"As it turns out, explanatory journalism may have a promising future in the market for news. On May 9, in partnership with NPR News, This American Life dedicated its hour-long program to explaining the housing crisis. “The Giant Pool of Money” quickly became the most popular episode in the show’s thirteen-year history. CJR praised the piece (in “Boiler Room,” the essay by Dean Starkman in our September/October issue) as “the most comprehensive and insightful look at the system that produced the credit crisis.” And on his blog, PressThink, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote that the program was “probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard.” Rosen went on to note that by helping people understand an issue, explanatory journalism actually creates a market for news. It gives people a reason to tune in. 'There are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole, I am unable to make sense of any part,” he writes. “Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop.'
Rather than simply contributing to the noise of the unending torrent of headlines, sound bites, and snippets, NPR and This American Life took the time to step back, report the issue in depth, and then explain it in a way that illuminated one of the biggest and most complicated stories of the year. As a result of the program’s success, NPR News formed a multimedia team in late August to explain the global economy through a blog and podcast, both of which are called “Planet Money.” And on October 3, This American Life and NPR aired a valuable follow-up episode, “Another Frightening Show About the Economy,” which examined the deepening credit crisis, including how it might have been prevented and Washington’s attempts at a bailout."
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