Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
You cant swing a cat around the Apple Podcast charts without hitting a true-crime podcast.
It is also, naturally, a complicated one.
Every project is a string of delicate responsibilities, a minefield of ethical conundrums.
Their responses have been edited for clarity.
Does it feel bad to hit up the victim?
Lauren Spohreris the co-creator of RadiotopiasCriminal, an anthology podcast that tells stories about crime.
Not all of the stories we tell onCriminalare violent.
When were deciding whether or not to pursue a violent crime, we start by thinking about the victims.
Is the victim living?
If so, lets contact them.
Its insincere to pretend we need to be tough reporters who put facts ahead of the human beings impacted.
Were digging up personal stories and making choices about how we frame them.
Not to think about who is listening risks compounding peoples pain for your own benefit.
Is there enough tension?
I have a mental checklist of questions.
First, is what were saying true, and how do we know that?
Is there enough tension and action in each scene to keep the listener engaged?
Is the writing conversational?
And then theres dialogue and scene-setting.
When youre using recorded audio like we did inDirty John, well, those characters speak for themselves.
But often their real voices were not very dramatic.
After all, theyre regular people, not actors.
So how do you fix that?
Its amazing how just a few hard jewels of detail can amp up a scene.
Does this story matter?
Samara Freemark is the senior producer of American Public MediasIn the Dark.
We wouldnt do a story that was merely about a horrible crime, no matter how bizarre or colorful.
How do we make it feel like its not true crime?
Julia Lowrie Henderson is a producer on ESPNs30 for 30 Podcasts.
That can feel like a narrative burden, because it so easily becomes what drives the narrative.
Are we helping more than were hurting?
Connie Walker is the host of the Canadian Broadcasting CorporationsMissing and Murdered.
I have a go at center the victim and families experience in our storytelling.
Im also an indigenous woman, so I think my own experience really informs my reporting.
For decades, this issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls has been ignored by society.
), its equally important to answer the bigger questions.
Why are indigenous women disproportionately victims of violence?
Why have so many indigenous women gone missing from the Highway of Tears?
Why are indigenous kids taken into care in such large numbers?
Why do so many cases remain unsolved?
How do we convey that not everyones truth is THE truth?
How can I respect the lived trauma of these events and also get someone to relive it on tape?
Their stories the Everyman stories can be more instructive about the nuance and problems of justice in America.
Can we make a difference?
Do we have enough information to examine the case more deeply than has been done before?
Do we have it right?
Dunlop and Jacob Ryan are journalists at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
Not just nearly right.
That means not only getting the facts straight and having documents and/or interviews to support them.
That also means putting those facts in the proper context so theyre fairly presented.
And it means giving people affected by those facts the opportunity to respond to them.
When weve done all that, we think weve got right.
Thats the process we applied toThe Popes Long Con, over and over again.
And seven months later, no one has raised a single substantive challenge to anything we reported.
So we think we got it right.
