Derek was raised in a family of white nationalists. David Duke is his godfather. When he got to college, he slowly began to change his views. I had pursued a story with him at my previous job and never could land the interview. Lynsea had the same experience years before.
In 2017, post-Charlottesville, Lynsea and I both thought of Derek and wondered if he would talk. When Lynsea said she would reach out to him, I thought it would never happen. When he declined my interview request years before, he said it was hard for him to do much media. To condense his story into sound bites was impossible. Doing interviews for a quick TV hit or a short radio segment wouldn’t work. All this was running through my head when Lynsea, two hours or so after setting out to book him, came to my desk and said he had agreed to do the interview.
When we recorded with him, Derek told us he felt comfortable talking because he was such a fan of the show. He knew we didn’t shy away from complicated stories. We relished the gray, and his story was all gray. When Lynsea and I tried to tell this story before, we couldn’t. The show it needed to be on didn’t exist yet. So we made that show. Then we talked to Derek.
In addition to its millions of downloads, “The Daily” is broadcast by more than 150 radio stations. How do you deal with the pressure of running such a successful show?
I try to think of the show as our passion project that’s heard by The Times’s audio team, my close friends and my family. That’s it. I know it’s delusional, but it soothes me to not think too much about the millions of people who actually make up our audience.
If I keep thinking, “Hey, we’re just making something that we would want to listen to, that would make our friends feel something, that my mom would want to share with our neighbors,” then I can ignore a lot of the pressures of the job.
How do you spend your time when you’re off duty?
After long days of making work that is innately ephemeral, I find great joy in making tactile things — mostly things I can eat.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/reader-center/behind-the-byline-theo-balcomb.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
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