The Press Box - Are Journalists Doing It Wrong? Plus, Jessica Bruder on ‘Nomadland.’

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker dissect columnist Margaret Sullivan’s piece, "A New Way of Looking at Trust in Media," to determine what journalists and citizens care about, and how to accommodate this change in journalism (3:50). Then, Jessica Bruder, author of the book ‘Nomadland,’ joins to discuss her experience reporting on the phenomenon of older Americans leaving their homes in pursuit of seasonal work, and touch on the Oscar-nominated film adaptation (30:28). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Jessica Bruder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ringer Dish is the place for all things celebrity, for major celebrity moments like the Met Gala and the Oscars, to the weird habits of the stars you love, to refreshers on the biggest tabloid stories from the last 20 years, Ring or Dish has all the vital details. On Tuesdays, catch jam session with Juliet Lippman and Amanda Dobbins for Royal Family Rumors, Celebrity Real Estate, and Industry Analysis. And on Fridays, listen to Tea Time with me, Kate, and Amelia, for lightning fast coverage on pressing celebrity news and gossip. Check out Ringar Dish on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, the Village Voice reappeared in print in New York City this week. What I want to know is what dead publication would you like to reanimate? Reanimate. I mean, that makes it sound so ominous.

Is there some concern that the Village Voice is going to start like eating people's brains in its new edition? Well, it is being run by the guy that gutted LA Weekly. So it's kind of a pet cemetery kind of reanimation. That's not the cat you buried. That's like demon cat. Come back to New York City. This is a great question. I feel like we've talked about this before in other forms.

I mean, listen, you're teeing me up to say spy or you're waiting for me to say something so that you can say spy. I understand that that's the appropriate answer. So I'm just going to go and say the things that I actually, the old magazines that I find the most joy in that actually get me going or just really old like like obviously wrestling magazines but it's the best ones or like the ones that are just tight like the title of the magazine is boxing and wrestling you know and it's like just just the cover the layout everything gets me going or like like like american detective like the old spy magazines like you like literal spy magazines lowercase s that you you didn't know if you were reading fiction or not there's like

the prose was so purple there was no distinction at all that would be a lot of fun to like reanimate one of those and just sort of run it as like a stream of consciousness zine or a substack I guess is what we should say in 2021. Polp magazines are a great idea.

Yeah. Black mask coming back. Yeah. If these are like demon reanimations, I do love taking something like Rosie's McCalls. Remember the most awkward magazine name of all time?

What if Pet Cemetery Rosie's McCall's came back? and was just being run by people who did not have good intentions, as opposed to the other one. What about portfolio, Pet Cemetery portfolio? We could really go the whole way here. Because I do like,

it's like, it's not just bringing a magazine back. It's bringing back a slightly demented version of that magazine. I think we could entertain ourselves for weeks on that one. Can we just reanimate George and make that like the official magazine of the press box? And the implicit joke would be that we didn't change anything at all. We just went the same, the same just like baseless gusto and just tried to take on the entire political and media world. Absolutely.

If we can just run that Kirstie Alley interview, everyone was tweeting the other day over and over again. I'm on board with the George reboot. Coming up on today's show, we talk about a news study that says readers and journalists may have completely different ideas about what they want from the news. Plus, are you a fan of the movie Nomad Land, which is up for six Oscars on Sunday? Jessica Bruder, who wrote the book The Movie is based on Stop Spy, all that more on the press box, a part of the ringer, podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, Margaret Sullivan, who covers the media for the Washington Post, wrote a column last week we've been wanting to talk about. Even if we don't agree with everything here, there is some valuable media naval.

gazing to be done. Sullivan was writing about a brand new study that showed that the things that matter to us journalists may not be the things that matter to our readers. Study is called a new way of looking at trust in media. So, you might ask, what are the kinds of things that matter to journalists? Well, Sullivan lists five things. Oversight, transparency, factuality, spotlighting wrongdoing, and giving voice to the voiceless. Journalism is a tribe, Tom Rosensteele, Executive Director of the American Press Institute tells her, these are our core values, and we think that everybody shares them. Well, the study Sullivan cites, which was done by API and the Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, shows, and I'm quoting

here, only one of those five core values touted by journalists also shares the support of the majority of American. That one is factuality. The other four values are underwater. And I'll set you up with this, David. I'm quoting here from the study itself. Only 11% of the public supports all five of the core journalism values

unreservedly. I'm of two minds about this study. Because the reaction that Sullivan is feeling, is having herself and what she's going for and trying to convey this to us is, well, these values don't seem particularly controversial,

right? So what's the disconnect? like, what are we not getting? What are journalists not getting about our audience? I will say, I have not read the entire study, obviously. But I do feel that there's a little bit of a disconnect if you're talking about when you say core values, right? First, let's set aside for a fact, for a second, the notion that every journalist shares these values, and this is what is animating every journalistic endeavor. But, you know, love for the, love for your fellow man is a core value, right? Like, spotlighting wrongdoing feels a little bit aside from most humans' cores, right? Oversight is not something that, like, my mother or my wife would cite as a core value

in that, like, animates their daily living. You can understand how these things might not be perceived as core, whatever you might define that as in a personal way. But there is a huge disconnect here. She's, Sullivan says in the piece, something we all have heard a million times. Trust in the media has fallen from about 70% to 40% over the last 50 years or so. We see it, we hear about it constantly. And this is something that you and I talk about on the press box. I feel like this is a refrain every few months or so.

Part of the problem with journalism is the self-importance of journalism. And I don't mean to that as an insult, but like, you know, You see you had the quote from Rosensteele. He calls journalism as a tribe. I mean, that's one step. I mean, tribe is like one degree away from saying something that's like implicitly insulting, right? I mean, you could say, like, if he had said journalism is a cult, would you have been like, would that be like definitionally different than the point he's trying to make right there?

I don't know. I just feel like, I feel like it's, I want you to talk about these values and how you feel like they actually animate the newsroom. But I think that from, from where. I'm sitting, I think that it's, there's always going to be a disconnect between a group of people that are motivated by a cause, rightly or wrongly, and the people that they're serving, because there's always a little bit of, it's a service job, even, even into the, in the best, the best reading of it. And, you know, it's, there's, there's a sort of eat your vegetables aspect

to it. They're doing this thing to help, you know, the readers, not necessarily to, you know, I mean, if every person had their way, I mean, the New York Times would just be Sunday night football or something. You know, I mean, it's a different, they're necessarily conflicting points of view. Yes. It's interesting you should say vegetables, because I remember this quote from David Simon. Of course, former journalist who then became TV guy. He said something once about TV dramas, which really applies to journalism, too. He said, if you ask the audience what they want, the audience is like kids.

and you and I have kids and the audience will say we want more ice cream whatever it is we love the most about your thing we want that we want ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream ice cream don't want any vegetables anything we don't like we want ice cream

and eventually if you just let the audience do that like kids they would get really sick because all they ate was ice cream so there is a certain sense that if you just ask people what do you want from journalism it would be as hard for them I think to pick it out as it would be

for me to say, what do you want from Netflix series or HBO series? I don't know. You know, like you're going to show me something and I'm going to either like it or don't like it, but I'm not sure I have that idea at my core. To your point about trust, people bring this up all the time. I was looking at the Gallup poll, which often gets brought up. Can I, can I give you a different interpretation of these events? Please. 2004, the number for trust in the media was 44%. 20, 20, it's 40%. So, you're telling me we've gone through four years of the president of the United States saying reporters are liars. And we are basically at the same level that we were at 16 years ago. Now, that's a lowish number. But at the same time, I would sort of argue that that's actually

pretty good given where what has happened in America over the last 16 years. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure that is exactly, you know, when we talk about, well, they don't trust me. Well, it's actually pretty flat, again, given that one particular party and one particular president has taken pains to try to say that the media isn't telling you the truth. One thing the authors of the study say that's interesting is that this is not just a liberal conservative thing about the media. Rather than distrust toward the media being tied only to the perception of partisan bias, the authors, right, the problem at the heart of the media trust crisis may be skepticism about the underlying purpose and mission journalists

are trying to fulfill in the first place, which gets us back to those core values, things. They did some really interesting A-B testing. Do you want to hear the A-B testing from the study? I do. I do. I love all discussions about A-B testing. Let's go. This is the stuff that's actually fascinating to me, where they took an AP story essentially about a local scandal

and wrote it two different ways. Tell me what you feel about these two. Here is number one, the number one way to write a story about a local scandal. Quote, a project aimed at helping the city's most marginalized low-income neighborhood has been abandoned in the wake of a misuse of city funds by the parks director. Okay, you are spotlighting the citizens who are affected by this scandal. That's number one.

Here's number two, David. The city's parks director intentionally defied the orders of the mayor and diverted city money from a key recreation project to businesses owned by his family and friends. The low income and marginalized communities go to the second paragraph. And what the authors are saying is that there are people whose biggest value is voice to the voiceless. These are vulnerable people. That's who a news story should be focusing on. There's a second group that is more interested in authority, like defying the mayor.

Yeah. That's the big thing. So if you write the exact same story and just switch your lead around, you can appeal to different groups of people. Now, what do we think about that? Because it does seem like there's a moral aspect of that, too, if you're dropping the people affected by the scandal down to the second paragraph. Well, I mean, to take the vegetables metaphor an unnecessary step further. I mean, sometimes you've got to like melt cheese on broccoli to get kids to eat it, right? I mean, the goal is still getting them to eat the broccoli.

I don't know that that. I understand what you're saying. But I think that it's interesting. The A-B testing is an interesting thing because, I mean, just a way of looking at this whole thing, because I find it impossible to disentangle this study using A-B-testing to prove a point about media from the daily practice of every online periodical at A-B-testing every headline they run, right? I mean, we at the Ringer have two to three headlines for every piece, depending on, it's I mean, the story page itself never changes, but the headline you see on the home page,

on Twitter, like all the places, like it can vary, not in fact, not in, you know, the facts don't change, but the pitch changes, right, depending on what the audience is. And even on the homepage, that's what A-B testing is. You run different headlines at different points of the day and see which ones get more clicks. And it's a real thing that every single periodical, every outlet does this. How about every journalist when you tweet your piece of second time? Do you use the same tweet? No, you deliberately set up. up, you tee up the second one, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's, you're, this is exactly what people do all the time. And there's a good, and with good reason, you want to get as many sets of eyes on it.

And what they're talking about here in the study is a, is almost a more defensible version of that. This isn't a craven attempt at clicks, right? I'm gathering at click farming. This is a, this is a, this is a, this could, at, at its best, this is a, this is a, um, a means of getting the most eyes on a, story that that deserves those eyeballs, right? Yes. I guess I'm a little skeptical that the lead of a story about a local scandal would really make that big a difference in trust. I mean, if you, they're talking about, of course, you would be doing this across a newspaper, across the publication. But is that little kind of nod at one value over another value really going to make the difference? Headlines I get, because those are easy enough for tweets, right? You can

just keep changing them, tweak them up, and you find it. You find out. You know, out essentially how people respond to a story. The other stuff is interesting to me. Is that going to, at the end of the day, move that trust number? Well, I think, and again, I'm stuck way deep, I'm deep in a rabbit hole of hypotheticals here. Hey, Apple News as one just sort of, you know, ominous specter hangover all of our culture. You and I have different Apple News stories when we open up our phone, right? You and your wife have different stories. You and your, you know, your mom, whoever, you get very different things based on what you've clicked on over time. And we all know either for ourselves or someone's very close to it with someone who kind of opens up when you're

like, oh my gosh, did you see this big story in the, you know, LA Times? And they're just like, all I got today was like Kardashian updates. And you realize that like you're, you really get put in a very specific like rabbit hole or very specific place with by your own tendencies and you start missing things that actually matter or might matter to you, even if it's not something that serious. What I'm trying to say is, would we not be in a better place? If they were steering us with leads and headlines and giving us the news, you know, like giving us like the,

if we all got some version of the same 100 stories, but through headline and lead, they got us into those stories based on our preferences. Wouldn't we be a more informed civilization? So we brought the newspaper back essentially. This is exactly it. We've reinvented. We're reinventing a newspaper here.

But thanks to this kind of, you know, sort of AI, Apple AI, the leads of the, the newspaper stories are all going to be slightly different. Or maybe the headlight. To get us in there, right. Yeah. That's exactly what I'm pitching.

This is so hypothetical, but that's, but that would be a much better situation than waking up one day. I mean, I've listened, there's days where I've, where I've pulled up Apple News and just been like, realize that like I'm only getting NBA stories or whatever.

And I'm just like, this is not like, I don't want this. Like, how do I get out? How do I back out of this? But it's a, it's,

you know, it's not, it's, I'm not saying we're all impervious to this. That's the, that's the, That's the ice cream thing. It's giving you way too much ice cream.

Sure. That's the ice cream. What I want is, what I want is whipped cream topping or whatever. You know, I mean, you just want to be, you want to be lured in.

Well, just a burger, right? You need a little sustenance, right? You can't just have the ice cream or you're going to get a little bit sick. Yes. That's, that's right. I mean, I do think that it's,

that there's a, you know, there's a bigger issue here. And AB testing is, I mean, it sounds, it's easy to sort of raise an eyebrow at that, even if you know what it is. But I think that, you know, so much of journalism is, when people talk about distrust in journalism, they're not just talking about the New York Times having a liberal bias. That's a real thing. I mean, that's a real belief that many people have. But, you know, I was like, my mother-in-law the other day was complaining about how they always, but the way they present, the way they always frame murder stories on the local news, right? It's always like, it's like she, I mean, to it to her mind, it was like, like,

For men, like mass murderers, it's like, well, you know, they always interview people and like, you would have never known it. He was such a nice guy. And then for women, it's just like, it takes a more ominous slant. Just like, what's wrong with this mother that she killed her family? You know, whatever. But like, these are instances of like conventional wisdom that permeate all newsrooms, especially old school ones.

But you see, but like the local news is like, anyone knows this. It's like demonstrably less trustworthy in the way that they present things and what they choose to present, right? Everybody knows that like it's 10 minutes till the news and the teaser is just like like like massive shooting at the supermarket, tune in 10 minutes. And then like the story is not that. Like they go for the bad stuff. That's a that's a much better example of media bias, right? That's some or reason to distrust the news.

And that and people see that and people complain about that. But it sort of trickles up to the national newspapers too. People conflate that thing with this perception of liberal bias or whatever else. There's just a whole lot going on. And I'm not sure that A-B testing really has anything to do with that. And the instance of like core value parallels doesn't really have much to do with that either. Bingo. Bingo.

You absolutely hit on something. And Jay Rosen made this point on Twitter too, which is it would be sort of troubling and weird to say, well, we as journalists are focused on transparency. And we just can't get the public involved. Somehow our trust is eroding even though we're focused on these very popular core values. Rosen says this. journals believe they have the right to, one, grab your attention via breaking news, clickbait headlines,

etc. to commodify it and three sell it to others, a practice fundamental to the business. The audience knows that, so that's also a huge factor in trust, right? Being manipulated. And it's not just, we can pound on local news stories and we're, you know, 48 hours

investigates murder things. But people do that on Twitter all the time. They manipulate the audience. Right? I see sports writers do that all the time with the way they word tweets, the way they do the things. And that absolutely erodes trust in journals. Like, this person's playing a game with me.

It's not about this person is so focused on transparency. They're not giving me what they want. This is, this person's playing a game with me. They're trying to grab me and oversell things they have and overhype things they have and tell me something that they don't, that isn't really true, right? Isn't 100% true. Well, I mean, and part of the, I mean, I'm making. a huge leap here, but it's kind of part of the subtle genius or not so subtle genius of

like Fox News is that they, they insist upon the lie, right? When they bring you in with some crazy stuff, they make sure that that's a story that they tell whether or not it's ground in reality. They insist upon it. Yes. And Rosen goes on to continue that you can only get so far by looking at what journalists say their fundamental values are. There are other priorities that are less likely to talk about and may not realize they have. So that is a kind of fundamental weirdness of this study. But he does point out, these studies are interesting because they do get us beyond the basic question was like, oh, no, they don't trust the media.

Oh, no, what are we going to do? And actually think about that in a more subtle way. That is absolutely a positive here. Because, and maybe that David takes us to the biggest question, which is, are they supposed to, I guess readers are supposed to trust us? I don't know that there's a way that you say, well, we don't care. if readers don't trust. Of course they're supposed to trust us.

There's probably a form of bigger and more fundamental questions. Are they supposed to like us? Yeah. Are they supposed to like journalists? I'm not talking about podcasts where you like the host because they're funny and all that stuff.

I'm talking about news reporters that you see breaking stories and are breaking stories about the political party you like and the political party you don't like. Are you supposed to like them in a fundamental way? Is that important?

You know, it just... Well, I don't know. I don't know what to do with that. That is a real question. I think the answer, everybody, I think, would say, no, you don't have to like them. But actually what we see at play is sort of an inverse of this, and I think in modern media, where if you were really only concerned about trust, it would be in the best interest. It would probably be in the best interest of all outlets to keep their journalists off Twitter, off the social media, right? trust isn't i mean listen we talk i mean there's there's allusions to this and other parts of the study but trust is really an institutional thing i think it's i think it's much more likely that you would

trust across the you would you would trust a newspaper or whatever trust the new york times across the board if you had no idea if you had never quote unquote met or it been exposed to via social media or on talking head hits on tv or whatever else the individual journalist now you may have such a high opinion of certain journalists that it's that it come, that it might average out, but probably not, right? If you, if you knew every single one. But should we, but should we like them? Well, we don't like anybody if we don't know who they are.

We don't see them on TV, if we don't see them on social media. So person by person, it's probably not a, it's, it's, it's probably better that they like us. Once they know us, right? I mean, once all journalists are exposed to the world, it is important that they're liked. But, but it's, it's not, I mean, the. had a sort of out of the bag, right? But I do think in a perfect world, it's easier to maintain the sort of institutional credibility when you're not, I mean, listen, if you're, if you're a, if you're a conservative person and you see a reporter from the Washington Post and the New York Times or even

an opinion columnist for one of those papers, it's online saying some like, you know, left-leaning stuff on Twitter, it's, it is rational that you would see that and say, man, the New York Times has liberals working for it. That's a fact. You know, if, you see that, right? And so I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I do think that perception, I mean, the cats sort of out of the bag on that perception. We should note, and we've seen this over the last months and a couple of years, that when you take journalists off social media, then you are deferring to the institution, right? Journalists would tell you we have a voice on social media to correct the lapses of the institution in some cases,

right? That gives us a voice in case the institution is screwing up. like the New York Times, the Washington Post or other newspapers are want to do. So it's not just like, you're right, like maybe you would somehow kind of burnish or, you know, or not like tear down the reputation of the institution per se, but then you're, of course, saying, well, the institution and its editors are doing everything right, which they certainly aren't. Can I make one final point about testing headlines on Twitter? Please. This is purely, purely a small, small bore observation, but an obsession of mine.

How did we all test our way into the theory that listing three things in a headline is the proper way to sell a piece, especially a sports piece? Let me give you an example. I'm just completely making this up. Okay. All right. I sit down on Twitter. I've got my new feature out. I'm typing out the tweet.

I wrote about John Morant, McDonald's Happy Meals, and what it means to be young. that is the way every piece is sold now it's the subject of the piece it's a random pop culture throw in that doesn't seemingly have anything to do with the subject of the piece and then it's the larger value you're communicating in the three slot how do we get there like what what it's the rule of three i think it's it's a it's a formula of subhead writing is it's a formula Yeah, I feel like more than anything. It's a formula sort of pitching that became subhead writing that became the way we tweet about things. What we tweet about when we tweet about journalism.

Yeah, but there's just so much going on there because it's like, here's the sports story you want. Here's the little nod that, hey, this may be more like a Brian Phillips column. This may be not just sticking to sports. And then the third thing is like, here, I'm going deep, man. This is not just a sports story and a little pop culture. No, no. there are major stakes at play here. Well, I think that what you're seeing is that if you actually,

actually take a step back, take a breath, wipe the slate clean, and look at the values that journalists prize, probably a little bit less oversight, transparency, factuality, etc.

And probably more like hitting the subject, expanding past the subject in an interesting and twisty way that might draw extra eyes or get you a book deal and then, you know, expanding into a larger argument. I mean, these are what editors would tell you. What you just described is what, you know, an editor would open an ideas meeting by saying, this is the sort of stories that we want.

And I'm not sure that giving voice to the voiceless is going to come up in that conversation. You hit the biggest value, book deal. Like, that's it. Transparency, voice to the voiceless, book deal for me. that's what every journalist really wants. All right, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

David Ian Trump apparatchik news. Mother Jones reports that recently pardoned Trump advisor Roger Stone has been hit with a Justice Department lawsuit, quote, for failing to pay nearly 2 million in taxes, penalties, and interest. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write that Merrick Garland is leaving no Roger Stone unturned. Thanks to Ryan Snyder. Glad to know that Roger Stone is back. Big news from Texas politics. A shock poll, as Matt Drudge likes to say, found prospective candidate Matthew McConaughey,

leading Republican Governor Greg Abbott, 45% to 33%. it was an overwork Twitter joke to write that this seems all right, all right, all right. Thanks to Chad Orzel and John. Haven't we had like four versions of this joke? The best one was right, like his political ideology would be all right, all right, all right.

Yes, yes. Yeah, or if he just came out and said, you know, I'm running as a Democrat, but I'm not as liberal as you think. It could be like center right, center right, center right. There's a lot of, we could have, listen, it's not going to end. It's not going to end anytime soon. I, I, I am

petitioning for for Matthew to stay in the race just for the headlines that we'll get. Finally, David, this is not an overworked Twitter joke exactly, but sometimes you just got to tip your cap. The New York Post reports that, quote, a man accidentally got one Moderna and one Pfizer COVID vaccine. He mixed and matched. It was an overword Twitter joke or whatever it was, to call this the Arnold Farma. The Arnold Farmer. Oh my God.

That is like such a hole in one. I love that. Thanks to Brian McGovern and Andrew Stetka. If you entered a crowded joke category and won, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. In the notebook dump,

it's Oscar week, David. Slightly muted Oscar week, wouldn't you say? Yeah. Yeah. David's like, I've done just as many illos as I ever do. No, I know. It's been, listen, the traffic seal, it does feel like it's a little bit slower. It does feel like, I thought on, this is going to be the most convoluted setup ever,

but on, on Rissillo's show this week or last week, he had on a new WWE rod lead play-by-playman, Adnan Verk, who may be on the Masked Man show this week, but he had him on, and he, they were talking about Oscar, they always talk about movies when they're on together. And I think it was Adon said, it's crazy that people always say they want, like, they don't care about the Oscars because they can't see all of these movies. And this season, they actually can see all these movies, but just no one's watching them. Like, you don't know where to find them, really. I mean, it's sort of like, which one of my like 5,000 apps has Nomad Land on it? I don't, actually,

I know the answer to this one. You know that one too, but a lot of them just kind of get lost in the, in the shuffle. But yes, it has been a muted Oscar week. So you mentioned Nomad Land, six nominations directed by Chloe Zhao starring Francis McDormand. Nomad Land is interesting for our purposes because it's adapted from a nonfiction book, a really wonderfully reported and written nonfiction book by one Jessica Bruder, who wrote about how older people, many of them having lost their jobs and their savings, turned to living permanently in cars and RVs and vans, and sort of traveling around the country going to these seasonal jobs at Amazon warehouses and other places.

what does it feel like to have that piece of very serious nonfiction become a movie? Here's Jessica Bruder. All right, Jessica, the people you wrote about in your book call themselves nomads or work campers. You've described them as geriatric migrant labor. What first got you interested in writing about them? Yeah, I love writing about subcultures,

basically these smaller worlds within our larger one where people, either by common interest or often by adversity, get together and essentially create their own world. I've also spent a lot of time writing about business and our economy. And on top of that, I'd been reading about a woman who went undercover in an Amazon warehouse. And she was briefly approached by someone who told her, I'm in an RV. I live in it full time. I can't afford to retire.

There's a whole program here for people like us. And when I heard that, that's where my jaw dropped. I said there's a whole program for people like you. And I wanted to know more. An idea you touched on the book is that for a lot of these people, their economic circumstances seem hopeless. What is it about living on the road that offers something, at least something like hope?

Yeah, well, for some of the people I met, getting employed in more traditional ways had been very challenging. There's a lot of ageism in America. And I remember Linda May, who's in the book and the film, saying, once I went online looking at these work camper jobs, suddenly there were so many possibilities, as opposed to before when she'd been looking at more traditional jobs. So I think people feel that. They also feel that they've stepped away from a system of flat wages and rising rents, this debt treadmill. People feel like they are trapped

and that getting out on the road while it comes with its own great risks bring some rewards. You talk about jobs. What kinds of jobs are these people doing on the road to get by? Yeah, everything from working on an Amazon warehouse to selling fireworks for the 4th of July at a roadside stand or lugging around Christmas trees, running the rides at Adventureland, a theme park in Iowa, basically being a host at campground sites, working at Dollywood or Wall Drug. There are just tons of these jobs all over the country. Yeah, it's interesting because I think when I go out with my family on various outings, pumpkin patches, Christmas tree lots, you mentioned sports stadiums. all of these places employ basically seasonal labor, bringing in lots of people to do things for a couple of months and paying them fairly low wages. Is that fair? Yeah, that is fair. For employers, they are an ideal and sometimes pliable workforce.

It's plug and play labor. They show up with their homes, work as long as you need them, and then disappear on the other side. One of the challenges these people face is finding a place to park at night so they can sleep, a practice. that's sometimes called stealth camping. How did you find they were doing that? Yeah, so stealth camping usually refers to people trying to sleep in urban areas where often local laws prohibit that sort of thing, prohibit sleeping in a vehicle or overnight parking.

And to do it, it's really a matter of blending in, trying not to draw attention, whether it's getting right to your sleeping spot and falling asleep rather than hanging out or turning on your lights, creating a situation where your vehicle looks like it's part of a fleet or might be a work vehicle. There are all sorts of little tips and tricks that people use to avoid drawing attention to themselves. There's actually apps that show you like which Walmart parking lots are friendlier for people who are trying to spend a night there versus other Walmart parking lots. Yeah, it reminds me of the hobo signs of your when people would, you know, leave a little glyph saying you can get a good meal here or this train yard.

has a nasty guard. You can go on app. So when I used is Allstays, and it would tell me, this Walmart is fine. This Walmart is hostile because they're in a town where it's not allowed. This Walmart is okay, but you should park in this particular corner of the parking lot to avoid the freight trucks coming and going, all sorts of stuff like that. You write, most nomads avoid the label homeless like a contagion. They are houseless after all. Homeless is other people. Why is that distinction important? that's important for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is people deserve dignity and a sense of agency. And the word homeless in our culture has become so stigmatized that it no longer means what it claims to mean. I remember reading a newspaper story a few weeks ago and seeing a photo caption that just called the guy in the picture a homeless man. You know, that guy has a name. He's a person. So this is an interesting subject. How did you find people like Linda May who you wound up writing about? I went out to the desert in a town called Courtside in Arizona, and I walked up to people.

Linda May, I think the first thing I ever said to her was, can I pet your dog? But basically, I walked around talking to people, telling them who I was and what I was doing, and did that a whole lot and met some people. And what did they make of you arriving with a notepad and saying you wanted to write about them? Yeah, some of them were hostile. I remember one woman telling me, oh, I've heard about you. you're the journalist, you're going to make us look like a bunch of homeless vagabonds. And I remember slinking away thinking there's just no even explaining myself to this person.

But I'm an immersion journalist, which means we don't go away. So a few days later, when we were all sitting around, she ended up telling me her whole story. So some people kind of opened up after a while. Other people opened up right away. And some people just don't want to talk. And I don't push them. And someone like Linda may think her story was interesting. No. Linda was shocked. I remember when the story first came out as a Harper's cover and the fact checker got off the phone with her and she called me saying, did you write a book? What's going on here? Like my story is not that interesting. And I told her I thought it was really interesting and that it was pretty incredible. And I think she felt validated by that in some ways and continued to through the book.

One person you interviewed tells you this around this time every night it hits me. that this isn't a vacation or a trip. This is it. Did most of these people you talk to regard these circumstances as being permanent? A lot of them did. A lot of them did. But a lot of them were also very much trying

to have a short time horizon on what they were thinking in terms of next few months rather than next few years. But I think, you know, I definitely met people who didn't imagine going back to traditional housing, who basically saw the capital

S system as something that was broken and saw themselves as conscientious objectors who would be on the road for a long time, if not for the rest of their lives. Did they tell you what they thought they would do when they got older? Well, I asked about that quite a bit, and a lot of people had a lot of not very strong answers, which is actually kind of why I showed up in the piece. I jokingly referred to myself as the warrior in chief because I had worries that other people weren't expressing. I remember one guy telling me that his long-term plan was bleached bones in the desert. Other people thought they might end up falling back on family that they'd been trying to avoid burdening in their language. You know, there was a lot of stuff, not much of it was solid. And I did and continue to hear occasional stories of somebody just passing away out in the road in an RV or a fan.

Did this story first take shape as a pitch to Harper's? It did. It did. So you run in Harper's in August 2014, and you said in the book you were surprised this would be a long-term multi-year reporting project. Why is that? Oh, I just don't assume that anything is going to go that way. You know what it's like to be in media, right? So I love the project. I came away from that story with so many unanswered questions, so many more threads that I wanted to tug on and was thrilled when I was able to expand it. But I feel like you'd never know what cultural context will be published into. You never really know what's going to resonate with other people. I only know what resonates with me. So I was thrilled when I was able to pursue it further. But I didn't. That's not something I took for granted. When you were thinking about expanding it into a book, how did you think about the idea of where this story is going to begin and where this story is going to end?

Yeah. I knew it was going to push far past where the article went. I knew I would be able to go deeper in a lot of ways. And I didn't know where I was going to start out. That was a challenge. I ended up starting out in scene, kind of in media res with Linda May, watching this scene that to me was terrifying that to her was just no big deal.

She didn't even break a sweat and kind of introducing her that way and then later going back and bringing us through the past and up through that moment again and kind of lapping it. That was the structure I went with. I really expected the ending

to be traveling to visit land with Linda May that she was just kind of scouting and seeing how she imagined her future on that land. Of course, I won't spoiler the book, but some things happened that I didn't expect, and I ended up going beyond that. So I basically had these rough goalposts and ended up going in different directions,

but they helped me build a structure. About halfway through the book, you tell the reader you traveled to see these people at various places around the country, you've talked to them, but you didn't feel they were telling you everything you wanted to know, partly because you were visiting them once you got to the site rather than sort of living with them. So at that point, you do what? At that point I ended up with a camperman. So when I was doing the story for Harper's, I was out in the Sonoran Desert in a tent for two weeks with a rental car.

And I was out there, which was good, but I was still kind of dropping in because most of the people I wanted to write about were pretty far out in the back country. And I've been told by Rangers that I couldn't go out there because I wasn't self-contained. I had to camp kind of on the front lot near the porta-pottie, you know, all that delightful stuff. So yeah, so I wanted to be there 24-7. That meant getting myself in a camper van. And I found this 95 GMC Van Dura, and I slapped a solar panel on top,

some golf cart batteries in the back. And that was the beginning. We do a lot of strained puns on this podcast. Will you tell people what you named your camper van? Okay. I wasn't sure if you were into the dad jokes or not. Yes, my van was named Halen. And people keep saying that it's actually named Van.

And I think that's way too obvious. It's already obvious enough. So just just hailing, please. And what did you find, you read about this in the book? What did you, what was it like to sleep in a van for the first time? Yeah, you know, I didn't expect it to feel remotely weird to me because I'm out there as a glorified tourist. I'm not a nomad. I'm a faux mad. I'm out there with my, you know, pad. And I live in Brooklyn. And I come back and I have an apartment. And I was. really, really anxious. I remember thinking, all right, I'm here out in public. Will anybody see me? Will they call the neighbors? Will I get what Van Dwellers call the knock? Which is that three sharp, short wraps on your door that basically mean you're about to get thrown out of wherever you are. Now, for me, that would be an uncomfortable confrontation and maybe a minor inconvenience and a fine or whatever. But for people who are living full time on the road, that can be much more than a hassle.

You can have tickets that add up. People can get towed, literally towed into debt. as one report refers to it. And even though those things weren't going to happen to me, I had a very hard time sleeping and was surprised by it. This is this experience of seeing like headlights come by your van and essentially saying, is that just somebody coming by? Or is that somebody going to stop and knock on my door? Yeah, people were driving through the parking lot all night.

I just remember seeing, I had shades in the back. I remember they would light up white with the headlights and then red with the taillights and just watching white red, white red all night, wondering what was going to happen. You spent a week working at an Amazon fulfillment center in Texas.

What surprised you about that experience? It surprised me. That's a good question. Yeah, just getting inside, the orientation surprised me, just the way things were described to people. For example, I was in a pretty modern warehouse, so robots would ferry merchandise

to the workers who were at different station. So I wasn't going to be walking 15 miles a day on concrete like some of the people I interviewed. But I just remember the woman leading orientation saying, yeah, you should expect to do thousands of reaches and squats every day as these shelves are brought to you. Buns of steel, here we come. And I'm sitting there. And I'm one of the only people at the orientation who doesn't have gray hair. And I'm thinking, buns of steel, here we come. This is just not the demographic for that. So the disconnect really, you know, that kind of toxic, positive. Disconnect slash pep talk really shook me a little.

Yeah, you fasten on the language that companies like Amazon used to recruit older workers. And part of it is almost this like baby boomer generational flattery where they say, you understand what work is. Another person says, we found that work campers have great work ethics. And for that, we applaud you. Almost of saying, you know, we're going to pay you really low wages. We're going to give you this really hard job. But before we do that, we're going to tell you that.

We're going to try to, you know, at least verbally sort of salute your generation for coming to work for us. Yeah, it makes me think of when the military advertises what they're doing as travel benefits. It's that same sort of bright siding. And actually, some of the stuff you're quoting, I ended up, I was able to mulch it into a short film that I did with the director, Brett, story, called Camper Force, where we see what's going on, but we're also hearing all of this very positive. you know, people return year after year. And to me, that was a little Orwellian, just hearing that happy, shiny voice. I want to vet you write about us, the rubber tramp rendezvous in Quartzite, Arizona, which you mentioned. What is the rubber tramp rendezvous?

Yeah, it's an annual gathering and skill share of and dwellers. And I came upon it quite by accident for the first time in 2014. And, gosh, then it was probably fewer than 75 people, but nobody wanted to keep track because if it hit 75, they'd have to get a permit. They were teaching each other everything from how to plug a tire to how to get cheap dental care in Los Algodones, Mexico,

to how to stealth park in cities without drawing attention. The wild thing is now the event is thousands of people. I was on the set of the film recreating the rubber tramp rendezvous. I was an extra, and they were recreating an early one

with few people, and afterwards, a bunch of us went over to the real one, and it had just mushroomed into this massive, massive thing. And people learn about it online and by word of mouth? Absolutely. Online, word of mouth. It's run by Bob Wells, who is a Van Dweller Evangelist and Guru,

who had a very popular blog that he then parlayed into a YouTube channel, and a lot of people come across it through that. These people were, a lot of these people were very online in terms of having blogs and Facebook groups and things like that. Was that helpful to you in writing this story, not only in finding them, but kind of being able to see their thoughts printed out on the? line? Absolutely. Just seeing how people reflect for different audiences is always useful. It kind of gives you a bit more of a 360 degree view of what someone's up to. And I wasn't always on the road. I'd be

out there for weeks or months at a time, but then I'd be back in my apartment. And almost everybody was on Facebook. So I knew where folks were, what they were up to. And it was easier to plug in again when I got back out. So I know a lot of writers have movie deals in their heads when they're working on a piece of nonfiction. Did you, when you started this project? No. I guess good for those lot of writers. I didn't. Somebody asked me if I had an actor in mind for the lead role when I was working on. And I was thinking, oh my God, I was just trying to stay warm in night and make my deadline. Like, I was preoccupied with many things, but none of them in Vault Hollywood. So you worked on this for years, this book, and then it passes out of your hands into the hands of people making a movie.

What is what is that experience like? Oh, it's totally weird. It's an out-of-body experience. And for me, I was able to do it because, well, first of all, I never imagined this being a movie. And when it was being talked about as a possibility, and then that was something that Francis McDormand was interested in bringing Chloe Zhao on board, I figured if there was anybody who could pull it off, it was probably these two women. and I signed on as a consulting producer,

which means I funneled all sorts of research in their direction. Stuff I'd reported on in Empire, Nevada back in 2011, things that didn't make it into the book. And I also introduced them to a lot of people. So, yeah, that involved quite a bit of trust. And for me, that trust came from knowing both Chloe and Francis's previous work, because people can tell you whatever they want, but I feel like they show you who they are in terms of what they're doing.

and I'd read up on them or watched up on them as the case maybe. You talked about Linda May and her reaction when she found out she was the subject of a Harper's story. What was her reaction when she was the subject of a potential movie? The whole thing was crazy. There wasn't really one reaction. It was kind of a slow, dawning reality. But we like to make jokes about it. I think I asked her a question the other day and she said I could call her agent.

Yeah, we all think it's absolutely nuts in a good way. I've stayed friends with just about all of them, so it wasn't like, oh, I'm digging into this past thing. For me, it was still very present. And, yeah, everybody's surprised and thinks that it's somewhat magical and strange. And it's just, yeah, and, you know, on top of that, we're in COVID time, so everything feels weird. So we're in deep weird here, but it's pretty cool. How did COVID affect the van dwelling life? In a lot of small ways that I think people wouldn't think about.

So for example, a lot of people I met use gym memberships at places like Planet Fitness, places that are pretty cheap, to take showers wherever they go. And all the gyms were closed. People will use Wi-Fi outside coffee shops. The coffee shops were closed. People camp on public land. A lot of the national and state parks were closed. People get these jobs. Some of them are in the parks. Again, the parks were closed. So particularly early on, there were a lot of speed bumps, oh, pun unintended, for these people. But, There were also people pointed out, oh, another big one is that, you know, when your government tells you, you should buy 30 days of food and also stay in one place, even if you can afford 30 days of food, where are you going to put it in your van? And if you're in a van, you're typically not staying in one place. People did like that they were able to avoid hotspots by being in a van, and a lot of them are naturally somewhat isolated, as it was pointed out to me. In the book, Linda May's goal is to build a permanent shelter called an Earthship in Arizona, the Mexican border. Was she able to do that finally? She decided not to. And I think she's tremendously

afraid of disappointing people. But Linda ended up, basically she has a house that she's excited about. She's closer to her family and they're in Texas. And she's a former general contractor. She's really excited to be working on a fixer upper. It's not the earthship. But what Linda really wanted, it turns out, even more than that, was to have a place that would be a hearth for people she cares about. a place that her family could come visit, where she could put people up and show hospitality. And that more than anything else has guided her, I think. And at a certain point, she realized that maybe two years of super intense labor on an earthship

that maybe people wouldn't come and visit really wasn't what she wanted after all. Jessica, Bruder's book is Nomad Land Surviving America in the 21st Century out in paperback now. Jessica, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me, Brian. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. our guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline about pitcher Carlos Rodon's no hitter was Rodon's

Sculps a Masterpiece. Today's headline comes from Simon Stoker. It's from the London Observer, David. There is a volcano eruption in Iceland near Reykjavik going on, and people are rushing to the site, including people that want to get married in front of the volcano. nice backdrop for all your Instagram content

I think that's all you need what was the observers strained pun headline Is this a wedding plan This is like a for better or for worse Richard I'll give you this

It's more It's love love is the keyword You want here Oh love is a pun word You want here Love Love Excuse me. Let me tweet that up a little bit.

Lava substituted for love is the word you want to go with here. It's going to be too hard. Lava. Is it just like I lava you or love, uh, love uh, it's ice. Lava is a mini splendid thing. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, Burr, ice. Frozen, uh, cold, love on the rock, lava on the rocks, uh, uh, ice, love on ice.

Uh, uh, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um. frozen free lava i have no idea i'm gonna feel so dumb when you say this lava in lava in lava in nancy midford here lava in a like instead of love in a something it's lava in a i have no idea what is nancy midford i mean who is it like what did nancy midford right okay what is nancy midford lava in a cold climate oh god that's fantastic Lava in a cold climate. Good work, Observer. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica Servantes and Isaiah Blakely. We are back Thursday with reporter Brendan Kerner talking about his awesome new Atlantic story. See our Twitter feed for that. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.