You’re sitting a dinner party. The girlfriend of your friend’s friend is telling a story, or at least trying to. Instead of getting to the point where she delivers the punch line so her story finally makes sense, she starts laughing so hard she’s spitting out her food. She’s trying to close the thought; the table sits, rapt, but unmoved by the narrative. They’re sticking around waiting for the punchline to be delivered. But it isn’t. Instead, she grasps for the social shorthand: I guess you had to be there, and leaves her story at that.
That moment, the You-Had-To-Be-There, is what people say to bridge the gap between awkwardness and reality. It’s the moment of realization where the story might have had more meaning, actually been hilarious, rather than failing to deliver emotion in any direction.
It’s also a quick way to illustrate the distance between experience and narration, or experience and storytelling.
Stories often make more sense firsthand
If you were there to see the look on his face when he dropped five bottles of red wine off the conveyor belt at the Liquor Barn on Christmas Eve, coating everyone in the blast radius with splatters of red wine on their pant legs. If you were there to hear the intonation of his voice when he turned to the person behind him, who took the brunt of the liquid, and calmly said: “Sorry, I thought you said you wanted to try this wine…“
Sure, it’s funny to read. And even told as an anecdote it might get some laughs. But there’s no way to replace the actual events, had the moment been caught on tape.
Meaning doesn’t live in the sequence of events; it lives inside the texture of the moment—the timing, the awkwardness, the shared recognition. Storytelling is the ability to make those moments come back to life. Sometimes this can all be shared through anecdotes told by someone. But often, a story without that context collapses under its own weight. This is not a failure of facts. It’s a failure of presence.
Journalism Was Built on Distance
In the 1.0 world of journalism, the job of the reporter was to get the story and report it. The reporter, the journalist, was trained to be removed and impartial. The task is to find a story and report the facts…not get caught up in the emotions or the feelings or the delicate small truths of the day that go unsaid.
As narrative audio journalism emerged over the last 20 years, that gap began to shorten. Unlike traditional reporting—where distance signaled credibility—narrative audio often chooses to collapse the space between the person who experienced something and the person hearing about it. That voice in your ear doesn’t just describe what happened; often they were there, and this story offers a recreation the conditions of being there. It gives you a chance to come along for the ride, or to stay for a brief visit; when scene tape is available it offers an even more authentic experience (and most often these stories are more successful).
That shift—from reported distance to declared presence—has fundamentally reshaped how journalism is told, trusted, and understood.
Earlier journalism was designed to instill trust so that the story could remain ‘objective’ and produce all sides of the story, so that the reader/viewer could form their own conclusion.
Many other formats of media and storytelling have snapped to these trends: Blogs and Vlogs and the rise of social media; the always-on news channels that track every moment of a situation unfolding; the embedded news reporters at war; the tell-all style of magazine journalism; the ‘total recall’ narrative writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard memoirs…the list goes on.
But what is also true, is that there’s nothing like narrative audio to be able to put you there, in the moment. I could continue to argue that it’s even better than video because a listener must paint the image of the scene from their own imagination, which makes them more engaged in the story.
I have a ocean-sized hole in my heart for climate journalism
It’s the kind of storytelling that’s hard to get noticed, hard to do well, and even harder to get readers to engage with. Over the years I’ve covered a number of series that follow this beat: Expectant, which blurs fact and fiction, Threshold, which brings you out into the natural world, Ripple, a multi-award winning environmental caper.
More recently, I interviewed Ian Urbina, from The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, who he told me made a conscious decision to place his content—which is clearly about the ocean climate told from all perspectives—in the human interest category, not “shoved off on the Climate Desk,“ because that’s how to get people to listen.
So when I heard that Adriana Cargill had a follow up series to the 2023 Bingey Listed Sandcastles Podcast, about how a group of surfers stepped up to help with the 2018 Woolsey fire, I was locked in. Season 2 is about the wildfires of Los Angeles county, released one year later to the day.
Season 2 picks up where Season 1 ended in many respects. It offered affirmations that those surfers had gotten organized as an official unit of volunteer fire fighters. And it’s a good thing they did, given what happened in LA in January 2025. We learned about the lengths that they had gone to in the intervening years, between 2018 and 2025, to advocate for community involvement, get more training and certifications, acquire actual protective gear, and then go out and knock on doors to help spread their information to the public.
Everything about this series shares the right kind, the good kind of information. It’s very well-reported and shared from the perspective of one of the surfers slash volunteer firefighter, Keegan Gibbs, who is one of those gritty OG Malibu types who grew up there and called it home before the coastline was dotted with celebrity mansions. If this series wasn’t based on such good storytelling, and really connects you to the the humans of the story—in particular the Fire Chief and Gibbs—you could mistake it for a public service announcement that harkens back to Smokey The Bear.
The series also does the important job to dismantle the trope that the shining first-responder-in-armour is going to be able to save you and your home. It reminds you that it’s actually impossible for Fire and Paramedics to safely manage an entire city. The message is clear and worlds to educate the public about how to address the dangers of wildfires for those people who live in fire-prone areas, which much of LA County is, and Malibu is most definitely. The series makes sure that listeners learn how they can take “home hardening” measures for their own properties.
Here’s what the series does not do: give you a sense of what it was like to live through this moment as an inhabitant of Los Angeles.
The series opens with the notion, and the feeling, that you’re going on a ride-along with Keegan, the surfer-VFD protagonist of the series. It gives the sense that the reporter and producer of the series, Adriana Cargill, is in the car. But it’s a notion only, and that sense gives way to a montage of third-party accounts and found audio artifacts of what it was like in the moment, from CB radio conversations, to news reports to phone conversations. The tape is well-sourced and the reporting is solid. But it doesn’t give you that visceral sense of what it was like to be there.
Eventually, we hear Cargill interview the Fire Chief at their central command post when she reminds him that they had met during Season 1, which is about when we see Cargill come back into the story.
Like most of the world, I watched the Palisades fire unfold on a television and told through bite-sized social media bits. It was harrowing and shocking, a terrifying notion to consider living through what was essentially a hurricane and a wildfire at the same moment. As I listened, I kept waiting for her personal stance, her declaration of what her truth was during the fire. Instead, she offers a first-hand account from people who were there, but after the moment, as a reflection.
Cargill spoke of going back to the beach weeks later to finally go surfing again, now amongst the floating debris and water that smelled like battery acid—but there was no scene, no tape to show us the action. In this way, this was a classic tell, not show, where the narrator tells us how to see something , based on her own experiences, rather than showing us through an unfolding scene of live tape. Throughout much of the series, the fire was spoken of in the past, both in her memory and the characters of the story; that mix of memory and reporting makes it feel disant, and lacks emotion.
Cargill does build a scene, using live tape, around a community meeting which took place after the fire. The tension in the room is clear, the action of the scene felt present. It helped to illustrate the distance between what actually happened during the fires, and how people understood the events. It works to show how some people felt affected by the fire, out in public, and as a community, out in a world which is rapidly catching fire all around them.