In this lecture, I'll use examples from my two chart-topping Sony and Wondery/Amazon podcasts to teach students these lessons: 
A) Tape First: How to find the strongest tape, make it your pod's narrative spine and weave written narration around that tape. 

B) Structure: What are the essential ingredients in each part of the classic 3 act structure? Students will think about the primary question they -- and in turn their audience -- is asking and how to craft a story arc that ultimately answers that question. 

C) Momentum - Plot propels podcasts. Every episode ending needs to be a cliffhanger. How to avoid cliffhanger cliches (Who shot JR?) and find inventive ways to hook and keep listeners wanting more.

D) Finding your main character - Old-fashioned reporting (document diving, interviews) helps identify a main character for print, but podcasting demands more – Does that character have a voice you want to listen to? Is he/she a natural storyteller? Will that person allow repeated access to them? 

E) Interviewing for scene - How to prep interview questions so your subjects tell linear and vivid stories

F) Embrace the living outline: Students will learn how to outline and constantly update episode plans in Google Docs. This critical step in narrative podcasting allows a writer to track how they've put a very complicated puzzle together. 

My podcast  “Suspect, season II”  achieved a rare feat in narrative multi-episodic audio storytelling – it remained the #1 podcast in America for two weeks with the first episode and overall show downloads numbering in the double-digit millions. Why? Because the first five minutes established plot, tension, place and a mystery for the listeners to solve alongside me, a narrator with personality. It made audiences want to keep listening. In this lecture, we will analyze the first episode of “Suspect,” as I teach the class how to master writing a cold open. The class will pitch their own podcast show ideas and we’ll discuss possible cold opens to their shows.

Imagine getting halfway through a weeks or months-long reporting project about a character you're holding up as a moral person only to learn that years ago that person spent time in jail for fraud? A reporter doesn’t like surprises and I’m going to teach you how to avoid them. I'll explain how to learn everything you can about a person before you even begin interviewing them – in fact, you SHOULD know everything possible before that first interview. I will teach the class how to background a subject using Nexis-Lexis, Spokeo, PACER, court sources and other open-source intelligence networks.

We will do a timed exercise to test their backgrounding skills – There's breaking news about a man who has breached a Naval Yard and is attacking people. (A real breaking news event I was asked to jump on and scrub). How much can students learn and verify in real time about the attacker in order to feed an evolving breaking news story?

My Emmy-nominated CNN investigation, “Destroyed,” was a two-year  reporting project in which I was able to show that dozens of law enforcement agencies nationwide were trashing untested rape kits in open and unsolved cases. The story also showed police were failing at every level to investigate reported rapes and child sex abuse – known suspects and witnesses were not pursued, victims were disbelieved, and their rapes incorrectly labeled as having never occurred. The story led to widespread reform at several police departments and a new law prohibiting rape kit destruction. How did I get the idea for this project? A daily news story I was assigned to report that editors buried on the homepage. The daily story was about a North Carolina police chief who admitted that his department destroyed rape kits, but he framed the destruction as no big deal. He didn't say how the destruction happened or why. Right after I published that daily story, I filed a records request for more information. That yielded a trove of documents which showed the police had been trashing evidence in rape cases for more than a decade in poorly investigated cases. The next logical question: Were other departments doing the same?

Students will look through stories published by a reputable news outlet and find a daily story that has legs for a much bigger investigation. We will discuss what next steps can be taken to learn the larger story.

In this lecture, I’ll show students the fact checking method I use – organizing documents and notes in Dropbox and using Google Doc to annotate each fact in a story. The students will work on an exercise in which I give them a story and a small number of resources to fact check that story. They’ll annotate the story and organize the source material in a way that someone else can easily and quickly understand it.

This course teaches students the basic building blocks of a journalistic story. They will learn the difference between a topic and a story and how to shed their impulse to produce a rote, academic essay. By the end of the class, they will know how to ask compelling and tough questions during an interview and understand when to paraphrase and when to quote. They’ll learn how to put all the puzzle pieces of their reporting together from top to bottom, including writing a killer lead and crafting a clear nutgraf – the paragraph that tells the reader what the story is about. 

This course offers an ideal opportunity for anyone trying their hand at a personal narrative. It's also a treasure for any high school student freaked out about writing that college application essay. I will interview the student to mine their life for what might make an interesting essay thread. I’ll guide him or her throughout the writing process, teaching how to banish cliches, sentimentality and other common mistakes. The finished piece will dazzle any audience or college administrator. 

This course will help students learn where to look for stories and how to recognize one. Is the story idea original? It is going to tell an audience something fresh, useful or interesting? Where is the drama and tension in the story? Does it have extraordinary characters? What impact could the story have after publication or air? 

This course will also offer critical insight on filing public records requests to obtain documents that can be goldmines for story ideas.

Students will learn that a report is a series of facts, and a story is a character having an experience. A story is intimate, communicates the five senses and has a beginning, middle and end.

A student will see a report about how much oil BP spilled into the Gulf, and then read portions of a story that places the reader inside the Deepwater Horizon in the moments after it exploded and the harrowing rescue attempt to save crew members. We’ll discuss as a class the difference in lead, tone and character between a report and a story. 

I’ll show that even on a tight daily deadline, a rich character-driven story should always be the aim. We’ll use Chip Scanlan’s “From Jon to Lani, the Gift of Life” newspaper story to illustrate how a police blotter event - a man rescuing a girl from train tracks – can be written in a traditional inverted pyramid style or, as Scanlan demonstrated, a dramatic 800-word narrative. 

The students will activate the “story hunter” part of their brain. I share the ways I’ve found stories – small, buried stories in news outlets; random conversations (a doctor off-handedly telling me about a dangerous over-the-counter med that no one is reporting about); newsletters that cull interesting court cases and more. 

I’ll click around CNN’s homepage and invite the students to explore with me which news stories could have legs or other backstories. I’ll ask the students to take 5 minutes to think about a conversation they’ve had or a news story they’ve seen and come to Class 2 with an idea they think could become a story.

I’ll ask students to share some of their story ideas. I’ll take the idea best suited to the exercise and together we’ll tease out where students might begin digging to figure out if those ideas have merit. We’ll do that by answering these 5 questions:

After basic research is done, it’s time to pick up the phone or go meet a source to evaluate if the story is worth doing. We’ll do two exercises that demonstrate that interviewing is an act of listening. 

1. Students will spend 5 minutes interviewing each other. Then they’ll take 10 minutes to write a short profile about their classmate. Then the classmates will gently critique each other’s ability to listen and translate what was shared. 

2. I will go around the room in the order the students are sitting and let each ask me a question. The student following the first will have to ask me a logical follow-up question to the previous question/answer and so on until all students have asked me a series of building questions. This will force students to listen, think on their feet and ask probing questions that build on info accumulated. By the final student’s question, the students should have enough material to write about me. I will ask them what the lead might be – which is asking them to remember the thing that was most memorable.