The new biz journalism world called Planet Money

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Adam Davidson has reported on international business and economics for National Public Radio’s National Desk since December 2004. His reports can be heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” and “Day to Day,” as well as NPR newscasts. He is also editorial director for NPR’s multimedia project covering the global economy, Planet Money.

Davidson’s reports focus on the effects of increased global trade on the U.S. economy, U.S. workers, and U.S. competitiveness. After the deadly tsunami that hit Southeast Asia, he covered the aftermath of the disaster in Banda Aceh. Davidson spent two weeks there, living in a concrete bunker and filing several reports a day.

Davidson has visited countries that are undergoing dramatic economic change, such as China, to help listeners make sense of the sometimes overwhelming and confusing phenomenon of globalization. By introducing listeners to the people most affected by globalization, Davidson says he hopes to help listeners “better understand the profound changes happening in every part of the world.”

Davidson talked Thursday by phone with Talking Biz News about the Planet Money project. What follows is an edited transcript.

1. How did the Planet Money idea come about?

It started with this “Giant Pool of Money” show, the show that we did with “This American Life.” It was a fun experiment that frankly I thought was going to be a failure because I didn’t think you could do a one-hour show about mortgage backed securities and make it fun and entertaining. But it got a huge response. People wanted an educational piece to help them understand how the economy works and affects them, to give them some context. In the past couple of years, there has been more hunger and interest in business and economics news than ever before. I think you just have all of these new business news and economics news consumers who are different from the traditional business news and economics news consumers.

I have learned that there are many educated people that can not tall you the difference between a stock and a bond and can’t tell you how structured finance works. There are many people on Wall Street who can’t tell you how structured finance works. We were bringing water to the desert. We just sort of lucked in to having the right formula at the right time, which is clear, sophisticated reporting about business and economics. The goal is not to simplify things, it’s to make things clear. So we use all the tools of good reporting, placing things in good storytelling and not using jargon. It just reached a very large audience.

I just seemed sort of obvious that we should not make this a one-off, that we should make it a regular occurrence. So I worked during the summer of 2008 to make this a permanent part of NPR.

2. This is all new for NPR. How hard was it to sell?

It was shockingly easy. We have faced absolutely no internal resistance. We have faced tremendous internal support. To me, that’s shocking because we’re doing things in a different way than NPR traditionally does stuff. We have the same standard high-quality commitment to good journalism and good storytelling. But it’s a huge organizational change to have a true multi-media team that is fully committed to the Web, committed to podcasting and committed to the radio. It is this team beat approach, which is sort of new. Rather than one reporter pursuing one aspect of a story, we all work together. We’re now a team of six.

3. What’s the goal for Planet Money?

It is as simple as to help the audience understand economics and business and how those things impact their day-to-day lives. Sometimes I feel like we’re a continuing education class taught by journalists. Clearly, there was an economic crisis going on, but we started our efforts before the real crush of September 2008. We happened to launch the day Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were rescued, and the next week was Lehman.

Our original plan was to have a quiet period in the fall and get the bugs out and figure out who we are. Obviously, that was not the case. Most of what we focused on for the first six to eight months has been the ongoing acute financial crisis. That’s not our DNA. Our DNA is broader and focuses on economics much more broadly. We’re already beginning to plan stories about how China is impacting the American economy and why poor countries are poor.

It’s not just a topic focus. It’s a sensibility focus. It’s not just what stories do we tell. It’s how do we tell these stories. We’re friendly. We’re accessible. We’re curious. We’re on a journey ourselves. We’re not coming to you as the fully formed expert.

4. Do you and others try to have a specific number of posts each days?

It is hard to feed the beast. There are different demands for podcasting, for the radio and for the Web. And we’re committed to being on the radio regularly and doing these longer-form radio projects. It’s hard to mix all of that,

It really depends on what’s going on. It’s something we talk about a lot. The head of our online operations, Laura Conaway, did a study comparing us to comparable economics blogs. And no one posts much more than four times a day. Before that, we had been posting six to 10 times a day. We still post a lot.

5. When did the podcasts start?

It launched on that first Monday. Originally, we were going to do one a week. But when we launched on the day that Fannie and Freddie collapsed, we ended doing one each day that week. But we decided that wasn’t substainable. So now we post podcasts three a week. We post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

6. What’s been your traffic to the site?

I try not to pay attention to audience traffic. I prefer not to know. I know it’s in the many tens of thousands. I know it’s one of NPR’s most popular, and in the top 10 or 20 of iTunes. (Editor’s note: The podcast is downloaded more than 1 million times each month and the blog gets approximately 400,000 page views per month.)

7. Do you try to cross-market it by mentioning it on the air?

Yes, certainly. Whenever we’re on the radio, either on NPR or “This American Life,” we definitely make a point of doing a back tease.

8. Are there certain stories or topics that lend themselves better to radio than the blog or a podcast?

I think that is really one of the fun things to figure out. For me, most of my career has been a radio career, and NPR has been focused on radio. But it’s fun to see how different media demand different types of story telling. It’s liberating to be able to use video for storytelling. We do a fair amount of charts that we can’t do on the radio. I think that while we want everything we do to have the high journalistic standards of NPR, we do feel like the podcast is a place where we can play around more in the way we tell stories.

It’s OK to be not totally successful in our story telling. The difference between podcast and radio is much bigger than the difference between radio stories and print stories. We know what we sound like, but we don’t know what we look like.

9. Have you had to learn any new skills?

All the Internet skills. I really did not know how to use a blog editor. I want to learn more. I would like to focus more energy on visual storytelling. The hardest thing was just to learn how to talk to the Web development folks. I did not know now how to picture something in my head and convey to the development folks what it was. I didn’t know how Web people talked. That was harder than learning how a collateralized debt obligation works.

10. How popular are the Economist House Calls, where you call a random home to get an idea about how it’s faring in the current economy?

That was really fun. But it wasn’t necessarily a carefully laid plan. I like the spontaneity of that, and that’s our mission, to show people how broad economic principles impact your life on a day-to-day basis to help you make better choice. For me, it’s intellectual curiosity. That feels like one of the more on-point things that we’ve done. I love economists, but it is hard to find the ones that speak English. I want everything to be informed by an intelligent grounding in economics, but the best reporting is showing not telling.

11. Colleague David Kestenbaum wrote back in April that the Adam Davidson bobblehead dolls would soon be released. When can I get mine?

We have had jokes about products. He wants us to have a whole line of weird things that we sell. He wants us to have gifts that you can give rooted in sophisticated risk models.

12. Anything you want to add to the discussion about the now-infamous interview you did with Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel?

I think we’ve said more than enough. Not specifically about that, but I like that we are rooted in transparency. This whole process of revealing the process of learning how this stuff works and struggling with it is a crucial part of what Planet Money is. This is a very emotional story for everyone involved. This gets at the core of how we define society. And it’s very hard for journalists to deal with emotion, particularly their own emotion. In many ways, this is a story that gets to the core of what business journalists do, and I am very far from figuring it out. It continued to be a profound challenge.