Behind the scenes on 'Sold a Story,' APM Reports' breakout podcast

Sold a Story, from APM Reports, is the podcast that changed how a lot of American schools teach reading. Lindsey Seavert and I flew to Washington, D.C. to film a behind-the-scenes look at how it gets made.

We followed reporter Emily Hanford and her colleague Christopher Peak into classrooms and into Hanford's home office, where she keeps an enormous, meticulous spreadsheet of children's books and the reading methods behind them. That spreadsheet was my favorite thing we filmed. It says everything about the kind of reporting that goes into the show: patient, unglamorous, exact.

Our goal was to show that quieter side of journalism, the part that happens before anyone presses record on a microphone. Alongside the main piece we cut a handful of short social videos, and two of them, a TikTok and an Instagram reel, took off in the education world, which was a nice reminder that the small vertical cuts are often the ones that travel.

Public media is a big part of my work, from MPR News to this. If you are a newsroom or a podcast with a story about how the work gets done, I would love to shoot it.