Jason Moon, shares his passion for radio storytelling and the immense resources needed for such long-form projects

By Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, The Laconia Daily Sun

On this week’s episode of The Granite Beat, Julie and Adam speak with Jason Moon, the journalist behind many intriguing long-form projects at NHPR, such as the Bear Brook true crime podcast that has been downloaded more than 17 million times.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and length

Adam Drapcho:

Which came first for you: interest in journalism or interest in radio?

Jason Moon:

Interest in radio. Somewhere in high school I discovered This American Life and radio storytelling shows like it, and at that point I probably didn't register that what I was hearing was journalism. I just took it as storytelling and fell in love with the medium. Pretty much from the time I entered undergrad, I knew that's what I wanted to do. I was bound and determined to make my way to a radio station somewhere The type of storytelling I was interested in seemed at that point to really only be happening in the public radio space. Things are a little different now. But then I got to New Hampshire Public Radio and realized that journalism is actually what powers all of those stories that you have – to find a story to tell that's important, that's worth being told and worth being investigated. So I came to it with a love of audio and audio storytelling, and then I kind of learned how to become a journalist after that.

Adam Drapcho:

Can you give us a sense of the resources necessary to commit to this sort of project? Is it difficult to sell the idea to your superiors at New Hampshire Public Radio?

Jason Moon:

To the first part of the question, it takes an immense amount of time and resources to make the kind of narrative series that I've been working on for the past several years. I mean, this second season of Bear Brook, from the moment I first started looking into the story to publication, was maybe 20 months. That was about a year of reporting and then at least six months of the production side: the writing, editing, scoring, mixing, more editing, more editing, and then even more editing.

 Figuring out how to tell the story can take almost as long and almost as much effort as the reporting that goes into it. So it's not like I found the story and then just sat down with some notes in front of a microphone, you know? There's a lot of time and love that goes into the scripts and the mixing, down to if the three-millisecond pause between these two bits of tape is too short or too long. There's a lot that goes into it.

From a station perspective, I was like, Is this the best use of our resources? I think that's a debate that is happening across the whole public radio system, especially at smaller member stations like NHPR. There are dozens and dozens across the country, and you’ll get different answers at different stations. Some people say that time is better spent covering daily news and focusing on quantity of reporting. But for whatever reason, around 2015 when I first started working on the reporting that would become Bear Brook Season One, there was just the right mix of people here at the station. It felt like the right story, and we decided to take a risk to gamble on it. I don't think anyone went into it expecting that it was going to pay for itself.  Though we try not to think in those terms. 

It's one of the fun things about working in journalism and in public media particularly, is that that's the point – it's not about if we can monetize it, can we justify it in terms of how much money it brings in. I guess it's a matter of taste for some people as far as whether or not that's a useful form for journalism. There were enough people at the station and in the right positions around 2015 that felt it was, so I didn't really have to twist anyone's arm to make the first season of Bear Brook happen. In fact, the first person to suggest that maybe this should be a serialized podcast series was actually one of my bosses, so there was already some buy-in at the higher levels of the station. 

I wouldn't say it was universal, it still took three years from when we started having those conversations to when season one actually came out, partly because we didn't really understand how much work it was going to take.

Julie Hart:

There's a blurred line, maybe even an overlap between storytelling and journalism. I imagine some journalists could feel discomfort with this idea, because storytelling is sometimes equated with entertainment while journalism is discovering and delivering necessary, helpful information. Yet, in season two of Bear Brook, you openly discuss this conflict with the listener. Could you tell us how this conflict played out in structuring your storytelling, and why you decided to bring the listener in?

Jason Moon:

That's a big theme we wanted to point people to in season two, that we're telling you a story, and so are these other people that we're talking about – sort of everyone is doing it, so let's just point that out. It made for an interesting writing-structuring-editing process, where we would find ourselves in these meta conversations about storytelling and reporting in these layers that build up on each other. 

I guess the way it started, why I started to think about it and chose to include it as a theme in the story, was because of my first exposure to the case season two is focused on. I heard another true crime podcast was coming to New Hampshire to cover it, and I had been interested because this – if you haven't listened to the final episode, this is a bit of a spoiler – because you may recall that the very end of Season One involves an amateur web sleuth helping to identify the victims partly based on information she'd heard in the podcast, and it was sort of this weird moment where like, the fourth wall was being breached, and art and life were like intersecting and the feedback loop – it was all intermeshed. 

That got me thinking about how that must happen in lots of these cases, especially in true crime context. I watched both seasons of the Making a Murderer documentary series on Netflix before I started on season two of Bear Brook, and it occurred to me that the whole second season of Making a Murderer is documenting the things that only happened because the first season was created. 

It seemed like there was another system here that is affecting people's lives in the criminal legal system – this true crime, industrial storytelling complex, it's like, if that system touches your case sometimes you can make a huge difference. So anyways, that was sort of the original idea for season two. I was like, I'm gonna watch this play out in real time and watch true crime media be made, and then affect the case it's covering. It just seemed interesting to me, because I'd never heard anything like that or seen anyone try something like that. That was the original idea for this series. If you've been listening, you'll probably think it didn't become this sort of overriding structure of a whole series. But what it did do is it created this framing for the whole series of looking at everything that happened in the criminal justice system, the court system, and the police, looking at it through this lens of storytelling. 

When I started to actually research the case itself and understand what had happened, it just hit me that different versions of that same process were happening to different groups of people at very different times, from the 1980s to two years ago when the Undisclosed podcast came to New Hampshire. It felt like a unifying theme across the whole series.

 And of course, if I'm going to do that, I have to reckon with the fact that I'm doing it, so it sort of felt like a natural evolution out of that: if I'm going to be covering true crime as a force within the criminal legal system, then I have to turn that lens, at least partially, on myself while also trying not to make it about myself.

Julie Hart:

In that same vein, if we're acknowledging that in the storytelling there is at least a partial component of entertainment, how do you balance that with the idea that these are real human lives, real human suffering and injustice – and that's the root of the stories? What makes it worth it to tell the stories, while meanwhile these people may be reliving their trauma?

Jason Moon:

I think that's the most important question to ask at the outset of any story, but especially for crime reporting or true crime storytelling. You really have to understand and have a good reason for why you’re making people relive what’s for many, the worst thing that ever happened to them. Why report the story, and then why do the storytelling approach? 

For me, the first question is pretty straightforward. In Bear Brook season two, there's the possibility that the state of New Hampshire and public agencies that operate on our behalf messed up, and that's the sort of bread and butter journalistic approach. Like back when I was the health reporter at the station, if the Department of Health and Human Services had based a decision on some bad science or something – it's sort of the same kind of accountability reporting in terms of our public institutions. That's the big picture for my reason to do the story at all. 

And then to take this storytelling approach that we use, ultimately it's a question of taste. For me, the reason I think that approach can be so powerful is – what Adam said about having that memory of listening to the podcast while ice skating, I don't want to be presumptuous but I would gather you probably remember that story and lodged its meanings or lessons or whatever much more deeply in your mind than if I had written the story in a AP style, 1000-word print piece. 

As a younger person, when I was first falling in love with audio storytelling, the stories I remember that really affected me deeply were the ones that were told in this method. But all that said, there's a huge risk in taking the approach in overstepping, and I'm the first person to cringe at it. And particularly in true crime, the overemphasis on entertainment and the lack of sensitivity to people's trauma and the lack of a big-picture reason to even do the story in the first place. It's a very fraught medium, especially when it comes to doing true crime. So at the end of the day, I think it's ultimately a matter of taste, what's appropriate, what's ethical – at least that's how I think about it. 

Adam Drapcho:

Could you tell us what the personal cost of this type of reporting is for you? These are dark stories, and as you said, it sometimes takes years to report on them. Do you have to be conscious about the effect that it has on your own well being?

Jason Moon:

Yeah, I do. Thanks for asking that. It is taxing emotionally and sort of personally. These stories don't just…it's hard to leave them at the office, you know? I think we even wrote in the script that I dream about the stories. You have to dive so deeply into the material, so it becomes consuming in that way. But also, part of the reason I'm drawn to these stories is because they feel so important to me – they feel so urgently important, especially with Season Two. And so it's kind of my own fault in that I pick the stories, or I'm drawn to the stories that feel so urgently important, and then I suffer under the pressure of that for a year and a half or two years, or whatever it takes me to do the story. And even then, it's not like it's finished, you know. I mean, there's gonna be things happening in Jason's case for probably for years.

Julie Hart:

What advice would you give a smaller newsroom who's looking to start a project in this scope of journalism?

Jason Moon:

To do this kind of work specifically, I would encourage you to do the research ahead of time to figure out what you actually need in terms of the staffing, because we sort of learned a lot of those lessons the hard way when we were working on the first season of Bear Brook. It was almost three years in between the first bit of reporting I did on Season One and when we actually released an episode, so that's not ideal. And there were long stretches during those three years where I was convinced that we were never going to finish this thing and my little pet project was going to die a quiet death in some dark corner of the station. How many people does it take? What's a realistic time frame? I think it's possible to be sort of too eager and a bit naive in terms of trying to launch a narrative series like this, like, we'll just give a reporter a microphone and a month and what else do they need? You can get free audio editing software and it's not that hard to record yourself, right?. Obviously that's not that's not how it works, so I guess that's my advice for stations or management or people in charge for how to begin to think about this. Or call, I'd be happy to talk to people about what you need to do and some pitfalls to avoid and that kind of stuff.

This article is part of The Granite Beat, a project by The Laconia Daily Sun and The Granite State News Collaborative, of which Laconia is a partner. Each week Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, will explore with local reporters how they got some of the most impactful stories in our state and why they matter. This project is being shared with partners in The Granite State News Collaborative.