Just launched a new podcast Ransom, you can listen and get links to subscribe at https://ransompodcast.com or listen to the first episode here: On September 12th, 1995, McKay’s father, Carl, returned home from an Amway meeting to find the door ajar and his 12-year-old son, McKay, missing. The phone rang. A woman with a raspy […]

A recent FOIA request by Right To Know’s Emily Kopp yielded new information about Project Defuse, a DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to study bat-borne Coronaviruses that included Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher Shi Zhengli. The newly released documents, show collaborators’ internal notes on drafts of the grant proposal, which yielded two small revelations: I […]

Semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy)  is part of a class of drugs that mimic the action of the peptide GLP-1, a hormone that’s secreted from the small intestine in response to food. GLP-1 and drugs that mimic it’s actions like the ‘glutides’ have many actions throughout the body, but the most important direct effects are thought to be […]

Recently, KSL paid for me to attend the 2022 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Denver. IRE has a lot of workshops on data journalism, beat-specific seminars, and career advice, but I chose mainly to primarily attend lectures on finding government records through FOIA and its state law equivalents. Working in true crime podcasts, public […]

As I lay on my couch, shirtless and cold but sweating from my first Covid booster shot, I got a push notification about a Wired article: New Covid Drugs Are Here — and They Could Change the Pandemic The article highlights the benefits these drugs could bring to the third world, where the logistics of […]

On Tuesday I launched a new podcast, Algorithm! Algorithm is about a journalist who created an algorithm to use homicide data to try to identify serial killers. His algorithm flagged a suspicious number of unsolved strangulations in Gary, IN and he reached out to them to warn them they might have a serial killer on […]

I’m momentarily fascinated by the notion of copyrights and the public domain. The freedom of information and availabilty of it. A quick google search brought me to The Robesonian from October 29th, 1920. It’s a small, sparse paper from Lumberton, North Carolina. Just four pages, the only images are in the ads. 1920 was an […]

This post is a follow-up to the post Gimlet’s unofficial reading list for making good podcasts Just got finished Make Noise by Eric Nuzum, the podcast developer who helped guide shows like Invisibilia and Where Should We Begin. Make Noise was a super-quick read. I tore through it in two days.   The book advises […]

As I’m now working at an NPR station, but I was never formally trained in journalism, I decided to look up what I missed out on. Here are the introductory textbook’s used by 5 of America’s top journalism programs: Textbook / Book Program New Used   Who, What, When, Where, Why by James Glen Stovall […]

The Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, is launching a podcast app designed to help doctors to listen to educational content and take quizzes on what they learn. By listening to these podcasts and taking the accompanying quizzes, medical professionals could earn Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits, which are needed for licensing requirements. JAMA […]