cover of episode An Announcement

An Announcement

2023/3/9
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In The Dark

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In the Dark is moving to The New Yorker, bringing its investigative storytelling to a new platform with enhanced resources and support.

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Hey, it's Madeline. If you're a fan of In the Dark, I'm here to tell you, you need to subscribe to The New Yorker. If you love long-form storytelling and you've listened to all the serialized investigative podcasts, you've already watched everything good on Netflix, there is a wealth of stories you are going to love waiting for you at The New Yorker.

This magazine has some of the most remarkable reporting I have ever read. We're talking Ronan Farrow's recent investigation of Elon Musk, Catherine Schultz's Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the earthquake that will devastate the Pacific Northwest, Lawrence Wright doing the definitive work on Scientology, Rachel Aviv uncovering disturbing conditions at a Christian center for troubled teens. You'll have access to it all. And you'll get a free New Yorker tote bag. Indisputably, the best tote bag around.

That's newyorker.com slash dark. I hope you subscribe. I promise it'll make you smarter and more entertained and way better at dinner parties. Again, that's newyorker.com slash dark. Okay, I'm just going to hit record and there's the volume. Okay, just give me a little test, test, test. Okay, I'm testing right now. Test, test, test. All right. All right. Should we do this? Let's do this. Okay. Hey, In the Dark listeners. This is Madeline Barron.

I am coming to you with In the Dark Managing Producer Samara Freemark. Hello, Madeline. Hi, Samara. It has been an interesting few months. It really has. And our listeners haven't heard from us in a while. Yeah, it's been a very long time. But you and I wanted to sit down today because we have some extremely exciting news to share. Madeline, would you like to do the honors? Yes. Okay.

Kind of feel like we need a drumroll. Yeah, we definitely need a drumroll. You ready? Okay, I'm ready. In the Dark is moving to The New Yorker. Okay, so we should probably back up a bit. Yeah. Yeah. So for the past couple months, we've been talking and thinking a lot about what we want this show to really be going forward.

Like in our best case scenario, what do we really want to be doing in the years ahead? And, you know, we've been doing In the Dark now for several years. We've developed a show that we're really proud of. And what's what's next for us? And what would it look like to bring the show to a new home? So for the past few months, we've been really considering that.

We have spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different people at different organizations. We took a lot of meetings. We took so many meetings and we considered so many different models and so many options of where we could go and what the show would look like at different places. And at the end of all this, the place that we were both so excited about was The New Yorker. Madeline, how long would you say you've been reading The New Yorker? For a really long time. Yeah. Yeah.

It's one of those magazines that you read when you're starting, at least for me, when I was first getting into journalism and thinking, like, this is what I want to be doing, this kind of really in-depth, long-form work. You know, just thinking, like, wow, that's sort of the best that journalism can be. And that's what I want to be doing. Yeah. Yeah.

Madeline, you and I made a trip out there, and I think what we were most struck by was how we all shared the same sense of the kind of work we wanted to be making.

Yeah, and as we're having all these conversations with lots of different organizations, what we kept coming back to was The New Yorker, and for really specific reasons. Number one, the commitment to the kind of reporting that we do and that we aspire to continue doing, this type of really in-depth investigative work that takes months and months and months, and The New Yorker does some of the best of it in the world. The other part, equally important to all of us, is storytelling, because we talk about this all the time. It's like an investigative work that

If the story isn't well told, you might as well have not spent years with all your findings because no one's going to care. No one's going to engage with it. And so I just feel like they have that best combination out there. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, The New Yorker makes the kind of things that we want to make. Yes. I mean, I think like when you and I talk about stories and where we get our inspiration for things like story structure or how to tell the story of one particular person in the story and follow them through time, a lot of the stuff that we look at is actually not other podcasts. It's other stories.

It's documentary film. Right. It's novels. And it's this type of long form narrative journalism, magazine writing that The New Yorker does better than anyone else. And that's been true for decades.

And Madeline, we should say that it's not just The New Yorker we're joining. We are going to be joining a larger podcast network with Condé Nast Entertainment. So The New Yorker is part of Condé Nast, along with a whole bunch of other truly iconic publications like Vanity Fair and Wired and Bon Appetit and Pitchfork. Condé Nast Entertainment makes a lot of stuff. They've got some great podcasts. They also make TV shows and films and videos. I personally am a particular fan of the videos from Vogue and Bon Appetit. They're very good.

Yeah, and The New Yorker has put out some really impressive video work. They're up for five Academy Award nominations for video this year alone. Yeah, I think they may actually be competing against themselves in some categories.

This type of work, not just print stuff, but video, podcast, film, all of this is a big and growing part of what Connie Ness does. And what that means for us at In the Dark is that we will have a lot of people and resources to help support our work. Yeah. OK, so I think we should take a moment to just talk a little bit more about what In the Dark is going to be doing at The New Yorker.

So In the Dark, as you know it, is not going to change drastically. We're going to continue to do deep investigative reporting told over multiple episodes, exactly as you've come to appreciate it over these past few years. But we're also going to get to experiment and tell other stories, different stories in other ways with different people at our new home. And we haven't yet figured out what that all looks like yet. But that's something to look forward to in addition to In the Dark proper.

And there's something else that is just as exciting. And that is that it's not just me and Madeline bringing in the dark to the New Yorker. Hello. Hi, can you hear me? Hello, hello, hello. Testing one, two, three. We are actually getting to bring our team. It's amazing. Oh, my God. It's like actually rules.

I don't know about you, I woke up this morning just so excited. Dude, the New Yorker is sick. Like so excited that I had to go to the gym and like run for half an hour because I had all this like nervous energy.

Yes, the In the Dark crew is sticking together. We've got our producer, Natalie Jablonski. Yeah, coming to you from still snowing Minnesota. As you probably already know, pretty much every place I went in Mississippi reporting on the Curtis Flowers case, Natalie was right there with me recording the whole thing. Yeah, driving around back roads, knocking on doors and talking to people. And spending time in some, let's just call them questionable places. Boxes and boxes and boxes.

I dug through some old documents in the Coralite factory. Well, look, there's like there was something here and it's been kind of scraped off. Our producer Raymond Tungakar is also joining us. Hello from Chicago. Raymond was also such a crucial part of season two. He was the one who waded through all the evidence in the Flowers case that involved guns and bullets and gunshot residue. It just kind of went down the rabbit hole. And he did plenty of other reporting as well.

Hi. Good morning, Mr. Flowers. Hi, how are you? Also, remember reporter Parker Yesko? I mean, if you have heard season two, I doubt you could forget her. I'm Parker. Nice to meet you. Like when she spent months scanning more than 100,000 pages of court records on a portable scanner to learn just how often the district attorney in that part of Mississippi was striking Black people from juries. I never want to scan another document in

in my life. Or when we sent Parker to interview people who sometimes really, truly did not want to be interviewed. Did you commit the murders at Tardy Furniture? Did you? No. And last but certainly not least, someone whose voice you've never actually heard before on the podcast. I like to stay behind the scenes. Our audio editor extraordinaire, Katherine Winter. I'm Katherine Winter. I'm the editor of In the Dark.

And what else should I say about me? That's my favorite thing to say about me. Everything you hear on this podcast, every interview, every word we speak, all of that has been edited by Catherine. She has saved us from releasing and you from hearing all of our worst ideas. Our most confusing sentences are truly unfunny jokes. Our interviews that drag on too long. Catherine gets rid of all of that. Save us from ourselves. Yeah.

All of us got started at The New Yorker just a few days ago, so this is all very new. And we've got a bunch of ideas for new shows that we can't wait to explore. But the very first thing we're going to do is jump right back into working on the story that will be season three of In the Dark. Madeline, our first field recording of season three. It took like two years, pandemic. It's pretty great, I gotta say. We can't tell you what season three is about, not yet.

But we can tell you that we've been out reporting, talking to tons of people, knocking on doors. Hello. Hi. And reading documents. And for the story, we are talking about a lot of documents. So many that I'm not even close to done reading them all.

And these are documents that, without giving anything away at this point, we never thought we'd get. It's the first time this has ever been released. This is crazy. Like, no one else has this. No one else has ever seen this. No member of the public has ever obtained this before. We have no idea what it's going to contain. I cannot wait to read this.

We still have a lot of reporting to do, so we don't know yet when season three will be out. But we can assure you that it is the most ambitious season yet of In the Dark, and it will be worth the wait. You'll be able to find season three and everything else we've made at In the Dark, and everything we will make, right here in this same feed. So please keep following us here.

And if you want to hear more about this new partnership, head on over to the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. You can find that wherever you get your podcasts. They've got a conversation between me and Samara and legendary New Yorker editor David Remnick about In the Dark coming to the New Yorker. It was such a thrill to talk to David about all this. And while you're subscribing to the Radio Hour, go ahead and follow the other podcasts from the New Yorker, like The Political Scene and their fiction and poetry podcasts.

As always, thanks so much for listening. We can't wait to talk to you again. In the Dark was created by American Public Media. Hi, I'm Laleh Arakoglu, host of Women Who Travel. This summer, we visit a remote Danish island with strong Viking roots. So I think it was also part of the history you told yourself. We're strong women here. We're strong women. This is the culture of this island.

We've crossed the country with a baseball stadium chaser. Some games could be a day game and then you drive to your next location and take in a night game and then you turn around and try to get to a day game. And well, how can it be summer without at least one mouthwatering moment in France? I'm in a country where there's all these wonderful cheeses and fruits and I tasted a white nectarine and it was small and ugly, but it just had a sweetness and a juice that shocked me.

Join me, Lale Arakoglu, every week for more adventures on Women Who Travel, wherever you listen.

Hi, this is David Remnick, and this year's New Yorker Festival returns October 25th through the 27th. We'll be joined by Rachel Maddow, Sarah Bareilles, Atul Gawande, Seth Meyers, Mohsin Hamid, Audra McDonald, The National, Julio Torres, Ayed Akhtar, and many others. Plus live podcast recordings and panels on politics, literature, technology, and much more. And you can learn all about it at newyorker.com slash festival.

From PR.