Katie Rich: And the bucket of dopamine that must be released when you get that one thing. I mean you must be chasing that every freaking day, right? I mean that must be-
Madeline Ducharme: It’s hard to tell when it is that though. Sometimes you can’t figure out-
Katie Rich: But when you realize it. When you realize, “Oh, my gosh, this is it.” It’s just like kurgh.
Sophie Summergrad: It’s pretty great.
Katie Rich: Yeah.
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah.
Christina Cauterucci: And also, when somebody who you’ve been trying to get to talk to you agrees to talk to you. We-
Madeline Ducharme: Oh, my God.
Christina Cauterucci: I’m thinking about the major villain of Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs is this conservative state senator John Briggs who launched this ballot initiative and he’s dead. And we were like, “We really need to get somebody to tell his side of the story, and also, just tell us who he was,” because there wasn’t a ton of people who wanted to talk about him.
And when I finally got his son on the phone and his son was like, “Oh, yeah, my dad’s dead now. I can say whatever I want about him.” I was like that was a pretty intense dopamine rush, and I was like, “You couldn’t have said more magical words to me right now. That’s exactly what I want to hear.”
Katie Rich: That’s very… That’s sex. That’s just like, “Oh, my God.”
Christina Cauterucci: Yeah, it’s all for that moment, everything we do.
Madeline Ducharme: So much of the work is so tedious that you really have to relish those moments.
Katie Rich: That’s what I mean. Once you get that, you’re just like, “This is what I live for.”
Christina Cauterucci: And it’s not guaranteed.
Katie Rich: No.
Christina Cauterucci: I’m sure there have been projects where you don’t get something like that, or it’s just so straightforward that you don’t… It’s the challenge that makes it rewarding too when you finally get it.
Katie Rich: Do you have a… White whale isn’t the right word, but do you have a project that you’re like… I know sometimes in comedy when you think something is going to crush, it usually is a full dud. But the ones that you’re not sure, you know what I mean? Did you have projects where you were like, “This is the one. This is going to be it.” And it went nowhere. You’re still chasing.
Madeline Ducharme: Oh, my God.
Christina Cauterucci: I’ve had projects like that on the print side. A story that I worked on for months and interviewed 36 people, and then the information that I needed or the person I needed to talk to me didn’t pull through and we had to kill it, and that’s pretty freaking painful.
Katie Rich: And I don’t mean to be a bummer. I’m just saying maybe those people are listening, and then we can bring it back up.
Christina Cauterucci: Yeah, that’s true. I think for legal reasons I can’t say the topic of what that was, but-
Katie Rich: We will not-
Christina Cauterucci: I’m all ears for anyone who wants to expose anyone in the workplace or elsewhere.
Katie Rich: We will not say the topic. Baskin-Robbins.
Christina Cauterucci: Actually, not too far from-
Katie Rich: Really? I just made that up. Okay, so do-
Christina Cauterucci: Another strip mall mainstay.
Katie Rich: Okay, so do with that what you will, listeners, and contact us. I do want to talk a little bit about what you have done on the union side, which cannot go underappreciated or unstated as a proud union member. And you were all members of the negotiating committees at Slate. I’m just curious, the priorities, talking about how things have changed or not changed, how have the priorities changed or maybe not changed for the negotiation throughout the years?
Madeline Ducharme: So, I was on the bargaining committee back in 2021 that got our contract that started in early 2022. It’s a months-long process. It’s really intense and you’re just doing it in addition to your regular work life and everything. As you can imagine, your company’s not like, “Yeah, take six hours out of your day to not do your work and negotiate a contract that’s better for you and all that.” They don’t want to do that.
Katie Rich: And protest what we’re doing here.
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah, exactly. “To demand more from us.” That doesn’t seem like a thing they want to pay me to do. But that being said, being part of that negotiation and that bargaining committee was the hardest thing I’ve ever done professionally, and also the best, and I am sitting with sweet dread about when we have to do it again this fall.
But that being said, I mean the biggest priority for me when I think about those negotiations is I want to make our great work as possible as it can be. I want to make it as humane as it can be. I want to make it something that people really enjoy doing. And so, the work of the contract I feel like when we’re working to get higher salary floors, when we’re working to get better parental leave, these are all things that are obviously not a part of the daily process of excavating clips and calling people on the phone and trying to find the perfect source to talk about abortion in Texas or whatever.
They’re not part of that process, but they’re just this macro-level thing that makes your job possible. And you can’t have the moments of surprise and the moments of discovery that so much of what we talked about here today, those great moments that we’ve talked about here today, you can’t have them if you don’t have a well-staffed team. You can’t have them if you don’t have a comfortable salary that allows you to have time to read widely. You can’t have them if you don’t have the brain space that is enabled by the things that your contract protects you from, just cause.
I mean knowing that your job is going to remain here even after this big project is totally liberating. It frees up your brain to be able to think about other things because you don’t have to think about the next job that you’re going to string together after this. So, the contract is just the lifeblood of all of the work that we do even if it doesn’t show up every single day, and even if there isn’t anything in the contract written out that says you will be able to find all your clips or whatever. So, that’s something I think about all the time with our contract.
Christina Cauterucci: Working on Slow Burn has made me even more grateful for the part of the contract that grants us comp time, which I had benefited from in other parts of my job when I had to go on a reporting trip that required me to do work on the weekends or stay up late some nights-
Katie Rich: And could you just… What is comp time if we don’t know?
Christina Cauterucci: Oh, sure, yeah. So, this is when you’re working more than… I think we say 45 hours a week. We basically accrue extra vacation time in half-day increments for working more or less overtime. It’s not technically overtime, but it’s huge.
Katie Rich: But rather than monetary rewards, you get time off.
Christina Cauterucci: Exactly. You get extra vacation time.
Katie Rich: Ooh, I like that.
Christina Cauterucci: You should have that. Everyone should have that.
Katie Rich: Ooh, take note of that. Take note of that, everyone,
Christina Cauterucci: This was a big shift from… And I was at Slate before we had a union, and it was very much at the discretion of your manager. If you had to work many late nights one week, maybe they’d be like, “Oh, okay, come in late tomorrow,” or, “You can take tomorrow off, off the books, or whatever.” If you didn’t have a great relationship with your manager or if different managers had different ideas of what was fair, it was applied very differently across the board and there was no policy about it. Now that we have this contract with a policy, it meant that I actually accrued 32 days of comp time over the seven months that I was working on this podcast.
Katie Rich: It’s insane.
Christina Cauterucci: It was like many weekends, many late nights, and the only thing that got me through it and the thing that made me still excited to be working on this incredible story was thinking, “I can actually take a ton of time off after this. I’m not going to be forced to go right back into writing about the presidential election of all things. It’s all going to be worth it at the end because I’ll have this thing I’m really proud of and tell this really meaningful story. And I’m going to be able to make this time back by being able to shut my brain off for a few weeks.”
And I know that that’s been something that’s been extra important for the audio side because historically, our podcasts have been understaffed. I think Slate was really scrappy for a long time, still is, and we were one of the first outlets. We had some of the first podcasts out there. Our Political Gabfest and Culture Gabfest, and it grew organically from this small news organization. And now, we’re a real… More of an audio powerhouse, but still staffed really sparsely.
And so, a lot of audio producers had told us, “I’m working insane hours, and I can’t even take the comp time that I accrue necessarily because we don’t have enough staff.” And so, it’s something that I know the union has worked really hard on to make sure that people are getting the leave that they’re owed, and also, that they’re able to actually take it and not be worked to the bone because it’s really hard to do good work when your brain is completely fried.
Katie Rich: And that’s the thing where it’s like, from a capitalist standpoint, you should want your employees to be rested and-
Christina Cauterucci: And productive.
Katie Rich: And productive.
Christina Cauterucci: You want their brains to work.
Katie Rich: Because you’re going to get a better product and you’re going to make more money. But that’s not how it’s thought of. Sophie, what do you think needs to be absolutely enshrined in everyone’s contract?
Sophie Summergrad: Oh, man. Well, I will also say, as someone who has been beating the drum for comp time for a long time, Mads knows this. No, it really is like-
Katie Rich: I love this.
Sophie Summergrad: It’s the part of the contract that affects most directly, and I think Christina had that experience with working on the season two where I think, especially at a news organization, when you’re thinking about overtime or weekend work or late-night work, that might be thought of as breaking news stuff. So, you need someone to cover a presidential debate that’s airing at 8:00 PM and they’re going to be up writing for however long, or you’re going to be covering an election night.
I think election years are a big time for that kind of… Especially for the writers on our staff, pulling a lot of late nights, weekends, extra hours. I think folks think about that for a lot of our daily podcasts too and our news shows, but sometimes that conversation gets lost around narrative podcasts because we do have this long tail of maybe sounds cushy. We have a couple of months, we have seven months, eight months to work on something.
You would be shocked at how quickly that time goes when you’re working on pulling all of these things together. And so, we end up working a lot of weekends. A lot of nights you’re wrangling this huge story that is essentially a limited series multipart documentary, and we get a lot of overtime. And I think, to Christina’s point, I have also accrued quite a bit of comp time, and I’m now working on the next season of slow burn that is fast approaching.
And so, for me, it’s a little bit still… I think there’s still some room to go of figuring out how we can best use comp time for folks. I think, ideally, that you wouldn’t have 32 days of overtime. You’d have enough runway time, and you’d have a big enough staff to be able to prevent some of those things in the first place. So, I think that’s one thing is we are a lean team and maybe some more resources on the front end would be nice.
But I also think there have been some… And Mads, correct me if I’m wrong if this was in bargaining or not, or it was more of a spoken thing, but there used to be a time limit on how long after you accrued comp time you could use it. So, I think it was within two months, right?
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah.
Sophie Summergrad: And that, for some of us was-
Madeline Ducharme: Two months, yeah.
Sophie Summergrad: It was completely impossible because we’d be-
Katie Rich: That’s not fair.
Sophie Summergrad: If I said, “Oh, in February I have four days of comp time,” but the show is running through June, and I don’t have any time to take off those extra days because I’m going to need to be available the whole time. That was a big issue for a lot of people, I think. And now, the union negotiated to four months I believe.
Madeline Ducharme: We did. Yeah, that was in our most recent contract negotiation, which is like hopefully, you don’t get enough comp time where you need four months to take it.
Sophie Summergrad: Hopefully, but it also has been a huge weight off my shoulders of trying to figure out how to work it into my existing schedule when I know I have a little bit more of a cushion. So, that’s been a huge benefit to the folks on the narrative team. Narrative audio team especially. And so, that’s a very direct result of bargaining action that has been incredibly, incredibly helpful to our day-to-day lives, I think. Totally.
Katie Rich: Ideally, it should be like Bed Bath & Beyond coupons where it should never expire.
Sophie Summergrad: Forever.
Christina Cauterucci: And you’re always getting new ones in the mail, yeah.
Katie Rich: And you’re like, “I don’t even shop there.”
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah. I was thinking about the contract and the salary floors. I mean when I was part of the team that negotiated the first contract, I was making the bottom of the salary floor. It was literally the lowest low, which is $51,000 a year, which at the time, it’s different now. I think we’re up to 60. Woo. Which sounds still so low. I hear it and I’m like, “Oh, man, that hurts to think about some plucky 22-year-old getting a job here and starting there.”
Katie Rich: And who’s not living in North Dakota. In whatever tundra is in North… You know what I mean?
Madeline Ducharme: No, exactly. Living in DC, living in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. It’s something that is so important to diversity and equity and inclusion too. When you’re fighting for a salary floor, you’re not just fighting for the actual comfort of the people who already work there, people who are already in your unit. Which, of course, that’s a huge priority for your unit. But you’re fighting for the future of who will be in your unit. Of who you want to be able to work at this company. Who you want to be able to be a part of this storytelling, and you can’t strive towards that diversity and inclusion without a salary floor that is even halfway decent.
And so, thinking about the bargaining committee and thinking about the work we did to get that up, however incrementally we have, it’s all working towards a bigger goal too that will make our work better on the back end for sure.
Katie Rich: Right, because if there’s only a certain type of person who can tell these stories, then only a certain type of story gets told, right? Right, so we’re wrapping up here and I want to ask… I have two more questions and one is a little bit simpler and one is a little bit more straightforward, so I’m going to ask the straightforward one first.
As experts. As famed audio journalists, what help and advice can you give to lay folks like us as far as navigating the excruciating amount of information and misinformation out there so that we can be as informed as possible? Because the irony is we have more information than we ever had, and we are the least informed I think we’ve ever been. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe you disagree.
Sophie Summergrad: That’s the straightforward question. I’m like my brain is like-
Katie Rich: Well, the other one’s a little funner, so-
Madeline Ducharme: Got it.
Christina Cauterucci: That’s a hard question. I mean I think there are still news outlets out there who on many important topics are extremely trustworthy. I think that there’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical of some of these legacy news outlets, especially when it comes to certain topics. People have made a lot of valid criticisms of the New York Times on trans issues and stuff like that. But there are still those places I feel like I still trust because they still take their reputation very seriously.
I also find that finding specific reporters or critics who know what they’re talking about and have a good scoop or have a trustworthy take following people and who they follow, I sometimes will look at who reporters I like follow on X or whatever, or other people that they quote, and that’s how I go about getting my news. But it’s hard. I know we don’t want to delve into AI or whatever but-
Katie Rich: We can if you want. How much comp time do you have?
Christina Cauterucci: I know, right?
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah, it does feel like a frightening moment a little bit as somebody who believes really earnestly in the power of journalism for a healthy democracy to think about how easily disinformation can spread and how much easier it’s going to get with AI.
Sophie Summergrad: I was just going to say, to Christina’s point, thinking about people and journalists and reporters who you trust, and you appreciate their work and feel that they’re smart and tell the whole story or try to do their best feels really important. That is not a great way of saying that or a great sentence, but I will say as a small plug, I really do rely on the What Next team and Mary Harris as one of those voices for me.
I think not just because I know who you are, but… I mean that helps, but really valuing your journalistic perspective, the stories you do want to tell, the stories you excavate, the people you find. I can remember a couple of months ago Mary had a conversation with Peter Beinart who was the editor at large at Jewish Currents talking about what’s happening in Gaza right now. And it was a very meaningful and impactful conversation to hear and listen to. I listened to it three or four times. I sent it to a bunch of people thinking about what’s going on, and hearing Peter and Mary, two people that I really trust, and respect talk about this really intense subject with so much nuance and sensitivity and care coming from a Jewish perspective and a non-Jewish perspective, I really appreciated that.
So, I think, also, there’s something about What Next too like what you were saying before that you’re finding stories, you’re finding people. It’s very person-driven, not necessarily that more staid journalism that you could think about. And so, it really humanizes stories. I really trust the folks there to tell me what’s going on in the world in a way that feels informative and meaningful.
So, I just… Yeah, special shout-out to you guys because it… No, but it’s really true, and I think when you find a person, a show, a place, a thing, whatever it is that you really connect with and trust, that can be a great way to focus in on… My words are leaving my brain, but-
Katie Rich: It’s true.
Madeline Ducharme: This is so funny that you said all this about the show that I work on now because when I heard your question, my first thought was to actually offer advice to the other people in our industry to think about how we can… And not offer advice to the people who are consuming and reading us and listening to us and things like that. And that could be just because I fully misheard your question, but I also think that we have an obligation to not only make things that are smart and accurate and fair and honest, but we also have an obligation to make things that are engaging and funny and human and on planet earth.
That’s one thing I really like about Mary, our host, Mary Harris, because she speaks like a person that you would be friends with. And when you do talk to her not on mic, she speaks the same way. And I think that if you’re going to talk about how do we combat misinformation? How do we get at this stuff? I do think we have an obligation to make our work that is good and true the most engaging thing out there.
And that’s not to say that anything should be sensationalized, but that we should trust our audience to be interested in complicated and nuanced conversations, and we should be courageous and be unafraid to be a little human with them and make it something that feels tangible and accessible, and dare I say fun? I don’t know, but I think that’s a huge untapped important part of this war on misinformation.
Katie Rich: Yeah. Once again, it boils down to people and their stories, and that’s what’s going to separate us from AI, and that’s something that AI can never do is teach through personal experience. So, my last question, which I think is fun and you’re going to be like, “Katie, why are you intoxicated? It’s early.” As folks who have delved in many, many decades of history and stories and things like that, are we living in unprecedented times?
Madeline Ducharme: No, never.
Christina Cauterucci: I feel like the Doc Slow Burn answer would be no. However, it’s interesting doing a little bit of press to promote this season, which is about, an incredible spoiler alert, gay rights victory against all odds. Against this narrative that queer people are grooming young children, recruiting young children. In other words, there’s narrative that has taken hold exactly the same today. I think there’s so much different. There’s so much that is happening in today’s world that it was not happening back then. That what happened back then, the good part, is not necessarily replicable.
That’s not to say that we don’t have a chance to beat back this… Just speaking broadly, far right authoritarian ascendant wing of the Republican Party that’s taking power and becoming increasingly popular in some circles. But it does feel like the internet has changed a lot of things. In a good way, it’s helped people find each other and it’s enabled a lot of really powerful organizing. It’s also enabled the disinformation that we were just talking about, and it’s allowed people to be harassed in new ways.
We have domestic terror groups showing up at pride parades, and there’s a lot that’s happening right now that is maybe parts of it have been precedented, but a lot of it is unprecedented in the confluence of all the varying factors that are playing into what’s happening right now. And I think that makes it particularly challenging, as journalists, to show in some ways how history repeats itself. But also, how this moment brings its own unique challenges and how people who care about justice like the people who Sophie and I just spent months interviewing for this podcast have to find new ways to seek justice. And yeah, I’m curious what you guys think as other people who’ve done work in history.
Sophie Summergrad: One thing I, thinking about this question, I am going back to an interview I did with my grandmother actually for one of Slate’s other narrative podcasts One Year that we’ve all touched at one point. My grandmother was born in the 1920s. This was very much an interview about her and my grandfather getting married in 1942, highly recommend everyone listen. She talks about how sexy my grandfather was a lot, so great.
But I asked her if things feel different or worse or whatever than they did when she was growing up. She lived through the Great Depression, World War II, civil rights movement, anti-war movement. She had really been around for a lot of these touchstones I think that we think of in 20th-century American history. And she said a little bit what you were saying, Christina, where she was like, “It’s not worse now than it was then, but it’s different in the ways that it’s worse.”
I talked to her about COVID and interviewing her during COVID and thinking about, “No, it’s never quite felt like this, but this exact thing hasn’t happened in my lifetime before.” So, it’s always going to feel a little bit different, and yes, history does have a way of repeating itself. She couldn’t believe people weren’t out in the streets protesting one thing or another that she was like, “We dealt with this X number of years ago.” A lot of people in our latest season say, “I thought we did some of this back in the ’70s.”
But she would say, “It is different. It’s different with cable news. It’s different with the internet.” All of these things really do make things feel of their moment and of their time. And so, I think, for us as journalists, saying what you were saying, Christina, to reflect what happened in the past and show how there are these similarities and mirrors to the present, but also ways in which it really is different and maybe there are different ways that we can respond to it than people responded in the past where things are constantly evolving.
Christina Cauterucci: On a macro level though I do take some weird comfort in thinking not every society lasts forever. In fact, no society lasts forever.
Sophie Summergrad: Totally.
Madeline Ducharme: Oh, God. I was just thinking about my answer being no.
Katie Rich: Yours was a very effusive no, by the way.
Madeline Ducharme: I know, I know. And the reason I say that is because I think that there is some unhelpful narcissism in thinking that everything we’re experiencing right now is so completely unique to whatever we’ve got going on. Because I think that there are nonstop miseries and nonstop victories too. And I think that when people start talking about precedence or unprecedented, we tend to focus so much on the miseries, the aforementioned miseries. The really hard, the really horrific, the very awful things that human society has lived through.
And I think that it’s in our best interests to understand our precedented times through the victories as well. And I think that the Slow Burn season that just came out is a really, really smart, and really interesting and very, I don’t know, empowering, motivating story and version of that. Of understanding that this moment, this backlash that we’re living through right now has been beaten back before, and here’s how somebody did it before.
And nothing you’re experiencing right now is completely novel. Nothing that is happening to queer people to any other group of people is completely unprecedented, so go back. Understand where things worked. Understand where people found ways to make things work and learn from them. And I think a lot of us could stand to think a little less about our own situation and our own brain and our own understanding of the world and step outside ourselves and try to understand it from a historical perspective that can inform the way that you move forward too.
Katie Rich: Oh, beautiful. I mean true-
Sophie Summergrad: I like that, Mads.
Katie Rich: I love that.
Christina Cauterucci: Same.
Katie Rich: And also, I think one of the most optimistic things I’ve heard in a long time that I’m going to hold on to is this notion that it’s not worse, it’s just different. And that’s the idea. I mean I like that.
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah, I mean many things are better.
Katie Rich: Yeah.
Madeline Ducharme: Many things are better than back then.
Katie Rich: Yeah.
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah.
Christina Cauterucci: I was actually talking to somebody about AI recently and I was like this promise of AI is going to free us all from labor. I was like that’s been the promise of every technology that it’s going to free us from labor. And my friend was like, “Are you working a 90-hour week in a field? No, actually, there’s been some advances made.” And so, yeah, you’re right Mads. We do need to focus on some victories as well.
Madeline Ducharme: I just think so much about when you’re 21 it feels like nobody has ever been 21 before, but it is so powerful and refreshing to listen to something like this Slow Burn season, to engage with something and hear someone capture exactly that thing that you felt, and to just look beyond yourself. I think that so much of what is great about our work by the nature of the work are forced to constantly get out of our own heads, constantly get out of our own lives, and get into other people’s lives. Force them into their own heads.
And I think that doing that, the perspective-taking that I’ve gotten from that, the skills I feel like I have from speaking to people who’ve lived through things that are very different and very similar is… I don’t know, I feel like I’m armed. I feel like I had an arsenal of weapons to go into these conversations, to go into scary, daunting historical events that are about to be history, things like that.
Katie Rich: Oh. I guess my last question is then what’s your social security number?
Madeline Ducharme: I know.
Katie Rich: Since you’re so happy to share? Sophie.
Madeline Ducharme: I know. That was back when I was an underground radio 4:00 AM delirious with my friend saying, “No one’s listening. We can do whatever we want out here.” But now, people might be listening. This is the WGA.
Katie Rich: That’s what I’m talking about. Sophie, Christina, Madeline, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time, for doing all that you do, and doing it with a spirit of kindness, and curiosity, and respect. That is the best thing that a journalist can arm themselves with, so I thank you for doing that. And thank you for being a part of our union.
Christina Cauterucci: Thank you so much. This was really fun.
Sophie Summergrad: Yeah, thank you so much for having us.
Madeline Ducharme: Yeah, I really am so glad to always meet other WGA comrades and be able to spend time talking about our industry. Talking about why our union has made it so much better.
Christina Cauterucci: Yeah, solidarity forever.
Katie Rich: Let’s go East.
Speaker 5: OnWriting is a production of the Writers Guild of America East. This series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Our associate producer and designer is Molly Beer. Tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw and Stockboy Creative. You can learn more about the Writers Guild of America East online at wgaeast.org. You can follow the guild on all social media platforms @WGAEast. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thank you for listening, and write on.
