Make Them Care: Crafting Narratives About Entrenched Social Problems

In this session, Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times) and Chana Joffe-Walt (This American Life) talk about how to build a story structure that will make listeners care about even the most familiar, entrenched social problems.

In this session, Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times) and Chana Joffe-Walt (This American Life) talk about how to build a story structure that will make listeners care about even the most familiar, entrenched social problems.

They discuss the narrative and reporting techniques they used to help resurrect a long-dead discussion of school segregation in their Peabody-winning This American Life collaboration, and how to translate longform print journalism into the language of radio.


Featuring

Chana Joffe-Walt

Chana joined This American Life in 2014. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR where she helped create Planet Money . In 2015 she won a Peabody award for her shows on school segregation.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine covering racial inequality.