Diary of a Bad Year

Why do we do this job when we know we could die?  The central question of this piece is provocative and even more so coming from veteran war correspondent Kelly McEvers.  After giving a presentation about her work at the Transom Radio Workshop, someone asked Kelly how she was doing.  How she was really doing.  That was a complex question in 2012, a year in which six reporters were killed covering the Arab Spring and the wars and insurrections in Syria, Libya, and across the Middle East. That question set McEvers on a journey of hard questions, using a journalistic approach to examine the emotional toll of being in “The Tribe,” an informal club of foreign correspondents and war reporters. We hear from scientists that study trauma among journalists, family members of reporters that have been killed in their work, and McEvers’ own husband (also a member of The Tribe).  After an intense journey through the psychology of war reporters, we hear McEvers wrestle with her own choices and deliver an ending that is truly astounding.  Diary of a Bad Year is also, in many ways, the origin story of NPR’s Embedded,  which in turn has fundamentally shaped the sound of documentary podcasts.  In 2016 when NPR launched Embedded, created and hosted by McEvers, the announcement explained that the show would explore “emotional ideas not common in the regular news cycle. Reporters will say "I." They will admit they are scared or confused. They will wonder what to make of something they're experiencing for the very first time.”  This was a departure for NPR, which still maintains a robust stylistic code for how journalists present their stories.  While this approach was common in public radio, podcast listeners responded to a more intimate experience.  It was a leap for NPR to embrace the style, and it required a pioneering voice like Kelly McEvers to set the new standard.  Indeed, her approach in Diary of a Bad Year can be heard in foundational podcasts like Serial, and has led NPR to other hit podcasts like White Lies, Code Switch, and Invisibilia.  In that way, Diary of a Bad Year is a formative work.  It’s an early flare from McEvers to test out a simple idea: will listeners understand that a journalist is also a person?  It’s akin to an audio version of Joan Didion’s packing list, making clear that to get the story you will inherently get the person chasing it.