverage, a good strategy can be to start by asking for clarification around things that you don't understand, or that don't necessarily make sense to you given the context of a deal. Clarifications can be used to identify negotiating points in a less aggressive manner than pounding your fist on the table and making demands. And if the other side comes back with a response that doesn’t make sense, you can politely point out why it doesn’t make sense and why the thing you want makes more sense.

At the same time, don't be attached to the other side saying yes to everything, or frankly, even anything. There are some counterparties, especially big ones, who will view their deal terms as essentially non-negotiable. But there are also some counterparties who will say everything is non-negotiable and act offended or annoyed that you're even imagining that you could ask for more. Often that’s just a bluff, or it’s someone who doesn’t feel like taking the time to consider your request. But actually there may be points of flexibility in small ways so that you can get more of what you need, even around the edges. And if you can make a negotiation about more than just money –– since money is often a stumbling block –– you may be able to get some of your non-monetary needs met, even if the numbers don’t change.

Finally, don’t be afraid to stick to your bottom line. At the end of the day, no one benefits from you feeling resentful or taken advantage of just because you've agreed to give more than you feel comfortable giving. There are plenty of people who will just suck it up because they feel like they've got no choice, but at some point you will hopefully decide that you have other choices.

Shima recommends

• Anything by James Kim, Eleanor Kagan, BA Parker, Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, Eleanor McDowell, Alan Hall, Sayre Quevedo and Ariana Martinez.

• I still love Fresh Air.

• The Paris Review podcast.

• Forever is a Long Time. I was shocked and moved by the honesty.

• I love these episodes of Heavyweight.

• ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ Kids, 20 Years Later.

• The Lolita Podcast stuck with me for a long time.

Hi y'all!

I can’t lie, I’m especially excited about this month’s interview. It’s with the podcast that I’ve listened to more than any other. As in: when I refresh my podcast feed and see a new episode of Who? Weekly I hit play right away.
 
Here’s a little introduction for the uninitiated: Who? Weekly covers those low level celebrities who, when you mention their names, people ask, “Wait, who?”
 
Think Corbin Bleu or Fletcher. You might know them, but if you brought them up at Thanksgiving dinner your family would probably be lost. They’re not exactly A-list. Who’s (as they’re called in the Who? Weekly lexicon) are delightful because they’re so obscure that they’ll do ridiculous things to get in the public eye, like writing songs for Cracker Jack’s (as in, the snack) or playing a concert at your local Sam’s Club.
 
Hosts Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger follow these kinds of exploits, while giving sharp (but never mean spirited) commentary on celebrity culture. On Monday they take us through the week in Who? news and on Fridays they release a call-in show, where they answer ridiculous questions from listeners (“Does Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet make it a Who?”).
 
The show has a dedicated following, we call ourselves Wholigans. I’ve speculated with friends in the industry about how this show gets made — it’s clear that a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make a final product that sounds so effortlessly entertaining. It comes out twice a week (three times if you subscribe to their Patreon) and has been on for seven years. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
 
When planning this season of the newsletter I decided to go straight to the source: Bobby and Lindsey, to find out how they make the show feel fresh, and what it’s like to make a show with a friend. I think you’re going to love it.
 
Also in the newsletter this month: how to manage your money while freelancing, featuring star freelancer (and my friend) Alex Sujong Laughlin. She has excellent advice on practical skills like following up on late invoices and saving money for taxes.

Lindsey and Bobby backstage at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY 

Alice: Who Weekly started as a newsletter — how did you decide to make it a podcast?

Bobby: Our friends who had a podcast said, “This should be a podcast.” And we were like, “Whoa, why and how? We don't do that!” And they said, “Oh, just try it,” and they kind of gave us the tips on how to start it and do it and gave us the motivation to just make a pilot episode and see if we liked it.

But what's crucial is that Lindsay and I have gone into everything that we've ever done together with the assumption that it won't last, that it's just for fun. We did Tumblrs, we made the Who Weekly newsletter. We never thought that it would last that long and it didn't. And then we were like, “Oh, we'll just try a podcast, we'll see how long we can have fun doing this.” And it just sort of stuck.

Lindsey: I think the key to it was at this point in time, podcasting wasn't seen as anyone's career, unless you were like Ira Glass. There was no expectation that we’d make a career from it.

Everything that we've ever done separately and together revolves around a piece of media and how to make it funny or how to make it at all. Podcasting really just was another excuse to learn how to play with software and learn how to audio edit.

I do think that we probably wouldn't have started a podcast now, because now there's so much information about it being hard. It's a full-time job. It needs to be perfect. It needs to be engineered.

We would've seen that as too big of a barrier to entry. But back then, it almost felt bare bones, that you could get away with putting something out that was kind of DIY.

Bobby: It was a gag, it was very unserious. So it was unserious until it was suddenly serious when we realized: “Oh, there’s a little audience here.”
 

Resources

I’ll admit that I don’t have the best system for managing freelance payments. It’s usually a sticky note on my computer monitor that says “XYZ owes me money.” I’ll be lying in bed trying to fall asleep and remember that I should probably follow up on that invoice. When I told my friend (and fellow podcast producer) Alex Sujong Laughlin about this, she gasped in horror.
 
Alex does an excellent job of treating her freelance work like a business. So I called her up to have her explain her system to me. Here’s a selection from that conversation:
 
Alice: Talk me through your system for managing invoices.
 
Alex: I have a couple of systems, but it all comes back to the spreadsheet. As soon as I sign a contract I add a line to the spreadsheet immediately.
 
The main columns on that spreadsheet are:

• Invoice number. Let me give you an example: for Poynter, I had an agreed upon amount for 22 issues. And so I knew that I was going to need to send 22 invoices. Every time I sent an invoice, it was “Poynter Cohort #13, Poynter Cohort #14.” I’m counting up.

• Quarter, so Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.

• Doing business as. This is a way for me to make sure I know if they are invoicing to my business or to me as an individual. I have an LLC and I try to have all of my professional work going straight into the LLC, but if I'm teaching, for example, they're not gonna be paying my LLC to teach. That's a situation where I'm being paid as an individual.

• Job. That's where I'm writing, like what is the actual thing I'm invoicing for?

• Amount, so that is the total amount that's invoiced. Then I have a bunch of other columns that have to do with how I sort my money once I get it.

• Date that I sent the invoice and the date it's due according to the contract.

• Work type. Is it producing, is it writing, is it teaching? I just have that for my personal filing, because I wanna know how much of my income comes from what.

• Have you sorted your money? It's just like a check box – I'll check it once I've done it. [We’ll come back to this later!]

• Status. That’s either “paid” or “sent.”

That's the spreadsheet. And the way I use it is that whenever I sign a contract, I immediately add a line item to the spreadsheet. That doesn't mean I'm invoicing immediately, but it is a record of what money I should expect to be coming at some point.
 
And then on my calendar every other Thursday is Invoice Day. On Invoice Day I go through a spreadsheet and look at what needs to be sent and send invoices.
 
Alice: What do you do when your invoices are overdue? How do you track down that money?
 
Alex: I try to have my payment terms clearly written on my invoices and in my contracts, and it's important to pay attention to that because sometimes they'll sneak in net 60 or net 90, which is silly. [Editor’s note: that means that the client doesn’t have to pay you until 60 or 90 days after the work is done.]
 
I will wait until the day the invoice is due (usually 30 days after I sent the invoice to them)  and if I haven't been paid, then I'll check in politely and be like, “Hey, I wanted to check in on the status of invoice number whatever, it's due today. Let me know if you need any more information from me.” I usually give like about one or two weeks of messing around before I start to get really tough.
 
I think the toughest I've ever had to be was with this one publication; they were really wiggly and wishy-washy about getting me payment, and this was probably three weeks after it was due. I ended up having to escalate. So almost two months after I had invoiced, that's when I was like, I will be escalating this. Like you are in violation of this law. And they got me payment the next day.
 
Alice: When do you get to the point of thinking, “Okay I’m going to tweet about this.”
 
Alex: I usually am not eager to do that. I tweeted about NYU because it was three months after the class had ended and I still hadn't been paid for teaching a full class. And the person that I was communicating with was starting to get very dismissive of me and was not giving me any answers. I contacted the union and that helped a lot.
 
Alice: What’s your advice to people who are thinking about going freelance and want to start preparing financially?
 
Alex: I am very fired up and passionate about this. The minute I knew I was going freelance, I started a business bank account. And I immediately put $5,000 into it just to get it started.
 
I was thinking of going freelance for probably two years before I finally did it, and for those two years I saved a very big percentage of my paycheck.
 
A big caveat here: I am married, I live in an affordable town that's not New York, I don't have kids and I don't have student debt. And so I had a very cushy jumping off point. If a person has the good fortune of being in a full-time job and choosing to go freelance, save as much as you can and really use that time where you're getting a steady paycheck to experiment on how much you actually need to live, because it's unlikely that you're gonna get the same salary freelancing that you did while working at a staff job.
 
I forced myself to live on a low salary, a very low salary, as low as I could get. In part because I wanted to save the money, but also because I wanted to see how low of a salary I could live on so I could pay myself that.
 
Alice: I wanted to go back to an item on your spreadsheet, “Did you sort your money?” What is money sorting?
 
Alex: Once I went freelance and started my business bank account, I [set up] a checking account and a savings account inside my business bank account. And once I get paid, I sort my money. Everything goes straight into my business account, so it's a matter of taking out 40 percent for my business savings and taxes, and then 10 percent for my personal savings.
 
Alice: And then what about paying rent and buying other things, like for life. At what point in that process do things get transferred to your personal bank account?
 
Alex: I gave myself a salary and I pay myself every two weeks. And that's what I use to live my life.
 
Alice: Did you give yourself vacation days and sick leave?
 
Alex: Yes! All of these things, sick days, days off, and also how many hours you hope to work in a work week should be built into what you are deciding your rate is. Have you heard of the Writer's Co-op?
 
Alice: Oh yes, they have a great podcast.
 
Alex: I listened to their entire podcast before I went freelance, and it taught me a lot about how to manage my money and think about what I'm doing as a business. They have a very cool calculator thing, like they have an equation. They have some math that they include to account for the unpaid work that goes into being a freelancer, like generating leads, sending invoices, all of that stuff. So if you say you wanna work 40 hours a week, that's actually gonna look more like 55 if you're a freelancer. And you need to account for that. Part of that is how many vacation days you want to take. You decide what the policy is for the small company that is you. And they help you account for all of that and then do this amazing math: this is my day rate, this is my hourly rate, this is the absolute minimum I can work for and still have the lifestyle that I want.
 

Classifieds

Spring Intern (Part-time), 99% Invisible, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)

Spring Intern (Part-time), Earwolf, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)

Radio Newscast Intern (Part-time), KQED ($16.99/hr)

Newsroom Intern (Part-time), KQED ($16.99/hr)

Intern, KPCC, American Public Media Group ($18.66/hr)

Intern, Make Me Smart, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern, Performance Today, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern, Marketplace Tech, ($18.00/hr)

Digital Intern, Marketplace, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern, Marketplace NY Bureau, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern, Media Production & Operations, APMG ($18.00/hr)

Intern, Audacy (No pay information included)

Programming Intern, The Block, Audacy ($15.00/hr)

Creative Intern, California based, Sony Music Entertainment (No pay information shared)

Creative Intern, New York based, Sony Music Entertainment ($15.00/hr)

Fellow

Last Mile Fellow, Sirius XM

Kroc Fellow, NPR ($50,000/yr plus benefits)

Fellow, Education Research & Production Assistant, APMG ($18.00-$23.00/hr)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, Earwolf, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)

Associate Producer, Volume/Faction, Sirius XM ($40,000-$55,000/yr)

Associate Producer (Part-Time), The California Report, KQED (No pay information shared)

Associate Producer (Part-Time), Southern California Public Radio, APMG ($26.76/hr)

Associate Producer, Minnesota Now, APMG ($22.74 - $32.36/hr)

Associate Producer, Weekend All Things Considered, NPR (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, Branded Podcasts, Audacy (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, Audacy (No pay information included)

Assistant Producer, WBBM Newsradio 780, Audacy (No pay information included)

Associate Producer, Entertainment Podcasts, Sony Music Entertainment ($60,000-$70,000/yr)

Associate Producer, Narrative Non-Fiction Podcasts, Sony Music Entertainment  ($60,000-$70,000/yr)
 

Other

Contract Production Coordinator, Wondery
Producer, On the Record, WYPR​

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.

Bobby and Lindsey recommend

• Little Gold Men

• StraightioLab

• Vibe Check

• The Town

• Pop Pantheon

Hey y'all!

Welcome back to Starting Out from me and Transom. We took September off for some much needed rest, and so that I could prep a new season of interviews and resources for y’all.
 
One of the questions I’ve heard the most is how to make the jump from intern to full time roles like Associate Producer. I remember when I finished my last internship and started applying for AP roles, feeling like I was sort of floating through space looking for a foothold. Ultimately you just need one person to say “yes” to you in order to get that first gig. But the road to that point can be demoralizing. This month’s interview and resource guide are all about how to get to that first “yes” from a hiring manager.
 
If you are reading this and you are in the position of hiring APs I would like to beg you (in a dignified, classy way) to do your part to end this perma-training culture. Take a chance on someone who only has internships on their resume! Be the Bradley Cooper to someone’s Lady Gaga! 
 
I interviewed the hilarious and talented Laura Mayer about all of her hiring manager secrets. It’s a long read, but very worth your time if you’re looking for an edge on your job applications.
 
We also talked about her podcast Shameless Acquisition Target, which follows her quest to get acquired and make enough money to buy a house. It’s a commentary on how the industry functions today and the traps that you can fall into when trying to make a living off of podcasts. I have spent many afternoons this summer in the garden, listening to the latest episode and live texting my reactions to my friends. If you haven’t listened yet, do it now before the finale is released.

Alice: How do you think this industry has changed since you've gotten into it?

Laura: I started in public radio in 2008, 2009, and there was this really pervasive sense of scarcity. You just felt lucky to have a job. And then when I was at Panoply, it was like, "Oh, I'm suddenly making a livable wage. I have dental insurance." So it was less of a financial scarcity mindset, and it was more: "We work at the podcast factory, where we have to make as many shows as possible so that we can create as many ad units as possible." That wasn't the emphasis when I was at WNYC. There was one project to be made.

One thing that hasn't changed since I started in podcasting is the sense of so much opportunity. But the thing that I have seen is this continued emphasis on volume of shows. And volume of ad units. I think that's being kind of shortsighted in a lot of cases. You still have to make this thing good. And I think that might be one thing that is different from my time in public radio, which is that in a lot of cases — and I'm not saying this is the case for every show I've worked on — but I think that there is this idea that the podcast doesn't necessarily need to be good, it just needs to be done. And that's a different way of doing business.

AW: I was listening to episode two of Shameless Acquisition Target and you were talking about the way that the industry has changed and the feeling of being at “the podcast factory.” Do you still recommend this line of work to people?

Resources

The period between an internship or fellowship and your first “real” job (probably associate or assistant producer, aka AP) can be really hard. Everyone is telling you that you’re overqualified for internships but underqualified for AP roles.
 
How do you make that jump? It can be a difficult time, when you’re short on money and applying to jobs feels like throwing an application into a void, with no expectation that you’ll ever hear back. I remember being terrified all the time. And I’ve heard from many of you that you’re stuck in that in-between space too. Here are some steps that you can take to get a foothold.
 
Start while you’re in your internship.
           
I say this all the time, but build relationships with your coworkers. Tell them that you’ll be looking for work after your internship is over and ask if they know of any shows (inside your workplace or out) that might need some support.
 
Be super up front with your manager that you’re looking for an AP role and ask for their advice on making that jump. Chances are your manager has been in the same weird limbo themselves and will be happy to help ease the transition. They might introduce you to someone else in the organization who is hiring, or share other connections.

Be dependable. 

If you say you’re going to do something, do it. Double check your work before turning it in. Figure out an organizational system that works for you.
 
I want to be clear: this doesn’t mean that you can’t make mistakes or struggle with a task.
 
Some of my biggest early career screw ups came from not asking for help when I needed it because I wanted to be seen as trustworthy and good at my job. My ego got in the way of getting the help I needed.
 
Turns out the thing that actually makes people trust you at work is asking for help as soon as a problem comes up, instead of trying to hide it in hopes that no one will notice.
 
If something is taking longer than you expected, let your manager know that you might need more time. If you’re stuck on a step in the process, ask for help. It’s not catastrophic to struggle with something, everyone has growing pains. It’s part of the process.

Classifieds

Internships
 
Summer Podcast Intern, The Wall Street Journal, ($900/week plus cost of public transportation)
 
Spring Podcast Intern (part-time), The Wall Street Journal, ($25.71/hr)
 
CNN Spring Podcast Intern (part time), CNN, Warner Media (no pay information given)
 
Podcast Intern, The Record, Recorded Future (no pay information given)
 
This Is Uncomfortable Intern, Marketplace, American Public Media. ($18/hr) (plus, you’d get to work with me!)
 
Multimedia Intern, The American Civil Liberties Union ($18.57-$21.42/hr depending on experience)
 
Development Intern (part-time), Radio Ambulante ($10/hr)
 
Fellowships
 
Maximum Fun Production Fellow, Maximum Fun ($17.50/hr) 
 
Kroc Fellowship, NPR ($50,000/yr plus benefits)
 
iHeart’s NextUp Initiative, iHeart Radio ($2,000/month)
 
 
Associate/Assistant Producers
 
Podcast Associate Producer (Seasonal), NFL (No pay information given)
 
Associate Producer of Branded, Pineapple Street Studios, Audacy  ($67,000-70,000/yr)
 
Associate Producer, Audacy (No pay information given)
 
 
Other jobs
 
Reporter, KUCB, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (​​$44-56,000/yr)
 
Reporter, New Hampshire Public Radio, ($40,200-48,199/yr)
 
Reporter, Health & Equity, NHPR, ($46,200-55,399/yr)
 
Morning Edition Producer, NHPR, ($46,200-55,399/yr)
 

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Laura recommends

Normal Gossip: obviously
 
Once Upon a Time…at Bennington College: Give me all the gossip in a cafeteria at Bennington College at the end of last century, PLEASE
 
The Town with Matthew Belloni: for all of my Hollywood industry goss needs

Hiya!

Welcome back to Starting Out from me and Transom! 

This month marks one year of Starting Out, and I kind of can’t believe it. Over the last year I’ve written this newsletter in my free time: on planes, trains and occasionally in the passenger seat of a car. But mostly, I’ve written it on my couch, on the back porch, at my kitchen table. I’ve paced around my neighborhood while interviewing my radio heroes.

I’ve done a lot of cooking and crafting and writing in this little duplex but this newsletter is still one of my favorite things I’ve made here. 

This newsletter would not be possible to make without the team at Transom. Jennifer Jerrett, Sydney Lewis and Jay Allison edit my work and I benefit from their sharp editorial minds all the time. The best way to support this newsletter is to donate to Transom. They’re the real deal, y’all. 

As I start planning the next season of Starting Out I’d love to hear which resources you need and what narrative audio makers you want me to interview. This newsletter is only worth making if it’s actually helpful to people, so I really appreciate your feedback!

I’m so excited to have B.A. Parker in the newsletter this month — I’m such a fan of her work. I remember meeting her for the first time at WNYC and being so starstruck that I probably came off as incredibly awkward. 

I’ve heard from many of you that you want to hear from people who got into narrative audio after working in another field and Parker fits the bill. Before working at This American Life (!!) she was a film professor. I spoke with Parker about making her start without any journalism experience, and about getting to know her new co-workers at NPR’s Code Switch.

Alice: I've talked to some interns who are taking on remote internships and are trying to figure out how to get to know coworkers in a remote world. You've had a bunch of freelance jobs during COVID, what is your approach to that? 

Parker: With the new team that I'm on at Code Switch I'm doing one-on-ones all this week with everyone on the team, just, “How are you doing? How can I help? What's going on?” With The Cut, we all worked from home, but we all lived in Brooklyn. So it was just like, “Let's go to Fort Greene really quickly for four hours to talk about pitches or to see how everyone's doing mentally,” because I got that job in the summer of 2020.

Alice: Not a notoriously great time for mental health. 

Parker: Not a notoriously great time for mental health! On another job I did this summer some people were in Seattle, some people were in L.A., one person was in Toronto, one person in Chicago. I would still try to have weekly meetings to reach out and just see how everything's going. I'm also always really concerned that I'm not helping enough. So I always emphasize, “Hey, what can I do? How are you doing in your neck of the woods?” That kind of thing. 

Even with the last show I was on, I sought out the intern and I was like, “Hey, are you free for a half an hour, just to chat?” That was a show where I had no real responsibilities, I was just the guest host. But I know that being an intern during this time is really bizarre and so I’d ask, “Hey how are you doing? What kind of pitches would you like to present?” I saw myself giving assignments, being like, “Can you give me two pitches by Wednesday and we could talk 'em over. If you like.” 

And then I really fought to get one of their pitches on the air and it did!

Resources

In honor of one year of Starting Out I wanted to collect all of our previous resource guides for anyone who might have missed a previous issue. 

• How to learn Pro Tools for free

• How to write a cover letter that will get you an interview

• A glossary of jargon that you might hear in a first job

• How to learn Hindenburg for free

• How to talk about money at work

• How to get an edge in your NPR internship application

• How to vet a workplace to make sure it’s a healthy work environment. 

• How to prepare for a job interview

• How to start exploring sound design

• What you need to know about unionizing your workplace

• How to have a productive networking conversation 

Phew, that’s a lot of resources! I’m already starting to dream up new resources for the next season of Starting Out. I’d love to hear from you what would be most helpful. 

Classifieds

Internships

A Better Life?, Feet in 2 Worlds ($15/hr)

Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation ($25/hr)

Fellowships 

The New Voices Magazine Jewish Media Fellowship, Jewish Women’s Archive ($750/semester)

Reset Production Fellow, Chicago Public Media ($55,000)

Podcasts Fellow, Chicago Public Media ($55,000)

Education Fellow, Chicago Public Media ($55,000)

Kroc Fellowship, NPR ($50,000)

Associate/Assistant Producer

Associate Producer, Here & Now, WBUR, (WBUR did not share pay information)

Assistant Producer, SCPR AirTalk, Southern California Public Radio ($23.90/hr)

Associate Producer, The Takeaway, New York Public Radio (NYPR did not share pay information)

Associate Producer, Somethin’ Else, Sony Music Entertainment (Sony did not share pay information)

Associate Producer, Comedy and Culture, Crooked Media (Crooked did not share pay information)

Associate Producer, Audacy (Audacy did not share rates)

Assistant Producer, The Brian Lehrer Show, New York Public Radio ($61,480-$63,000/yr)

Associate Producer Digital Producer, Minnesota Public Radio ($22.62/hr)

Misc. 

Digital Producer, Iowa Public Radio ($35,568 - $48,178/yr)

AES x Arup Diversity in Audio Scholarship

Podcast Producer, Slate (minimum 66,000/yr) 

Narrative Podcast Producer, Slate (minimum 66,000/yr)
 

Calls for Pitches

Resonate Podcast Festival, Virginia Commonwealth University

 

If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities. 

Parker recommends

• Gender Reveal: Tuck Woodstock just did a great interview with Edith Surreal, who discusses her transition while being a masked wrestler. 

• Turner Classic Movies's The Plot Thickens: The season on the making of "Bonfire of the Vanities" had me hooked and the set tape used is gold. 

• Black in Appalachia: This show is such an important public service in changing the narrative about whose stories gets recognized in the region.