The current media landscape doesn't always champion detailed, nuanced conversations about important topics, but that's just what the team at 1A, which is created at WAMU in Washington, D.C., and distributed through NPR, does. 1A dives into policy matters with experts and with listeners. Jenn White, the host of 1A since 2020, says to produce 10 hours of quality, in-depth work a week takes work. And when asked about that work, she says it is spread across many talented radio professionals.
White: Oh, wow. That's… yeah, that's a big question. We are very fortunate to have a team of amazing producers. They are curious, they're dedicated. They bring their own interests to the show as well. And if I was having to prepare all of this by myself, it wouldn't happen. That's the short answer.
But what we typically do is once we decide on the show topic, either because it's something that's been pitched by a member of our team — and everyone pitches ideas — or it's come from someone who's listening and they send us a show idea, or it comes out of a show we've done and listeners have questions that spark new ideas. Once we nail down what the show is about, the producer will curate a list of prep materials for me. And so it may be a list of articles, or maybe there are some interviews they think would be helpful to watch. If it's a book for an author interview, I try to read the book because I feel like that's important if you're in a one-on-one conversation with an author. And often I come out of that prep process with questions of my own, so I'll do additional preparation. And then we get ready for the show.
Kellams: In an era when soundbites are king, stories get shorter and shorter. What can the value be to devoting 53 or 54 minutes to a person or a single topic?
White: It's invaluable, I think. We are in a time when we're constantly being told our attention spans are short and they're getting shorter by the moment. What I've learned in doing 1A and other daily news shows is that it's not so much that people's attention spans are short. We often just don't spend enough time with the topic. We are driving this process in a lot of ways, and so having almost an hour to really delve into a subject gives us a chance to get underneath that sort of top-line idea, to get into the nuance. And it provides us with space for questions from people who are listening.
I think that's one of the most important things about 1A. It's the opportunity for listeners to engage with the subject, to ask experts and elected officials their questions. There are so few places in media that create that space for people today. And so I think that's probably the most important part of the show.
Kellams: There's a balancing act here, right? Because you have your prep material, you know the questions you want to get across, but it's also live radio. You also want to be active listening. So how does that, over the course of an hour's topic, manifest itself — get in what you want to get in, but be able to be adaptable?
White: I often tell producers there's the conversation we plan, and then there's the conversation that actually happens. And listening really is the key part of it, Kyle. And this is something you know from Ozarks at Large. We have to be the person who stands in for the listener. So if someone is throwing around a lot of industry speak or acronyms, is the person listening to the program really understanding what we're discussing? Probably not. So we have to be the person who's doing that interpretation for them in real time.
But sometimes conversations go in unexpected directions because listeners take us in those directions. But sometimes the conversation that I had planned is less interesting than the one that is happening in real time. And you only figure that out if you are listening to the guest.
If we're talking about accountability interviews, if we're talking with elected officials, then yes, that's a different kind of conversation, and we have to keep them on point, try to pull them off of their talking points, to get them to speak in more depth about whatever it is we're discussing. But especially when we get into some of these more heady topics, whether it's about health or science or art and culture, allowing the conversation to breathe and develop organically is just as important as preparing vigorously for the conversation ahead of time.
Kellams: Because this is live radio and you do have the interactions coming in from texts and listeners, there is a sort of give and take, and there's a personal relationship you develop with listeners. And I've wondered how much you have thought about that in the years that you’ve been hosting.
White: Oh, I think about it all the time. When I first came to 1A, our executive producer, Rupert Allman — he's since retired — asked me what my vision was for the show. He said, “What do you want 1A to be?” And I said, “I want it to be a show where Americans are in conversation with one another, discussing what we want the country to be.”
And so fostering a space for that conversation is top of mind for me. So it's not about me telling people what I think the country should be. It's not even our guests telling everyone, “Well, this is what it should be.” It's me, the guests, our listeners, all in conversation with one another as if we're all sitting at the same table. And I think, again, there are so few spaces in media these days where you can have that kind of collective discussion, where it's not just about the talking heads talking at you. There's space for you in that discussion as well. And that's something that we go into our production process with every single day.
Kellams: You mentioned everyone on the team can make pitches. And like you mentioned, we might have an hour about health care or the environment, but there are also the topics that we don't see coming, that we don't expect. What are the pitch sessions like?
White: We have a few rules. When you pitch an idea, we want to know: What's the big question we're trying to answer? What's the thesis for the hour? What are the core three questions we want to answer through the discussion? How are listeners supposed to interact with this conversation? Is there a question for them so they have a voice?
We also have something called “nothing about us without us.” So if we're talking about a community, we think it's really important to have members of that community in the discussion. So if we're talking, for instance, about policies that affect Native American communities, we're not going to talk about those communities. We're going to have people from those communities as part of the discussion.
So those are some of the key questions you have to be able to answer in the pitch process. And sometimes the idea is completely formed and it's an automatic yes. Sometimes we say we need to flesh out a few more things. Or, because we have a very democratic approach to this, we start in one point, but by the time we've talked through the pitch, it's morphed into something different, but something that better fits the program.
Kellams: Are you able to get to a space where you're not thinking about possible topics or the program?
White: No. No, I think the answer is no. I'm a very curious person. I have a lot of very curious people in my life, and in most conversations I'm like, oh, wow, that would be a good show. Some of our programs have come out of me just observing what's happening in my life and then saying, I think there's a story here.
A good example: I was at my annual girls’ getaway weekend, and just in talking with my six friends, I realized that the majority of them had some sort of autoimmune illness they were dealing with. And I said, is this normal? Like, are we just a weird group? So I started to do some research and realized that the number of autoimmune diagnoses has risen, that women often go undiagnosed for a long time, or misdiagnosed, that their symptoms are either ignored or explained away, their pain is ignored. And that turned into part of our In Good Health series.
And the amount of feedback we got — the number of messages we got from women who had the same issue, had gone undiagnosed; from men writing in about the women in their lives who had been in similar situations or who they'd seen through autoimmune illnesses — it was overwhelming. But that just came from me observing a moment in my friends circle and saying, I wonder if this is something other people are experiencing.
And so often our shows come out of something that someone is observing in their life and saying, hey, is there something here? And because we are in this constant conversation with our audience, we can get that feedback and people can engage and then share their stories. And I think it's really powerful.
Kellams: Well, thank you for the daily conversations on 1A, Jen White. Thanks so much for your time.
White: Kyle, thank you.
Jenn White is the host of 1A. Our conversation took place earlier this week via Zoom.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
