Editorial leadership / Audio storytelling / Audience strategy
After the Fact
The podcast was the experiment. The team was the proof.
At Pew, credibility was everything. And for good reason. The organization's reputation rested on the quality of its research, the rigor of its analysis, and the trust it had earned over decades. But that commitment to getting things right could also make it difficult to try something new. Teams worked in silos, decisions moved slowly, and the fear of getting something wrong often outweighed the possibility of doing something better.
I came in believing that great storytelling required something different: multidisciplinary teams, shared creative ownership, and the freedom to experiment, learn, and adapt. Not at the expense of credibility, but in service of making credible work more accessible, engaging, and useful.
After the Fact became our opportunity to put that belief to the test. We took an underperforming podcast and used it to demonstrate what could happen when editors, producers, videographers, designers, and digital strategists stopped thinking only about their individual deliverables and started thinking together about the whole story.
The result wasn't just a better podcast. It was proof that a more collaborative, connected way of working could succeed, even inside an organization that had good reasons to be cautious about change.
The podcast had relied on short seasons released months apart. Each episode passed through specialized teams and layers of review, while listeners had to rediscover the show with every new season. We needed a steadier rhythm and a team that could make creative decisions together.
The opportunity was to connect research from across Pew’s programs through stories people wanted to hear, without sacrificing the rigor behind them. That meant changing both the publishing model and the way the team worked.
I built support for a cross-functional production team with shared ownership of the work. Instead of handing off a finished podcast episode from one specialty to the next, we started asking together: What is the strongest story here? Could field reporting also become video, photography, or another piece of the larger story? People brought ideas beyond their job descriptions, and the team could move faster without treating editorial standards as negotiable.
Building the experience
One team. More ways to tell the story.
The podcast gave us a way to test a different kind of editorial production: one cross-functional team making decisions together, rather than a sequence of specialized handoffs. Editors, producers, designers, videographers, and digital strategists began thinking about the audience and the entire story from the start.
That shift changed the questions we asked in the field and in planning meetings. A reporting trip was no longer only about capturing audio for an episode. We considered what video, photography, short-form clips, and related research could add, and how one theme could connect insights from multiple Pew programs. The result was a recognizable show with a steadier rhythm and more ways for people to discover the work.
Visual identity
A show people could recognize.
We refreshed the podcast's visual system so episodes were immediately identifiable across Pew.org, social channels and video, while still feeling like part of Pew.
Editorial approach
More voices. More dimensions.
We moved beyond a single interviewer and guest, introducing multiple hosts, correspondents, field sound and interwoven interviews to make episodes more human and narratively rich.
Audience discovery
Meet audiences where they are.
We brought episodes and original clips to YouTube, Instagram and other platforms, helping busy audiences discover the podcast where they already spent time.What changed
A rhythm audiences could return to.
We moved from occasional five-part seasons to a predictable biweekly release schedule, producing 24 episodes in FY25 versus 13 the previous year. About 27% of listens within 90 days came after an episode’s first week, suggesting that episodes continued finding audiences beyond launch day. Just as importantly, the experiment helped build confidence in connected storytelling across other Pew initiatives.
The people behind the work
I helped set a new direction for After the Fact, but the podcast became what it is because talented people took that direction and ran with it. Dan LeDuc, Emily Chow, Devin Gallagher, Giuliana Pence, Demetra Aposporos, Julia Barnes, Magen Wetmore, Gaby Escala, Mike Dechant, Antonio Villagronga, Benny Martinez, Gabriela Domenzain, and many other contributors, voices, and creative thinkers made the work their own.