All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang is a public radio nerd through and through. Twenty years ago, she walked away from a promising law career to immerse herself in the world of audio journalism. Chang has reported for WNYC and NPR’s Planet Money and she became co-host of ATC in 2018. Through it all, Chang has remained a true believer in public radio’s ability to create enlightening and passionately crafted stories, and in the importance of the NPR network in American civic life.
Ryan Heinsius: I’m wondering what your public radio origin story is. Did you have a moment that was a specific revelation as far as NPR is concerned?
Ailsa Chang: It was a season. It was fall of 2006. So, I don’t know how much of my backstory you know. I used to be a lawyer, Ryan, and I was a very miserable, unhappy lawyer at a law firm in San Francisco. And I knew I didn’t want to stay there after about five years of legal practice, so I just quit cold with no plan at all.
And I bummed around San Francisco for a while where the law firm was and where I was living at the time, just kind of listless and depressed. And I thought, “Okay, I need to get out of the apartment because this is just getting so pathetic. I have nobody to talk to, nowhere to go.” So I signed up for an unpaid internship at KQED, the NPR member station in San Francisco, not because I thought I’m going to get into public radio, but just because I was a casual listener of public radio up until then and I thought that the people on air sounded like engaged, smart, down-to-earth good people. And I just wanted to hang out with a small community like that while I figured out my life.
So I show up and I’m one of the interns for this show there called Forum with Michael Krasny and I’m booking guests. And that is when I start discovering the interview, like as someone who’s a booker. I have to pre-interview these guests, I have to figure out what is it that they’re passionate about and want to talk about; learning how to ask the right questions to coax them out of their shells and get them to reveal their most interesting bits. And I loved that exchange and I thought, “Huh, I never would have thought, but I kind of like doing the interview.” So, it was the course of autumn 2006—my God, that’s almost two decades ago at this point—that I thought, “I think I want to do this.”
You know, we’re so lucky to do what we do, Ryan. We, we get this like free ticket to sit in the front row of any story we want to, we have a free ticket to call up anybody we want to and ask them why they believe what they believe, why do they do what they do, what are they passionate about. I think it’s a real privilege to be able to do that and to do it through human conversation, right? That’s what makes radio different from, say, print or even TV.
Just that singular human voice talking to another singular human voice, that exchange, that human connection, makes what we do so unique.
I just love it so much. There’s nothing else in this world I would rather do.
RH: From a reporting standpoint, how does the broader NPR culture produce such high-quality journalism day in and day out? It’s rather remarkable to me, actually.
AC: Well, okay. I think it’s actually such a simple idea. I have never in my entire life been surrounded by more earnest nerds as I have in public radio. And I’m saying this as a former lawyer, right? I’ve been surrounded by smart people for many, many years. Let me just unpack what I mean by earnest nerds. And maybe a better adjective is “sincere.” People, my colleagues, we take what we do so seriously. We’re all nerds. We’re very curious-minded people. We love to learn, and we love to learn about a vast range of things, which I just love. We’re quirky like that. But we take the task at hand so seriously to get it right, to make sure that our reporting is fair and balanced and neutral.
We go out of our way to interrogate any biases that we may have as humans, to make sure that we are checking those biases, to make sure that there are layers of editing in our content. When we’re thinking of story ideas, when we’re going around the pitch table, we’re constantly in conversation: Did we over-cover that? Have we under-covered that? Did we cover it with the right voices? Have we under-covered certain voices in that story that we are over-covering? So, we’re constantly trying to do better, and I love that. That, to me, is the central engine of NPR, a bunch of very dedicated, authentic, hardworking nerds who’re just trying to do the absolute best they can to give you, the listeners, the best, highest-quality reporting.
RH: I love that. Now the public media’s federal funding has been eliminated dozens of NPR member stations and many more rural and tribal stations are really in danger of going dark. What do we as a country stand to lose if these stations are no longer functional?
AC: The really tragic thing is that a lot of these stations are in, as you’ve mentioned, rural areas, areas where there are news deserts, where public media has been, if not one of the few sources of news, the only source of news.
And also keep in mind that we provide another service. In addition to disseminating journalism as public media, we also give a lot of these communities emergency broadcast signals so that there can be emergency alerts in situations of natural disasters or other very urgent situations. That is a huge, very critical resource that some of these communities might end up losing if these member stations go dark. Bear in mind, we have as NPR headquarters, we’ve set aside something like $8 million to help prop up some member stations that foresee that they will have to shutter because they have lost this federal funding in the near future. That $8 million will not last very long, so we don’t know what the long-term plan will be.
But our network—I mean, we were just talking about this earlier, Ryan—our network is so valuable and so unique in the way that it allows for expansive and also localized coverage, right?
We have hundreds of member stations. Correct me if I’m wrong, maybe like over 1,000 broadcast signals across this country.
But those hundreds of member stations allow for public media, for NPR, this network, to cover very local stories, right, like the Grand Canyon fires, to national stories like what’s happening in D.C. with this current administration, to global stories like what’s happening in Gaza and in Ukraine and in China.
We are able to give people in even rural, sometimes remote communities a window into their locality, their nation, and the world that they inhabit. And, and that’s a very special thing that we can do because our network is so expansive and, and, and simultaneously so localized.
RH: The media landscape at the moment is so fractured—social media has become such a prominent news source for so many people. Legacy news sources maybe don’t have the sway that they once did. But how does NPR best make the argument that it continues to produce this high-quality journalism and remains more relevant than ever?
AC: Because people need fair, neutral, thoroughly reported news. As the news landscape is getting more and more fractured and more and more siloed, that has only put a big spotlight on how important it is to get, uh, fair and balanced reporting, right? Because if you exist in a silo of news and you are only feeding upon a very limited set of viewpoints and the news is either completely false or very slanted, you’re losing out on critical information that you might need to operate in your day-to-day life, that you might need to cast a vote, that you might need to just navigate the current economy, right? And so, my argument for why NPR and this vast member station network must continue to exist is because the electorate needs that. We are dedicated to the mission of disseminating truthful, unbiased, fair, thorough reporting so that people can make accurate decisions about their everyday lives. And I’ll even go a step further. Because we are in radio, because we traffic in the human conversation, we traffic in human connection, we continually remind people how important it is to come together and literally have a conversation about divisive topics all over this country. And every once in a while when I listen to two people who initially disagree come to a meeting of the minds, or at least like a little glimmer of a, “Oh. Hmm. I guess that’s a good point,” right? Like we’ve, we’ve all heard those moments on, on public radio where you can hear one guest or maybe the host one side of a conversation acknowledging an unexpected truth that the other side has just uttered. Moments like that are important because they remind everyone that as long as we are willing to pause and listen and keep an open mind, we can find more commonality with each other than difference. And I think that’s really important for just our social fabric, really.
RH: Well, Ailsa what a pleasure it’s been to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.
AC: Oh, you’re so welcome. Thank you so much, Ryan. It was such a joy to speak with you.
