How to craft a podcast
Walkley Award-winning journalist Rachael Brown knows a thing or two about telling a good story. Her true-crime podcast Trace reviews the 38-year-old cold case of Maria James, who was murdered in a back room of her Melbourne bookshop.
Words by Rachael Brown
RESEARCH YOUR STORY
16 months of research went into the first four episodes of Trace, much of it done around my actual job as an ABC radio current affairs reporter. I was interviewing victims of crime and survivors of sexual abuse in my spare time. In any spare second and on weekends I was teaching myself about DNA, researching which Italian town hall I’d need to visit to access certain birth records and trawling through ancestry databases.
It was a pretty miserable 2016, all while watching mates post social media photos of fun dinners, dates and holidays. But the deeper I waded into this dark story, the more evident it was that meticulous research would be crucial to shore up my interviewees’ claims. It was all-consuming, but necessary.
Two tips. First, get a counsellor early, so the darkness doesn’t fester. I started having horrific nightmares because I never gave my mind a break from the evil I was dealing with. Second, have a touchstone, something that keeps you going on the miserable days. Mine was the James brothers, because I’d promised them I’d help solve this. They hadn’t given up, so I wasn’t about to.
REPORT
The reporting legwork was literally that, wearing down boot-leather. The generation of people I was trying to track down aren’t easily found on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, so this meant finding addresses on federal rolls and landing on doorsteps armed with a smile and cake, hoping to find whoever’s holding the missing puzzle piece. I conducted around 50 interviews that didn’t make it to air, but which were crucial in corroborating historical events and testimonies. I made many trips to the State Library to dig into microfiche and spent countless hours trawling through coronial documents, newspaper cuttings and victim statements.
The most humbling thing about making Trace was the trust that crime victims and abuse survivors placed in me. Remember, it’s not your story, it’s their story, you’re just helping them tell it. So go gently, imagine how you’d feel in their shoes and try to empower them by letting them steer the chat if possible.
FIND YOUR ANGLE
The interactivity added pressure to the production process, but it was crucial episodes were kept flexible, so the podcast could evolve as it went to air. For example, in Episode Four, detectives’ admission to Mark James about a DNA bungle meant an eleventh hour scramble – re-interviewing, re-scripting and re-cutting.
We had to learn to roll with the punches, logistically and emotionally. When I learned of the DNA bungle, it lifted and broke my heart in the same microsecond. It meant one of the priests could still be the killer, but also, it might never be able to be proven. It meant all suspects were back in the frame. I thought, after all the sweat and nightmares and brave interviewees pouring their hearts out, how can this be the end? I didn’t want Trace's answer to be ‘there can't be an answer’. But this development that blindsided me, heartened Mark James. It helped explain something he’d never been able to reconcile – how a paedophile priest who’d been seen covered in blood could be ruled out as a suspect. To Mark James this meant new momentum in the case, potential grounds for the coroner to reopen Maria James’ inquest and for police to retest her exhibits for DNA.
PUBLISH
Trace launched on 17 June 2017, on the 37th anniversary of Maria James' death. The first four episodes were released in quick succession, one a week, and Trace quickly became the ABC's most popular podcast. It’d be crass to celebrate strong statistics for such a tragic story, but the figure I celebrate is 300 – the number of emails that quickly flooded into Trace’s account, with new leads. This helped Trace win the 2017 Walkley Award for Innovation. Episode five dropped in September 2017, followed by episode six in June this year. More updates will come once the coroner decides whether to reopen the inquest and once Victoria Police retests Maria James’ clothing for a new DNA sample of her killer.
If you’d like to read more about interviewing vulnerable and marginalised people, as well as survivors of abuse and trauma, I urge you to read this VCOSS Piece: http://vcoss.org.au/blog/never-the-silent-witness/ (via The Wayback Machine).
FIND YOUR INSPIRATION
Sometimes, as a journalist, you choose stories. Sometimes they choose you. I didn’t create Trace because I’m a true crime fiend, rather, the many layers of this case and the people caught in its wake touched me. I felt a podcast would be the most respectful medium to explore this case forensically and compassionately and to give a powerful voice to those involved.
I’d read a Guardian article arguing that Serial would never be possible in Australia because of restricted access to court documents and police records. Around the same time, a colleague and best mate told me an electrician had given a police statement claiming he’d seen a priest covered in blood near the Maria James murder scene. The fact that police had eliminated this priest as a suspect in 2015, but refused to say why, bugged me. These two elements must have been marinating in my mind because one day in February 2016 I woke at 4am with the idea of reviewing this cold case through an interactive podcast. I hoped the police might appreciate an extra pair of hands and thought the James family would welcome any way to revive their mum’s case. I was acutely aware of the ‘true crime as entertainment’ slippery slope, so my early caveat was getting the blessing of both Maria James’ two sons, and former detective Ron Iddles – this case was his first homicide investigation.
PITCH YOUR IDEA TO A PUBLISHER
ABC News had never done a podcast like this before, so I had to carve a path out for it. One boss was concerned about how the podcast would resolve, given it’s an unsolved case. But that’s where I felt its beauty lay. I explained that listeners would have a role to play, they’d be participants, able to contribute information and fresh leads that, when corroborated, would be rolled into the next episode. I thought, if this model works, imagine what that could mean for the nation’s other 1300 cold cases languishing in dusty boxes. In our profession, the chance to drive a project that could help people and effect change is exciting and why many of us got into journalism in the first place.
After nagging my bosses for most of 2016, it was commissioned just before Christmas that year and I was partnered with an experienced Radio National production team.
ASSEMBLE YOUR INFORMATION
Fashioning my monster of an investigation into a podcast was tough. I wanted to include so many of the details and insights from my 16 months of investigating, dead-ends and all. But for this story to resonate and inspire fresh leads from the public, each episode needed to have very clear narrative flags. Trace’s script editors hadn’t been part of the investigation and this strengthened the writing as they were seeing all the information with fresh eyes.
My initial vision of seven episodes (with room for more depending on what listener interactivity turned up) was compressed into an initial four. Any journalist will know, this killing of your darlings is tough, but it made for a stronger, clearer series that would hold the listener’s attention.
EDIT
Trace’s beautiful sound design by Martin Peralta did much of the heavy lifting. The immersive design made listeners feel they were walking through the investigation, right beside me, sharing the highs of discovering new information and the lows of harrowing survivor accounts.
The intimacy of the medium allowed the James brothers’ experience to resonate powerfully, it offered Adam the space he needed to speak publicly for the first time and it afforded anonymity to other church abuse survivors.
For my narrative voice, Trace’s producers were very keen to keep me out of the story, no musings, just plot. It was important for me to play a very straight bat, given the incredible claims listeners would hear over the course of the series. Because podcast listeners have chosen to listen, you don’t have to preach. I voiced episodes very close to the mic, and quietly, which allowed me to experiment with intonation, in a much more confined space. The producers helped me to tell the story, not read it, by encouraging me to turn my script face down and just explain what was important about each upcoming section.