Three audio journalists with different specialties discuss shaping an episode that captured the collapse through a single voice.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Some episodes of “The Daily” come together over weeks. In the case of Monday’s episode, it took a weekend. Responding to the rapid fall of Afghanistan’s government to the Taliban, the podcast featured the visceral reactions of one resident of Kabul as she was witnessing the collapse of the country around her, day by day. (She was referred to only as the initial R., because she feared retaliation by the Taliban.) To shed light on the making of this episode — and the many choices and areas of expertise that combine to shape one show — three staff members talked about their roles: Lynsea Garrison, one of the producers; Larissa Anderson, an editor; and Chris Wood, a sound engineer who works in London. Their responses have been edited. For several weeks, a team of producers had been looking for voices of people trying to leave Afghanistan — from former military interpreters, to people rushing to apply for a priority visa, to others who aren’t eligible for those visas. I asked Fatima Faizi, one of our reporters in Kabul, if she knew anyone we should talk with. She mentioned R. a couple of weeks ago. I talked with R. over the phone for an hour or so, to learn more about her background. We were supposed to talk again in a longer conversation, but then the situation there really started to deteriorate. I realized that she would have zero time to talk in a recorded interview, so I sent her a voice memo just suggesting that this could be a way for us to talk and document her experience. It was a pretty spontaneous idea, and she agreed by sending me a voice memo back, and then we continued the conversation, with her documenting what she was experiencing on the ground in a very fast-moving situation. I wasn’t in constant communication with other producers about this until Sunday, when we all listened to the voice memos together and thought they were powerful enough to sustain an episode. For me, listening to each voice memo just conveyed how urgent this situation was. And, when she messaged me about Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad falling, I was at a loss for words, just at her pain, desperation and her anger at feeling betrayed by the world. I knew after those memos that she had given us something special. As we were finishing the episode in the early hours of Monday morning, after the Taliban had taken the capital, R. was still sending me voice memos, so, at the very end, we added her most recent updates to keep her experience as fresh as possible. There were many other people who also shared their updates with me over the weekend.
