In 2018, journalist Brian Reed faced a lawsuit over his most famous project. City Sa podcast he hosted and executive produced, had become an almost instant sensation the previous year, breaking ratings records, earning high praise, and sparking debates about issues of consent and privacy for its deceased subject. Then the Peabody Award-winning series was hit with a lawsuit from the estate of the podcast subject alleging a violation of Alabama’s right of publicity law.
“To win their case, [the complainants] had to argue that City S it wasn’t journalism, legally,” Reed says. “And it put me in a position where I had to think about what journalism is in a very basic way that I had never done before.”
The lawsuit was eventually settled in 2020, with the executor declaring that the estate no longer had any issues with the podcast. But Reed continued to ponder questions that arose during the saga. The experience helped spark his latest project, an in-depth analysis of the state (and flaws) of journalism today. Put everything into questionDebuting Thursday on KCRW, the series delves into the gray areas of the profession: ethical dilemmas, the pressures journalists face, individual codes of conduct and whether this type of nonfiction storytelling can make a difference at a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low.
Reed begins the podcast by turning the spotlight on himself and his most famous work. In the pilot episode, Reed talks to one of the City SHis harshest critic, Australian journalist Gay Alcorn, called his podcast “morally indefensible” in a 2017 interview. Guardian piece. The two discuss Alcorn's concern for consent after City SThe subject of , John B. McLemore, committed suicide early in the reporting, the decisions made behind the scenes to discuss intimate details of McLemore's life, and why this story of a private citizen seemed worth telling.
“It's not a mea culpa for City S,” Reed says of the conversation, adding that he still feels “comfortable and proud” of the work he and his team have done. “That said, it was enlightening to see how two journalists who have been doing this for a while can look at a story and approach it so differently.”
Subsequent episodes address how top journalists do their jobs in a landscape marked by political partisanship, distrust, and the prevalence of misinformation. In a roundtable of journalists over drinks at a Brooklyn wine bar in one episode, This American Life Host Ira Glass recalls that when he first started out in journalism, he thought that if he presented the facts to news consumers, he could convince them one way or another and spark change. Now, “I feel like what I saw wasn’t true,” he says.
In another episode, Reed interviews Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman, who helped break the story of widespread NSA surveillance based on Edward Snowden's leaked documents in 2013. Gellman left journalism earlier this year to take a job at NYU Law's Brennan Center for Justice. “He basically had at least a little bit of a crisis of faith in the efficacy of truth in our time and in the ability of journalists to make a difference,” Reed says. Future reporting will focus on Tangle News founder Isaac Saul, whose newsletter Reed says has helped American families bridge political divides; and two Alabama newspaper employees who were arrested for an article they published in 2023.
In her conversations and reporting so far, Reed has found that some guiding principles of journalism are widely shared, including accuracy, transparency, accountability, and minimizing harm. But other values, like objectivity and impartiality, are more controversial: “In some places they’re sacrosanct, and in other places they’re seen as ridiculous or even harmful, certainly counterproductive.”
Reed ultimately wants to create a space where journalists “can be introspective about their work, open to criticism and self-evaluation,” as he states in the first episode of Put everything into questionAsked how the attempt to get journalists to accept this kind of self-reflection has gone so far, Reed says, “The jury’s still out.” He adds, “We’ve had enough victories to make me feel encouraged.”
One group Reed has reached out to in particular are journalists he admires. He’s been surprised by the sentiments he’s encountered as a result. “There’s something very real and in a way important happening right now in journalism, but it’s deeper than I thought,” he says. There are some sources he’s long considered “high priests.”[s] of journalism” who tell him they have no idea what to make of the current moment. Reed says, “It's both perversely reassuring, I think, to know that people I respect and who have thought about this longer than I have are also very worried and lost, but also worrying.”
The podcast is set to release every two weeks, with 26 episodes in its first year, and Reed hopes it will become a long-running show with many more episodes to come. It's the first title from his new company Placement Theory, which he co-founded with colleagues This American Life veteran Robyn Semien. Her mission is to incubate innovative, forward-thinking audio stories. One way she aims to do that: “Every story we’re working on is told by a reporter or an anchor who is the only one who can tell that story, or certainly that version of it,” Reed says.
So why was Reed the right person to tell this story, to question what ails journalism today? “This show is driven by my own midlife, midcareer existential crisis about what my profession is,” Reed says. “It comes from a real uncertainty and fear and confusion that I have about this career that I’ve dedicated my life to.” He adds, “This show, the way it’s told, the lens it has on the world, comes, in a lot of ways, from my own experience.”
Put everything into question
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