A new podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting aims to expand the audience for the center’s audio offerings while also showcasing the interviewing skills of host Al Letson, who also helms CIR’s Reveal.
Launched Wednesday, More to the Story with Al Letson features Letson discussing timely topics with a variety of guests. Each weekly episode features one interviewee and runs shorter than the hourlong runtime of Reveal, which airs both on radio and as a podcast.
“The way we’re thinking about it is that we’d like to talk to people who are looking at the shape of America, who are in the midst of it, who are very much attuned to what’s going on in the world around us,” Letson told Current.
CIR’s team has been working on the show since December. Letson said it felt like the right time to release the podcast because the world is changing quickly. He wanted to mix up his usual work and sink his teeth into a new project, he said.
“The great thing about Reveal is that we do these long investigations that take a long time to put together, but the good thing about this new podcast is that we can move a lot quicker,” Letson said. “I like to think of Reveal as a pretty big battleship, and it takes a lot to move it quickly, whereas what we’re doing now is kind of a speedboat, and we’ll be able to react to stuff a lot quicker.”
Reveal EP Brett Myers said that in launching More to the Story, the show wanted to create content more connected to the news cycle and to feature Letson, whom Myers calls “an incredible interviewer.” He said the podcast’s newsiness will bring more people to the Reveal brand.
“More to the Story has a good shot of popping up when people are searching the podcast feeds for something news-related, because it’s very topical,” Myers said. “There’s a good chance that listeners are going to find More to the Story [and] find Reveal through More to the Story, and basically the two podcasts will help each other grow and prosper.”
Last year, the Center for Investigative Reporting merged with the Foundation for National Progress, which publishes Mother Jones, to strengthen their newsrooms and expand their audience. The merger gave the organization leeway to start a new podcast, Letson said, because Reveal was previously in “survival mode.”
“We were making good audio, but we didn’t really have the chance to kind of dream about what we wanted to do next,” Letson said. “Combining with Mother Jones really gave us that opportunity to kind of think about what we wanted the future to look like.”
Myers said the merger challenged his vision of Reveal and what it can be. He said Mother Jones’ top editorial team pushed Reveal to think strategically about its future.
“Definitely, this is an outgrowth of those conversations,” Myers said. “Like, how can we grow and evolve to serve our listeners, and how can we grow and evolve to become an increasingly financially strong entity?”
‘Firehose of news’
More to the Story will provide Reveal with more real estate for advertising, making the larger organization more sustainable and keeping content flowing for years to come, said CIR Senior Radio Editor Kara McGuirk-Allison.
“We’re in this moment where there’s a firehose of news,” McGuirk-Allison said. “… There’s information, but there’s also disinformation. I think that listeners are kind of hungering for guidance, like perspective and insight. This is giving us a more timely vehicle to respond to that news that’s happening with conversations with Al that … speak to the moment.”
The show’s first episode featured Tim Heaphy, lead investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee.
Letson asked Heaphy how the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, which Heaphy also investigated, and the Jan. 6 insurrection made him feel. “Both events made me feel disillusioned, discouraged,” Heaphy said.
“I’ve been fortunate that in both events, I’ve had a chance to be part of the healing, part of the understanding first, which I think is a precondition to healing, trying to just sketch out a credible narrative of what occurred,” Heaphy added. “So I feel fortunate in some ways that I’ve had that outlet, but the bottom line is … these spasms of violence reveal a much deeper division within our country.”
Upcoming guests include New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, who discusses the roots of the immigration problem in the U.S., and Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator, whose interview will focus on the colliding forces of bird flu, the anti-vaccination movement and the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
One of the biggest challenges McGuirk-Allison and Producer Josh Sanburn face is determining what to cover each week. “There’s such a sort of flood-the-zone mentality from the administration in terms of all the executive actions and all the policies that are happening,” Sanburn said.
Not ‘Reveal’ leftovers
The show’s team says Letson’s interview skills make the show unique. Sanburn said he hopes Letson’s ability to cover topics that other hosts overlook will differentiate the show.
“He is really excellent at breaking down people’s barriers and having really personal conversations that you don’t often hear elsewhere,” Sanburn said.
Letson said that as an interviewer, he leads with his heart and practices empathy. “But also, when I have somebody on that I feel like we need to hold them accountable for something they said or they did, I can do that,” he said, adding that Reveal has given him a “toolbox” for having complex conversations.
Letson said he wants listeners to know that More to the Story is not leftovers from Reveal but rather original content that the show’s team is approaching in a “very unique way.”
“My number one thing is that I just want to make thrilling audio,” Letson said. “I want to make audio that people get excited about and are talking about.”
Myers said the journalism industry faces many challenges as “Pulitzer Prize–winning news organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, go belly up.”
“Part of what More to the Story is really trying to do is to find a way through this hard moment, not by just doing the same old thing that we’ve always done, but by reaching out to meet more people in more ways and more people in new ways,” he said.