Emily Guerin

Emily Guerin is a senior reporter at KPCC, the NPR station in Los Angeles, the host of the LAist Studios podcast California City. Follow her on Twitter here.

How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
I didn’t start making radio full time until I moved to North Dakota in 2014 to cover the oilfield for Prairie Public Radio. For five years before that, I’d been doing the bad economy hustle: alternating low and unpaid journalism jobs and internships with similarly low-paid gigs leading wilderness trips and teaching environmental education. 

So I had a weird resume, and I think I got the job because almost no one else was willing to move to North Dakota. But I got lucky there, because I had a wonderful editor and talented colleagues who taught me how to write for the ear, how to sound like myself while recording, and how to gather good tape. 

I realized that making radio just worked for my brain in a way that print did not. NPR-style radio stories felt like little form poems: I found the boundaries of the format freeing. I also liked the intimacy of it. I liked that gathering good tape required me to sit in people’s kitchens and hold a microphone six inches from their faces as I asked them personal questions about their lives. I liked physically hearing people’s voices, versus reading their quotes. I also liked that I got to put people on the radio who almost never were on the radio.

How did you become aware of California City, and why did you decide it was an excellent topic for a podcast?
When I first moved to LA I was the environment reporter at KPCC. It was summer 2016 and the drought was still going strong. I learned that this little city in the desert I’d never heard of before, California City, was having a really hard time saving water. So I went out there to find out why, and ended up learning that it had to do with the fact that this real estate developer had planned the city’s infrastructure for half a million people, but very few of them every came. Now, there were all these rusted water lines snaking beneath the empty desert, bursting spectacularly.

While I was there, someone I met mentioned two interesting things: a) many people thought the original developer, Nat Mendelsohn, had never intended to build a city, that he was a con artist trying to sell as much land as possible, and b) that salespeople with a company called Silver Saddle were still making a very similar sales pitch today.

 I went home and finished my little 4-minute story on California City’s water woes, and then I began googling Nat Mendelsohn. I read all about his dream to build a city from scratch, and how he’d gotten in trouble with the FTC for deceptive advertising and fraud.

Then I googled Silver Saddle. There was hardly anything written about them at all, so I ended up on their Yelp page. Lots of people left reviews saying they’d been tricked into buying a worthless piece of desert land there. Their stories were so similar to each other…and the pitch was so similar to Nat Mendelsohn’s. I couldn’t believe that this same dream had been sold for sixty years. It seemed insane. I knew immediately I couldn’t tell the story in four minutes. But there was no other option, because KPCC didn’t have a podcast team then. So I waited. A year and half later, producer Arwen Nicks was hired to create a podcast department, and during her first week in the office I pitched her the show.

Is California a true-crime podcast? How do you describe it?
Our marketing folks describe the show that way for promotional reasons, and it’s sort of true. There is a murder in the show, which allows us to call it true crime, but most of the real estate shenanigans I report on are allegations of civil fraud. To me, the show has more of a noir vibe. I call it an investigative narrative. 

I have noticed that several of the people you've interviewed have complimented you on your interview style. How would you describe it? How did you hone it?
There is a big difference between interviewing for broadcast radio and interviewing for a narrative longform podcast. When I first started making California City, I didn’t know the difference. But fortunately the producer I was working with, James Kim, did.

We’d do these 3-hour long interviews in which I spent a lot of time getting information and asking people how they felt about things. Because, in 4-minute long NPR pieces, that’s all you have time for: information and emotional reactions to that information. You don’t have time for stories.

At the end of these interviews, I’d turn to James and ask, “James, what did I miss?” And he’d be like, “Ok, tell me the story of the moment when you realized X. Where were you, what were you wearing, what was the weather like, etc.” And I realized, when I got back home and began writing, that that was the tape I was using. Because James had gotten them to speak in stories, which you need for long-form narrative podcasts, whereas I was just getting their reactions to things that had happened. From then on, I copied James.

If you were going to create another podcast, don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be?
This is kind of impossible right now because of coronavirus, but I’ve always wanted to make an audio reality show set inside an assisted living facility. My grandmother lived in one during the last few years of her life, and there was SO. MUCH. DRAMA. I’m also interested in making a fiction podcast (or maybe a TV show) that fictionalizes a few real things that happened during my time in North Dakota: a high-profile murder, corruption in a local sheriff’s department, and a huge oil spill. And I’m interested in making some kind of investigative memoir about this weird cult-like experience I had in New Zealand when I was 18.

Women in podcasting are constantly being criticized for their voices. What is your relationship with yours? How would you describe your voice?
It’s evolved a lot since I first got into radio. Back then it was higher, less confident, more formal. I was trying to mimic people on NPR. When I lived in North Dakota, I started experimenting with putting more of myself into my pieces: micing myself when I asked questions, including my reactions to things people said. But it wasn’t until writing and recording California City that I really developed what I consider my authentic voice. Arwen Nicks really pushed me to stop writing NPR-style scripts, which made the voicing sound more natural automatically. I think people often underestimate how much what you’re reading influences how you sound. If you write a formal, NPR-style script, you will read it that way.

What shows do you love?
I think S-Town is the greatest podcast of all time. It inspired my work on California City more than any other show. Running from Cops is a close second. I think Dan Taberski is one of the best writers in audio, and I love how he makes investigative reporting about shit that matters fun to listen to. That is so hard to do. 

I listened to the beginnings of a lot of podcasts when I was trying to figure out how to start California City. The first 15-30 seconds of any limited-run series are critical. I was especially impressed by how The Butterfly Effect and the first season of Serial begin.  

James Kim has gotten me into fiction shows. His show, Moonface, is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. I also love Passenger List. They’re both so fresh and original.

I’m a huge fan of Desert Oracle. I listened to it a lot while driving around on lonely Mojave Desert roads at night.

I love the direction Reply All has gone in recent years. It’s always a must-listen for me. And I really miss Another Round!

Thanks, Emily!