Peter Balonon-Rosen

Kendell Kelton (00:01):

I am Kendell Kelton, and I'm your host today on the Rough Draft, featuring honest conversations with folks from across the creative industry. The Rough Draft explores the creative process, tools and resources used by some of the best in the business. From journalists to content creators and business leaders, we shed light on what it looks like to break into the industry, make mistakes, collaborate with others, and also the essential tools that help us along the way. This week I'm excited to welcome Peter Balonon-Rosen, a producer for Vox's daily news podcast, Today, Explained. With a rich background in audio journalism, Peter has worked across several clean podcasts, including Throughline at NPR, and shows at Marketplace, like The Uncertain Hour and This is Uncomfortable. A veteran in the field, his passion is for storytelling about inequality, culture, and policy, and his work has been recognized with numerous awards. On today's episode, Peter shares his career journey and the unique challenges of producing a daily news podcast.

(01:10):

All right. Hi, Peter.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (01:12):

Hey.

Kendell Kelton (01:14):

Hi. Thank you for joining us today.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (01:17):

Totally, totally.

Kendell Kelton (01:17):

I wanted to start from the beginning. So you've spent your entire career in audio and you started first as a reporter in the public radio world and you're now on podcasts, and I just want to start with how did you end up in audio journalism?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (01:36):

Well, so actually even before... When I was in college I guess is when I got my start, I was working at a public access TV station and I was basically just helping anyone who came in. I knew a little bit about how to do video editing software, so I was just helping people make anything they wanted, and while I was there, they started a local news show and they were like, "All right, hands on deck. Let's go." And so they basically threw a camera and a tripod at me and were like, "Please help us report stuff. We need to fill this out." And so from there, that led to a fellowship at the local NPR station in Boston where I went to school.

(02:15):

But being there, I then was surrounded by audio and surrounded by great radio storytelling, and having come from doing some TV stuff and had been thinking a lot about the pictures and whatnot, I really was astounded by how visual audio really could be and how it could really immerse you in a world and you weren't necessarily reliant on the pictures you captured, but you could use the sound to kind of paint your own pictures and kind of create a whole scene for people who are listening. So I really fell in love with it there. I started off as an education beat reporter there in Boston. After that, I moved to Indiana where I was on a statewide team of reporters and was doing education reporting there. And then worked at Marketplace, the National Public Radio program, both producing weekend news shows and then moved on to the podcast team doing longer form storytelling, and I've kind of lived in the podcast sphere since.

Kendell Kelton (03:19):

When you eventually landed at Marketplace, the shows you worked on were longer form and sometimes investigative, like The Uncertain Hour, which was nominated for a Peabody earlier this year.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (03:32):

Yes, recently.

Kendell Kelton (03:32):

Congrats.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (03:32):

Thank You.

Kendell Kelton (03:36):

But then it was like there's also This is Uncomfortable, which you also worked on, which is a little bit... I mean, it's a little bit more storytelling, maybe some investigative in there. Do you think your background in kind of the news public radio or education space helped inform your approach to these longer segments versus potentially the difference in the news cycle?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (04:02):

I mean, I think one of the things that I quickly realized working in public radio stuff was that when you are working in sound, you're also very much working in emotion, and so that was really something that, especially for the personal storytelling side of things, I feel like really helped inform the approach about trying to basically reach people where they are and find ways to get them to open up to you on mic, I think makes the most compelling audio that you can get. And so I think when you're doing more investigative reporting, you're trying to maybe uncover something, but I feel like you're taking that same ethos when you're talking to people about themselves and their lives, and trying to uncover what's going on inside of them and get them to open up that way. So I feel like definitely. Even though news and tell me about your deepest, darkest secret can feel so very different, I think there are ways that the two really help inform one another.

Kendell Kelton (05:00):

Do you think that influenced why you adopted more of a producer role? I mean, I know you've done reporting as well, but you're leaning heavier into that, and so I just kind of want to hear a bit more about why producing maybe versus reporting.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (05:16):

What I've grown to love with producing is that you can kind of do it all, right? I really like the thrill of the hunt of trying to find sources and trying to find stories, which you're very much doing all the time as a producer. I also love getting to create the whole soundscape that you're working with, and that's everything from the narration and the way that you're choosing which sound bites to use from a source to the music, to the sound effects, to the way that you can really create a whole cinematic approach in the stuff that you make. And so I think from a producer's chair, you have a lot of opportunities to play with a lot of those different things.

(05:56):

And I think that when I was first starting out, I very much thought, "Okay, reporting. That's what it's all about, right?" You want to go out there, you want to kind of be the face of it, you want to talk to the people, you want to be in the action, and I do love that stuff, but doing all the producing work, I've realized that there is actually a whole world to explore, and that's one facet of it, but getting to play with the sound, the feel, there's many different ways to do that and you have a lot more control over that, I guess, from the producer's chair.

Kendell Kelton (06:27):

And so now you're a producer at Today, Explained from Vox, which is a daily news podcast. I have to imagine the balance of comprehensive reporting with a rapid news cycle could be a bit of a grind. What is it like to try and plan ahead on a daily show?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (06:44):

It's actually way more possible than I imagined before I was doing all this stuff, because I think being in the news cycle, you are able to predict often some things that might be coming down the line or just be understanding where the conversation is, and I think we move on a team that is very nimble and so we can make things quickly, but we also have the opportunity to say, "Okay. Hey, this is coming up," or, "Hey, this is a interesting idea that will give us more time to spend." So even though it is a daily show, we're not creating something brand new every single day. At least I'm not.

Kendell Kelton (07:22):

Well considering that, what stories or themes are you personally most passionate about covering?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (07:29):

Sure. I mean, I very much like things about culture and inequality. I think a lot of the things that I have really enjoyed covering are how the realities of how wonky policy plays out, like covering a lot of Supreme Court cases and constitutional decisions has always been really interesting to me. So is covering trends in streaming wars and how copyright works within the music landscape.

Kendell Kelton (08:01):

Well, I had listened to a recent show I think that you produced around how college students aren't reading as much as they used to, but I thought it was really fascinating. I mean, it's one of those things where maybe that wasn't in the headline of various papers on that day, but I think that's a good example of, no, but this is a thing that's happening in the real world that everyone can kind of understand and grok and find as interesting, and so it's not that drumbeat of all the craziness happening in the world all the time.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (08:37):

Yeah. No, and I think that that story is a good example of ways to find news-related stories that feel super relevant to people's lives, but aren't necessarily about the tick-tock of what happened yesterday or happened this morning, and I think that's a good example of a show that we were able to spend some time producing and making it feel kind of creative, but I think it was also looking at a topic that felt very relevant to my own life where I'm like, "Hey, I'm not reading as much as I used to, and it turns out college kids are either, and this is transforming education."

Kendell Kelton (09:14):

All right. So now I want to talk about your creative process, Peter, and how you make an audio story. When you're putting together a podcast episode, how do you approach the story or what is your process for approaching a story as a producer, like getting started?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (09:33):

Well, I think first of all, I want to make sure it's something that I'm interested in. I think that is very much one of the main lenses that I'm looking for stories through is just my own personal curiosity and something that feels either relevant to my life or sticky, or something that feels worth chatting about with a friend, and then it's often just trying to find the person who can speak to that, because if you're putting together an audio story, you need someone who's going to be on the other side of that microphone.

(10:03):

And so when it comes to more newsy things, it's often looking about people who have written about this stuff or people who have studied something, whatever the phenomenon you're looking at. If it's more on the personal storytelling side of things, you're trying to find people who have shared about their life or who are willing to. And I find that for that part of things, Reddit and Twitter have been very good resources, places where people are spilling the beans about their own life online and then you can reach out and say, "Hey, I thought this was really interesting. Do you mind if I ask you about that and sharing that?"

Kendell Kelton (10:41):

We talked earlier about the love you have for the fact that as a producer you get to wear all these different hats and you get to learn all of these different things and applications from music to sound. So I'd love to hear a bit more about what are the strategies or tools you consistently rely on to create these stories?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (11:04):

Probably my teammates. I feel like having good people to work with and talk to or collaborate with is really important. People to bounce ideas off of, I feel like, helps make any idea much better. And one of the things that I really enjoy about this type of work is the process of watching ideas grow, and so I find the process of just talking through things, you'll find one kernel that you find really interesting and someone else having a different kernel that they find interesting, and you can build on it and grow, especially when you're pitching stories. And then I guess as far as hard tools go, I mean, I mentioned Reddit, Twitter. Those are good places to find people. I do a lot of my work in Pro Tools, so I am working in that every and don't think this work would be possible without that.

Kendell Kelton (11:55):

Considering when you started your career, how have technological changes impacted your production? Because I mean, even the rise of AI and getting summaries or being able to generate social posts from things. I mean, things have been changing so fast it feels like the last few years.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (12:16):

Yeah. I mean, I think probably the biggest change that has impacted my work has been transcription services and just how much time I need to spend getting transcripts of things and swimming in tape. There is something that is really special about swimming in tape, and really understanding it and feeling it wash over you, but also just takes a lot of time to log it all and make it all happen. And so that has been a very useful thing. I haven't really played with AI so much. I don't know. I think as far as production and sound design goes, I feel like right now we're kind of in a little bit of an exciting moment where there is a lot more 360 sound design happening with all of our headphone technologies that are advancing and finding ways to really make sound and audio storytelling much more cinematic than we did in the past.

Kendell Kelton (13:13):

I've noticed in a few podcasts that I listened to, and then also listening through some of your own work, use of kids talking in the background, or there's a laugh placement here, or somebody's walking and crunching on leaves, or just this one spark of music that you need to have to generate some sort of feeling. I think when you strip everything, strip that away from it, it does create a different experience for the user.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (13:44):

Totally. Totally. Yeah, I think that's really important. I do think just COVID really also transformed how people do podcasting, like here we are, we're not necessarily sitting next to one another, but we are still able to connect to this way. Now, we can turn every guest into a junior audio producer and have them kind of record themselves and help us, which has opened up a lot of possibilities. It's also changed just the sound and feel of a lot of radio and a lot of podcasting. There's a lot of the being out and hearing that leaf crunch, that I do miss, that I don't feel like I'm hearing quite as much as I once did, and so I think that with this kind of more connectivity, it's made things a lot more accessible, but it's also changed the sound, it's changed the feel of what audio stuff sounds like these days.

Kendell Kelton (14:33):

Well, and I think it's also just changed the amount of content you have available. There's so much out there. What are some other challenges you think are facing the industry, or even opportunities that you're excited about?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (14:49):

I mean, I think the biggest challenge is funding right now. In the past year, we've seen a lot of legacy shows ended. We've seen a lot of colleagues getting laid off. I think there was a real bubble that burst and there's been a lot of contraction. I think people kind of had to have a reckoning that these podcast series weren't going to make the huge bucks that a lot of people maybe were betting on, and so finding sustainable business models to continue this work, I think, is probably the biggest challenge facing the industry. There's all sorts of innovative ways people are trying to get money. There's subscription models now to podcasts, different ways of trying to monetize things, and so I'm interested if someone cracks that code and figures out with all this content, how to... Everyone is on the search for new listeners and everyone's on the search for dollars, and if there's someone who's out there who can put those two together, I think we would all benefit from that.

Kendell Kelton (15:48):

Yeah. No, I think that's fair. And so then what advice would you give someone trying to break into this field if they're a student, for example, and they're just getting started?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (15:59):

Do the stuff that feels like yourself. I feel like if you can point us things that you make and say, "Hey, this one thing feels like a Peter touch, feels like a whoever touch," I feel like then you're onto something good. I think the best artists, no matter what medium they're working in, you're like, "Oh, that sounds like so-and-so. That looks like a Scorsese movie," and so finding little things that feel like you, that you're able to bring into your work, I think is really the important thing. That's one thing. And then at the same time, rip people off. Literally find things that you like, that you appreciate that other people are doing and say, "Hey, let me try to do it too."

(16:44):

It's all a learning process. Don't necessarily plagiarize someone, but if there are certain techniques that you are very into, like I remember listening to certain pieces and being like, "Wow. I really love the way that they intro this person, or the way they talk about this person's character traits," or in an interview like this where you're sitting down with someone, how they remark about something in the background that helps you understand who that person is a little bit more. And then I was like, "All right, let me try." And so finding little ways to rip off techniques that people do, I think will... You're never going to do it the exact same. And you can then find your own ways and things that feel like yourself, but other people are a great learning pad.

Kendell Kelton (17:29):

I want to now talk about an audio piece, Peter, that you made that is really personal, I think, to you, and also for me, I felt it was a really great listen. When you worked at Marketplace, you produced and hosted an episode of This Is Uncomfortable called What Dad Left Behind, and the podcast itself kind of explores this blend of emotions around money, and so I want you to tell us a bit more about this particular episode and how it came to life.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (18:03):

Yeah. So the show that we worked on, the tagline was, "Life and how money messes with it." So we were thinking about all the different ways that money, wealth, and class impact people's identities, impacts their relationships, impacts how they move through the world, and at the time, I was telling my roommate about this podcast that I was working on, and he had recently lost his dad, and he was talking about these conflicted feelings he was having about having an inheritance that happened as a result. And he was saying, "Hey, I would listen to that story because I'm dealing with this. You should find a way to do that," and I was like, "Okay, that's great. I love getting ideas from talking to people in my life about the things that they're interested in or they're going through."

(18:56):

So I did some poking around to try and find some sources for this idea, and I just couldn't really find. There was a lot of people who were experts who could talk about what happens when grief and money mixes, but I think what I was really looking for was someone who could tell about their personal experience and really talk about the complicated feelings that happened as a result. So I went back to my friend Dean, my roommate, and I was like, "Hey, dude. What if we did that story that you were interested in, but we did it about you and what you're going through," and very graciously, he was game.

(19:34):

And it was probably one of the most challenging, most intimate reporting projects I've ever been a part of, because I lived with him first of all, so that really kind of blurred a lot of the source journalist boundaries. He was one of my very best friends, is one of my very best friends. And so we had had 10 years of pre-interviews and getting to know each other, which you don't often get with a source, which I feel like really made it intimate, but it also made it challenging because we were all of a sudden going to be talking about things we had never really talked about before. And so what we ended up doing is kind of sitting down and having some long interviews about him, his relationship with his dad, what happened with his dad's untimely death, getting his inheritance and how he was trying to manage all of that.

(20:34):

And so I think it was a few months, if I remember, of various kind of interviews, and then we put it all together and I gave him... We were trying to be very sensitive to how we did it, and so played it for him before we released it just to be like, "Hey, we're not going to give you editorial control over, yes, this part, no, not that part, but want to, A, be sensitive and let you know what's in here, and also giving you the nuke button. If you hear this and you say, 'Hey, this is way too personal. This is way too intimate. You did it completely wrong,'" he had the option to put the brakes on the entire thing, which luckily he didn't do. Actually. I remember in some of those listens, he was like, "Oh, I'm not putting the brakes on anything. I'm not trying to line edit you, but here's a little bit of context for this line or that line," which ended up making the final product much better.

Kendell Kelton (21:40):

Well, you talked about the challenges. Can you talk about that and how they may have informed your creative choices when structuring the episode?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (21:51):

Yeah, totally. The episode itself is about my friend Dean, his dad dies by suicide, he gets a massive amount of money as a result. It was an inheritance, and then he's really conflicted about what to do with this money, how to deal with it, and how to do things like pay off his student loans and these big money things that were hanging over him, but getting rid of the money that came from his dad kind of opened up this whole new kind of emotional can of worms. But I think the challenges with that were, yes, we talked about it in an interview setting, but then we were friends also. So then we were just talking about this outside of having the live mic and whatnot, and so I think the boundary between, am I your friend talking with you and being here to help you through a very difficult thing, or am I a journalist reporting on your trauma, those lines got very blurry.

(22:53):

And so I think how that informed the creative choices was, I think, it really lent us an intimacy you don't get with a lot of sources, and I was able to know a lot of stuff about him, but I also wanted to just make sure that I wasn't feeling we weren't invading something that was also a very special part of his life. And so there are certain things that we talked about that it was like, "okay, I think maybe we're not going to include this in here because it's not crucial for the story or for the storytelling." And we had some scenes in there that ended up getting cut where we went and talked with a financial therapist, someone who specializes in this stuff, and I think that was very useful for him, but it didn't necessarily serve the overall story that was for other people out there. And so there was just kind of keeping the lens of this is about one person's relationship with their father and their relationship with this money, kind of having that be the guiding light really helped inform the final form that the story took.

Kendell Kelton (24:10):

Well, do you think going through that experience, and it might not have, but may have helped informed how you move forward with maybe interviewing subjects that you're not personally close to, given that everybody's human and going through things? Do you think it changed just the way you approach an interview subject?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (24:34):

I think so. I realize doing a lot of that work that there are... People are going through a lot of stuff and oftentimes they just don't have an outlet to talk about it, and so I think you're both helping listeners by exploring a subject that maybe they're feeling, but also with your sources, you're giving them an opportunity to get something off their chest. And I think working on that show specifically, there were a lot of times when people would say, "Hey, I've just been wishing that there was someone that I could talk about this with. This almost felt like a therapy session for me, doing these types of interviews," which is, I think... I don't know. It is providing a service. I mean, we're not therapists, so it does open up a whole 'nother can of words, but helping people process their emotions and talk about things and maybe connect things into a narrative that they have been working through, I think is really special work.

Kendell Kelton (25:45):

Well, I think that's also where you get these deeply personal stories that are just so relevant to so many other people out in the world. I think it's really special, and it probably is a lot to have to wear that therapist hat in those meetings. That carries a lot of weight. Do you think that has an effect on even your producer hat, just trying to figure out, "Where can I pull these other nuggets? I can sense that they're feeling this way or that way. Can we dig into it more?" As an example.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (26:21):

Oh, 100%. I mean, I feel like as a producer, you're often listening into the interviews that you're working with amazing hosts who are amazing interviewers, but you're also kind of a bit of a second set of ears to say, "Hey, this really caught my attention. Maybe we should dig in deeper here." And I think you can do that when you're talking about emotions and someone's personal story, but even when you're talking, even in a news context where we're talking about current events or whatever, you're still there looking for those nuggets that jump out and maybe that you're noticing that the source seems interested in, and opening up that gate and going in even deeper.

Kendell Kelton (27:06):

Well, I think that was a great way to kind of tie a bow on this episode. I just really thank you so much for joining us and for sharing a bit more about not just that this episode of This is Uncomfortable, but then also your creative process and your career journey. I think it'll be very helpful for folks listening in. But before we go, can you please let our audience know where to find you and where to find your work?

Peter Balonon-Rosen (27:33):

Sure. I mean, you can find me on Twitter right now, or X, formerly known as Twitter. Peter Balonon-Rosen. But right now I'm producing work at Today, Explained the Vox daily news explainer podcast, and we're putting out content every day. So you'll find some stuff that I'm working on.

Kendell Kelton (27:52):

There you go. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Peter.

Peter Balonon-Rosen (27:56):

All right. Thank you, Kendell. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Kendell Kelton (27:59):

Well, that's it for today's episode of The Rough Draft. To learn more about our guests and to find links and resources related to the conversation, check out rev.com/podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to rate and subscribe in order to stay up to date with the latest episodes. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you again on the next episode of The Rough Draft.