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“If you’re looking for another political podcast to handicap the horse race, there are plenty of them out there,” John Hammontree told listeners in the intro to the third season of “Reckon Interview.”
In other words, that’s not what’s happening here.
“… We want you to join us as we explore the Southern issues, trends and movements that matter most,” he continued.
“And hopefully, learn how to plant our own seeds of change,” added cohost and Reckon’s editor-in-chief, R.L. Nave.
You might know Reckon
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as al.com’s social brand
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, which produced the Facebook Watch series “Chasing Corruption
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.” The brand has transformed
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, however, with “deep exploration of tough and important issues facing the South.”
The podcast, “Reckon Interview
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,” reflects that in its third season with a sharp focus on the role the South’s past is playing in our country’s present.
What do voting rights look like half a century after the civil rights movement?
How did the South shape the national politics we know today?
How have coalitions been built in a place divided by race, and what can we learn from that in a pandemic?
Coastal media tends to miss these storylines, said Hammontree, executive producer of Reckon’s podcast, “because they’re missing the movements that are happening on the ground.”
But the South is the birthplace of all those movements, Nave said. And so it’s the perfect place to explore them.
“In our lifetime, we’ve seen some epic elections and the rise of powerful movements,” he wrote in an introduction
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to the podcast’s new season. “But I don’t know that we’ve seen them collide in quite the way they are right now. That’s why Reckon made the decision to do something different in the months ahead. Instead of just covering politics, we’re dedicating this season of the award-winning Reckon Interview podcast to the movement and coalition builders and observers across the South who are educating voters on issues and fighting to make sure every eligible voter has access to the ballot.
"In short: We’re focusing on the people writing the South’s next chapters.”
Image via Twitter
Reckon isn’t covering politics the same way that traditional newsrooms do, Nave said. And its podcast offers the space to cover the movements we’re in the middle of.
How are movements built? Who are the people behind them? What does all of that look like mid-pandemic?
Each episode digs into those questions and offers actionable, practical advice, Hammontree said, including how to make sure you’re able to vote in a pandemic, lessons to build your own coalitions and how to make politics better in the South.
National political coverage is more divisive and insidery than most people actually are, said Kelly Ann Scott, Alabama Media Group’s vice president of content. The podcast gives people a place to breathe, explore, learn and form their own opinions.
The approach is new, but the issues they’re talking about are not, including stoking suburban racial resentment, lack of paid child care and voting rights.
“We’ve been having these same damn fights for decades in the South but also across the country,” Hammontree said.
They could keep repeating. Or new movements and coalitions could make them crumble.
Image via Twitter
Pictured at top, from the left: R.L. Nave, Reckon’s editor-in-chief (Image by Eric J. Shelton); bottom left: John Hammontree, co-founder of Reckon and the podcast’s executive producer. (Submitted photo)
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While you’re here:
Let’s start with a correction. Last week I wrote that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got a grant to support Editor’s Corps. That was both wrong and sloppy. CPB gave a grant
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to the Public Media Journalists Association. Apologies!
CONGRATS to the local newsrooms that are finalists
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in this year’s Online Journalism Awards!
Come work with me! Poynter is hiring a reporter
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.
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Whoa. Remember the editor in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who quit over a headline
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? He started a crowdfunding campaign to start his own newsroom and set a $5,000 goal. Look at it now
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.
There’s still time to apply
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for API’s Metrics for News and improve your election coverage.
I’m looking forward to learning more about the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index
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, which will launch by year’s end and show newsrooms what work is causing people to subscribe and what work is causing them to unsubscribe.
I got to catch up last week with the team behind the Council on Foreign Relations’ Local Journalists Initiative. Check out their resources here
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.
And check out this Poynter online group seminar starting next week on reporting in the age of social justice
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.
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That’s it for me! I’m starting to figure out how to fit 4th-grade math into my work day and hope whatever you’re facing this fall is making some amount of sense, too.
See you next week!
Kristen
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