Podcasts about Journalism

The 404 Media Podcast —  A journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world. 

The Digiday Podcast — A weekly show about subscriptions, commerce, the modern newsroom, content creation, audio, streaming, and more.  

Freelancing for Journalists - How to approach freelancing, covering topics ranging from how to get started and what to include in pitches, to how to negotiate rates. Each episode includes guests on different career paths, and who have a variety of perspectives.    

IRE Radio Podcast (Investigative Reporters and Editors) — Behind the story with award-winning reporters, editors and producers to hear how they broke some big stories.

It's All Journalism — The series talks to working journalists about how they do their jobs, the latest trends in journalism, and the changing state of digital media. (not being updated) 

Journalism History — A scholarly journal covering the history of mass media.    

The Journalism Salute — A spotlight on interesting and important journalists and journalism organizations. 

The Kicker — This Columbia Journalism Review podcast explores serious and challenging topics related to journalism and media. (not being updated) 

Longform Podcast (longform.org) — A weekly conversation with a non-fiction writer on how they tell stories. (not being updated)  

Media Voices — Major media industry news each week from three experienced freelance journalists. The focus is on the business side of media and its impact on journalists’ work.

On the Media — Produced by WNYC radio, this is a weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.  

Reveal (The Center for Investigative Reporting) — A look at CIR’s investigative reporting, focusing on real-world impact—from civil and criminal investigations to new laws and policies, better-informed conversations and community-driven solutions. 

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — A discussion of the Institute's research on trends in media. Based at the University of Oxford, this think tank offers research on the future of journalism.   

The Tip Off — A behind the scenes look at standout investigative reporting from the journalists themselves. (not being updated) 

WriteLane (Tampa Bay Times and Poynter) — Some episodes explore a piece of the writing process: finding ideas, interviewing, seeking structure. Others dive deep into a single story, breaking down the how and why. Some include interviews with other journalists. (not being updated) 

Examples of older podcasts about journalists doing journalism: 

I'm Not A Monster (BBC Panorama and FRONTLINE PBS) — “How did an American family end up in the heart of the ISIS caliphate? Over four years, journalist Josh Baker unravels a dangerous story where nothing is as it seems.”   

The Other Latif (Radiolab)  — “How did this nerdy suburban Muslim kid come to be imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay?” 

The Canary | Washington Post Investigates —  “Two women and a shared refusal to stay silent. A seven-part podcast hosted by investigative reporter Amy Brittain.”

White Lies (NPR) — “In 1965, Rev. James Reeb was murdered in Selma, Alabama. Three men were tried and acquitted, but no one was ever held to account. Fifty years later, two journalists from Alabama return to the city where it happened, expose the lies that kept the murder from being solved and uncover a story about guilt and memory that says as much about America today as it does about the past.” 

The Line (Apple) — “Explore the impact of the forever wars on the U.S. Navy SEALs through the lens of the Eddie Gallagher case.”

The Lazarus Heist (BBC)  — “‘Almost a perfect crime.’ The hacking ring and an attempt to steal a billion dollars. Investigators blame North Korea. Pyongyang denies involvement. The story begins in Hollywood.” 

In the Dark (American Public Media) — “We investigate the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, who was tried six times for the same crime. Flowers spent more than 20 years fighting for his life while a white prosecutor spent that same time trying just as hard to execute him.”

Fluid & Crystallized Intelligence

British psychologist Raymond Cattell in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life. Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

It's Not

It’s not rocket surgery.

AI Supervision

One coding team spent 3 days fixing what should have been a 2-hour problem. They had "saved" time by having AI generate the initial implementation. But when it broke, they lost 70 hours trying to understand code they had never built themselves. The time you save upfront gets charged back with interest later. The best teams avoid this because the human engineer actually understands the code. They shaped it. They made the key decisions. The AI just handled the mechanical work of typing it out. The new constraint is: "Can we understand the code we're writing fast enough to keep moving?" Treat code review as a comprehension verification step, not just a bug-catching exercise. - Paul Sangle-Ferriere

Discomfort & Progress

The short-term discomfort of adopting a new routine will always be less than the ongoing stress and disappointment of not making progress on your most important goals. - Jeff Su

AI takes the creativity out of cheating

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.  But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had done the writing. -More in the New York Times

Never too Late

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Goals Need Systems

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. – James Clear

AI Misrepresentation of News

New research has found that AI assistants routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. Key findings:

45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.

31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.

20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.

More at BBC News

The shift in the creative arts brought on by AI

Pixar is an analogy to explain the potential benefits of the shift in the creative arts brought on by AI. Before Pixar, there were these folks who were really high-end in terms of their craft. Animators put a lot of energy into the drawings in each frame. But once computers could automate that work, the role of the animators shifted. They were able to spend a lot more time — and, for that matter, put a lot more resources toward — thinking about storytelling and plot development.” -New York Times

The Brooklyn Bridge

I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.  -Will Rogers, born Nov 4, 1879

AI Prompts & Verbalized Sampling

A team of researchers have come up with an ingenuously simple method to get language and image models to generate a wider variety of creative responses to nearly any user prompt by adding a single, simple sentence: "Generate 5 responses with their corresponding probabilities, sampled from the full distribution."  The method, called Verbalized Sampling (VS), helps models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini produce more diverse and human-like outputs—without retraining or access to internal parameters. -VentureBeat 

Encouragement

We appreciate what a person does, but we affirm who a person is. Appreciation comes and goes because it is usually related to something someone accomplishes. Affirmation goes deeper. It is directed to the person himself or herself. While encouragement would encompass both, the rarer of the two is affirmation. To be appreciated, we get the distinct impression that we must earn it by some accomplishment. But affirmation requires no such prerequisite. This mean that even when we don’t earn the right to be appreciated (because we failed to succeed or because we lacked the accomplishment of some goal), we can still be affirmed – indeed, we need it then more than ever. I do not care how influential or secure or mature a person may appear to be, genuine encouragement never fails to help. Most of us need massive doses as we slug it out in the trenches. 

Charles Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip

A Real Relationship

It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them. -Anothony Storr

AI Definitions: Facial recognition

Facial recognition - This AI technology uses statistical measurements of a person’s face to identify them against a digital database of other faces. For instance, Clearview AI was trained on billions of images. These AI-powered systems are used to unlock phones, verify passports, and scan crowds at events for malicious actors. It’s used by many US agencies including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. It has a serious problem with false positives and a history of unintended harms and intentional misuse based on racial and gender bias.

More AI definitions here

What Counts

It is not what you accomplish but how you behave that counts.

When people are Free

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. -Eric Hoffer

The Gradual Effect of AI on Creativity

"When people use A.I. in the creative process they tend to gradually cede their original thinking. At first, users tend to present their own wide range of ideas, but as ChatGPT continues to instantly spit out high volumes of acceptable-looking text users tend to go into a 'curationist mode.' The influence is unidirectional, and not in the direction you’d hope: 'Human ideas don’t tend to influence what the machine is generating all that strongly,' Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab, said. ChatGPT pulls the user 'toward the center of mass for all of the different users that it’s interacted with in the past.'" - Kyle Chayka writing in the New Yorker

Résumé virtues & Eulogy virtues

Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to talk about at your funeral.

Time is limited, and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. To move from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues is to move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

An AI Ticking Time Bomb

U.S. companies are up against a ticking time bomb: Thanks to AI, hackers are on the verge of launching fully automated cyberattacks that can move faster, smarter and more personally than ever. OpenAI and Anthropic have both already found evidence of nation-state adversaries and cybercriminals using their models to write code and research their attacks. -Axios