Rescheduled and Resilient: NPR’s Next Gen Radio 2020
By: Doug Mitchell
Tags: NPR, Journalism, Audio, Digital Media

Late February

I was an hour or so from hitting the “send” button announcing on Instagram the selected cohort for our project, scheduled for March, at the University of Southern California. Dr. Amara Aguilar, a USC professor and one of our long time team leaders, emailed to say, “Hold up.” She said the dean, director, and faculty were deciding whether to shut down the entire school because of the spread of the coronavirus. A few minutes later, Amara wrote back saying the school was closed and students headed off-campus, not to return. We were told to postpone the project. I didn’t know it at the time, but here in December as I’m writing this, we would discover that all of our 2020 work would not be canceled but merely delayed.

March, April, May, June

EVERYTHING was closing. We were told to stay home, and we did. Meanwhile, I wondered, out loud, can we still do our work? Will our sponsors still fund us? I remember a colleague asking me a few years ago about doing all-remote projects, and my response was “That’s not what we do. We’re a high-touch program.” At the time, I didn’t have to think about all-remote, but now I did, and I had no idea if that would work. We canceled our May programs with the University of Nevada, Reno, and NPR station WHYY — not for financial reasons, but because there was just too much going on with stay-at-home orders and colleges and universities deciding on the fly what was a good strategy to keep going (or if they even should keep going).

But, I thought, if our sponsors are still committed, then it’s a matter of making some hard and educated guesses. I checked in with KUER, the NPR station in Salt Lake City, Oregon Public Broadcasting, USC, Colorado Public Radio, and CapRadio in Sacramento. All remained on board; we just needed to figure out how to do our digital media sprint when NO ONE is in the room. During the months before re-starting the program with KUER in July, we found that a lot of what we had been doing was already “remote.” From our student and story-selection processes to mentor-trainee planning, deliberate use of cloud storage/sharing, and team meetings (you remember conference calls right?). Many times, our site developers and illustrators we’re not in the room. Our guest speakers were often not physically present, either. Once I realized this, assembling our all-remote strategy and team got a lot easier.

July, August, September, October, November

We re-launched. Because all-remote NextGen was new, we started small with four selected students and four mentors. I asked Stephanie Kuo to be our Managing Editor for this re-start. She is a NextGen alumna who has been a project mentor, too. Also, and very important, she already had been doing distance teaching through her work as Director of Training with PRX. Most of the mentors and staff for this restart were experienced with in-person teaching and now had been doing remote work in their regular jobs since March. Building a strong mentoring team is always important. When it’s all-remote, it’s just crucial. Also important: over-communicating. Journalists are the worst at communicating, anyway. So, knowing this, we meet on Zoom and insist on using Slack for instant communication and within specifically named channels for each project. Those channels are created, maintained, and removed on a timeline, too.

The pandemic has truly brought out the inequity in this country. When we were all going into the same building, the building itself would serve as the great equalizer. Everyone would have access to the same tools. Not now. Seeing this in full, we added, as part of our selection process, a “tech survey.” The tech survey doesn’t play a role in who gets selected — it gives us a necessary heads-up as to who has access to what tech ahead of doing the work so that we can arrange to make accommodations. Truth: I have been asked more than a few times about going remote during the years. I waved it off saying, “We’re ‘high-touch’” meaning success equates to being in the room. Uh, no. Not exactly.

There’s so much more we are now aware of, and as we look into 2021 and beyond, we continue to build more flexibility into our process. We now know the possibilities are endless. The pandemic could have ended Next Gen Radio. We simply refused to let that happen and in fact, next year we’ll create opportunities with people in new places, including journalists at tribal newspapers and radio stations, print journalists in Texas, and another early-career project for audio journalists and storytellers.

Our 2021 Next Generation Radio Projects:

Jan 3–8, WUSF/Florida Newsroom, Tampa, FL

March 14–19, NAJA Early Career/Tribal Journalists

April 25–30, KOSU, Tulsa, OK (Race Massacre 100th Anniversary)

May 16–21, University of Nevada, Reno, NV

June 14–19, WHYY, Philadelphia, PA

July 11–16, OPB, Portland, OR

July 18–23, KUOW, Seattle, WA (Early Career)

Aug 1–6, KUER, Salt Lake City, UT

Aug 15–20, Colorado Public Radio, Denver, CO

Sept 12–17, Texas Newsroom, Austin TX

Oct 10–15, Cap Radio, Sacramento, CA

I have to thank some folks: Managing Editor Traci Tong (a.k.a. “Work Wife”), Visuals Lead Erica Lee, Audio Engineers Selena Seay-Reynolds and Patrice Mondragon, Digital Editors/Producers Elaine Heinzman (who edited this piece), Laura Isensee, Jenn de la Fuente, Joanne Griffith, and Robert Boos; and our Illustrators: Team Lead Yunyi Dai with Emily Whang and Ard Su. Also, thank you, Brian Bull, Gabriela Saldivia, and Carrie Jung. They all jumped in, headfirst, at least twice since July, to this new reality, and it would not have worked without them.

Finally, yet another nod to Seth Godin as I’m a daily reader of his blog. This one is about prediction. He presents a simple standard of measurement to apply to those who are, every December, predicting the future. This particular blog post asks questions. Looking ahead, I’ll ask them this way:

“What’s our track record?”

“Can we show our work?”

“Have we taught our method(s) to others?”

And, as my colleague and good friend Maxie Jackson says spinning a famous quote: “Ask not about the difficulty. But instead ask, What’s the opportunity?”