ReMarket Podcast: How stories progress from night to day
This week on the ReMarket Podcast, how stories evolve from morning to night at Marketplace. Every couple of months I step away from being reporter on the Marketplace Sustainability Desk to spend a week embedded with the Marketplace Morning Report. That means I work 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. here in our Los Angeles studios with the tightly knit crew of producers and hosts. Yes, 1 a.m.
Working on the morning show dramatically changes my perspective — and it’s not just the messed up sleeping patterns. The overnight news crew tackles stories in a different way than the rest of Marketplace. So this week I’m exploring how stories evolve day to day at Marketplace.
First up: The announcement on Monday afternoon that Facebook was buying this photo-coolifying and sharing app called Instagram for $1 billion. The afternoon show scrambled to cover it, and reporter Mitchell Hartman did the story for the top of the show. But when I came in Tuesday morning at 1 a.m., the story was still buzzing, so Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson interviewed me about it. Then they got Marketplace Tech Report host John Moe to dig in deeper on Instagram.
So the story went from breaking the day before, to people stewing on it overnight, and then we served it up with a bit more insight the next day.
But more often the Morning Report is where stories start, from square one. I sat down with Ethan Lindsey, the producer of the show to talk about story choice and the news cycle. One great example of story progression came when Ethan saw a blog post about a new study on hybrid cars from the L.A. Times. The story said that people who bought a hybrid didn’t tend to buy another hybrid the next time they went car shopping. The morning crew ended up covering the numbers of the study with the guy who wrote it.
And then Ethan pitched the story at the big daily editorial meeting, and producer and editors wanted to take another angle for that afternoon’s show: Not just what the study said, but some outside perspective on why hybrid owners may not choose hybrid again. A perfect way to use the extra time — and more awake sources — afforded to the afternoon news crew.
And then there are the Morning Report stories produced ahead of time. And when I heard this aquaculture story on lobsters from reporter Elizabeth Wynne Johnson, I sensed Elizabeth probably learned a lot more than she could fit into her 55 seconds of air time. So I called her up to ask what she didn’t get to tell us about lobster farming.
OK, so now time for you to consider the lobster. Thanks for listening!
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