Why We Wrote This
Who reports the news? People. And at The Christian Science Monitor, we believe that it’s our job to report each story with a sense of shared humanity. Through conversations with our reporters and editors, we explain the qualities behind our reporting that affect how we approach the news. Behind today’s headlines we find respect, resilience, dignity, agency, and hope. “Why We Wrote This” shows how. The Monitor is an award-winning, nonpartisan news organization with bureaus around the globe. Visit CSMonitor.com/whywewrotethis to learn more.
An Alchemist of Folk
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An Americana-infused folk music revival has been a surging in the United States for years now. Georgia’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has emerged as one of the most singular interpreters of that music and all of its tributaries. Writer (and fan) Simon Montlake, a hard-news reporter most of the time, joins host Clay Collins to talk about why the modest Mr. Fussell is worth discovering – and about what folk music means to the transmission, down through generations, of the cultures it preserves.
Writers’ Read: Drug Use and Compassion
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Drug decriminalization is another story that often sets up as a binary debate: It's either a path to societal meltdown or a way to regulate behaviors that appear inevitable, and to stop filling jails. Test cases in three places – Portland, Oregon; British Columbia, Canada; and Portugal – show that solutions require very nuanced thinking. And compassion. Yvonne Zipp, our features editor, introduces this episode, which includes full story reads by three Monitor writers.
On the Run at the Games
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When a sports-loving writer gets a shot at covering an Olympic Games, the story becomes one of joyful immersion and inspired output. Ira Porter joins host Clay Collins for this episode about reporting from the Paris Games and finding the human stories that matter most in that sea of competition and aspiration, heartbreak and triumph.
How To Listen to the World
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Reporting straight news can be an outsider’s game: Get the facts, look for color, file on deadline, repeat. Gathering news that’s meaningful to readers, news that’s human and relatable, often means collaborating with a region’s own reporters. Two Monitor writers who also co-write stories and edit journalists from across Latin America and Africa join guest host Amelia Newcomb, our managing editor, to talk about balancing the special challenges and opportunities of that work.
A Climate Saga Gets Sticky
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Good research can transform public knowledge. It can affect the evolution of public attitudes. But the way in which data and findings are arrayed and framed for consumption matters. A lot. In this episode, Monitor climate writer Stephanie Hanes talks about reporting her story of a climate scientist who had a very public moment of self-reflection – and found himself reflecting on his role as a shaper of a certain narrative.
Encore: Images That Bring Humanity Into Focus
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Photography does so much to humanize reporting. What does it mean to come at stories quite literally through the “Monitor lens” that this show explores? A longtime staff shooter who has made images in more than 80 countries and on every continent, Melanie Stetson Freeman talks with host Clay Collins about joyful moments and sobering ones, and about how the people and places she encounters still bring surprises after all of that travel and all of those years. This is an encore presentation of a 2023 episode.
Can Trust Cool a Murder Rate?
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Everyone loves a good counternarrative, especially when the prevailing narrative is a dire one and the counter offers credible reasons for hope – backed by data that bears up to scrutiny. In this episode, writer Troy Aidan Sambajon talks with host Clay Collins about a crime-stat story that became something more. It’s a validation – with some big caveats – of community policing, community agency, and the central ingredient: a willingness to try building trust.
Title IX at 50 Plus Two
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What’s happening in women’s sports besides Caitlin Clark? A lot. Two years to the week since this podcast soft-launched with a conversation with writer Kendra Nordin Beato on Title IX’s 50th anniversary, we offer an update. This encore episode adds some discussion of how much has transpired in all three braids of the Title IX story: women in education, women in college sports, and progress in fighting sexual harassment and abuse. Hosted by Clay Collins.
Turning Trust Into Tree Cover
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Urban tree loss is a widespread phenomenon that has been addressed, with different degrees of success, in cities from New York to Nashville. For multimedia reporter Jingnan Peng, a story about a tree-planting initiative in Louisville, Kentucky, became a story about rebuilding community trust. He spoke to host Clay Collins for this episode, which includes encore material from a 2023 show on Jing’s coverage of another greening-of-cities phenomenon – compact Miyawaki forests – and a discussion about how a multimedia reporter matches storytelling format to story.
A Kinder Brand of Capitalism
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Maybe it’s because she came up through the Monitor’s Points of Progress franchise. We like how Erika Page, our Madrid-based writer, frames one big part of her beat. “It’s [about] looking for where creativity and ingenuity and humanity are in operation,” she tells host Clay Collins in this episode. “Because once you start to look for these things, you kind of start to see them everywhere.” A return guest on this podcast, she talks this time about reporting from northern Spain on a particular brand of capitalism that workers appear to believe in.
