But it’s hard for readers like me, who know very little about the issue, not to be taken in by what in hindsight seems like an unfair generalization:

Disability has become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn’t supposed to serve this purpose; it’s not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work.

The NPR graphic that got me all fired up.

I posted a link to the piece on Facebook, which my mother, the bleeding-heart liberal, saw. She immediately fired off a response, a link to a Baseline Scenario piece by James Kwak.

Kwak concludes that “the [NPR] story as a whole suffers from… facile extrapolation from the individual story to national policy.” Ouch! Moreover, he insists,

[Joffe-Walt] overlooks the big story. Federal welfare reform set lifetime benefit limits, meaning that, after a few years, you get completely cut off. After some welfare recipients got jobs, this was the factor that ensured that welfare rolls would go down. Many people who couldn’t work and got welfare now can’t work and get disability. That’s a good thing—especially if the alternative is pushing them onto the streets.

Just something to think about. Many thanks to my mom for helping me think a bit more critically about this issue (and, of course, for all the other great stuff she does for me).

Further sort-of-related reading: Today’s excellent Daily Beast piece by Stuart Stevens, “Poverty Plagues Obama’s America, Press Based in Booming Cities Shrugs.” I’ll just give you a taste:

[Obama] wakes up in the morning eager to focus on jobs the same way George W. Bush woke up eager to focus on health care.

Here is an interesting article that brings to mind what St. Paul wrote: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

Chana Joffe-Walt and Alix Spiegel, in their story for National Public Radio report that many psychologists and economists believe we are all capable of behaving profoundly unethically without realizing it, and that our workplaces and regulations need to be better organized in such a ways as to structure things around our weaknesses, and take into account the cognitively flawed human beings that we are.

We talked with Audrey about how she broke into this unique corner of the news world and learned more about her inspirations and future goals.

Audrey Quinn recording the sounds of science

The Recollective:  How did you get into radio?

Audrey:  When I was just out of college and living in Seattle, I worked for a few different neuroscience research labs. I’m a total sucker for the notion that our thoughts and behaviors come from biological mechanisms. People are so fascinating and mysterious, and the fact that scientists can track down the physiological manifestations of our psyches thrills me. But, it turns out, I wasn’t meant to be one of those scientists. As much as I liked the ideas addressed by science research, lab work and me just didn’t gel.

I was starting to consider science journalism when a friend introduced me to Martha Baskin, the producer of the environmental radio show Green Acre Radio. She told me about a free reporter training class at Seattle’s community radio station KBCS. I signed up, and as soon as I finished training the news director Joaquin (“Wakx”) Uy began assigning me science stories. It was the perfect incubator situation for a beginning producer, Wakx gave me a lot of free reign to figure out my own reporting style, but he also really pushed me as an editor.

Producing science radio stories felt more fulfilling than any other pursuit I’d known. I loved everything about it, going out and recording interesting scientists, obsessing over my scripts, voicing my stories, and sitting at the computer so transfixed by editing I’d barely break for trips to the bathroom. To get a better idea of radio career options I did a series of internships at Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW. Once again I feel like I lucked out with how much hands-on training I got there. I learned how to quickly turn around news reports, create NPR-style features, and produce a daily news magazine. After that I moved to New York and started freelancing.

A recent blog post on the Radio Cabaret event in which Audrey was one of the participants

The Recollective:  What made you want to work in radio?

Audrey:  This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t start listening to public radio until a few years after college. And even then it was just the “gateway drugs” of This American Life and Radiolab.  So making radio and wanting to make radio came pretty much at the same time for me.  Once I tried it, I was immediately hooked on the combination of journalism, technical abilities, artistic creation, and performance that it affords.

That said, while radio was my first love I’ve found branching out into other mediums essential to my career.  Video production, podcasts, blogging, and print work have recently paid the better part of my bills, and also help me feel more marketable as a journalist.

The Recollective:  What is most challenging about being a freelance reporter?

Audrey:  The lack of direction, on so many levels.  There’s no one to tell you when you should work, there’s no one (usually) to care how much you get done, and there’s no one to let you know what you should do next. Which in some ways is totally exhilarating, but the lack of stability makes me a little crazy at times.  I’ll go for weeks with more work than I can handle, then within a few hours of finishing up those projects I’m already panicking about whether I’ll ever work again.

The Recollective:  You cover a lot of different fields of science in your work.  Is there a specific field in which you are consistently most interested or does that change from time-to-time?

Audrey:  I started out very broad, I figured science radio was specific enough of a pursuit in its own right, and I didn’t want to box myself in.  But talking to other science journalists like Dan Grossman (who’s honed the environmental beat), I came to realize the importance of carving out your niche. Lately I’ve been returning to my love of neuroscience, and I’m putting down roots in the general health beat from my healthcare blog for CBS’s SmartPlanet. I’m also really excited about female-focused science stories — either stories about women scientists, science stories about women’s health, or science stories directed at a female audience.

The Recollective:  Are there science reporters or producers in general whom you admire or who inspire you?

Audrey:  When I was just starting out I stumbled upon Ari Daniel Shapiro’s website, and he’s been my scientist-turned-producer role model ever since. Over the last year and a half I’ve become ridiculously dependent on the inspiration I get from the other members of my radio club (recently named the Brooklyn Broadcast Cooperative). We’re a listening group/potluck that meets in different radio producers’ apartments each month.

When I get ready to produce a radio story, I find myself consistently guided by three different advisers: (1) Chana Joffe-Walt, who via her Transom manifesto outlines how to make engaging “Idea Stories” (pretty much every piece I make fits that category, so I probably re-read her guide at least once a month), (2) Robert Krulwich, who at my last Third Coast Audio Doctor session talked with me about how to break out of the traditional he-said-she-said feature mold and encouraged me to make my stories more conversational, and (3) Patrick Cox at PRI’s The World, who taught me to add energy to my features and pick up the pace with a back-and-forth style of shorter quicker actualities and tracks.

The Recollective:  What do you think makes a good science story?

Audrey:  Good science stories tell me something surprising that I feel excited to know, and great science stories also engage me on a personal level.

Audrey Quinn gets the "scoop" on fecal sludge from Professor Kartik Chandran for a story aired on Living Planet, an environmental show on Deutsche Welle Radio

The Recollective:  In a recent post on your blog you write about a realization that fascinating scientific discoveries do not necessarily make for great radio.  Tell us about your process for balancing science and story.

Audrey:  Honestly, story appeal always comes first for me.  A scientist could have made some unparalleled breakthrough in say, theoretical quantum physics, but unless I can tell that story in a way that speaks to listeners’ lives it’s not my thing. That said, I think good writing can make almost any science story engaging.

The Recollective:  Are there any events or topics in science about which you are excited and would like to produce more stories?

Audrey:  I mentioned before that I’ve become more interested in science stories that involve women. I feel like a lot of traditional science journalism just doesn’t read in a way that engages me, and talking with other women I’ve gathered that I’m not alone in feeling that way. I think that too often women and girls assume they’re bad at science when really a lot of science media just isn’t communicated with them in mind. I’m still trying to reconcile how I want to work to make science more appealing to women without ghettoizing (or heaven forbid, dumbing down) “science for women,” but that aim has informed a lot of my recent work.

]]> http://iamdustycole.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/59/ Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:04:51 +0000 Dusty Cole http://iamdustycole.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/59/ The crazy story of 14 year old, Willow Tufano. Bangs, braces, and all. Funny, interesting piece.
Story by Chana Joffe-Walt (love that name. really. fits NPR perfectly.)

http://m.npr.org/news/front/148218539

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/09/148218539/this-14-year-old-girl-just-bought-a-house-in-florida?device=iphone

Posted by Mallary Jean Tenore at 6:33 AM on Mar. 22, 2010

National Public Radio reporters David Kestenbaum and Chana Joffe-Walt wanted to help the public better understand the financial crisis — an ongoing narrative that they believe gets weighed down by numbers, statistics and seldom-explained financial terms.

So they made an investment as part of a “Planet Money” project. Together, with colleagues Alex Blumberg, Caitlin Kenney and Adam Davidson, they pooled $1,000 of their own money and bought a toxic asset — a sliver of one of the bonds that fueled the housing boom and then lost their value during the bust.

“I feel like we’ve bought our front row seat to the last quarter of the financial crisis,” Kestenbaum said in a phone interview. “We’re going to get to watch this thing die.”

The purchase has meant that Kestenbaum and Joffe-Walt are stakeholders in the story.

In this case, the reporters said, becoming stakeholders was a low-risk way to get an inside perspective on what toxic assets really are. It has also helped them generate story ideas and gain access to information they may not have otherwise had, such as how the investment status of a toxic asset changes over time. Spending their own money, Joffe-Walt said, helped give them greater ownership of the toxic asset and, subsequently, their reporting on it.

Kestenbaum and Joffe-Walt spoke with “Planet Money” Editor Amy Stevens before making the purchase to ensure transparency and minimize any conflict of interest. Stevens said any money they make from the toxic asset will go to charity — likely one that helps educate people on financial issues. If they lose money, they’ll take the loss.

“We certainly didn’t want to share in any financial rewards,” Stevens said by phone. “We also thought that in this case, once you are an owner, it gives you unique insight into what’s inside one of these things.”

To resolve the ethical dilemma, they were also transparent about their decision, letting listeners know that they made the purchase and would not benefit financially from it.

“The key thing was we should not stand to gain personally. We just wanted to make sure that we were ethically scrupulous about that,” Stevens said. “The financial stake in it is really a journalistic tool. It’s a way of taking a look at what’s inside the toxic asset, but it is designed so we don’t have a financial interest in it. And it’s a very nominal amount of money. It’s almost like an experiment; it’s really a way of studying a phenomenon.”

Kelly McBride, Poynter’s ethics group leader, said she thinks NPR made a smart decision in being so open about the purchase.

“I like it when journalists put themselves in the place of the consumer, then describe their experience. It’s similar to using a product or doing a travel story. You have to be very transparent with the audience,” McBride said in an e-mail. “I think it’s the perfect way to explain a complicated process to their audience, since most of us don’t really know what toxic assets are.”

“Planet Money”‘s toxic asset has more than 2,000 mortgages in it. Whenever the foreclosed homes in the bond are taken over and sold for a loss, the bond shrinks, meaning the toxic asset will eventually disappear entirely. Whenever a homeowner in the asset makes a mortgage payment, those who own the asset get part of that money.

So far, Kestenbaum and Joffe-Walt have received $406.88 but have no way of predicting whether they’ll ultimately gain or lose money when their asset disappears.

“There’s some drama in it,” Kestenbaum said. “Every month we get updates on how everybody in the pool is doing. There are a lot of human stories there in terms of who owns it and where they are.”

Joffe-Walt and Kestenbaum hope to hear from some of the others who own part of their toxic asset, which has lost 99 percent of its value throughout the past few years.

Kestenbaum was reminded of this recently when he attended a toxic asset conference (yes, they have those) to further inform his reporting. While there, he asked one of the speakers, Craig Schiffer, for his thoughts on “Planet Money”‘s toxic asset. Kestenbaum reported last Friday on what Schiffer said.

“You bought this personally?” Schiffer asked, a sound of disbelief in his voice. “It’s not a very good portfolio, man.”

The interactive time line that accompanies “Planet Money”‘s coverage shows just how much the value of the toxic asset has depreciated over the past three years.

“Planet Money” added interactive components to the stories, Stevens said, in hopes of giving people an easy way to visualize the financial crisis’ impact on the asset.

“The concept of a toxic asset is very, very abstract,” she said. “By doing everything from a podcast to an animated Web video to a radio story to a blog post, we feel like we are reaching a broad audience and helping bring to life something that would otherwise be very dense.”

One of the challenges Joffe-Walt and Kestenbaum have faced is figuring out how to explain a dense subject in a limited amount of time.

The original version of their story for “Morning Edition” was 12 minutes. They had to get it down to about 7:40. “That’s not much time to explain what a bond is and have a whole story with characters in it,” Kestenbaum said. “A radio story is like a poem. There’s not a wasted word in it.”

Joffe-Walt said she pictured telling the story to her mom, aka the average listener. Would her mom, she’d ask herself, understand what she and Kestenbaum were saying?

Their animated video helps break it all down, in a simple sort of way. Instead of referring to the bond by its technical term — “Harborview Mortgage Loan Trust 2005-10″ — Joffe-Walt and Kestenbaum call it a “pesky little creature,” a blue-haired “pet” that they hope you’ll help name. (I voted for “Toxie.”)

Their pet, they explain in the video, is sick because people are falling behind on their mortgage payments. They encourage listeners to follow their pet’s journey and make a prediction about how long she’ll last.

Kestenbaum and Joffe-Walt said they hope their ongoing reporting on the toxic asset will help inform listeners’ predictions.

“I think generally we’ve been trying to do every story in a way that doesn’t dumb down the actual details, that’s accurate and understandable and, whenever possible, human,” Jofee-Walt said. “If we can get people to understand what a toxic asset or a bond is, it’ll be a major success.”

“Planet Money”‘s Toxic Asset Coverage

“We Bought a Toxic Asset, You Can Watch it Die,” by Chana Joffe-Walt and David Kestenbaum

“Toxic Assets Market Awaits Rebound” by David Kestenbaum

“Toxic Assets: What You Need to Know” by Jacob Goldstein

Podcast: “We Bought a Toxic Asset!“

Interactive time line: “Tracking Our Toxic Asset“

Animated video: “Meet Our Toxic Asset“

Vote: “Name Our Toxic Asset!”

I absolutely love when individuals not directly involved with poetry or literature, bring it into their classrooms, lectures, and even exams. In this case, the NPR blog post by Chana Joffe-Walt features an economics professor called Stephen Ziliak who has quite the fascination with haiku (for good reason). This inspired Joffe-Walt to challenge her readers to craft recession haiku’s in the comments section, creating a modern and relevant use for a traditional form and a great outlet for frustration. So far, the response is a whopping 190 haiku comments and counting. Fabulous!