Tessa Kramer and Ellen Horne
Tessa Kramer and Ellen Horne are the host and executive producer of Admissible, respectively. Follow Tessa on Twitter here. Follow Ellen on Twitter here. Follow Admissible on Twitter here.
Describe Admissible: Shreds of Evidence in 10 words or less.
TK: An investigation into misconduct at the Virginia state crime lab
EH: Erin Brockovich meets In The Dark
TK: That’s way better
What has your relationship been like as reporter & host (and podcast newcomer?)
TK: When Ellen and I met, I’d been working as a reporter/producer on documentaries and podcasts for years, but this was my first time hosting a podcast (and I found the prospect somewhat terrifying). While we were pitching this story around, I was working as a reporter/producer on a series that Ellen was hosting, so I took a lot of mental notes on what it means to be a host, both in terms of being out front as the public voice of a series and playing a leading role on a team and making big production decisions.
Ellen, can you speak to the importance of mentorship in podcasting, especially for narrative projects like this?
EH: I was profoundly lucky to have a mentor like Robert Krulwich. In the first few years, we fought frequently (and sometimes bitterly!) about what we were making. The stakes felt desperately high. It took me years to be confident enough in my own work to even think of him as my mentor…because it was hard to admit that I needed one. He is still my most trusted mentor (...and we can laugh about those early story battles.) Now, a few decades after we first met, I see his influence all over my career: the way I think of character and voice, the play and conversationality of my interviews, the drive to create emotional depth...truly the list is hella long and I am forever indebted to him. But perhaps his influence is most evident in my habit of cultivating relationships with up-and-coming journalists, like Tessa. (In addition to being the executive producer of Admissible, I am a professor of journalism at NYU and director of a new grad program in Podcasting and Audio Reportage.) Tessa is a powerhouse journalist and host. I’ve learned so much from Tessa. She has that killer balance of being a big picture thinker along with a relentless attention to detail. And, best of all, she’s a total delight as a collaborator. We’ve built a team together that, I hope, will thrive for years to come, which can welcome in and train newcomers. Tessa has so much to teach other journalists. We need more rigorous and sensitive reporting in the world.
Tessa's background is largely in TV and film. Why was audio the best medium for telling this story?
TK: Funny you should ask because initially, my reporting partner Sophie Bearman and I thought this would be a short documentary. We even filmed our first few interviews. But we quickly realized that there wasn’t a lot to capture visually. This is a complicated story with a lot of players (a lot of deceased players) and most of the “action” takes place in the past. But the story of uncovering the story – how our sense of the narrative was slowly being turned upside down throughout our reporting process – that felt very active. A narrative podcast can be a great medium to capture that kind of discovery.
What made you personally gravitate toward this story?
TK: At first, I was really interested in the stories of the 13 men who’d been exonerated. At the time, I was tutoring at a federal prison in Brooklyn, and growing increasingly interested in people’s experiences within the prison system. One detail that caught my eye was that a few of the exonerees met and became friends in prison. They were falsely convicted of similar crimes, with no way of knowing they’d later have their names cleared thanks to the same forensic scientist, Mary Jane Burton. Of course, the stories of the exonerees are still a huge part of the series, but after we met Gina Demas, the whistleblower, the focus of our investigation shifted to Burton and her work at the lab.
EH: Right away I was struck by the scale of this story. Mary Jane Burton likely worked thousands of cases. As we had bigger questions about her, it seemed as if we were on top of an iceberg. No spoilers here, but I’ll just say, our questions got much bigger than one forensic scientist, so you can imagine how exponential the potential harm might be.
The series touches on some challenging topics (sexual assault, racial bias, and systemic failures); how did your team approach these topics in an ethical manner and did any challenges come up along the way?
EH: We were well into the reporting phase by the time the Dart Centers’ guidelines for trauma-informed reporting were published – and they are a fabulous resource. The way that Tessa and Sophie had conducted the interviews with the sexual assault victims was very much in line with that thinking. While in post-production, we relied on three things: thorough fact-checking, sensitivity listeners, and many rounds of iterative edits.
Tessa, you reported on this story for about four years. What is a tip you would give to someone interested in working on an investigation of this size?
TK: I’ll give you a few. First and foremost, this process taught me that everything is probably going to take longer and be a lot harder than you expect, so it’s good to come prepared for that and ready to learn along the way.
Second, if it feels like people don’t want to talk to you about something, you’re probably onto something.
And third, I highly recommend staying organized from day one. At the beginning of reporting, you don’t know if it’s going anywhere. You don’t know if you’re going to end up with two hours of tape, or 200 hours, so I suggest you assume it’s the latter and stay organized accordingly (e.g. log your tape as you go, back up your files, put links to your sources in research documents, etc.) There were big breaks in that four years – periods of time where I had to take on other full-time work until we got funding to complete reporting and production – and it was a lifesaver to have everything organized when we finally got picked up.
How does this series differ from the kind of true crime we have been seeing as of late?
TK: I don’t even know if this series fits in the genre of true crime – but it’s definitely about crime! One fundamental difference is that many true crime stories focus on a particular case, and often, trying to solve that case. From the outset, the focus of our series was something different. Our story took us into the inner workings of a state crime lab, shining a light on one of the key building blocks of so many cases: forensic evidence. I do want to say that I love a lot of the true crime that's out there! There are so many true crime podcasts and documentaries that inspired me to do this work and have had a huge impact on exposing injustices in the criminal legal system (Serial, In The Dark, The Central Park Five, The Staircase, to name a few).
What do people not see about the behind the scenes that go into a narrative, investigative podcast of this caliber? Who are the unsung heros and behind the scenes folks that helped make this podcast what it was?
TK: I could go on and on about the people working hard behind the scenes, especially our producer Dana Bialek and our fact-checker Chloe Wynne, both of whom played huge roles in carrying this series across the finish line. But one person who is essential in a narrative podcast is the editor, who basically figures out how to turn a big, sprawling story into a compelling, coherent 12 episodes (which is different from an editor in TV/film, by the way). If all goes well, listeners may not even think about the role of the editor because the final product feels like the only way the story could have been told, but our structure actually went through a few big evolutions. So, I’ll give my unsung hero award to our editor Danielle Elliot (and a hat tip to Ellen who also contributed editing).
EH: VPM’s Gavin Wright gets my nomination for unsung hero! He’s a producer for VPM (a Virginia-based public media station) and Gavin has been an all-in Team Admissible frontline worker! Can’t imagine having made this without him. He’s a Swiss Army Knife, helping to coordinate a lot of moving parts and keeping everyone talking to each other, and aware of deadlines.
A running symbol or metaphor you refer to is "Pandora's Box" and at the end of the series you talk about the two interpretations of hope being left in the box. Now with the series fully out, where do you stand on that interpretation?
TK: I was hoping no one would ask me that. I’m no Greek scholar but I choose to believe that after releasing all the evils into the world, Pandora saves hope for humanity.
EH: I’d never heard this before Tessa put this in a late episode 12 draft. If sloth and greed and whatnot were released into the world, but “hope” was not, I figure that means humanity doesn’t have it. I’ve read that the word the Greek poetic Hesiod uses is “Elpis” (Ἔλπις) which is more like ‘expectation’ than ‘hope.’ Maybe what wasn’t given to humanity was more certainty about outcomes – more of an ability to see the future. While we worked on episode 12, which is about the need for stronger reforms in forensic science, I thought a lot about “hope” and what it means to have it. And I kept thinking about the Czech playwright, poet and president Václav Havel who described hope as “an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
What’s a podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
TK: S-Town is my all time favorite. I’ve listened to it several times.
EH: This American Life is inspiring. Not only has it spawned a movement of narrative audio, but week-after-week they are still making some of the best work out there.
What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
TK: I hope I’m wrong and lots of people know about both of these podcasts, but I absolutely loved Chameleon: Wild Boys and You Didn't See Nothin.
EH: Rough Translation The writing makes that show. It’s a show with a lot of heart that always delivers satisfying insight and surprising voices.
Anything I didn’t ask you that you want to say?
EH: We are hard at work on season two! We spent a lot of the first season in the crime lab, and in this next season, we’re going to focus a bit more on evidence in the courtroom. The stories we are looking at have some big juicy narratives, but rather than asking "whodunnit" we will continue to examine thorny questions about the inner workings of the criminal legal system.
Thanks, Tessa and Ellen!