Screen shot, Another Round
If you’ve listened in to BuzzFeed’s “Another Round With Heben and Tracy,” you might look forward to Tracy Clayton’s super-bad jokes or Heben Nigatu’s live-list reading or that moment near the end of the show when they both sound pretty drunk. For me, one frequent highlight comes when they talk about the media.
Clayton and Nigatu are writers at BuzzFeed and co-hosts of the podcast. Here’s how they described the podcast as it launched:
Another Round is basically happy hour with friends you haven’t met yet. Grab a drink and yell along with your preferred electronic device as we talk about everything from pop culture to squirrels to racism to sexism to male strippers to literally everything.
If you’re a journalist, some of the talk at happy hour includes finding out what’s behind a piece, how a headline was chosen and what it’s really like to cover a story. Here are five moments for the media from “Another Round,” (with apologies for the cliched list-in-a-story-about-BuzzFeed approach.)
Episode 1: Clayton and Nigatu interviewed writer Durga Chew-Bose about her essay “How I Learned To Stop Erasing Myself.”
Chew-Bose said: “I have to say, the most exhausting thing for brown women who write, and what will ultimately burn us all out, is that we’re actually expected to explain things to white audiences.”
Episode 4: Gene Demby from NPR’s Code Switch spoke about “public radio voice,” the whiteness of podcasting and audiences the media is missing.
“There’s space for sort of different voices and different perspectives, and this is a thing that media in general needs to fix, it’s not specific to public radio,” Demby said, “but it’s a thing that obviously is close to my heart…”
Episode 7: In this episode, Nigatu and Clayton spoke about the heaviness of dealing with the news. They asked some BuzzFeed colleagues how they take care of themselves while following difficult stories. Most of them spoke about disconnecting from the Internet and social media. BuzzFeed Associate Community Editor Michael Blackmon has social-media-free days, sometimes with a movie.
“The last time I did this I went to go see ‘Cinderella,'” he said, “which I really enjoyed.”
Episode 8: In this episode, writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spoke about her work and the role she plays in choosing headlines.
“I don’t understand how the title isn’t a part of the story,” she said. “I’ve yet to understand that when people are like, ‘well, they’re gonna pick the title.'”
Kaadzi Ghansah said she pulls her pieces from those places.
Episode 13: There’s a quiz in this live show featuring writer Roxane Gay at WNYC’s Women’s Podcast Festival. It’s called “Is This The Name Of A White Dude In Public Radio Or Just Some Syllables I Mashed Together?” Here’s one question from the quiz, (and sorry if I misspelled the fake names):
“Greg Hackenhort, Tanner Sherpnserp or David Folkenflik?” Nigatu asked.
“OK,” Clayton said, “I feel very confident in this one. It’s Greg whatever you said. It is. Don’t try to tell me it’s not.”
