Case Study (Part 1): Navigating Threats to Journalism with NHPR’s The 13th Step Podcast

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: Hey everyone. Welcome to Podcast Perspectives. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro. This week on the show, we're going to present you with part one of a case study that we conducted with NHPR. This case study is called Navigating Threats to Journalism with NHPR's, The 13th Step podcast. Ira Glass praised The 13th step produced by New Hampshire Public Radio's Document Team, as an example of innovation and excellence in public media in the DuPont Columbia Awards, Murrow Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize honored the series for excellence in investigative reporting in the podcast space.

But to get to that point, it took more than three years of production planning and station support for the sound rich journalism of The 13th step to see the light of day, especially as NHPR navigated both physical and legal threats to its reporting process and staff welfare. In April, I moderated a panel with Katie Colaneri NHPR's Senior Editor of Podcasts and Dan Barrick NHPR's News Director to talk to them about the comprehensive and years long production planning and editorial process behind the podcast.

How NHPR navigated and overcame the challenges to its podcast reporting, including physical threats, vandalism and legal pressures. Key lessons learned from NHPR, maintaining journalistic integrity, while ensuring staff safety and the guiding principle of NHPR'S document team and how taking the time to tell the whole story leads to bigger impact.

This webinar was designed for newsroom leaders and journalists looking to build and strengthen their podcast reporting strategy, and includes a lot of actionable insights for developing sustainable workflows and support systems for audio journalism. Glomerate helped with the marketing of this podcast and had a firsthand look at all of the work that the NHPR team put into this.

And if you tune in next week, you'll have part two of this case study. We have Podglomerate’s, SVP of Marketing and Audience Development, Joni Deutsch was joined by Rebecca Lavoie, NHPR’s, director of On-Demand Audio to talk about how to make a sustainable business model and grow revenue from shows like this.

And thank you again to the Online News Association who helped us put on this webinar. ONA is the world's largest digital journalism association connecting journalism, technology, and innovation. Through virtual webinars like this, as well as their annual online news association conference taking place, September 10th to 13th of 2025 in New Orleans and their online journalism awards.

ONA supports the work of journalists, technologists, executive students, educators, and digital media change makers. You can learn more@journalists.org. Let's get to the first part of this case study, and I hope you tune in next week for part two.

Meghan Murphy: Hey, everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, where, wherever you are in the world.

We are so happy to have you with us here today for this excellent virtual session that we have planned. I'm gonna just say a quick welcome on behalf of ONA, the Online News Association. I'm Megan Murphy. I'm the program director at ONA. And we are, we are a place for journalists to have important conversations about the things that are coming up in our industry that we should be paying attention to and discussing and aware of.

And one of our key focus areas for 2025 is this idea of resilience and what that means when you're working in newsrooms, when you're for news organizations, for individuals working in news and for the communities that we serve. And so we had, we had asked our community what this means to you.

And we love to hear your responses and we've been taking suggestions for what discussions we should have and case studies of how your news organizations are dealing with this idea of resilience. And we had a pitch from our friends over at the Podglomerate for. This case study with New Hampshire Public Radio and this excellent podcast called The 13th Step.

And when we started talking about the idea, for the session. It turned out that we actually had, there were a couple of different ways that the team was thinking about this idea of resilience in, in terms of the production and it, and what it meant for the team and for the organization.

And so we decided to make this session a two-parter. And so this is part one. And we are going to talk about the back, the backstory of how the team put together the podcast. And some threats and navigated unfortunately some threats to the process along the way. I won't get into more detail than that 'cause we're gonna talk about that in detail in a few minutes, but we are so excited to have you with us here today.

Jeff Umbro, who's the founder and CEO of the Podglomerate and Katie Colaneri, who's isNew Hampshire Public Radio's senior editor of podcasts, and hopefully in a little while we might have Dan Barrick join us. Here's here. Oh, hi Dan. Welcome guys.

Dan Barrick: I had to sign into the NHPR Zoom account, like the administrator, apparently to make it work, but sorry for the delay.

Meghan Murphy: Oh my gosh. We're so glad you're here. Well, welcome. Thank you. So Dan Barrick is New Hampshire Public Radio's news director and. So we're gonna hear more from you two in a few minutes and so glad you could make it. And Jeff, why don't I turn things over to you to give us a little intro.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much, Megan. How's everyone doing? Happy Monday. So I'm really excited to talk about everything that we're gonna cover today. I heard a kind of tragic stat the other day that said that we are losing journalism jobs quicker than coal miners. Which I actually did not fact check that.

So ironic for this comment, but it was. It was a big moment for me to just sit back and understand like, we're dealing with a lot of things right now whether it's changes in technology, in business models and staffing in like the definition of truth. So, so this is a very timely discussion that I'm really excited to have and we.

Could not have two better people to discuss that with. So today we have Katie Colaneri who is the senior editor of podcasts at NHPR, where she leads the document team, the stations award-winning long form narrative audio unit and Dan Barrick, who is NHPR’s news director, where he oversees the station's local journalism in all formats.

And we're actually gonna be talking to today, and I'm Jeff Umbro founder and CEO of the Podglomerate, which is a podcast services firm that in this instance helped NHPR with the marketing for this show. And I wanted to just spend a minute like. Briefly discussing The 13th Step podcast. And then I have a bunch of questions for Katie and Dan on how they kind of navigated this.

I hope, really unique experience, but like, perhaps not, which is part of the discussion today. So I'm honored to be moderating today's case study webinar on navigating threats to journalism with NHPR's, The 13th Step podcast. If you guys are unfamiliar Ira Glass praised this podcast as an example of innovation and excellence in public media.

And the DuPont Columbia Awards, Murrow Awards and Pulitzer Prize honored the series for excellence in investigative reporting in the podcast space. But to get to that point, it took more than three years of production planning and station support for sound rich, for the sound rich journalism of The 13th step to see the light of day, especially as NHPR navigated both physical and legal threats to its reporting process and staff welfare.

It's hosted by investigative reporter Lauren Childen, and produced by the team who made such critically acclaimed podcasts as Bear Brook and stranglehold. The 13th step dove into the American addiction treatment industry in the longstanding culture of sexual misconduct, a phenomenon, people in the recovery world called The 13th Step.

The series explained why that misconduct remains unplaceable and why America can't truly address the addiction crisis until it takes The 13th step seriously. I. It also got personal illustrating the danger for journalists and their sources when they expose alleged wrongdoing by powerful people. A New York Times article about The 13th step published around the time of the series launch described that danger in greater detail.

So on today's webinar, we're going to explore the resiliency of NHPR podcasts, including the comprehensive and years long production planning and editorial process behind The 13th step, how NHPR navigated and overcame the challenges to its podcast reporting, including physical threats, vandalism, and legal pressures.

Key lessons learned from NHPR, maintaining journalistic integrity, while ensuring staff safety and the guiding principle of NHPR's document team wherein taking the time to tell the whole story leads to bigger impact. So the goal here is to have takeaways for everybody for their outlets, their institutions and individuals in order to develop sustainable workflows and support systems for audio journalism and podcast productions.

Just a housekeeping note that this is part one of a two part case study. So if you're interested in hearing more about how NHPR podcasts, like The 13th steps The 13th step are marketed and monetized be sure to check out that second webinar in May. And I think we might have a link in the Zoom chat for that one.

So, we have Katie and Dan here who are gonna like, answer everyone's questions in a remarkable way, I'm sure. And I'm gonna kind of guide this with a few questions of my own. And so I, I guess this is a question for Dan. Would you mind walking us through the initial genesis of The 13th step and as part of that, what made NHPR commit to such an extensive investigation?

Dan Barrick: Sure. Good morning everybody. Sorry for the delay, but I'm glad to be here and be part of the conversation. The story that ended up becoming the podcast in series started from very kind of routine beat reporting. It was during the pandemic. Lauren CHN was at that time her official beat was kind of enterprise political reporter, but, as with the, you know, with all of our newsrooms and ours for sure quickly got, you know, turned into pandemic specific reporting. And she did a number of pieces, but she was doing some reporting based on a tip about, places health settings where proper COVID protocols were not being followed and the risks that posed to patients and residents.

And one tip in particular was about a chain of addiction treatment facilities, the largest in New England that happened to be located in New Hampshire, where they were f flouting concerns about, you know, masking, about communal living. This was a facility that was run by a man named Eric or the whole chain.

Eric Spofford, who we had actually reported on a lot in the years running up to that he had sort of become the face of addiction treatment in New Hampshire. He had opened up a number of sober living facilities. He'd become very close with. At the time, governor Chris Sununu had held a number of political events at Spotford facilities.

He had testified in front of the US Senate as a guest of venue New Hampshire, US Senator Kelly aop. But we'd gotten pretty good tips about just how, you know, how things were being run there. Lori did a story, pretty straightforward story about the complaints and the concerns. Once that story ran.

She got a whole set of other tips that were actually in a whole different area that were quite concerning about allegations and concerns from both staff and patients at various facilities run by Eric Spofford about sexual misconduct and harassment that he had engaged in Alleg, allegedly against both staff and current and former patients of people seeking treatment from him.

That running that down just even to Aer, you know, ascertain whether those tips were valid, whether we could corroborate them to some degree took a lot of work. But once Lauren started pulling the thread, it became pretty quickly, but clear pretty quickly that a, there were a number of people willing to talk, at least even just off the record initially, about their experience working alongside of Spofford living and see getting treatment from him and his staff that there was a lot here that would, that a big story to tell that would require a lot of reporting.

And two, it became pretty clear that, not only was this an open secret within New Hampshire that he had earned a reputation as a guy to avoid, or but that. Industrywide there had, there was sort of an open secret within the industry that the influx of federal money the public concern about addiction had created a dynamic where you had, you know, sort of pe, you know, entrepreneurs willing to set up facilities, receive, you know, federal support, sometimes Medicaid money or other state funding.

That gave them both economic and political power. They were offering a service for sure. But that, that it was not uncommon nationwide for there to be a dynamic of, you know, a power imbalance that people, that, you know, some of those folks with those inclinations could take advantage of to to engage in abuse and mistreatment.

That's a big story to tell beyond just you know, you know, a straightforward, you know, three, three, you know, three women close to New Hampshire's largest treatment entrepreneur say that he engaged in abusive behavior towards them. So. So, so, so the question was how do we tell that story using, you know, journalistic practices?

But the platforms we had it coincided with at the same time we had decided to kind of break off a small group in the newsroom, Lauren and Jason Moon, who had worked on a podcast. We had done just a few months before that about the New Hampshire primary to do more long form investigative work.

And this. It quickly became clear that this was a story that would benefit from that kind of longer time, longer term investment longer plat, longer, you know, bigger stage. And that's how we decided there. So it was a pretty, you know, it arose from, you know, the way a lot of just good stories in the newsroom arrived.

Just a good tip that comes to a good reporter who knows what to do with it. And but that was, you know, that was the first, really the first step.

Jeff Umbro: I love it. And Katie, when did you come into the process?

Katie Colaneri: So I was hired to be the team's first full-time dedicated editor about a month before we published the first series of stories about the allegations against Eric Spofford.

And so, I, I really was just kind of wrapping my head around the reporting, around the team, around the story when suddenly we published this huge investigation. And then everything that, you know, folks heard in the podcast kind of took off. From there. You know, when I came I was expecting to just sort of help the team, you know, take this initial investigation and, you know, kind of do, figure out what the podcast angle was going to be.

But then obviously we had all these other, you know, the vandalism, the defamation lawsuit and all these other things that happened that I was there with Dan and also with the editor who had been hired to oversee justice, this investigation, Alison McAdam to figure out, you know. Not only how, you know, whether we were going to include those things in the podcast, but also just how to actually respond to these things as they were happening to our team.

So it was a really turned out to be a really interesting time to join the team for sure. I

Jeff Umbro: can only imagine Now I imagine everyone on the, this call is some level of like. Understanding of what did occur, but could you give a little bit of a breakdown of like what you're referring to with the vandalism and et cetera?

Katie Colaneri: Yeah, so there were two rounds of vandalism. So the first happened I believe about a month after the first story detailing allegations of sexual misconduct against Eric Spofford was published. And first it was at. Stan's house as well as at Lauren's parents' house. And then I think another month after that there was another round of vandalism at Lauren's parents' house and at her house in the suburbs of Boston.

And then in the meantime there, you know, and at the time we had no idea, you know, who was behind it. Fast forward now, the department of Justice has charged, four people in those acts, including a co, a close personal friend of Eric Crawford's for, you know, allegedly paying three other guys to carry out the vandalism in retaliation for the reporting that Lauren had done.

And at, so at the same time that this is happening we were also navigating legal threats. To us and to Lauren's sources which eventually resulted in a defamation lawsuit that Eric filed against NHPR and several of the key sources in the first round of stories. And that, you know, again, fast forward at the time, this was all just kind of happening and we didn't know how this was all gonna play out.

But fast forward a judge throughout that lawsuit ultimately saying that, you know, Spofford claims had no merit.

Jeff Umbro: Now I wanna spend a minute because it, it sounds like there are two separate things that are occurring here. One is that you all are, you know, running a three year long investigation and trying to stay on track and maintain, like, just the professionalism of actually, you know, reporting and producing that show.

And then separately, there's a lot of things that are happening. Throughout that process that are, you know, distractions and like taking a human toll on you all. 'cause we're all people. At any point did you really feel like you were kind of playing, like, you know, we're on a balance beam between those two things and like how did you try to kind of maintained focus on you know, doing the job, but also like protecting yourselves?

Katie Colaneri: I mean, that's exactly what it was like Jeff, like, there were just, you know, a lot of. Really hard conversations that we had to have. You know, not only just about, you know, this was something that we thought that we had tried to prepare for and maybe you wanna talk a little bit more about that, Dan?

'cause I know the team before I had arrived on the scene had already thought that they had talked to a lot of really good people. You know, knowing that we were dealing with a potentially litigious. Subject. That is Eric. You know, I think the team tried to take a lot of steps to protect themselves and know what to look out for.

But then I just think nothing prepares you to actually having violent attacks, you know, being carried out multiple times. Not only on the staff, but then also on the staff's loved ones. And we kind of found ourselves in the middle of the situation for which there really was no. Roadmap. Fortunately now we have, you know, I know one of the things for today is we wanna give some takeaways.

We now have some very clear takeaways. Should anyone find themselves in this situation, which we certainly hope not, but there's so many resources. I mean, it's now comforting kind of to know, you know, if there's any cold comfort here. It's knowing that there actually are people and places and resources for this kind of thing that we found out through this process.

But it really was difficult because what happened initially was, not having any roadmap. Not only did we have to kind of figure out, you know, just like take stock of what had actually happened, you know, whether it would be safe to go forward, whether it would be safe to publicize any of this in any way to report, you know, and then there's just always that con comfortable position.

You know, when journalists find themselves being dragged into the story you know, reporting on ourselves is that something that we really wanted to do? What could the mechanism be? Would that be safe? To say nothing of the actual, you know, then conversations we were having to have with our upper managers about just keeping the staff safe and what steps would even be possible.

So yeah, it was extremely difficult. But yeah. Dan, what I'm sure you have a ton to add here too.

Dan Barrick: I mean, part of it, it was made difficult in part by the way that we chose to report the story. So I maybe in case it wasn't clear. We did end up in March of 2022. We did end up publishing.

Once we had enough confirmation about some of the basic facts of the allegations against Barford. We did end up up publishing a long investigative piece, digital and an on-air piece that just laid out the basic facts, hinted at some of the broader societal and national and, you know, industry concerns there.

But we felt we had to do that for a number of reasons. One, we felt we had important information that, like, you know, sitting on this for several more months. Might mean more people got hurt that more people would fall victim to the same incidents that we were reporting. And two for story, as I'm sure you know, everyone on the call is aware, like, you know, getting reporting stories like these with sensitive allegations and victims who are hesitant to air them against powerful people.

We felt that publishing some part of what we knew would act as a sort of. Encouragement and give people a sense that we were willing to put our, you know, our weight behind the story. And that encourage victims to come forward and speak to us basically by saying like, we're willing to go on the, put it on the line and publish this.

And you can trust us to tell your story. You know, we had all kinds of concerns going into that. We've, you know, we obviously went to Spofford with a list of questions. We saw an interview. We were, this is before the publication of that. We were met very aggressively by his lawyer with threats of litigation, vigorous denials, all of which we published.

The vandal, the first round of vandalism Katie referred to happened a month after that. It was shocking. It was scary. The other, you know, the more public pushback around the legal threats to our sources, it made it made everything more difficult because we were, at that time we were also still reporting the story for the podcast.

Yeah. So we're both trying to defend the existing reporting. That reporting that had already been out there navigate a threatening. Potentially violent, you know, environment for the team working on this while continuing to try to keep sources close to vet the, you know, ensure that our work, that we were still, we were being sued for one story, that we were further reporting out.

It was very or, you know, facing the threat of that. But we you know, I'd be lying if there weren't moments when, you know, some of us individually or collectively really questioned, was it worth it? You know, was it worth it to continue to report out the podcast? But we felt extremely confident in the accuracy and the importance of what we were reporting.

And move forward. But what we did do is in that intervening time, the spring and summer of 22, is we base, as Katie said, we basically had to teach ourselves through, you know, reaching out to all kinds of resources. And we can talk about that. I. You know, the basic playbook for protection of journalists, legally, physically, psychologically, emotionally, talking to, you know, consultants who work in that field.

Talking to folks at places like dart, the DART Institute at Columbia. And building that capacity in-house. And I don't think if we if we had not done that, I think if the journalists working on this had not felt supported emotionally, physically, their families the story definitely would've fallen apart.

That it would've been impossible to report that and have people, you know, day to day have the confidence to continue reporting, editing, producing the story. Just the mental fortitude it took to do that. If we didn't feel like we had a plan for how to deal with that. And if we didn't feel that the station would be standing behind it in court, if further legal action came, it just, it would've been too easy just to fall apart.

Jeff Umbro: And could you spend a minute talking through some of those resources that you all found helpful?

Dan Barrick: Sure I can. Katie and I we can just kind of tag team. So we pretty quickly realized, like internally hr, we just did not have the knowledge. You know, both Katie and me and the other editors on the newsroom didn't have the knowledge.

Our HR team didn't have the knowledge, our senior, so we reached out to, a group called BP Risk Management that provides physical security. They mostly work in, like with newsrooms that are working in war zones. Yeah. But they had also worked with journalists who had faced, you know, domestic threats from sources, attacks about how to assess risk.

What kind of resources? Like temporary, you know, temporary bodyguards are there protections? How to talk with local law enforcement about protections for, you know, the actual f facility, the newsroom you know, bulletproof glass on the front door. Everything from that to, to you guys put bulletproof

Jeff Umbro: glass on the newsroom doors.

Dan Barrick: The main door between the the building. Where the, yeah, where the public can kind of come in out. It's a secure door, but there's always been glass there. Yeah. We talked with Bru. Is it Bruce Shapiro at dart? Dart?

Katie Colaneri: Yeah.

Dan Barrick: Yeah, who was great. Both on that, on the logistics of self, you know, self preservation, but also just more the psychological.

It was good for me just that it's like a newsroom manager, the skills around how to help journalists who are working on potentially risky and dangerous work. The kind of mental inventory. You know, one of the things he told me, he is like, you want to, you know. You need a plan because a plan helps reduce uncertainty and fear feeds on uncertainty.

So it doesn't mean you know what's gonna happen and you know exactly what you do, but you at least have a plan. And he said you need to plan for four things that I'm sure they're gonna forget one. But you need a journalistic plan. So basically, how are we vetting the material to make sure it's accurate?

You need a legal plan. What, you know, what do we do if we do, if we get sued, will we stand behind the reporting? You need a physical security plan is the newsroom willing to pay for things like security, bodyguards, things like that. And you need a psychological plan. How do, how, what kind of mental and emotional and psychological support do folks need?

Do they need do we need to consider paying for counseling? How do we deal with, you know, time off and downtime? And that was really helpful and kind of straightforward once you think about it. Those were a couple big things. We got, we the station paid for originally just for the folks working this project, but eventually the, we made a routine for the entire newsroom.

Things like delete me, you know, that scrubs personal data off the internet. That's now just like an annual thing we offer for everyone in the newsroom. I'm trying to think of other stuff, Katie, that we had,

Katie Colaneri: yeah, the station spent like something like over 50 grand on all these different security measures.

But, you know, one of the things that we kind of realized partly through Colin was like Colin Pereira was the person from HP Risk Management who ended up being our like risk consultant. He's also with the Committee to Protect journalists. You know, realizing like during key editorial points, especially when we were gonna be having.

Interactions with Spofford, especially putting the podcast together. You know, going back to him for comment again, after all this had transpired. You know, ways to have security for Lauren or putting her up in a hotel. Not, you know, where she normally lives when the podcast was gonna be coming out.

You know, there were just expenses like that, that I think we just never could have foreseen. That the station had to kind of, you know. Rally to, to do. There was also a period of time while Lauren was recovering from the trauma of what happened while still trying to report the story that, you know, she ended up, you know.

Working a different kind of work schedule when we were able to make some arrangements with our HR department. I will say I've never worked at a station before where something like that was so willingly offered, but I think the fact that there was just all this support from the the leadership on down for doing whatever we could to, you know, help.

You know, Lauren, get through this, I think was, you know, one of the things that really you know, kept this from dying on the vine, as Dan was saying before. We also, another really big piece was that as a team, Lauren was seeing a trauma therapist who was really excellent and at one point it kind of became clear that.

The best, one of the best ways to help her get through it was to have the whole team, the whole editorial team, have a similar baseline understanding of what trauma does to the brain and give us certain tools to help us manage that as we were continuing to try to finish out the podcast. And so in addition to, you know, the station paid for a whole session with our team where she taught us.

About how trauma affects the brain in a really intimate way and a really team specific way, knowing our specific dynamics. And then she gave us an exercise that I would recommend to anybody here to help create a, an environment of psychological safety when you're working on projects like this.

So she recommended that every time we were gonna be having, you know, sort of an intense meeting or we were gonna be having an edit on a script that we do, what she called a check-in. So everybody goes around and just talks about how they're feeling, what they're bringing to that moment. Then somebody else in the circle repeats back to them, I hear that you are feeling anxious and worried about X, Y, or Z.

And then at the end affirms for them, you know, and you're doing a really great job. You're doing the best that you can. And just, you know, getting that out on the table kind of clears the emotional air in a certain kind of way so that. Everybody recognizes the burdens. Everybody else is carrying, recognizes it, validates that they're doing a really great job.

And then we can kind of get back to the work, which was the other thing that I feel like was always a balance. You know, we had so many conversations where, you know, the sentiment would be expressed that I just wanna like, do the reporting, you know, I just wanna get back to work because that's, you know, what we were all here to do and the emotional stuff.

Was just making it so difficult at times. And so this tool really became something that, you know, even to this day on stories that are not the 13th step we will bring out when we're having difficult moments on other stories. Because it really does, you know, it does help clear the air in a certain kind of way.

The other thing that just kind of like a bigger principle that I think we learned from all this is that fear can lead to a lot of paralysis. And so. It can be, you know, like it just makes it really hard to make decisions. And so if you have a handful of trusted people who know you but aren't like directly involved in the work to bring them in to help make.

Decisions and help kind of dislodge that feeling of being stuck. That's another thing that I think just in hindsight is a big takeaway. You know, and that it's okay to feel fear. You know, these things are really scary and we know that more and more journalists every day are being threatened with lawsuits and other kinds of things.

And so that fear is real. And I think that as professionals, we've often been told to stuff that down and to ignore it, but. Facing it by ha, by bringing in somebody else who might be a little bit more clear-eyed is a way to move forward while not minimizing those very real feelings.

Dan Barrick: Yeah, I would I can't emphasize that enough. Katie's last point, you know, as a four person team, it would've been ims, you know, ha, half of whom had. The size of their houses, you know, spray painted with threats. It would've been impossible for us to navigate questions about safety, security what is a reasonable response to this?

And yet, yes, there are lots of consultants, some of whom we did use who can provide this, but like thinking about, there are free resources like dart, like the committee provides, protect journalists. Think of it almost like a reporting challenge. Like, okay we're faced with this. Que we don't know how to deal with this.

Pick up the phone and find people who are a step removed, who do not, who are not bringing the emotional baggage can be more clinical and objective and clear-eyed to help even just affirm Yes, you're that. That's scary. You're right to feel scary, but here's a way to think about it was crucial because we probably would have.

Talked ourselves into paralysis as a four person team. That was, you know, half of whom we're dealing with the impact of this. The other half were seeking to support them and not push them. We didn't know, you know, there, Katie and I had many conversations where we just weren't sure. Are we asking too much of Lauren?

If we ask her to keep going, are we asking, are we undermining her if we don't? And having people outside of that circle to to just kind of think it through and be a resource. So. Being willing to do that in these tough moments is really critical because it'll it, the, it can collapse from under the pressure, under the stress.

Otherwise

Jeff Umbro: I have 10 questions I want to ask you guys based on just this part alone. So, but just cognitive time, I'm gonna ask you first what. What decisions went into, or thoughts went into like protecting the sources in the story? 'cause like we just spent a lot of time talking about the team making it, but you know, there are a lot of other, you know, kind of, people involved here.

Dan Barrick: I can, that's a really good question. And the source management became one of the trickiest aspects of this. You know, most of it fell to Lauren as the direct communicator, you know, liaison to them. But it was something we talked about a lot. I. And it's a really fine line because on the one hand, you know, you need to have an objective relationship with the sources.

You can't promise them things or offer them things. On the one hand, everyone we spoke to was familiar with Eric Spofford and his reputation, and so they were pretty clear-eyed, you know, beforehand when they agreed to talk to us. But the reality of, you know, acts of violence and legal threats took it to another level.

We, we were both, you know, we both assured sources that we were standing by the reporting that we would defend it vigorously that we would. Adhere to the promises we had made to them in terms of anonymity in the, in certain cases or but we were also, we did have, we felt we had to be open with them that if we're sued and a judge orders us to hand over notes we will take every legal step to prevent you know, that we had a lawyer, but that we couldn't, we, you know, we couldn't promise them every.

Active security, but we couldn't give them, you know, promise them a blanket like that, that we can make this go away when we couldn't, we didn't wanna give them false hope.

Jeff Umbro: Yep. And for anybody who hasn't listened to the show like you, you talk a little bit about this during the actual podcast.

Katie Colaneri: Yeah. I mean, there were, right, there were sources who dropped out. You know, there was one source who told Lauren, you know, you can't protect me. Nobody can protect you, me, and. And in a lot of ways it was, as Dan said, like, you know, being really upfront with the sources that yeah, that's true. Like we, we could do everything we could with the reporting materials to a certain point, but you know, we couldn't hire anybody, a lawyer for example, we couldn't guarantee, you know, what was going to happen.

And so I think you know, with really excellent guidance from our First Amendment attorney, SIG Schutz who just all love to sig I think Lauren did a really excellent job. You know, just being incredibly transparent with the sources. You know, she would often say it as like, oh yes, I had to like, you know, she often would have to do journalism 1 0 1 with a lot of people over and over, like the same source that she'd been talking to for a long time over and over again.

You know, not to be patronizing, but just to be really clear Yeah. And transparent about, you know, what she was doing with the reporting. You know, what she could and couldn't do as far as you know. You know, helping them or, you know, protecting the information. And so I think that's just another thing that, you know, doing any kind of reporting like this, just expect to have those conversations a lot.

Jeff Umbro: So I have two more questions that, that I want to make sure we touch on, and then I think we can do a quick q and a. But my first is just how did. The legal process and, you know, the source and staff like safety process impact the storytelling of the actual show. Like did you make different decisions and you may otherwise have if you weren't dealing with something so sensitive?

Dan Barrick: I don't think so.

Katie Colaneri: One of the guiding principles, right? Like that s to us, he'd say to us, do everything the way you do it. You know? And so that actually kind of became a big guiding principle. But sorry to cut you off, Dan, but yeah, no,

Dan Barrick: that's, yeah. And that applied everything from like how Lauren took notes and archived her tape in her interviews to, you know.

How we did things internally, you know, just the kinds of meetings and notes we took internally that was seeks guidances. Both, you know, don't let the integrity of the journalism be you know, you know, things like this, you know, lawsuits and vandalism and whether or not they were coordinated, they shared the same goal, which was to chill the reporting.

And he, you know, he was always firm and like, you have to not let that happen. The other. Reason that advice makes sense is like from a legal perspective. You don't wanna start either like destroying notes when you normally don't, or don't feel obliged to be more aggressive in documenting stuff that is not your normal habit.

Don't feel like you need to change practice because that could also raise suspicion about that you're, you know, about your methods. So we kind of just. Steady as she goes. And, you know, all the other kind of supports we just discussed kind of helped make that a little bit easier than it might've been otherwise.

But I don't think the story, the, I mean with the obvious caveat that we decided to integrate the vandalism and the legal threats into the podcast itself, where normally it, you know, and that was somewhat a function of the way we reported it, where much of the reporting was already out.

Through one format while we were reporting the podcast, but we felt like including that was important journalistically because it shone a light on what, on, on how these players acted. That they used legal threats and threats of physical violence and intimidation to cover up their acts. And we were being subjected to the same tactics that the people we were reporting on were.

And it felt like there was editorial value in, in reporting that.

Katie Colaneri: Right, and ended up underlining the whole point of the podcast, which was there's this unpoliced long tolerated culture of sexual misconduct in these recovery communities. Why is that not changing? This was exhibit A.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. And I know a very small part of the reason why you released all of the episodes at once was because you wanted this to be available all at once and not extend the point in which people are like learning about this case in real time.

So, right. So it, so like there are things that, like, it did impact a little bit just in terms of process, but but I, and then my final question, you, Dan, you'd mentioned before it was kind of like during the process of reporting this, you asked yourselves many times like, is this worth it? We all know kind of how you would measure success for a podcast, whether it's like downloads or number of listeners or how much money you make from that.

But are there other metrics that you all have paid attention to for this show regarding like how you're gauging impact and success?

Dan Barrick: One, one big one, which I may maybe is kind of obvious, but the feedback that Lauren's gotten directly from women and men, frankly, around the country who say they saw their experience.

Mirrored in what we reported, and they felt finely seen and felt incredibly grateful. And you know, many, most of them, they didn't even, they weren't even urging us to report, you know, which often happens. Somebody says, well, well, there, there's another guy just like that. You should report that they, for them it was sufficient to feel like that this story that they as Katie indicated, felt, had just been waved away, had been told.

That often happens in investigative stories, but I think the scale. The volume that we heard come in the frankness and the vulnerable way in which people thanked us for that was just immensely grateful because you just have no idea who's hearing the story. We felt like we were doing our sources a service by, you know, giving them the opportunity to speak their truths.

But people who, you know, we didn't even know existed before we reported this to feel validated like that was just. To this day you know, people are still discovering the podcast and Lauren will forward along notes, you know, just let us know she's heard from a person and it happened on a scale that was just unknown to me in previous reporting, I.

Katie Colaneri: Yeah, definitely never seen anything like the response that we got from people. I mean, there also has been legislation that's been proposed in New Hampshire to try to get at some aspects of this, at least in the state. And so of course, you know, you always love to see that kind of impact, like people with some power trying to do something about the problem that you're exposing.

And so that was also really great to see.

Jeff Umbro: Impact journalism. I, I really wanna spend the next hour talking to you guys about like the business model and everything behind the show, but I won't do that because there's a second webinar that we're gonna talk about that on. And everybody can sign up.

Link is in the chat. I have a thousand more questions, but I will pause and make sure that all of the attendees can take some time to ask questions if they have them.

Attendee: So.

Jeff Umbro: Is there anybody who wants to jump in?

Attendee: I'd love to talk me through if you could, like was there any reluctance on the team's part of putting how they were affected? Through the threats and other things in there. I mean, so, so much is ingrained in journalism of like, we are not the story we're telling the story and like, discomfort and like how did you handle that?

And like, and was that, you know, were people like some members of the team more interested in including that in the podcast than others? Not to asking you to name anyone, but I'm ju I, I could imagine it, it would be different among different folks.

Dan Barrick: I I think there wasn't a huge gulf in opinion on the team. I think we all recognized that it was important that we, even if we didn't say it right away, like, you know, we all got on a call the day that the first wave of vandalism hit. Nowhere in that call where we were like, well, obviously we're gonna have to report this.

But there was never like an aha moment. I think there was a lot, you know, I'll just speak personally, there was a lot of that conflict. Not only the kind of like, you know, we're not the story kind of ethos I think most reporters have, but you know, I was scared. I didn't know if there's gonna be another round of vandalism.

I didn't know if would I be exposing myself to further risk? Would whoever did it be pissed off that I was, you know, frankly, I had a lot of conversation with my wife about, about, about this because she was, she too was a victim and I felt like had some, needed to have as much say as I did in what she was comfortable with.

And that affected the level of detail. You know, Lauren interviewed me about, about, you know, what it was like. But I think for all the reasons we said a few minutes ago, we felt this wasn't just like, oh, we did a story about a crooked politician. Who? And then we happen who sued us for libel.

This was our reporting indicated that this tactic of, you know, law, legal, what are they called? Lawfare, you know, and other more underhanded shadowy threats were used to silence victims. But I think. Lauren needed time to work through that, but there was never any persuading.

And to be honest, I'm not sure what we would have done if she said, there's no way I will ever, you know, I will not be comfortable with that. I, you know, I'd have to think about that, what, how we would've handled that. But it felt pretty critical to the story and it felt like it. I'll leave it.

I'm still thinking about bit of your question there, but we did, we had many conversations about the scale of which, what to, I mean, I'll give you one instance. Like when it, when the first event happened as a newsroom, we didn't report on it initially. We were not the first to report on it.

And when time came that we felt it wasn't until the second round of vandalism that we did, and we used an outside. We got hired a freelance team to report on it, you know, objectively, as you often do, but we weren't sure just of the standalone newsworthiness of it. We weren't able at that point to directly connect it to the reporting we were doing.

In fact, we spoke to somebody in the New Hampshire Attorney's General's office and they, I. Almost kind of waved it away as, oh, maybe it's just a coincidence. The local cops, when they showed up at my house, asked my wife if she had any angry ex-boyfriends who might have done this. So, but once, you know, once the second round occurred and we realized, you know, we felt that this was pretty central to the bigger story we were trying to tell.

Katie Colaneri: Yeah. And I know that there were a lot of like. Questions when we were putting together the third episode of the podcast where, you know, this actually, you know, we revealed this happened and you do hear some emotional conversation between Lauren and Jason kind of reflecting on this. And there were a lot of, you know, edits of like, okay, how much of that raw emotion and how long, you know, is that going to, you know, how much real estate is that gonna take up in this episode?

And. I think at the end of the day, we struck in our, and I hope, hopefully listeners agree that we struck a really good balance there of allowing that raw motion to come through. Because again, it is scary without it also overshadowing the bigger point that like, this was someone who was, you know, these were people who were trying to keep.

These really terrible allegations of these alleged awful acts from coming out. And I think, you know, I think we really tried to kind of strike a good balance there of like letting people know what it's like to report these stories while still having the the alleged victims, you know, kind of front and center as well.

Jeff Umbro: It's a funny thing. I don't think this is at all an apt comparison, but I often think about the idea of like, if somebody works in a newsroom and they have a personal Twitter account and they have to decide what they wanna share on that versus what, like, you know, newsroom stuff they wanna share that is like the most vanilla version of having to make that decision on this podcast.

You know, like how much of myself do I wanna represent versus like my organization and. This is just like that same decision, but with much larger stakes,

you can't really e even writing a policy for like, the Twitter part of that, like doesn't always work, so can't really make like a blanket statement across.

Dan Barrick: But like to, to jean's question like. I'm hoping it, you know, we, we came out the right way. Like we, the whole time we were really reminding ourselves that yes, we were like victims in the legal sense, but we were not the, we were not the center of this story. And that yes, we had, you know, we had suffered, but we were telling the story of, you know, in this case, women who.

Whose lives had been really destroyed in some cases by the abuse they'd suffered by the, you know, the professional consequences they'd suffered. And this wasn't first and foremost a story about can you believe this guy is a attacking journalist? What a what a bad guy. This was about the broader scope of behavior.

And we were just one aspect of it, but we really did not wanna lose sight of. You know, the people at the center of this who's, who had been made to suffer in silence for years in some cases.

Jeff Umbro: I know that we're at time, but does anyone have any additional questions? I.

Thank you guys for having us, and thank you to Dan and Katie. And if anybody hasn't listened to the 13th step yet or any of the NHPR podcasts, I really encourage you to they're putting on a masterclass in real time, so

Katie Colaneri: thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Dan Barrick: And if anybody has any que you know, Kate and I tried to kind of reconstruct our thought process from years ago and I'm sure there's stuff we forgot.

And if it's helpful to, for, to talk directly, if you know, and it's useful in a practical way for work that you're doing or journalists you work with is doing I'd be happy to, you know, get on the phone or something like that. 'cause it might be more practical than the big picture stuff we tried to share today.

Katie Colaneri: Yeah. Plus one to that. Always happy to talk about anything. So.

Jeff Umbro: Megan, is there anything else that you want us to touch on?

Meghan Murphy: No, this is great. Thank you all so much. This was such a wonderful conversation and just such a I thank you for taking the time to like really reflect in such depth on your experiences in the team's experiences and there's a lot to to take away here, I think.

And yeah. I just, I really appreciate it and Jeff, thanks for moderating

Jeff Umbro: Of course, happy to do it.