Casey Miner

KendellKelton (00:01):

Hi, I'm Kendell Kelton, and I'm your host today on TheRough Draft. Featuring honest conversations with folks from across the creativeindustry, the Rough Draft explores the creative process, tools, and resourcesused by some of the best in the business. From journalists to content creatorsand business leaders, we shed light on what it looks like to break into theindustry, make mistakes, collaborate with others, and the essential tools thathelp us all along the way.

(00:24):

This week, I'm super excited to be talking with CaseyMiner, an editor at Throughline, a podcast from NPR that explains the historybehind current events. Now, Casey has spent most of her career editing podcastsfor Planet Money, Wondery, and Reveal, to name a few. And she has taughtnarrative story structure at University of California Berkeley, and isco-founder of The Editors Collective, a group of narrative audio editorsworking to diversify the field and build networks and career paths for neweditors. And on today's episode, Casey discusses her journey editingphilosophies and the art of creating powerful audio stories.

(01:10):

Casey, thank you so much for joining.

Casey Miner (01:12):

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

KendellKelton (01:14):

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to be talking with you formultiple reasons, but I think your career as an editor, but then also yourcareer within audio journalism is so fascinating considering the boom we'reexperiencing with podcasts. We're on a podcast right now.

Casey Miner (01:34):

Yes.

KendellKelton (01:34):

But before we dive into a little bit of that, I actuallyjust want to start with your roots and where you began, I think in SanFrancisco and public radio.

Casey Miner (01:45):

Yeah. So I started my audio career at KALW public radio inSan Francisco. Shout out to KALW.

KendellKelton (01:53):

What drew you to even starting there?

Casey Miner (01:57):

When I graduated from college, I had started writing forthe alt weekly in the city where I was, and that was also an experience where Istarted freelancing for them at a moment when they didn't have a lot of staff,and so I was given free rein in a way that I don't think is super commonnecessarily. And then, at a certain point, I thought, well, I've never really hadany formal journalism training, so I applied to do the research fellowship atMother Jones magazine, which is based in San Francisco. And I came out here todo that, and decided, oh, maybe I'll go to grad school for journalism atBerkeley because it's right here. And one of the things I liked about theBerkeley program was that it was very holistic, you had to focus on a lot ofdifferent skillsets.

(02:38):

And I took the radio class for fun, and the first time Igot a recorder and went and interviewed somebody, I was like, oh, you get tohear their voice and their mannerisms and they laugh and there's all this coolsound. I loved the texture, everything just sprung to life. And so, when I waslooking for internships in between my two years of school, one of the ones Iapplied to was this internship at KALW, which was in the Bay, and so then whenI graduated and they had this role as a temporary, it started out,transportation reporter, so that I could go and work at this place, and then Ithink I just really haven't looked back.

KendellKelton (03:17):

And it's exploded in the last several years. You could seethat progression upwards around 2015, 2016, which is right around the time thatyou actually started and created your own podcast, right?

Casey Miner (03:32):

Yes. So I launched my own podcast in... I think I launchedit in 2015. And yeah, as you say, this was right around... I got very fortunatein this way that, again, I didn't know at the time. The time when I was at KALWwas right around the time that Serial came out, and that podcast really startedbooming, and all of a sudden, everybody-

KendellKelton (03:50):

Oh, that one in particular changed it for me. I was like,oh, I love this, I'm in.

Casey Miner (03:54):

Yeah, absolutely.

KendellKelton (03:54):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (03:56):

And I think we all really loved it. And then, it was cool-

KendellKelton (03:59):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (04:00):

... because all of a sudden, my skillsets and theskillsets of my peers, the people I was working with, were all really indemand. It was like, oh, you know how to edit audio, you know how to record,you know how to interview people, how to get high quality sound, how to host.And so, there was a lot of work, and I had had an idea for a show that I wantedto do on my own, and so I launched this podcast called The Specialist, where Iprofiled people who did interesting or unusual work. I would go and spend a daywith the mock attacker in a women's self-defense class or a home stager in theBay Area where the real estate market is totally crazy, and the zoo chefs atthe Oakland Zoo was another one that I liked.

KendellKelton (04:39):

I actually listened to the poll.

Casey Miner (04:42):

Oh, you did? Oh my gosh.

KendellKelton (04:42):

Yeah, I did. I listened to it. I was like, well, thisfeels timely. And I thought it was so interesting, you don't know what some ofthese folks are doing, just to set up a voting location at a school, what ittakes.

Casey Miner (05:00):

What's required, yeah. I was curious about that, who is doingthe work that makes everything around us go, I think is another way to thinkabout it, because there's so many people doing work that you really don't thinkabout or see.

KendellKelton (05:14):

You had transitioned into more of an editor role, and soI'd like to just hear a bit about that decision and would love to just get yourtake on why editing.

Casey Miner (05:27):

Yeah, absolutely. I love to talk about why editing, Ithink more people should be editors. And so, let me say what I mean first, becauseI think sometimes there's a little bit of confusion, so the kind of editing I'mtalking about is not audio editing, moving around chunks of sound in Pro Toolsor Audacity or something like that, although I have done that as well, I'mtalking about narrative story editing, so working with a producer to refine anidea, shape a story arc, plan interviews, do the interviews, figure out what'sthe best part, weave it all together with other kinds of sound, and eventuallymove it towards the finished product that you hear.

(06:05):

Part of the reason I like it is because it is reallycollaborative and it's fun to help somebody create their vision, and I think asa producer, especially when you've done hours of recordings, it's so easy toget lost in what I think Jad Abumrad of Radiolab famously called the GermanForest. You're in this thick, dark woods and you cannot see anything at all andyou feel like you're never going to get out, and the editor, I think, is theperson who comes with a lamp, the editor comes and helps you along the path,the editor helps you say, "Hey, we're going to bushwhack through thistogether."

(06:40):

And it's a cool role because you do have a differentperspective on the story. You're hearing about it, you're talking about it withthe producer, but you're not in it, so sometimes you can see things that maybethey're not able to see. "Hey, what if we started here? Tell me more aboutthis character. Talk to me about this experience of recording, and I'm going towrite down what you're saying as you say it, because I hear a lot of energy andexcitement and details in what you're saying that aren't coming across in yourscript right now, and I want to help you get that out there."

(07:06):

And then, from a practical standpoint, it's also a littlemore predictable than a reporter job. Anybody who's been a reporter knows thatwhen news happens, that's when you have to go, that's when you have to go bethere. And I have done that, and I think as I have advanced in my career, Ihave two young kids now, I have valued the more regular schedule that comeswith editing as well. We're not seen enough as editors, we're not seen enough,so I would like us to be seen more.

KendellKelton (07:38):

In your current role with Throughline at NPR, I'd like todig into what is your process, especially in the early stages of storydevelopment as an editor.

Casey Miner (07:57):

Yeah. So NPR's Throughline is a show where... I think youmight broadly describe it as a history show, but we think of it more as being atime machine. If you're reading a story in the headlines, how did we get here?What took us to this point? Who are the people? What are the stories you mightnot have heard, or the people you might not have heard of who helped us get tothis moment?

(08:18):

And so, one of the things that's cool about the show is wecover a very wide range of topics. In the past couple of weeks, we did anepisode about the Crusades, an episode about Christian nationalism in the US,an episode about the Third Amendment, we have an episode coming up about theorigins of Thanksgiving, we've done episodes on K-pop, we've done episodes onsmell. And we're a small team, we're about eight people. And so, one of thethings we're thinking about, it's an hour-long documentary style show, whichmeans that we're interviewing people, we're using music, and we're using a lotof archival sound, and those elements are integral to how we build the story.

(09:01):

The hosts and creators of the show, Rund Abdelfatah andRamtin Arablouei, created it with sound is an essential part. So it's not thekind of show where we're sprinkling in a little music at the end, the scoringand the archival sound and the scene building and the interviews and thewriting are all part of it and all working together. And so, when we'rethinking about episode pitches and when I'm talking about those with theproducer, part of what we're thinking about is, okay, how are we going to tellthe story? What's going to keep somebody listening for an hour? What'spropelling us forward narratively? Is there an archive of oral histories we candraw from? Are there writings we can dramatize? Is there an interesting backand forth between the hosts and the guests that we can include? So we want tobe thinking about those elements from the beginning.

(09:50):

So I talk with the producers ahead of time about whattheir pitches are, they bring them to the full team and say their ideas. Andthen, once they get a green light from the hosts, we start figuring out, okay,who are we going to talk to? Who's going to be our anchor guest? And part ofwhat we're looking for there is someone who can tell us the story.

KendellKelton (10:11):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (10:11):

Who can tell us if there's characters, can they talk aboutthe characters? If it's more like the development of an idea, are there sceneswe can build out around that? We've done this whole series on amendments to theConstitution, which it's like the transportation reporting of cinematic audio.

Kendell Kelton(10:28):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (10:29):

How are you going to make the Third Amendment for an hour?

KendellKelton (10:34):

Right.

Casey Miner (10:35):

And part of what I talk about with the producers and helpthem do is think about that, what are the stories that show us what happened?

KendellKelton (10:44):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (10:46):

What are the ideas we can talk about? How are we going toget through? How are we going to break it up into a [inaudible 00:10:50]structure? And so, I sit in on the interviews that the hosts do, which isunusual, it's one of my favorite parts of this job. But typically, I haven't...Especially if people are recording in the field, obviously the editor is notgoing to be listening in on the phone or whatever.

KendellKelton (11:04):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (11:05):

But because we do almost everything remotely, and becausethe interviews are so long, our interviews are 90 minutes to two hours-

KendellKelton (11:12):

Oh, wow.

Casey Miner (11:13):

... it's really helpful as the editor to sit in, and we'retalking on Slack the whole time. Right from there, I'm saying, "Hey, thisis a really good point, let's dig in on this. Here's some follow-upinformation." And then, once we've done all the interviews, we have ameeting where we storyboard, and where we basically all sit down and weoutline, okay, how are we going to open the show? What's the art going to be?What's the takeaway from each part? What's the mood that we're going for? Sowe're thinking about sound and we're thinking about building the story, andthen off they go and they make it.

(11:42):

And it's unbelievable the work that the Throughlineproducers do. They're working with dozens of tracks and pro tools and doingvery intricate sound design and layering, as well as storytelling with theseinterviews and this archival sound. We're also really trying to test thepremise, whatever it is, our argument is, whatever story we think we'retelling. History is complicated, and so we want to be sure that we're on solidground and in terms of what we're arguing. The producers make a draft that'sbetween 50 minutes and an hour, and I will listen to the draft, and when itcomes in, I don't look at the script or anything like that, I usually take awalk or do my dishes or something like that. I try to hear it like I wouldlisten to an actual podcast that I was not working on and-

KendellKelton (12:29):

This is your walk and listen technique?

Casey Miner (12:30):

This is my walk and listen technique, yes. So I will walkaround my neighborhood listening, and either writing on a notebook as I listen,making my notes-

KendellKelton (12:38):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (12:38):

... or sometimes I just am making the notes on my phone asI go, it's easier with a notebook. And so, I'm sure many of my neighbors haveseen me do this many, many times. But I really want to hear it that way,because reading is a different experience, and there'll be a role for thatlater in the process, to really go through the script and do that line editing.

KendellKelton (12:57):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (12:57):

But I just want to hear it. What's boring? What'sengaging? What's delightful? What's confusing? What's making me curious? Andso, I'm really paying attention to that. And then, I make all my notes and havea meeting with the team, where we talk through all of that, and I give my bighigh-level notes like, "Hey, I think this is working, I think we mightneed to talk about restructuring this." We talk a lot about the frame andhow we're setting up the episode at the beginning to help listeners understandwhat they're going to hear. And then, we go through multiple other revisionsafter that.

KendellKelton (13:28):

And I think you have your self-described ethos aroundediting other journalists, is it edits not-

Casey Miner (13:39):

Edits not edicts, yes, that is something that I will saytoo. And I think what I mean by that is there is a style of editing that somepeople have experienced, and I think is probably more common in an old-schoolnewspaper environment, where the editor, their job is to come in and giveorders, "Fix this, take this out, move that."

KendellKelton (14:02):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (14:02):

"Yes, no." Come down from on high and tell youwhat it is you are and aren't doing, and that is not how I see the work. I seeit as a collaboration from the beginning. And so, what I try to do is to say,"Hey, this part isn't working, this isn't working for me. This part isconfusing, or this part is boring. Here are some reasons why I think that mightbe happening. Here are some ideas I have for what we could do to solve theproblem. These are just ideas, if you have a different idea, we should talkabout it." I think it's more important for me that we diagnose what'sgoing on, and then we work collaboratively to figure out how to solve it.

KendellKelton (14:41):

Fact-checking these days is a little bit of a hot topic.

Casey Miner (14:46):

Yeah, to put it mildly, yeah.

KendellKelton (14:49):

It is, and I could be wrong here, but I feel, at leastfrom my point of view, is that it can, depending on the story, get harder andharder to do, with so much misinformation, myths, or disinformation out there.So how do you or your team approach fact-checking with your stories?

Casey Miner (15:13):

You're identifying a really good point, and I think one ofthe things that does help us is that we are a historically-focused show-

KendellKelton (15:22):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (15:22):

... by which I mean that we are not reporting breakingnews. We have a little bit of an advantage because there has been more distancebetween-

KendellKelton (15:30):

Yeah, that's true.

Casey Miner (15:31):

There's more distance between our show and the storieswe're trying to tell. And so, I think we do it on a few levels, and the firstone is that checking of the premise. I'll take the Third Amendment episode thatwe did, the Third Amendment is the one about housing soldiers, the one thatsays you can't quarter soldiers, and so what do we do? Well, we start lookingfor people who study the Third Amendment. There aren't that many of them, butwe found a few. And then, we ask them, "What do you think about the ThirdAmendment? Why is it important? Why should people care about it right now? Whatdo people misunderstand about it? What might we be misunderstanding? Is thething we're saying to you, does that sound right or would you change it?"

(16:03):

And we do that with all the shows, with all the episodes,so we really try to understand, is the premise we're starting from even sound?And I think we're never trying to say it's definitive or it's the onlyperspective. History is very contested, as we know. It's more like, is this aplausible argument? Is this an argument that people who devote their lives toit have made? Is there archival support for this argument, this story thatwe're [inaudible 00:16:26] is their archival support for this? And then, whenwe get to the fact -checking stage, we work with an external fact-checker, wehave them do another layer of that. And our fact-checker is really, reallygreat, he's really experienced. And so, every line in the episode is gettingfact-checked. So is this sentence that we wrote true? If our guest is making acertain argument, is that a plausible argument?

KendellKelton (16:57):

So Casey, I want to do a deep dive with you on one of yourparticular episodes of Throughline that you worked on, it's called A Tale ofTwo Tribal Nations. The episode is a pretty powerful exploration of history andidentity, and it's centered on a couple of different paths that were taken bytwo Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota regarding land ownership. And so, I wantto start with what initially drew the team to this story.

Casey Miner (17:30):

Yeah. So that story was pitched by our producer, AnyaSteinberg, who had had this experience when... She's from Minnesota originally,which is where she and her co-reporter, Sequoia Carrillo, ended up doing thisfield reporting. Anya is not Native, and what she talked about is that growingup, she always went to a summer camp, and the summer camp was on a reservation,it was on tribal land. And when she was older, she started to reflect on thatand think, wait a minute, why could I go to a summer camp that was on areservation? Why was I able to do that? I thought that land would belong to thetribe.

(18:10):

And so, she had researched this in college, and she endedup basically bringing this story where she was like, "Hey, there'sactually this really interesting story where did you know that most tribes inthe US don't actually own most of their reservation land? Most of it has beensold to private owners." And we didn't know that. And so, she startedtalking about, "Well, there's actually these two bands of Ojibwe inMinnesota, and one of them, the Red Lake Band, was able to hang onto most oftheir land and avoid this sell off, and I want to do a story where we go, we dothis field reporting and we go and we tell the different stories of how thefates of these two bands of Ojibwe diverged and what happened and why and whatit led to."

(18:51):

And what Anya brought that was really cool was, well,here's this counterfactual, if you wonder what would've happened if we hadn'tbeen forced to sell this land?

KendellKelton (18:58):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (18:59):

What would've happened If there had been this other path?And actually, there is this example right up the street of a tribe that wasable to avoid this for all of these various reasons. And she brought a verynuanced understanding of it, it's not a blame thing, it's not like, well, thisband of Ojibwe people did the right thing and the other one did the wrongthing, it wasn't about that at all. It was about all of these differentcircumstances and characters and people doing the best they could inconstrained circumstances, these really powerful narratives.

(19:28):

And so, she and Sequoia got a grant to go and do fieldreporting and interview people who live there now, interview the descendants ofpeople who had made some of the choices that had led the different groups towhere they were today, and was able to bring back this really interestingstory, where we bounced back between the present day and the past to tellstories about how the land had been allotted or not and what had happened. Theywere able to take a week-long reporting trip and go to both of these places anddo all this really, really great work, interviewing people on the ground,because as she also made the case to us, this is a story about land, but thisis a story about place.

KendellKelton (20:06):

The story also involved weaving in reenactments andarchive material and in-studio interviews, so how did you and the team work tostructure those different elements for this particular story?

Casey Miner (20:20):

Well, one of the things that we did was we found an anchorguest who was himself Ojibwe from this region who had written about this andhad done a deep dive into the history of the different players, so both theNative American players and the white players, the people who had come togetherto negotiate these treaties, or try to force the tribe to sell, or resist theeffort to force to sell, all the different characters. And he was just sogreat, and so we did a long interview with him, one of these one and a half totwo hour interviews, where we had him tell these different stories and reallydescribe the characters based on all of the archival research that he had done.

(21:00):

Who were these people? What happened? What are therecords? Is there a record of this treaty negotiation? Is there a record ofthis conversation? Are there letters? Is there this or there that? And he wassuch a fabulous guest and such a great storyteller that we were able to usethat as the anchor. And then, Anya and Sequoia went and did additional archivalresearch to find some of those documents and figure out, okay, how can wedramatize this scene of this particular negotiation? How can we describe thischaracter? How can we bring these old scenes to life in a way that feelspowerful and has a lot of momentum? And so, then we just worked through how todo that.

(21:39):

Once we had all of the material, we went through thatstoryboarding process that I described, and we settled on moving back and forthbetween doing a scene in the present day and then diving back into the historythat led you up to that scene. And that led us use all the great field tapethey got, where they're describing being on the ground, or being on the RedLake reservation, where all of the signs are in Ojibwe and things like that,and there's Ojibwe radio station, we got to use recordings from the local radiostation, which was so great, and then to go back and say, "Here's whathappened." And they had also interviewed the descendants, as I said, ofpeople who had been part of these stories who still live on that land, whichwas really powerful.

Kendell Kelton(22:29):

Not being Native American, how did the team approach thoserelationships and build trust to be able to go in and to tell the story?

Casey Miner (22:37):

Yeah, I think we had a couple of different ways. Anya hadbuilt some of these relationships with some of the people we interviewedthrough her own research in college when she had started looking into this.

KendellKelton (22:47):

Okay.

Casey Miner (22:48):

And so, she knew some of the people we talked to and askedfor introductions and things like that, they planned to go there. And then,Sequoia, her co-reporter, is herself Native. She's not Ojibwe from Minnesota.

KendellKelton (22:59):

Okay.

Casey Miner (22:59):

But she's Native, and she's also done a lot of reportingfor NPR on Native communities, and she was really, really helpful to us also.And so, they both were really helpful in making sure that we were usingappropriate terminology, that we were describing people in respectful ways,approaching people in respectful ways.

KendellKelton (23:20):

What made this episode in particular, because you werelike, "I want to spend time on this one," what made it stand out toyou personally?

Casey Miner (23:31):

I think it's that, first of all, we just don't get to dothis very much, we don't get to do this kind of field reporting, and I thinkthe story itself was one that we just... I had never heard anything like it,and I don't think I would've heard about it if it weren't something that Anyahad experienced firsthand and that she really wanted to dive into. It's not thekind of thing that gets covered regularly in media, and I think it felt reallydifferent either than other stories that I have heard in mainstream media aboutNative American communities. And it had great characters, everybody had so muchagency, everybody was really three-dimensional, but it was just so rich, it wasrich in the present, and it was rich in the past.

(24:18):

I think that was the other thing is it also felt like astory that was very alive. It didn't feel like, oh, let me tell you a storyabout these people who are gone now. It was like, no, here are all these peoplewho live here right now in the 2020s, and also, here's how they're stillworking with and grappling with the legacy of all these other things that havehappened, which was also really active-

KendellKelton (24:39):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (24:39):

... because efforts to get more land back are still activeand underway, efforts to rebuild community are active and underway. And so, Iloved it, it felt so alive and unexpected and interesting, and I learned somany things that I didn't know, including, but also far beyond, that initialfactoid that we opened with, which is, "Hey, did you know that most tribesdon't actually own their reservation land?"

KendellKelton (25:09):

Is that what you're looking for as an editor, when youhave your own take, but then you just see, whether it's the reporters or maybeit's the whole team, just come to life and it just feels just very magical, isthat like, that's why I'm doing this?

Casey Miner (25:26):

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And in this case, it wasfun because I don't usually get to work with reporters on field reportingtrips, but I got to help them.

KendellKelton (25:36):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (25:36):

I had them send me voice memos at the end of everyreporting day, telling me what they had done and what was cool and what theyremembered and where they were, and we used those as the basis for drawing someof the details that ended up in the story. And just getting to do that wholepart of it and really have it be a three-dimensional experience was so much funand really cool. It's such a great story, and it was really an honor to helpthem make it. And it won an award, we won an Indigenous Media Award for thatstory.

KendellKelton (26:06):

Oh my goodness.

Casey Miner (26:07):

Yeah, thank you.

KendellKelton (26:08):

Well, congratulations.

Casey Miner (26:09):

Really, it's Anya and Sequoia who should get the maincongratulations.

KendellKelton (26:13):

Well, we're definitely going to link to that episode inparticular in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us. Before we go,can you let our audience know where they can find you and your team's work?

Casey Miner (26:27):

Yeah. And yeah, thank you, it's been a total pleasure. Ilove to talk about everything-

KendellKelton (26:30):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (26:30):

... so thanks for having me on.

KendellKelton (26:32):

Yeah.

Casey Miner (26:33):

I am not really active on social media.

KendellKelton (26:39):

Oh, the rarity, we love it, we love it. Good for you.

Casey Miner (26:42):

I have a handle on X, formerly Twitter, but I don't use itall that often. If you want to find me there, it is ReedMiner,R-E-E-D-M-I-N-E-R. But otherwise, I recommend just following Throughline. Sothe show is from NPR, and it's called Throughline, you can find it wherever youget your podcasts.

KendellKelton (26:59):

Amazing. Well, we'll link to that in the show notes. Thankyou again for joining us.

Casey Miner (27:03):

Yeah.

KendellKelton (27:03):

Really appreciate it, Casey.

Casey Miner (27:04):

Yeah, my pleasure.

KendellKelton (27:06):

Well, that's it for today's episode of The Rough Draft. Tolearn more about our guests and to find links and resources related to theconversation, check out Rev.com/podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation,be sure to rate and subscribe in order to stay up to date with the latestepisodes. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you again onthe next episode of The Rough Draft.

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