Last spring Streets.mn hosted a Contributors’ Workshop in Rochester with several presentations to help people get started on their journey as contributors. We are excited to share those recordings with you on the podcast!
Links
- Rethinking I-94 West
- Minnesota Is Not California
- City Walks: Navigating Pedestrian Infrastructure from New York City to Minneapolis
- Speak Up About the Capital City’s Bike Plan
- Great Big Bollards: A Manifesto
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
The presenters in this episode are Erik Ruthruff, Micah Davison, Jeremy Winter, Max Singer, and is hosted by Ian R Buck.
We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
Note: this is a computer-generated transcript. We will update this post once a human has had time to revise the transcript.
[00:00:00] Max: At the core, when you’re making an argument, if you’re making a case, if you’re presenting something, you are telling a story. And that’s not trivial. That is, I would argue, the whole part. You know, finding, finding those ways to embrace the irrational in a way that does not sacrifice, you know, the, the rational, the fact based, but also Kind of incorporates them into one compelling, uh, Inferno.
[00:00:29] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Seward, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am your host, Ian R buck. We’re going to get a bit meta today and talk directly to you, the super engaged audience member who wants to get more involved in Streets.mn in some way. Last May, we hosted a Contributors Workshop in Rochester to provide resources to community members who may be interested in writing articles, producing podcast episodes, or putting together photo essays for the site. Fortunately, we recorded the workshop so you all can take advantage of these resources, even if you were not able to attend.
Enjoy!
[00:01:20] Erik: Alright, let’s get this going! Hello, my name is, nice to see you all, uh, my name is Eric Rutherf. I am the content manager for Streets Amen, and I sit on the executive board. And I’m sort of one of the people sort of wrangling workshops and stuff like that. Uh, so I’m super glad that you’re all here. In my day life, I am a professional editor and a project manager.
My dad was a civil engineer for 25 years for the Forest Service. And my college roommate was a civil engineer who was working out of some place in Boise, Idaho. And so, growing up like that, um, I’ve always had this sort of knack and interest in roads. And what I’ve learned about roads is that everybody has an opinion.
About a road whether it should be there whether it should be Expanded for more traffic whether it should be narrowed and have bike lanes added to it whether it should be eliminated entirely and that’s you know, sort of what why I’m here and that passion of the history of the civil engineering in my life and Everybody’s sort of interested in roads and trails and stuff like that.
Many of you will remember back in The election of 2016 and how that worked out the day after that, I thought, um, wow, I don’t like what just happened at the national level and I need to figure out something that I think I can do locally that I feel like I have some, some control overs I can make a contribution to, uh, to sort of maybe improve the world around me a little bit, but also sort of help control what could be the chaos.
That might happen, um, so I opened up my local free newspaper and the city I was living in, uh, was running ads for, um, volunteer citizens to be on a bunch of different city commissions and one of them was the transportation commission. So I thought, huh, I’ll apply for that and I was interviewed about two weeks later and then I spent three years as.
Um, in a transportation commissioner and we got to see how do decisions in little cities get made about roads. And it turns out that a lot of the things that you think would be easy to change for a city, uh, there’s a lot more at stake. I mean, there’s a lot more complication in, you know, a bunch of citizens want to change something.
And then it turns out, oh, that road is actually a county road. And the county is all about maximum throughput of cars through this space and they are not interested in hearing about how we could make this space greener or how we could make it safer. Um, and a lot of the rules about how roads get designed and stuff are from, uh, civil engineering guidelines from the fifties and sixties and your local city officials.
Our new rules are not allowed to veer much from what those rules are, that are governing us from the 50s and 60s, about how wide a road has to be and, you know, signals and stuff like that. Um, so it’s, every time you think that you want to, it should be really easy to just change this thing to that thing.
It’s actually more complicated if you go back and you look at, like, how does this decision and get made and what’s it based on and stuff. So I have found that really fascinating when I was working for the, when I was on the Transportation Commission. Then I moved to another city during COVID and they didn’t have a Transportation Commission.
But a friend of mine told me about StreetsAmen. And I thought, huh, interesting. So I was looking through the articles and I saw that they were looking for editors. So I signed up to be a volunteer copy editor. And they said, Hey, wow, have you got some professional experience editing? We could use you to help us figure out what we want to do, um, for the next several years.
Um, so they, I took them up on that. Um, and now we’re here, we’re running workshops, we’re running a newsletter, are, uh, we hired a managing editor, um, and we sort of have our shit together a little bit now. Um, which I’m happy about, but one of the things that I was able to do when I was working on that, that city transportation commission is, you know, you can do, you try to find little things that you can sort of get ahold of and change.
And I worked on this thing called the clover ride, which was not a big deal, but it was a passion project of the mayor’s and the city covers, or the city organizes a. With a organization called DARTS and one day a week on Fridays for about five to six hours there is a nice handicap accessible bus that runs on a route that goes to a lot of the places where you know elderly homes and stuff and they go on a fixed route and those the the people who have Mobility transportation issues have a fixed route where they can go once, you know, one every Friday They can go I need to get to the grocery store.
I need to get to the pharmacy. I need to get to the YMCA and it’s Reliable and it’s costs up to three dollars if you can afford to pay that or it’s nothing And it just works for a bunch of people and that’s like one of those little things you’re like, yeah, I was able to affect a change like that. So make changes like that in, in, in time, in terms of like your activism sort of have small scope and get little accomplishments done.
Um, and it’s kind of cool. So Streets Amen has been publishing for like 13 years and due to COVID. We were too disorganized to even write our, our, uh, we’re 10 years old sort of celebration stories. We had plans that we were going to go back and look at the archives and, and do best of stories and stuff like that.
And people were just mentally exhausted during COVID and we were all working from homes and doing Zoom chats once a month and it just never happened. We do have on our homepage near the, the, the bottom third of the page or so, an archive stories. And if you have not spent much time looking at those stories, I encourage you to do so.
So we’ve got 13 years worth of stories to pull from. And the way that Micah and Amy and I do that is this week, I think, what is today, May 11th? Hepa’s Day. That’s actually part of my speech. We publish or republish three stories that happened during that week in the last 13 years. And if you don’t get hung up on looking at this story that was say, you know, five years or eight years old.
The stories are good. The stories are often relevant to what’s going on now. And they are, and as you sit through this workshop and think about starting writing content that, you know, or doing podcast content, the stories that you write are just not going to end up on our homepage. They’re going to end up as something that gets recycled and reused.
And the stories that you write become sort of the, the seed for stories that other people will write. If you work on, uh, transportation is a, is a great topic and housing is a great topic and you know, equity in transportation and housing is a great topic because when you write about that, you are seeding what future people are going to, are going to write about.
It is amazing how many stories I look at that are. You know five, eight, twelve years old that are relevant to what’s going on right now. It’s like ideas for changing a road, for example. They have been arguing about changing that road, like Add Road in St. Paul, for twelve, fifteen years. And the stories that people wrote back then are about a lot of the same issues of why that road has unchanged or not improved or whatever today.
So, as our group gets you, hopefully, excited to, uh, write about your local areas, um, and maybe when you start working with, uh, Amy, she will push you to, can we do a little more research? Could you add some links to this story? The, the work that she’s pushing to do is making a better story. But it’s also improving the conversation that’s going to happen later.
So When you start writing about your area, hopefully Future people are going to be relying on stuff that you wrote And links that you found to help them develop stories and make arguments at the legislature or Make a case at your local city council Um, the content that you develop now affects people down the road, even if you don’t see what that effect is yet.
So at, at, at Streets, it’s our mission, our stated mission on our website to foster positive connections and inclusive conversations about better places in Minnesota. And we’re starting that now with our new friend in Rochester. Uh, so I wanted to just say thank you for coming to this workshop. I hope we’re going to make a positive connection with you and that the changes that you hope to see to make the world a little bit better start here.
They take time. Um, sometimes they don’t happen right away. Um, but if you make allies and friends and you sort of learn how the history of something happens and. You meet the right people who can influence that change. Um, you can make those changes, maybe not immediately, but things get better and you make better places.
[00:12:31] Micah: So, I’m here to talk to you a little bit about what kinds of articles Streets. mn publishes and hopefully give you some inspiration. to write some articles yourself. So the first article type that we see a lot is the aspirational article talking about what should there be that isn’t there right now? Um, what great policy or infrastructure could we have with the right alignment of political will, citizen activism?
And here’s an article that embodies the aspirational type of article. Uh, we’re going to be giving you links to these presentations, so, um, I made sure that there were hyperlinks to these articles, so you can feel free to go into it and click on the articles and read through them yourself, um, it’s, I’m going to be taking elements of these articles and showing them to you, but, um, I do encourage you to look through the articles themselves.
So this one’s called Rethinking I 94 West, and The, if you’re familiar at all with what’s going on with I 94 and the Twin Cities, there’s a big, there’s been for years a big state run rethinking I 94, um, visioning going on. And this article was shifting the focus a little bit to the western side of where I 94 comes through the Twin Cities to the, um, the Lower Park area of Minneapolis.
And you can see if you, if you’re at all familiar with downtown Minneapolis, where the focus is on that article. So what is neat about this article is that it starts by giving a history of the area. Shows what it was like beforehand, um, before any freeways were built. It shows what happened to the neighborhood when the freeways got built.
And then that sort of segues well into an explanation of, you know, why do we need something better? Well, the reason why they need something better is because a lot of value was lost when the freeways went through there in the first place. So one of the quotes from your article is, I have heard ongoing concerns related to I 94, and again and again I have heard community members share big ideas and big visions for repairing the damage.
And that’s coming from somebody who’s a resident of Loring Park there. So one of, another great thing about this article is that it is not afraid to make big plans. So, Eric, you mentioned in your intro that it’s good to focus on what you can do, focus on what, you know, those incremental steps that you can take that are possible.
And this is taking nothing away from that at all, but it also is of value, and we get a lot of articles like this where they’re making a big plan, And, you know, they’re saying, let’s make a big move here. This is something big that needs to happen in our city. And another good thing about the article is that it doesn’t just tell you about the big plan, but it shows you the big plan.
It’s got lots of excellent graphics, um, laying out. This person was a landscape architect or is a landscape architect, so they happen to have the skills to, um, put together really big and detailed, um, area plans. for how they thought this area should change. There’s another cross section of how they envision putting a cap over Interstate 94 and making it a much more pedestrian friendly setting, and then they show a connectivity map of all the different trails that would be able to be connected.
So that was one common article type, thinking big. And then the next, another one that we see often is taking a larger issue and zooming in to our communities and thinking about what. What about that issue, what about that issue is relevant to our communities? So, you know, some land use or transportation or urban planning issue that’s receiving attention on a national or even international level, and take it related to Minnesota, the Twin Cities and in your case Rochester, that can be a really compelling way to, you know, take current news and Make a story out of it for Rochester.
So, this was an article that we had that received quite a bit of traction. I think it was last year. Um, Entitled Minnesota is not California. Um, and it was talking a lot about the, um, Sorry. So, it’s kind of an optimistic comparison of housing policies and outcomes between Minnesota and other states, particularly California.
It’s, and if you know anything about, you know, what housing is like in San Francisco and Los Angeles, um, yeah, there is reason to be optimistic here compared to some of the other places in the country. One thing that I really liked about this article is it starts with a clever introduction. And it starts with these two paragraphs.
And it’s a really nice introduction because it’s taking that national issue and saying, We get so much information about what’s going on in other parts of the country and other parts of the world, and that’s amazing because we can relate it to what we’re experiencing here. And then it also says we get so much information about other parts of the world and what’s going on that it’s incredibly easy to mis contextualize it and assume that what is working somewhere else would work here or what’s not working somewhere else is not working here.
And he just does that in a really nice way by just changing up a couple of little words in the first two paragraphs. It makes for a nice intro. And it isn’t afraid to have a positive take about where we live. And I think that was another thing that really caught my eye about this article. That’s a map of housing rentals for less than 1, 000 a month.
On the top is the Bay Area, and on the bottom is Minneapolis and St. Paul. Now of course we know that there are a lot of factors that go into why housing is an order of magnitude almost more expensive in the Bay Area than in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but it makes the basic point that we have a measure of affordability here in housing that, you know, other parts of the country could only wish for.
And it does all this without saying that we have arrived, that we have, you know, got all our ducks in a row with housing. But it takes an overall positive spin, and actually I think this particular writer has done that a number of times, and I appreciate his articles for it. It’s kind of a breath of fresh air.
Another nice thing about the article is that it links to and dialogues with some other articles. And this is a really, this is a thing that we have started emphasizing more on Streets. mn, and there’s some real value to it. And what I really particularly like, you really can’t see it very well on this washed out slideshow, but he’s linking to other Streets.mn articles. It’s an author who is cognizant of. The current dialogue in Streets. mn, who thinks of our publication as a conversation, a larger conversation and is having, you know, some references and some more detailed takes on, on other articles there. And, there’s also another link that is from another blog, and that just shows that he’s, that the author is engaged with some other current views and opinions and research that’s out there.
So, those links are really helpful and important. Another type of article that we have often, and this might be actually our most common type of article, is a, uh, what I call an activism notice. So, when you read these articles, they’re trying to tell you. That it’s time to take action or that you have an opportunity to take action, whether it’s attend a meeting, submit some public input, um, contact an elected official about a pressing issue.
And this story actually was written by our managing editor, Amy Gage, um, recently about the update to the St. Paul bike plan and giving people notice to attend and give feedback on that plan. So for articles like this The five W’s are essential, um, and it’s also essential to, to make them appear in a succinct and organized way, but we also recognize that this is long form story writing and just giving the five W’s would be kind of a disservice to that format.
You can do that on X or Twitter or whatever social media platform you’ve fled to from X. So, it’s important to give the why. It’s important to focus on the why because that is the one of the, that’s the one W that really these long form stories do well. And Amy’s story does a great job on that why. So what it does is it highlights the opposition that is likely to surface against plans for cycling infrastructure in St. Paul. Um, it shows photos of the actual people who would benefit most from the new policy, and it gives actual quotes from people who give their reasons for supporting that policy. And then a final common type of story that we have is simply observations. This is a fairly broad catch all type of category, but it’s emphasizing taking delight in or being curious about the built environment.
We have a lot of stories that are like this, and it’s not about trying to marshal support for anything in particular. It’s not about saying, this must be better, or whatever. It’s really about taking pleasure in what we have. Taking pleasure in the urban environment. Um, Wolfie who’s going to be presenting after me.
This is what, this is Wolfie’s bread and butter. He loves taking bike rides around St. Paul. Um, I didn’t use his as an example story because he’s going to have lots of his own to show you. But, um, yeah, you’re going to get more of that in depth from, from him. The, the story that I am highlighting is called, Uh, called City Walks, Navigating Pedestrian Infrastructure from New York City to Minneapolis.
This was actually our first story from a new, a new contributor, Brian Formholz, who has recently moved to the Twin Cities via a little, a little bit of time in St. Cloud, and before that New York, and before that Los Angeles. And he’s an excellent photographer, and he really put together quite an impressive photo essay.
That, um, well, I’m going to take you through it a little bit. It’s about, you know, it shows the urban environments in Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, everywhere that he’s been. And it describes really a personal journey of the author, both in words and in the photos. And I think that the photos themselves give you a real sense of his eye and of the places that he has been interested in.
So, we started with New York, and this is, yeah, this is Minneapolis. Not a lot of people in his photos, but it still has a very personal feel to them. And the images, they tell a story by themselves, but the combo that he has of his words and his image, they work together to paint a really rich narrative.
About his love for urban environments and about his own history in them. We get a lot of articles that don’t, that kind of defy categorization. And some of everything is probably a good descriptor for a lot of our articles, but I just wanted to show you one that really is quite a combination that works very effectively.
This was very recently published, Great Big Bollards, A Manifesto. Um, Um, as you can see, that is not a bollard, and there were no bollards anywhere near that bus shelter that was wiped, completely wiped out. And that’s kind of the point of his article, actually, is that a lot of the urban environment that we take for granted, you know, street furniture, everything that is not on the road looks a lot more solid and substantial than it really is.
And that that is very biased toward minimizing damage to the automobiles that end up crashing into these bus shelters, benches, street lamps, and, and these are all made to just break away really easily and not provide much protection for anybody who’s not in an automobile. So yeah, when you’re wanting to grab reader interest, you can’t go wrong with a viral tick tock video.
And that is one. The thing that he put in here. And I believe that Dan Marshall, the author’s comment about this, was that this video was more educative about the state of roads and driving in America than the entire MUTCD manual. So what, what you can see is that there’s, you know, something to grab the reader interest.
And he put that at the start of the article and it was just a really awesome way of making his point right off the get go. And then. It lays out everything else that he has to say. So there are elements of all the above article types here in Dan’s article. He’s got aspirational in this quote. He said, we need to protect all of our pedestrian spaces with great big bollards.
Let’s protect schools, playgrounds, movie theatres, daycare centres, everywhere people get together to enjoy life outside of a car. So there’s that aspect of like we, let’s build things here. Let’s. change our urban environment. There’s an implication that there’s an activism notice. The reason that I put that particular picture with activism notice is because this is what a lot of our cities have been putting up as a way of saying this is what will protect people from cars and that’s just not the case and that’s something that, you know, we might not get great big bollards built, but we might get something better than what’s that.
So, um, He’s also got environmental observations. These happen to all be Dan’s photos, and he gets often his signature, you know, 10 speed old bicycle in every one of his photos so you know that it’s his. All right, so some common elements from all of these is that there’s a hook early in the article. Um, it could be a compelling picture, a strongly declarative sentence or paragraph.
That it’s richly illustrated. You know, for better or worse, our brains are living in the 21st century, and they have been very 21st century ized. They get bored of reading and reading and reading. We’re not great at walls of text. We need breaks. And we need breaks that are not complete distractions that get us off topic.
And that’s what visual elements in articles serves as. Links, like I mentioned before, they give people the option to bounce back and forth between the article. And there are some people who can’t do that and it would drive them crazy. They don’t have to follow those links. But there are other people who want to go down the rabbit hole of certain things.
And articles that have links can be the seed for a healthy obsession. You know, whether it be about bus rapid transit, about designing vibrant public spaces, about affordable housing. Using those links. If you’re the article that starts that obsession in a reader, you will leave a lasting impression, even though they subsequently read a whole bunch of other things.
So, it’s a way to sort of make your article memorable. And, have a takeaway. Have a strong conclusion that helps sum up what people read. And that’s something that I said is uncommon, because, honestly, we don’t, we struggle with that with a lot of our writers. We have people who, I, I think it’s very common as writers for people to say, okay, here it is, I’ve said what I’ve said, now the article is finished.
But that really leaves a little bit on the table in terms of bringing home the message for the, the reader. Your takeaways for today is that advocacy journalism is not straight news, and I hope that these articles have given you a sense of that. Uh, so, like I said, with those common elements that I mentioned, give them a hook.
Something that interests them, give them a takeaway, what they need to Remember about your article, give them something other than a wall of text and give them links to learn more.
[00:30:09] Ian: Next up was the podcast section. So Jeremy Winter and I went up onto the stage and talk to everybody about a little bit about how the podcast team process works to give folks an idea of how to plug into that.
[00:30:27] Jeremy: It’s nice because I think one of the good parts about podcast is that since there’s so many discreet steps You can kind of assembly line it, you know It’s really easy to get something and be like listen I know writing a whole article might be really scary for you But you could just do us this one little thing is one little thing and that’d be so important And so, you know for me where I got started doing audio editing, you know It was a simple little task, you know Go in this file and Edit some things.
Sure, it’s like an hour long interview, but you know, it’s the simplicity of the task eases the mental burden a lot of that, and so yeah, um, I’m Jeremy. Again, I still do some audio editing. I’m also the board liaison, the, um, StreetsMN, uh, uh, podcast committee member. And so I, I try to, you know, interface between the podcast side of things and the not podcast side of things.
In the end, it’s all streets.mn and we all work together here.
[00:31:27] Ian: Now, the easiest way to get involved with the podcast team is just to write us an email with a suggestion for a story that you think that we should tell. Uh, and Max Singer happened to be at the workshop and he had recently, uh, done just that.
So I brought him up on stage to tell everybody what that process was like from his perspective.
[00:31:50] Max: Yeah, uh, it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Uh, I sent one email. Um, this was for the Poem in Your Pocket Day podcast, which, uh, just came out this May. Yeah, um, basically just a, a delight giving, gathering story, um, that I knew from the neighborhood that, It was about my mom, so I couldn’t tell it, but yeah, I wrote in an email to the podcast committee and they pretty much took it from there.
I connected folks email wise and then I got to step back and watch the incredible product that was created by the great people at the Streets of Ren podcast.
[00:32:29] Ian: So after Max sent me an email suggesting that story, I brought it to the rest of the podcast team at our very next meeting. We host meetings every two weeks.
And I pitched it to everybody and asked if there were any, uh, members of the team who wanted to take on that story and champion it. So, um, Steena Neal lived in the neighborhood and, uh, really enjoys the delight cultivating stories. So she decided that she wanted to produce that episode. And after that, it was her job to communicate with, uh, you know, Max and, uh, and any potential guests for the episode who happen to be Max’s mom, uh, and coordinate all of, uh, all of the logistics, um, for that whole process. And Jeremy has a few more details about what the rest of the process looks like.
[00:33:24] Jeremy: Every two weeks, we will meet up, we’ll go through our Trello board that we have, which organizes all our ideas.
We try to work together to figure out, hey, who wants to do this? Maybe someone will have availability to do actual interviewing and traveling and finding people. Uh, you know, one of the great things about the Streets. mn podcast, if you want to join in, is maybe you just know somebody whose voice you want to feature.
And if you’re willing to go and, you know, talk to them yourself or try to get them in touch with us, that’s a super important step, the networking part of things. Uh, we’ll try to see, oh, okay, who’s, who’s available to edit this? You know, uh, the editing process, uh, is something that can be easily divvied up.
We have a transcription process that we do. Usually we’ll start by saying, okay, okay, we have this idea. Do we have anyone who wants to talk about it? You know, one of the best parts of a podcast audio medium is that you can literally showcase people’s voices, right? So we usually try to get some sort of guest related to a topic.
We’ll see who can interview them and when, uh, once we’ve got that through and we have like a general narrative and stuff and we’ve lined up the interviews and we’ve scheduled everything, logistics are important too. Um, we’ll get, try to get the audio recorded. Once we’ve got some raw audio available, we’ll go to our editors, we’ll see who’s available to edit what and when.
Uh, once the editing process is finished, then we can move on to transcription. This is something we’re still finalizing, figuring out exactly how we want to do our transcription process, but we have a few good ways of doing it, and so we will send that to a transcription person, The nice thing about editing and transcription is that they can be divvied up.
Maybe someone can edit the first half of the audio, someone can edit the second half, someone can transcribe the middle third. However it may be, there’s ways we can make it to be accessible to people, to be like, okay, whatever little way you want to help, we can get you in there and make you feel involved somehow.
Um, and yeah, once all of that transcription and stuff is done, we will upload it and Get it out there, I guess. The final thing I should mention is that in all of this we’ll usually try to, um, in addition to the raw interviews, have a sort of add in some sort of framing, you know, some bit of just greater context.
Usually Ian will do, um, a little bit of an overall blurb to sort of ground everything. And, um, yeah, once we’ve got the narrative set up and everything, we’re, uh, we’re good to go. We’ll post it.
[00:36:04] Ian: Now, one format for episodes that we have been very interested in pursuing more often is what I call the host producer guest model, where the host is the person who is talking directly to the audience, so they introduce the show, and then They’re talking to the producer and asking the producer, Hey, what is this story that you brought to us?
Um, the producer tells us a little bit more about the topic and then, uh, introduces the guest. And so then the producer is the person who’s actually talking to the guest. And every once in a while, uh, we. Transition from that conversation between producer and guest to the conversation between producer and host so that the host can continue to give more context and, uh, kind of serve as the audience surrogate, right?
Being the person, the uninformed person in the room who can ask the questions that the audience might have had. Um, I really enjoy that model and, um, it is a little bit more time consuming. Uh, it takes a little bit more effort on our part as a team, but it’s But, um, when it comes together, it is a very rewarding, uh, format and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from audience members about it.
We received a question from the audience at the workshop about what, what we consider to be like good candidates for podcast episodes. So like, if you have an idea for. A story that you want to tell on streets out of men. How do you know whether it’s going to work better as a written piece or as a podcast?
Um, and the two strongest things that I look for with something that is going to look good in a podcast is, uh, number one, do you have some specific ideas for people who can tell their own stories? Right. Um, if you can interview somebody about. This particular thing and how it affects their lives. That’s a very, very powerful, uh, thing to put into a podcast episode.
Um, and then the other. Telltale of a good podcast episode is, do we have experts in the field who we can interview about this thing? Right. Because experts, people who work in a particular field at their day job, right, they can talk forever about that particular thing. And it is delightful to hear people really getting into the.
The details of a thing that they care about a lot. Um, and podcasts are long enough that you can actually get into those details. Whereas most of the written articles, uh, shoot for a much shorter, uh, read time than what we do for our episodes.
[00:38:48] Jeremy: Yeah, I, I think back to the, um, the documentary, uh, uh, Rondo Beyond the Pavement, talking about the, um, you know, destruction of the, the Rondo neighborhood and just all of the interviews they had there of people talking about their lives, you know, before and during the construction of the, the freeway.
Um, you know, there’s, it’s really powerful. There’s, there’s something very emotional and raw about that, that there’s no substitute for. I think. But anyways, um, so yeah, we, um, we’re trying our best to go out there and, and, you know, get people’s voices and get different perspectives on things. And admittedly, a lot of the streets.mn team, and especially the podcast team is located out of the twin cities, you know, and like we were talking about before, we want to diversify and both get ourselves out there more and get more people in. And so. You know, we’ve talked about how easy it is to get involved and send us your ideas. Um, sure, you can come to our meetings if you want, but you don’t have to.
We are more than willing to work with people on a single case by case basis, you know, if you want to just say, hey, I know this person. Even if you want to just give us a contact, be like, they have something they really want to talk about. That’s amazing. Um, if you want to try to help us spread our reach.
One of the beautiful things about Streets to Other Men is that we have, um, uh, really good licensing, uh, Creative Commons. Um, licensing that makes it so our content can be spread far and wide. We’ve done crossover podcast episodes where we’ve hosted other podcasts. And, and likewise with them, we’ve ha gone and given ourselves Um, given radio stations, um, are podcast episodes for them to broadcast.
So if you have a local radio station that is looking for, you know, um, programming relevant to the area, uh, feel free to, you know, um, shoot them an email and say, Hey, listen, I have something that, you know, maybe your listeners might want to hear. And as long as we get credit, that’s fine.
[00:40:58] Ian: Another great way to get involved with the podcast team.
If you don’t want to be a member of the team, uh, you know, on a weekly basis coming to every single one of our meetings. Um, but if you want to still contribute. Ongoing, uh, is you could have a recurring series, right? Um, so I’m thinking of like our book club series that, uh, Alyssa Shuffman hosted back in the day.
Um, you know, every three or four months, she would bring a new, uh, book to the table and ask everybody, all of our audience members to read that book together. And then she would, uh, you know, Go and find a guest to speak about that book. And, um, and yeah, it was like, she didn’t have to be a direct part of our team for all of our meetings, but she was able to bring that content to the table, uh, on a, on a recurring basis.
So we are definitely looking. to foster more of those types of, uh, roles, um, opportunities for people to, to do recurring series.
We also had a segment of the workshop, uh, hosted by Wolfie Brauender about, uh, how to bring. photos into your articles and, um, you know, what they can contribute to the final product. Um, Wolfie does a recurring series called St. Paul by Bike where he presents, um, what almost count as, uh, photo essays, I would say, um, And unfortunately the presentation that he gave relied heavily on visuals.
Understandable. Um, so it wouldn’t really work very well here on this podcast episode. We might explore taking the recorded audio of his presentation and combining it with the audio. Uh, the slides that he presented and, uh, put out a video for a version of that. Um, let us know if that is something that you would really, really like to see.
Um, but, uh, for now, for this podcast episode, we’re going to skip that section. And we finished off the event with a panel about advocacy journalism, uh, featuring Mary Morse Marty and Max Singer. Uh, unfortunately, Mary’s microphone was not. Sending its audio to the recorder. And, uh, and we did not realize this until after the event, uh, when we were putting together this episode.
So I’m very sorry, Mary, that none of your audio made it in here. Um, but we do have, uh, some shorter clips, uh, that, uh, of Max talking about a few topics. Um, and, uh, he’s got some good thoughts in there.
[00:43:50] Max: Yeah. Um, as, as you hit upon, uh, I think, yeah, the first, the, the first place I start with any, anything I’m taking on is, um, like, what is the personal, what is the personal stakes?
What’s the personal draw? It doesn’t necessarily have to be for something personal. Uh, sometimes I write about the, the FRA long distance rail study, which is, uh, something I’m personally interested in, but have, uh, Uh, I don’t have, you know, I can’t claim to have any deep personal connection to it, um, beyond my personal interest.
And so then it’s really interrogating why am I personally interested in that? Like, what’s, what’s the why? Um, cause that, that ultimately will be the story, even if it isn’t the content of the story, it is the, um, the emotional weight and hopefully what you are trying, what you’re most trying to communicate to other people.
Um So I’d say, yes, start, start with that personal connection, whether it’s the anecdote or the, uh, the reason you care. Uh, and then, uh, especially approaching, uh, controversial issues. Um, you know, whether it’s finding the best, um, the best opposition to what your, um, what your stance is, you know. Finding the, you know, your counterpart or imagining your counterpart, you know, um, I think it’s like arguments with yourself.
Um, and if you can’t, and if you can’t win that, then, you know, you reassess your position, you reassess your evidence, you, you reassess your conclusion. But, um, yeah, and, and thinking in a mind that isn’t your own, um, which is, is definitely, you know. It’s something I, I certainly, it’s a skill that we’re always, we’re improving and honing and, uh, you, you can also draw from lots of places though.
And I think, um, as, as people in this room likely have the experience of, you know, you can think of that experience like when you show up someplace by bike or, um, talk about how your neighborhood’s changing, you know, you can, you can, we’re, I think, we’re, we’re fish out of water in that way. We’re used to it.
Um, I think that’s probably what it draws people in this room today. Um, but as those fish out of water, we can also think of those those assumptions that that we’re used to. We’re used to dealing with, um, and approaching it in a very empathetic, very understanding way, because we do know we’ve experienced it.
We’ve worked against it, but there’s ways to embrace it in, um, talking about an issue in, you know, Exploring the counter arguments in, um, in, in, uh, providing context, providing the, like, the milieu that you’re drawing from, um, I think that’s, that’s, uh, kind of part of the process is, yeah, the dissent. I think that, you know, evidence and, and like, rational, very important parts of, um, Of advocacy journalism, uh, as it were.
But, I think the most important part is that it’s a story. Um, and there are communi there are communications professionals who, you know, go to school for this stuff, but at the core, when you’re making an argument, if you’re making a case, if you’re presenting something, you are telling a story. Um, and that’s not trivial.
That is, I would argue, the whole part. And, you know, we as, you know, people who grew up hearing stories, like, we know the parts of a story, uh, and that is not, like, I, I won’t, I won’t fall too deep into hyperbole, but that’s huge. It’s a story, um, um, You know, so, like, what are the characters, you know, are they, you know, maybe the facts, the evidence are characters, you know, what’s the, um, what’s the progression, uh, you know, beginning, middle, end, climax, all that.
It is a story, uh, and it is possible to, to, because people do relate. That is why the irrational is so effective, um, and, you know, why there’s irrational stories that, uh, that we, uh, Hold on to, like, not to get literary, but like Dante’s Inferno, right? You know, it’s, it’s him trashing a bunch of his peers. No one remembers what they were on about, but they remember his story because he took all of his complaints about, you know, Renaissance Italians and made it into a story about going into the depths of hell.
Like, is there facts and evidence in there? Yes. And there’s also incredibly vivid imagery. That, um, that people remember to this day, because they remember Dante’s Inferno, I, not, not as peers. Um, I think of like, um, and there’s, and that is a way to bring people in. It’s, it’s both hearing their stories, but also having stories in which to like, provide as well.
Um, My grandfather lives in, uh, North St. Paul, uh, Minnesota. Uh, you know, it, it, former, former small town, but now it’s been kind of suburbanized, um, urban sprawl. And, you know, he’s, he thinks I’m crazy. Uh, you know, I, I, I’ll bike, uh, to Easter from, from Minneapolis. It’s just, it’s a distance. We don’t need to talk about that.
You know, I’ll take the M track to Chicago. And he’s like, I don’t know why you’re doing that. Um, but Uh, he, he drives, uh, his granddaughter to school, uh, at least a couple times a week. And, you know, I was talking to him about a holiday, I’m like, Yeah, that must be nice, you know, like, you know, time with the grand, like, being part of the routine, like a, kind of like, day, you know, having that in, and he, he had a totally different take.
His take was, he’s like, yeah, well, yeah, but when I was that age, you know, I, I walked, I walked to school, or I biked to school. Like, he remembered a time in which things were different. End. And his emotional, uh, connection to, like, getting kids to school, uh, is totally, you know, totally different than, you know, maybe if I’d come and be like, you know, North St. Paul needs sidewalks. There’s not sidewalks on every street. There’s, there’s people, you know, there are stories you can tell that get to people. Uh, giving kids a safe route to school is absolutely one of them. And so. And I think that is something that can, you know, be married with, um, with the facts and evidence.
Because, you know, there’s, you know, if you’re talking about a school pick up line, you can talk about the space obligation, you can talk about the, uh, the traffic, the, uh, backed up cars, idling cars. You can also talk about, like, the human aspect, the story aspect, the emotional tenor of, like, how did kids used to get to school?
Like, what, what do we lose when? Uh, parents wait in line for like, what, 45 minutes? I, I don’t have kids, but I look forward to not finding any way to not wait in a pickup line. But, that’s kind of my thought on, on the rational and irrational, which is, you know, finding, finding those ways to embrace the irrational in a way that does not sacrifice, you know, the, the rational, the fact based, but also Kind of incorporates them into one compelling, uh, Inferno.
Yeah, start, start with something you care about, something you can say a lot about. Whether it’s a personal experience or just something that, you know, Grinds your gears. Start there. Like, start with your Facebook rant, and don’t post it as a comment, put it in a document, keep going, research it, like, start, start with that inkling of personal experience and emotion, um, and that will become your article.
Uh, maybe not everyone will. I certainly have drafts that will never see the light of day, but once you start drafting, you will find that it, it’s very easy to just keep drafting, so. That’s, that’s the takeaway. Just keep drafting. Yes. Just like in biking, keep drafting.
[00:52:19] Ian: Now, do you want to help Streets.mn, but, uh, do not have the time or energy to contribute pieces to the website? Well. Good news for you, we are currently having a donation drive. So, Streets has a lot of initiatives that we want to do. We have big ambitions, but on our current budget we cannot implement all of them.
And, um, these include things like expanding the number of people who get paid for the work that they’re doing on the website. Um, and, um, Expanding the types of anti racist initiatives that we’re able to pursue. Having more of a presence at in person events and doing more outreach. Um, those are the kinds of things that Streets.mn wants to be able to add to our repertoire.
Uh, and if you are able to join us as a sustaining member, uh, that would be a huge, huge thing. Um, recurring donations. really help us to be able to build a budget that reflects the amount of money that is going to be coming in. Um, so those are a lot more valuable than a one time donations because we know that we can count on them.
Um, but whatever you can give. Um, we would love to have you join us in, uh, continuing to make this content that, uh, fosters conversations in Minnesota about land use and transportation and making our communities better places. So if you can join us in that endeavor, uh, you can head to streets. mn slash donate to get started.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons attribution non commercial non derivative license, so feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Eric Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet.
Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.