From a New York Times story by Reggie Ugwu headlined “A Validating Prize for ‘This American Life’: The radio show and podcast won the first Pulitzer in the audio reporting category”:
Like all of Ira Glass’s favorite stories, this one starts with an obsession. Last spring, Nadia Reiman, a supervising producer of “This American Life,” the influential radio program and podcast of which Glass is host and co-creator, went down the rabbit hole of a new Trump immigration policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico.”. . .
The episode of “This American Life” born in response, “The Out Crowd,” made history on Monday when it won a Pulitzer Prize — the first-ever recipient in a new category for audio reporting. The award is a milestone not only for Glass’s program, now in its 25th year, but also for the entire medium, which has been energized over the last decade by the emergence of podcasting as a force in journalism and culture. . . .
The winning episode, released last November, took listeners inside the lives of individuals on both sides of the Remain in Mexico policy. Among them were government workers haunted by their role in carrying out the program, and a Honduran man who was kidnapped over the course of reporting. . . .
“I think how we treat people who we don’t consider to be citizens and who have no real political power says something about who we are as a nation,” Reiman said.
Glass added: “As a journalist, you’re always in a battle to get people to pay attention to things that you wish they knew more about. The Left and the Right have very clear narratives on this topic. I think what was interesting for us was to get in there and say, ‘Here’s what it’s really like.’”. . .
At the beginning, the show, retitled “This American Life” the following year, was mostly a quirky compendium of slice-of-life audio diaries and handmade field reports — slacker cousins of the stately news and human interest stories that had come to dominate public radio.
Glass, by then a 17-year broadcast veteran who’d worked at the NPR fixtures “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” was chasing a more narrative style of radio that had faded with the advent of television.
“I was very interested in telling stories that unfolded like a little movie — with characters and scenes and an arc,” he said. “That kind of thing was widely understood to be one of the special powers of this medium in the ’20s and ’30s, but for some reason not many people were doing it anymore.”. . .
As the show’s audience has grown, it has branched into other forms of media, including film production and a two-season television experiment with Showtime. It has also helped foster an entire ecosystem of narrative-driven podcasts (two under its own umbrella, “Serial” and “S-Town,” and several others created by alumni, like “StartUp,” “Invisibilia” and “Heavyweight”) that Glass described as the show’s true legacy. . . .
As for where the show will go in the future, he had only one mandate: that the staff continue to be led by its obsessions. “The show is good if people are following their amusement and their curiosity,” he said. “I just don’t like getting bored.”
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