 | | A mural of George Floyd in Minneapolis.Donfard Hubbard |
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How do you cover a nationwide outcry? |
The answer, we decided, is with a lot of voices. There is not a single story of this moment. It is millions of stories, from every corner of the country. |
Last Friday, a team of producers and editors began making a special evening episode with our colleague Audra Burch to document the growing outrage over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the national protests that were spilling into the streets. |
Audra ended our conversation with a candid assessment and a set of questions about “how we should be thinking about who has the right to justice.” “We want to think everybody does. But I don’t know,” Audra said. “I just have been thinking a lot about it and frankly have not come up with any really good answers. But I do know that we deserve better and more honest conversations.” |
Then, we tried to capture the momentum of the unrest as it continued to build. |
We planned a show for Monday that we hoped would represent the private anguish and public protests unfolding before our eyes. We asked colleagues to record what they were seeing on the front lines of the demonstrations, and to narrate in real time. By Sunday, we had collected a set of powerful vignettes that, when combined, began to convey the magnitude of the moment. |
The episode started with producer Hans Buetow, who lives just outside Minneapolis, on the ground in the city still in the throes of protests, asking residents through a mask to describe the scene around them. In this excerpt, he’s speaking to a woman who is cleaning up the remains of a demolished restaurant: |
| AMANDA BOWLIN: It’s pretty much just soot and bricks and melted glass, melted steel. You couldn’t really tell that there was ever a building here. |
| HANS BUETOW: Your hands are black. |
| HANS BUETOW: Even through the gloves. |
| AMANDA BOWLIN: Yeah, went right through the gloves. |
From there, the episode told a chronological story of the weekend, with dispatches from Mike Baker in Seattle, Nikole Hannah-Jones in New York and John Eligon in Minneapolis. It concluded with a black protester telling John, who is himself black, that the space between them was both enormous and infinitesimal. “You’re a black man looking in my eyes. Does this look necessary?” the protester asked John. You can hear John wrestling with this tension: |
| JOHN ELIGON: And one thing that struck me as I talked to two of the protesters who were being arrested is, they said that I was black just like them, but the only thing that was different was that I had a press badge on. And I really didn’t know what to say to that, in some ways, because in a way that’s true, right? |
 | | Joe Morris, a protester featured in today’s episode.Julian Gonzalez |
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But we are not done. Over the coming days and weeks, we will document the ongoing protests, the response from police departments, and the systemic issues — seen and unseen — that lie behind the death of George Floyd. |
We’re eager to hear your feedback on these shows and your ideas for ways to think about and cover this moment. |
Memorializing 100,000 lives |
On last Friday’s episode, we remembered the lives of 100 people who died from the coronavirus in the United States. Producer Bianca Giaever explains how this episode came together: |
About a month ago, as I watched the coronavirus death toll grow, I began to think about some of the most powerful memorials I’ve witnessed: thousands of names etched into the mirror of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The hulking pile of lost shoes at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Every item an artist’s mother owned before she died, displayed carefully in the atrium of the MoMA. |
I wondered if it was possible to make something just as impactful in audio. What would that sound like? |
A story by Lydia Davis came to mind. In “Local Obits,” she arranged various descriptions from obituaries, using only first names. For example: “Tootles enjoyed puzzles of all kinds, painting items her husband built and keeping in touch with family and friends via the computer.” Davis embraced the clichés that people grasp for when a loved one dies. |
Her work became the inspiration for last week’s episode honoring 100 lives lost to the coronavirus, which we aired just after the death toll crossed 100,000 in the U.S. Producer Annie Brown and I collaborated with colleagues in the newsroom to gather and arrange moments from people’s lives. Our other producers reached out to families to make sure we pronounced every name correctly. I even found the number for Dave Prine, the brother of singer John Prine, in a phone book, and miraculously, he gave us an interview. |
We finished the episode just as the sun was coming up. And in our final edit, we changed Michael’s intro to say “100,000 lives,” instead of “100,000 deaths.” The choice of life over death summarizes the episode — it’s the joyful moments from those lives that triumph. |
 | | The Rabbit Hole team, living on the internet. From left: Andy Mills, Julia Longoria, Larissa Anderson, Sindhu Gnanasambandan and Kevin Roose. |
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The process of producing an audio series is both creative and destructive. Our reporting and tape are the building blocks, and we try to push them to tell the most human and emotionally complicated story possible. We build drafts and then we tear them apart. Over and over. |
After months of debating and rebuilding, we arrive at what I find to be one of the most joyful parts of our process. In our past lives, my colleagues and I would crowd around a computer to listen to an episode. We’d consider every second. Does that breath work? What about where the music comes in, and how it goes out? And at the end, we’d ask ourselves: Do all of these seconds — all of these small moments — add up to something bigger? A complicated feeling, a new thought or question? This process requires us to listen differently, and more deeply, than we do in the mundane minutes of our days. |
By the end of Rabbit Hole, our team was not crowded around a single computer. Instead, the frames of our screens were filled with palm trees, a Midwestern sunset, a 5-year-old. It’s harder to hear intricacies this way — refracted through a video call, the sound can warble and glitch and cut out. So we leaned closer and listened harder. |
Rabbit Hole has revealed the many ways the internet is changing us. And as we finish the series, I’m grateful that the internet also made it possible for us to work together to tell this story. |
Tuesday: The Minneapolis police officer whose tactics led to George Floyd’s death had a long record of complaints against him. Shaila Dewan asks: Why was he still on patrol? |
Wednesday: Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis explains why this moment “is not just about the eight minutes of time where our officer had his knee on George Floyd’s neck. This is about a hundred years’ worth of intentional segregation and institutionalized racism.” |
That’s it for The Daily newsletter. See you next week. |
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