Last fall I discovered what I called “a unicorn of a series” in my review. It’s the 9-hour long, independently created (and then widely distributed), compelling and absorbing series Cement City.
I ended up falling in love…with a town…that I’ve never been to. It’s called Donora, and it’s in rural Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburburg.
Jeanne Marie Laskas is a best-selling author (Hidden America, Concussion), and Erin Anderson is a long time audio producer and academic…and it turns out they each had a skill the other wanted to learn. So these two colleagues from the University of Pittsburg decided to embark on an experiment. What would “immersion journalism” look like if it was done in an audio format?
I named this my No.1 on the Bingey List for 2024. And it’s just that good that it needs more explaining, more detailing…and more time to discover with the creators.
Here’s an audio version of our interview for you to dive into. For anyone who works independently, there are so many inspiring and helpful nuggets in here. And…if you think that your passion project is taking too long, or it’s going through another period of languising, keep faith. This series took eight years to make it to you.
Key Moments:
[1:04]: How to describe - and make - an 8-year project
[5:20]: This was an immersion journalism project brought to the audio space
[7:10]: Falling in love with the town became their goal
[12:45]: In the early days of production, they began to work with other producers but they found the story away from them. The temptation to follow the news pegwas not their temptation at all.
[13:38]: They handed in a completely formed series to Audacy when they became the distributor
[17:00]: This series was entirely co-written…here’s how they did it
Influences: Falling Tree, Cathy Fitzgerald, Our Town (Broadway theatre play); S-Town; snowglobes; orchestra conductor; symphonic sound; Netflix TV series structure based around characters;
[27:20]: What the Launch Party was in the town of Donora, PA
[30:52]: Was there and Us & Them vibe - how did they deal with this?
[41:32]: The music, from the band called Donora, who made the credits music, got involved
Team of Three
Erin Anderson—Producer, Editor, Co-writer
Jeanne Marie Laskas—Host, Co-writer
Michael Benoist—Story Editor
+ Mike Woolley - Sound Design and Editing at the end
QUOTES:
Jeanne Marie Laskas: “ A lot of people were sort of helicoptering in, and interviewing a couple guys at a bar, and trying to understand…and we wanted to commit. And really commit to understanding, as best we could, to what was happening in a lot of America that we did not know about.”
Jeanne Marie Laskas: “ We wanted to do something much more like a universal, it's almost like a work of fiction. It could be fiction. And in order to do that, outside influences were not helpful.”
Erin Anderson: “ I became part of the furniture in a deep way. Like I could stand in front of people and they would just talk amongst themselves…. like there is a certain way in which everyone became very vulnerable, like By nature of us being there for so long.”
Erin Anderson: “ this is the equivalent of my tenure book.”
MORE LISTENING!
Rob McGinley Myers and I sat down on his podcast Phonograph to discuss all the things that make their pilot episode, Episode 1, of Cement City what it is.
Pull on your radio nerd ears and have a listen.
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