I've Got A Beef With The Outlaw Ocean podcast
That's a seriously mixed metaphor
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I heard first about The Outlaw Ocean podcast in Podcast: The Newsletter, by Lauren Passell, a great industry newsletter, where she claimed she was “hooked” on this new series. That’s enough for me to go and find something for Bingeworthy…so I went searching.
It wasn’t hard to find…it’s a CBC and LA Times co-production and it was trending in Apple Podcasts.
The Outlaw Ocean was reported and produced by Ian Urbina and the non-profit journalism organization he founded called The Outlaw Ocean Project. Their website says they have a mission to create high-quality investigative journalism content, which they distribute “for free.”
Yes, I did find it, for “free” on my podcast app, although I did have to endure some very annoying ads for two minutes, right off the top. Skip the midroll, and plunk those high-paying suckers right out front to annoy the listener. That’s my first beef, and to be clear, it’s with the CBC. I’ll have some more of those later.
The trailer for The Outlaw Ocean immediately conjures images of The Bourne Identity
It opens with Ian Urbina saying
“I’ve seen a lot of things in my years as an investigative reporter, but nothing quite like this.”
And then he describes the scene that we are hearing, which is a murder video caught on a cellphone camera. You can hear gunshots, men screaming in a foreign language that's hard to make out, more gunshots, and some watery sounds. It’s an inciting incident that doesn’t take much effort to draw you in.
Then Urbina says that he’s spent most of the last 10 years reporting from that deadly frontier—the high seas, and suggests
“If you really want to understand crime, start where the law of the land ends.”
Urbina has had a formidable career as a journalist, including winning a Pulitzer Prize, as an investigative reporter at The New York Times. So this tracks as a person to listen to to get the real goods. I was all set to binge.
Two minutes in, I was hooked and ready to clear my afternoon to settle into this high-drama story
My assumption, based on this trailer, was that this would be a serialized narrative story that was going to follow the crime captured on that cellphone, down into the depths of humanity, to finally figure out how it all came to be, and who these men were that sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A murder mystery with a million watery layers.
I don’t usually go for true crime, but this felt like it could be something different. There are seven episodes, so I assumed this was going to be a doozy of a story that followed a labyrinthine path through all of the themes he suggested: murder, slavery, gunrunning, human trafficking and some staggering environmental crimes.
The first episode delivers. As promised, it digs into the story of the murder video, and we learn the backstory, which is like a plot ripped from Jean le Carré novel: a cell phone was discovered in the backseat of a taxi in Fiji, which held this illicit murder video, which was then turned over to Interpol, who contacted Urbina to see if he could follow the breadcrumbs of this story, with the goal of finding the gunman who committed the murder.
But here’s the thing: By the end of the first episode, he solves the case. It goes all over the Pacific Ocean and around the Horn of Africa, but after 8 years, it finally results in a conviction.
So I go on to the second episode, thinking that we’re going to jump back into those 8 years that it took, the long and impressive lengths that Urbina’s reporting took him on…but then I realize that’s not where we went at all.
Episode 2 takes you on another caper, the longest law enforcement chase in nautical history…a chase that lasted 110 days and went all the way to Antarctica…to take down an illegal commercial fishing vessel.
And then Episode 3 covers the not-well-known reality that slavery still exists at sea slavery…Episode 4 takes us to a “micronation” Sealand, which is actually an abandoned aircraft platform that has declared itself a sovereign state…and then on to ships that take women more than 12 miles out from land into international waters, so that they can offer them abortion pills, to end run national abortion laws.
I hope you’re keeping up here.
At some point, I halted my binge and began googling. From listening, I knew that this work came from his reporting, and there were moments of footage where you could tell he was actually there. And those parts are delivered with journalistic prowess to be envied. But then, all these other chapters. It all seemed…too…organized…too pulled together into a larger thesis…too much like a book.
I was not surprised to discover: Ian Urbina has already written a book, by the same name, which has chapter headings that suggest there’s a lot of overlap between these two projects.
That’s not the part I have a beef about. I think it’s great if you can figure out how to multi-purpose content and get important stories out into the world as far as they can go.
It’s just this: Narrative podcasting is its own thing. It’s not an audiobook. It’s not a repurposed thesis. It’s not an awesome TED Talk with 6 million views. It’s not even awesome footage that gets ripped into a series.
And if you have content that’s this good…that has this insane access, that literally covers the globe, that goes to places almost no one has even been to before…it deserves to be brought inside that industry.
Narrative podcasting is a lively industry with people who know how to write narration, create a narrative arc, and pull together a story into a coherent whole, so that it does all the great things that stories can do…and these folks (hello! 👋🏼👋🏼) can work well with awesome content, like this.
Bingeworthy aspires to be that place where all these parts of the narrative podcasting industry come together, get discussed, debated and then…celebrated.
Here’s my beef, in layers:
This could have been a truly incredible narrative podcast that followed one story, down a million layers, and revealed lots of fascinating things along the way. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was a series of topics, strung together (which makes a lot of sense in a book format, less so in a podcast series).
The way this show was packaged in bad faith. The trailer was clickbait, and it didn’t deliver on what it proposed to do. It began as an engaging thriller…but then it started another one, and then another one…it missed the boat, if we aren’t too full up on nautical metaphors just yet, to deliver on the promise of a singular thrilling story. I don’t like it when I fall for marketing that hoodwinks me.
Ian Urbina needs audio training. He has a great voice. He can deliver the story. But too often, his voice starts off strong, but then his sentence falls off a cliff. This happens so much that it almost made me want to have my hand on the volume to dial it up and down. This also leads to choppy editing, when you attempt to piece phrases together, leading to it sometimes sounding like a ransom note where phrases were cut out of a magazine and then glued together. This is a skill that can be learned and practiced.
The CBC published this but it doesn’t appear that anyone actually worked on it, based on production credits. This brings me back to 2006, when I worked in the documentary world, and CBC started to say they would now focus on “acquisitions,” rather than commissions, which was code for the won’t PUT money into docs any longer, but rather, they would ACQUIRE them, and offer a fraction of the production budget, for a broadcast license. This was after once someone else had put the real money into them to make the film (read the filmmakers’ money). Have we already jumped the puddle here in podcasts, and moved on to acquisitions?
The story is upside down. The last episode, called the Epilogue, was my favourite. To me, it was the perfect beginning to a narrative podcast story: Who is this man of mystery, Ian Urbina, who seems to not get sea sick, but instead get land sick? This is why he’s the perfect person, maybe the only one, who can go out into the farthest places of the world to get this story, and he was called to action by the arrival of a murder video, which he was compelled to investigate. His stunningly apt description of sailing to Antarctica brought back visceral images of my experience on a similar ship. This could have been the start of a story that took you on a very long journey….but instead, it was actually the afterthought.
The narration was told to a third person, not me. This was a writing problem, as well as a producing problem. My guess is that someone interviewed Urbina, and this became the narration track. This did not feel like it was written as a narration and then recorded as such…this is called “tracking” and it’s what this industry does, usually fairly close to the end of the process. It’s done over and over (and over) until it’s right. It’s never right on the first take. And using the interview material instead, is like taking it all “from background.”
The effect for the listener is that I felt like I was listening to someone else’s conversation, rather than having the narrator, Ian, speak to me. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to hear this incredible story, firsthand, from the guy that was there. I wanted to feel like I was put in the room, rather than standing at the door listening in to someone else’s conversation. If they had hired a seasoned podcast producer, they would have done this right away. Had the CBC not just smacked their lips at this “free” content, which they now only had to profit share, they could have done that too. But they didn’t. And I think the series suffers because of it.Let’s talk about this “free” part The website of The Outlaw Ocean Project describes their work as non-profit investigative journalism organization that distributes their work for “free.” I understand the nuance of this, but I think it does a disservice. I suppose we can still talk about podcast distribution as being “free” but, really, that doesn’t really set you apart in the podcast world (yet).
A small bit of internet digging explained that in fact, Urbina received a grant from National Geographic to make this podcast, so that’s not free. This was only mentioned (obliquely) in the credits of the last episode. Why not state that explicitly? I don’t understand. Let’s also consider that lots of the footage used was recorded years ago, likely when Urbina was a reporter paid by the New York Times, so, on salary. And there was a book deal, that must have paid him too, and allowed him the space to be paid to work on his ideas and do more research.
So that brings us up to the point when they took it, presumably in a fairly finished state, to CBC and the LA Times, who were “very excited about it,” reports Urbina in his Q+A from the Global Investigate Journalism Network. No guff they were excited about it. They didn’t have to pay for the intense production, a decade of investigative reporting, and seemingly even much of the production. As their website says, they like to own the IP to everything, so they do that work upfront and then bring it out for marketing and distribution, which is presumably where the CBC comes in (I’m less familiar with the LA Times). I guess that’s the “free” part, the podcast distribution, except that I’m guessing there’s a deal that assigns a revenue split on the ad sales….I paid for that with my two minutes of undivided attention for a product I don’t want.
So, please. Don’t talk about this as being “free,” because it’s really, really not done for free. Calling it “free” only devalues the rest of the industry who are working hard to get actually get paid to make these kinds of series made. And we cannot do this work for free, just like you.
I think that’s enough beef for now
The series has spectacular music and sound design. The sound created a mood, and a feeling, in a way that made it all incredibly visceral. It embodied what being a ship actually sounds like, which is incredibly unusual and difficult to capture.
The access in this series is next level. The people who are there to help tell the story, the places that the source audio takes you, are at times horrifying and then fascinating, and also infuriating. It takes you to all the places you don’t want to go, so you don’t have to. I absolutely never want to set foot in a fishmeal plant, but I’m glad I could learn that story, and feel like I was there, without enduring that stench.
The morals and values are bang on. The concept of shedding light on the high seas as a place of crime and depravity, while in the middle of some of the most beautiful and challenged natural environments on earth, is incredibly valuable. Finding stories that tackle climate change, in a gripping and compelling way, are the rarest of rare. I appreciate that he found a way into this narrative, and I want more.
I actually learned a lot while listening. In that rare kind of way, where many of the details stick, and return to mind later. That’s clearly the mark of a well-reported piece.
I just wish these details received the podcast production support and narrative story design that they could have benefitted from.
Have you listened? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Next week on Bingeworthy:
Werner Erhard began his EST programs, which stands for Erhard Seminar Training, in 1971. It later became a program known as “Landmark.” But what was it? A self-improvement program, a personality cult, a pyramid scheme…or just a conference to attend to help you become a better person? If you think this is something that hasn’t touched your life, you’ll be surprised to learn just how integrated it has become into the corporate machine.
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You should get your blood pressure checked because that's a lot of salt. I thought it was pretty good and harkens back to an older style of podcasting.