NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
July 14, 2019
By Marc Tracy
St. Paul – On a fall day in 2015, Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark went for a walk through the extensive skyway that threads through the buildings of downtown St. Paul.
They were new colleagues at APM Reports, a division at American Public Media where investigative reporters and radio producers had been “smushed together,” as its editor in chief, Chris Worthington, put it.
Strolling above the city, Ms. Baran and Ms. Freemark talked about ideas for their first project.
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Ms. Baran, the no-nonsense reporter who hosts the show, resisted the podcast convention of introducing herself by name at the start of each episode. (Ms. Freemark had to talk her into it.) After considering a career in social services, she joined Minnesota Public Radio in 2009 as a part-time web writer. Within a year, she had a full-time job, and later was the lead reporter on “Betrayed by Silence,” a Peabody-winning audio documentary that exposed a cover-up of abusive priests by the Twin Cities’ archdiocese.
At the conclusion of the first season of “In the Dark,” Ms. Baran put out a call to listeners for Season 2 story ideas. Thousands of suggestions came via email and social media. One, sent by a woman in Mississippi, seemed especially promising: a simple message claiming that Mr. Flowers had been tried six times for the same crime. The woman added that she believed he might be innocent.
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