Drinks for Five: Ira Glass, Zoe Chace, Jonathan Eig, Astead Herndon

Brian puts four journalists together in a room, gives them drinks, and starts rolling tape. Their only instructions: show up with questions for each other and be ready to talk candidly about the challenges in their jobs. Foremost on their minds: Why do people even share their stories with journalists in the first place?

You can watch this whole episode on YouTube [INSERT LINK]! And subscribe to the Question Everything newsletter too. 

You can hear Ira Glass and Zoe Chace on “This American Life”. 

Astead Herndon hosts “The Run Up” for the New York Times. 

Jonathan Eig’s book about Martin Luther King, Jr. is called “King: A Life”. 

Since drinking and talking off the cuff doesn’t always result in the most precise utterances, here are a few corrections and clarifications from our fact-checker: In Astead’s story about the anti-immigrant group in St. Cloud, Minnesota, the quote was “These people aren’t coming from Norway,” not “Sweden.” The book Jonathan mentioned about adolescent cellphone addiction, by Jonathan Haidt, is called The Anxious Generation. There were a few people we were unable to track down to confirm the details of the stories told about them: the two police officers Jonathan mentioned, and the source’s family member who Astead said complained to him about his reporting.  

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

Reporter Brian Reed re-examines everything about journalism, the profession he thought he knew. In the middle of making his second hit podcast, Brian got sued. Accused. Told the biggest story of his career — the Peabody Award-winning series S-Town — wasn’t journalism. Which meant he had to spend years proving that it was. Obsessing over the question, “What is journalism, anyway?”