Another Gem From NPR’s Planet Money

I became a big fan of NPR’s Planet Money show during the financial crisis. I think it does a really good job of explaining financial news in a layman-friendly way. It’s very easy to appreciate the difficulty of this feat if you’ve ever attempted it yourself, as I did as a newspaper reporter. The show, which I listen to via a podcast subscription, also strikes a nice balance of (a) making big breaking stories that everyone else is covering more digestible, and (b) tackling off-the-beaten-path features.

The staff is also very conscientious about following up on past stories. In that vein, they did a great update this week about a school that’s being rebuilt in Haiti following last year’s devastating earthquake. Aside from being a great human-interest story, this one also struck me as another great example of journalistic storytelling as a craft on the Internet, how it might be different from doing so in a legacy format, et cetera.

Planet Money started covering this school awhile back to illustrate the economic realities of trying to rebuild Haiti. Thing is, when the story aired, listeners started calling in asking how they could donate to the cause. This sort of thing has always happened to good journalists, but I think it’s safe to say, it’s increasingly happening now because the Internet has changed the audience’s expectations. By default, they expect to interact deeply with stories as a community. It’s more of a natural leap for more people now to say, after being told a heart-wrenching story about kids in need, “OK, how do I help?”

This put Planet Money in a bit of a weird spot, considering the traditional journalistic imperative not to get involved in stories, especially anything involving financial gain to sources. But the show’s producers came up with an inventive workaround: They created an account in the name of the principal of the school and then just told people about it. The producers spent basically no money on this, and they weren’t nudging people to donate, as if the show had “an agenda.” (Another big journalistic no-no.) Rather, the listeners set the agenda — they asked for an outlet — and the staff just responded to it. The show rightly figured that if the move was audience-driven, how could it erode trust with the audience — which is the ultimate point of the old standards anyway? The listeners were free to donate, and the principal was free to spend the money after the account was set up. Planet Money got out of the way at that point.

Where the story went from there got even more interesting. I won’t spoil it here; I’ll just encourage you to click through the link earlier in this post and listen to the whole thing. Suffice it to say, Planet Money deftly kept doing what it does particularly well — tell stories — while also realizing that it’s part of a community in which a two-way conversation is taking place. Bravo.