7 a.m. Wake up when our youngest, Anya, wakes up. Check Twitter. The site is a pretty central part of my work, in terms of synthesizing the sheer amount of information that I need to do “All In.” Of course, I tell myself it’s for work, but it also sometimes feels like I work for a tobacco company and I’m smoking three packs a day, telling myself, “I have to be in touch with the company’s product!”

9 a.m. Start to plan the week ahead. I don’t really go into weeks with any grand themes or narratives. One thing I’ve learned the hard way is you can’t get too attached to stories or set pieces in this news environment because things keep happening: It’s more like an improv than a three-act play.

I do, obviously, have a bead on the main stories of the week, like Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and the midterm elections. I also have a sense of building narratives: the idea that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation had provided a big electoral boost to Republican candidates and the conservative meme that the left had been taken over by “mobs.” I often think about how we’re telling stories in relation to those larger narratives, particularly when I think they’re baseless or wrong or dangerous.

10 a.m. Continue to read up about climate, the history of the U.S. Senate, and a new intellectual history of emotions and politics, called “Nervous States,” that my agent gave me. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters but don’t really read them; a producer assembles a note every morning that’s like an in-house newsletter that I read instead.

12:30 p.m. Head to work. Commute on the F train is blessedly smooth. Listen to the final episode of Slow Burn’s second season. (I don’t listen to music, actually. When I’m alone, I listen to podcasts.)

1:30 p.m. Meet with staff to plan for tonight’s show. “All In” is divided into segments: A block, B block and so on. For each one, a segment producer will start with a bulleted list of “ingredients”: news developments, audio and other bits of data. After running through the list, the producer uses a phone to record me while I talk through my sense of how the segment could go.

My colleagues will offer their ideas about order, narrative arc and other things we may have missed and omitted. Once we’ve talked through the introduction, we discuss who the guests are and what we want to do in the interview: what questions we want to explore, what conversational areas we want to bring up, and pieces of sound or quotes or data that we might throw in. We do that for each segment, usually in the same order as they’ll air. Then the segment producers begin writing scripts, which I review a few hours before the show begins.



By J. K. TROTTER

Source link