Okay, joining us in the spotlight today is Michelle Bash from WTOP.
And Michelle and WTOP just launched a brand new podcast.
First tell us what you do at WTOP.
I am a general assignment reporter.
So I do everything from the breaking news day by day to feature stories.
I love doing feature stories that are particularly interesting and unique and really catch your
attention on the radio.
So I have to do a little bit of the breaking news and the nasty stuff to get to what I
consider is the really fun stuff that I think people enjoy.
Now tell us how long have you been with the radio station there?
Did you start out in a different position or is this how you got hired at WTOP?
I've been with WTOP for 11 years.
I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio.
I started out here.
I was working at a different station in the market as a reporter and an anchor and this
station pursued me so I moved over.
They have a very intense training system here at WTOP where you have to, most people do,
start out in one position and kind of move around the room to learn how the newsroom
functions and so that's kind of how I started out.
Doing some writing first and some assistant editing, that kind of thing.
But it's very helpful to help you learn how it works here at WTOP and it is a wonderful,
unique place to work.
And for those that do not know, WTOP could probably be considered the best news station
in the country and it's certainly been the highest revenue producing station for many,
many years owned by Hubbard Broadcasting so that's not a bad place to work.
Oh, it's wonderful.
I feel blessed every day.
I'm a lucky person to have ended up here and it really is a pleasure.
So tell us how the idea for this podcast came about.
Well, I had heard about Tangier Island, Virginia just through other news outlets, kind of what
had been going on over there.
Then just over the summer, a new book came out written by a journalist.
It's called Chesapeake Requiem.
The journalist is Earl Swift and basically he spent a year on the island really getting
to know people there, getting to learn the island's story, what its problems are, what
it's facing.
It's facing an uncertain future.
And with the release of this book, both me and my bosses thought, well, gee, you know,
we shouldn't just report on this book and interview the author.
We should get you out there and really see what he sees and go in depth.
So talk about the research.
What did they have you do?
Well, of course, I went to Tangier Island and that was an adventure in itself, just
trying to get to this very isolated island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.
It involved a drive.
It involved getting on a boat.
You can only get there by boat or by plane.
I didn't have the plane, so I had to go the boat route.
And it can be a difficult trip to get there in terms of the roughness of the bay.
And I found that out firsthand on my trip back to my car aboard the boat.
Four to six foot waves on a small boat.
It was a pretty hairy situation.
So I can see why it's difficult to make the crossing even for tourists.
This island is mostly driven by the crab industry.
It's a crabbing community, but they also rely on tourism.
People come in on ferry boats from both Maryland and Virginia to enjoy the place during the
warmer months.
And so those are the two big driving forces for their economy.
So what is really the theme of the podcast?
The theme of the podcast has to do with the fact that this island is disappearing.
It's going under the waves of the Chesapeake Bay.
And many islands have done this over hundreds of years in the Chesapeake Bay.
We've lost them.
But this island, it's quite a story because, as I said, it's a crabbing community.
There are several hundred people, about 460 people that live there.
And they've been there.
Their relatives have been there for hundreds of years.
It was settled in the 1700s by white settlers.
Before that, there were Indian tribes on the island.
But it's sinking because of two reasons, both climate change, sea level rise.
And in the Chesapeake Bay, sea level rise has been accelerated because the land is sinking.
So the island is both sinking and drowning at the same time.
So the problem is, do we try to save this island of 460 people?
As I said, it's a crabbing community.
It's very important.
They catch a lot of crab on this island, the watermen that work there.
And they don't want to move.
Also interestingly, they don't believe the science behind what I just told you.
They don't believe that man-made climate change has anything to do with the fact that the
island is disappearing.
I kept hearing over and over again that the islanders believe erosion is the reason why
they're losing their land, that the waves are just eating away.
And they are.
Waves are eating away at both the sides of the island and it's coming up in the center
of the island.
So it's this islanders versus scientists back and forth.
How could it be saved?
That is a good question.
The islanders think it can be saved by building a wall all the way around it.
And if that sounds like something familiar, like maybe for President Trump, interestingly,
most islanders support President Trump.
And President Trump has reached out to the mayor of Tangier Island and told him that
he supports him.
And the mayor tells me that he's had some conversations with some federal folks in Washington,
D.C.
He believes because of President Trump's support of what they're trying to do.
Building a wall around the island would, of course, cost a lot of money, millions of dollars,
maybe more than that.
But scientists I interviewed told me that a wall around the island would not be enough.
This island is so low, it's only four feet above sea level at its highest points.
The land is.
So the whole island, I'm being told, would have to be raised up.
They would need to throw more land on there.
They would basically have to build up the land to build up the town on top of it again.
It's almost like starting over.
So then you're adding more and more millions onto that.
And so far, there's no one come forward with a way to pay for all this.
Did they say how much time they think the island has?
A paper that was published in 2015 by a scientist, a group of scientists, rather, predicted that
the island would be uninhabitable within as little as 25 years.
I have heard even worse scenarios since then by others.
But that was the big forecast in 2015 was that they had possibly as few as 25 years
to leave.
That doesn't mean the entire island would be underwater by then.
It just means that those folks that live there would have to leave because you have to understand
the situation they're in now.
There are only three basically strips of ridges.
These are three ridges that are sticking out of the water that make up the island.
The habitable part of the island is these ridges.
And that's where the houses are built.
There's businesses on these ridges.
There's churches.
And that's all that's left.
These buildings are literally clinging to the highland on this island.
Why a podcast and not a five-part series on the radio?
We want to branch out more than what we're doing already.
We already have some regularly produced podcasts that come out on a weekly basis, for instance.
We wanted to try to do something a little bit different.
In this case, we did five podcasts that dropped all at once on one day so they could be binge
listened to.
It's something I haven't done before.
I've done multiple parts series on the radio before, but not this.
So I was game to try something new.
It was something suggested by my managers, and it's something I'd like to do again.
I really enjoyed it.
And I enjoyed the ability of being able to stretch the story out even further than we
normally would on the radio.
There's more that's gone into it that would have had to have been left on the cutting
room floor if we had put it just on the radio.
So take us through the experience of being a podcaster and creating a podcast.
From the beginning, of course, as I said, I've done news series before, but the gathering
of the sound is made that much more challenging by the fact that I knew I was walking into
a situation where I would have these long podcasts to produce.
I normally produce stories every day that are about 40 seconds long.
So I knew I would have to gather a lot of sound and try to get as many interviews as
I could in a limited time frame.
So that was challenge number one.
Do you enjoy that a little more than the radio, or is it nice to have the mix that you have
now doing both?
You know what?
This is really exciting.
I really enjoyed putting together the podcast.
As I said, I'm new to it.
I've listened to other podcasts and really enjoyed them.
And this was exciting and new.
And the ability to, as I said, add in things that normally I would just X out of my thinking
and just leave behind, I've now been able to add, for instance, a lot more of the personal
things that I went through.
I normally try not to involve myself at all in a story.
And in this case, I was part of the story because just getting there, getting home was
an adventure.
Getting on the mayor's boat, the mayor is a waterman.
He allowed me to go out on his boat with him.
And he took me to a part of Tangier that you can't get to by any other way than boat.
And it was a settlement that used to be there and is now washed away.
It was like an adventure.
Did it get you thinking right away?
Wow, I have these other ideas that I'd love to do as podcasts because it is different
and it can be exciting.
Or were you ready to just get right back into the newsroom and cover what's going on locally?
Oh, I absolutely have many other ideas.
And these have been some I have thought of for years that I've been thinking would make
good features on the radio.
But our features are normally no longer than maybe one minute if they're running in newscast.
We do have holes where we normally put live interviews, which can be as long as maybe
three minutes long.
So I've had some ideas, but yes, this absolutely opened my mind to, boy, I'd love to do some
more stuff and look around at similar stories that have multiple angles and multiple facets
to them that lend themselves to podcasting.
And now you guys use a radio station, obviously, to promote the podcast.
So how has the response been?
Are you able to track whether people are moving over and listening to it?
I have not gotten an update on how many downloads we have had of the podcast.
I do know I've gotten a great response on social media.
People are very excited.
Some have heard about this place.
Some have visited this place.
People that listen to us, others are hearing it for the first time and are going, wow,
I didn't know that was right in my backyard because it's a few hours away from Washington,
D.C.
So you think Chesapeake Bay, you think you know the Chesapeake Bay if you live in this
region and many people really don't.
They don't know the story of this tiny little island.
And when I say it's tiny, it's the square mile.
It's about one square mile, just a little bit one square mile.
That's how small this place is with 460 people living in homes on little ridges.
That's the way it goes for these folks.
It's great to be able to work for a company like Hubbard where you're able to branch out
and do these different things and still get paid for it as part of your regular job.
What advice do you have for podcasters that are thinking about getting into it or they're
just starting or they're just launching and they really want to make a go at being an
independent podcaster?
I would say go for it and think outside the box.
It is difficult.
It was difficult for me at first to think outside my little box that I'm in.
Like I said, I think that there's things that I can't share on the radio and of course you
can when you podcast.
You can share anything you'd like.
And the rules are different.
You basically make your own rules.
Another aspect of this that was new to me was putting in some music that was created
here at WTOP for me, some musical interludes to take us from kind of one subject, one part
of the story to another.
That was new to me.
At first, frankly, I didn't like it.
It felt strange to have this kind of musical interlude where normally I would be talking
or have some great fantastic sound bite.
I got used to it after a while and in listening to the completed podcasts, I really liked
it.
So it's fun to push yourself and say, okay, can I do this?
Maybe I can do this?
Well, give it a try.
This answer would be very helpful to podcasters too because when you flip on the mic at the
radio station, you know, especially at WTOP, there are so many listeners out there listening
to every word you say.
When you do a podcast, you're getting into a studio and putting it on a tape, you're
recording it, not knowing what's going to happen afterward.
Obviously, with WTOP, you know they're going to be listeners, but it's a big difference.
So take us through what people can learn from you about when they record and then they put
it out there for others to hopefully hear.
Well, one thing I learned is that you want to, of course, keep people listening.
We know that already, us folks in news broadcasting.
That's why we want to do it quick and use these great sound bites as quickly as we can,
use great natural sound.
But in the case of a podcast, one of my pieces was about 20 minutes long.
So I knew that every few minutes, I needed to make sure there was something, you know,
at least something exciting to keep people listening beyond four minutes, five minutes.
You don't want people turning it off.
So you want to spread out the payoff, I guess is what I'm getting at.
I was, I initially disagreed with telling part of my story early on in part two of the
podcast instead of saving it for the end because I thought it was the ultimate payoff.
But my managers convinced me we should put it in part two.
It's about what we found, what I saw when I visited that part of the island I mentioned
that the mayor took me to that's now isolated and an island of its own.
I thought that was the most powerful part of my trip.
But again, it's all about trying things and rolling things out in a different way.
As long as you have other stuff to keep people listening.
And foreshadowing is great, too.
That's something I had never done before that my some of my news directors suggested was,
you know, touching on a subject and then saying something like we'll get more more in depth
on that later.
Never done that before.
How much writing did you have to do?
Initially this was a 10 part series.
So there was a lot of writing.
And it's funny, one of my managers literally said it's time to write your book.
So I sat and I wrote, I wrote and I wrote, and they helped me knock it down to five parts.
And they also looked at some of the sound and some of the adventures I went through
that I initially didn't write about, like I said, that I didn't think was worthy.
And they're like, oh, why are you leaving this out?
We should put this in.
And it's funny, there's even more that got left out that people might find interesting.
But maybe I can share in different ways.
We're doing, for instance, a listening party on Twitter on Wednesday.
And in that way, I can I can tell people, well, you know, when I was on the boat, this
happened and, you know, little things that were left out.
How difficult was it to kind of transition from being, you know, the the news person
with a limited amount of time to a storyteller where you had so much time to to to fill where
you you're trying to I imagine you're trying to say, okay, wait, this is going too long.
We never do things this long.
We're going to lose the listener to to letting it play out as a storyteller.
Honestly, I think the the hardest part for me was slowing my delivery down a little bit.
Okay.
That was was the toughest.
I tried it initially and and was told, you know, you really should slow down and think
more of this.
Think of people listening to this, you know, in their car more like an audiobook.
You know, take it a little slow.
Explain things a little bit more.
Let them breathe.
That was the hardest.
It wasn't about writing very long.
As I said, we we combined what was initially 10 parts into five.
So that eventually made sense to me.
And with the transitions, it's okay.
But it's the slowing down and giving people a chance to let it soak in a little bit before
moving on to something else.
What do you feel like the biggest challenge was?
It was the delivery.
I was worried initially that after I did part one that I did part two and it wouldn't match
up that the delivery might sound a little different.
And it didn't.
I got the cadence down.
And once that was once I got into it, because I wasn't recording these all, you know, in
a row, it took days.
So I wanted things to sound consistent.
And we nailed it.
I believe we nailed it.
What was the most fun for you?
The most fun was going there after my trip.
That's when I came back and I interviewed a scientist.
This is the lead author of the 2015 study that said the place could be uninhabitable
in 25 years.
He's the guy I interviewed when I got back and I was able to ask him some questions about
things I saw on the island.
This was a marine biologist.
And he was able to tell me things like, oh, you know, that's why you didn't see many trees
on the island was because there is saltwater intrusion coming up.
I mean, the saltwater is literally coming up through the center of the island and killing
their trees.
So that's why you go to this island and you don't see many big trees anymore.
The trees are dying.
It's something I don't think the average person would think about when you tell them about
an island that's, you know, disappearing.
You don't think of it happening from the inside out.
So that was interesting talking to him.
But go ahead.
No, go ahead.
I'm not going to go too much.
But like I said, the most interesting part was getting there, finding out things that
I had no idea about.
I didn't realize that going without a cell phone would be so difficult.
There are no cell towers on the island.
It's kind of a throwback because at several points I had people looking for me.
It's a very small island.
And at one point, you know, someone came up to me and said, oh, so and so is looking for
you.
And then it happened again and it happened again.
It's just the way things work on an island with no cell tower.
So when you sit down and you listen to all five episodes by yourself with the headphones
on to see how the final product came out, what are you thinking to yourself as you're
listening to the different segments and what's going on?
Because you're the only person that can see the pictures from the interviews or see the
pictures that you went through to get there on the island and things like that.
So are you thinking we nailed it?
Are you are you self critical?
What's going through your mind when you're listening to them all?
I tend to be very self critical.
And you know, I think you have to be to try to do your best, of course.
So I wish in some ways that I could have gotten sound that was a little bit clearer.
It was a case where, as I said, I was out on a boat getting some fabulous interviews
with the mayor driving a boat and I'm interviewing him on a windy, rainy day.
So I've got a lot of wind sound.
So I kind of wish I had a better microphone situation.
That's really my only disappointment with the sound overall.
But since it's been put out and birthed to the world, I've had people tell me that, you
know, it kind of adds to the feeling that they're there.
You know, sure.
And I understand that.
That's great.
As long as it doesn't interfere with understanding the man, that's great.
If they feel more like they're on the boat with us, that that's fantastic.
So it's great to get that feedback when I feel so critical myself of, darn it, why couldn't
I have gotten a little bit better sound out there?
What's your advice to other radio stations across the country that maybe don't do news
the way they used to?
It seems like it's almost a way where you can really extend, if you can afford it, I
guess, extend, you know, your news departments and do more of those in-depth study or stories
that radio doesn't seem to do anymore.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, this, think about it.
This is kind of a throwback to the 1940s, 1930s or something.
This is the way radio started to keep people listening for long periods of time.
I think it's pretty neat since we're in such a format here at WTOP where we're an all-news
format.
We're not talk.
It's all news and things move quickly.
Whereas a podcast, you're on one subject for quite a long time.
And if you're at a station that's in a similar situation where you don't have quite the time
on the air, but you have a great story, you have something to tell or something you think
will keep people listening, something you want to share, try the podcast way.
It's really fun and interesting.
And like I said, in my case, I had all of the tape.
You just need the time.
Put in the time and give it a listen.
Let people listen to it in the studio, other people you work with and see what they think.
So where can people listen to the podcast?
You can listen through our website.
You can get to it at WTOP.com.
It's also available through Podcast One and it's on iTunes.