The Press Box - Listener Mail and the Geniuses Behind the New York Times’ Eel Headline

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker answer your Listener Mail and talk about the difference between Trump-era journalism and what we’re seeing today (4:08), Conan O’Brien stepping away from his talk show (9:33), and what an NBA team’s standing could mean for its reporters (15:11). Then, Michael Roston and Sabrina Imbler from The New York Times join for a postgame interview to discuss their clever headline about moray eels (27:16). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guests: Michael Roston and Sabrina Imbler Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Chang is an avid student and fan of sports, music, art, film, and of course, food. With a rotating cast of guests, they have conversations that cover everything from the creative process to his guest's guiltiest pleasures. Followed the Dave Chang Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. What's on your mind today? Well, you can probably tell by the sound quality here that I'm absent a recording device. I made it to, I came to the beach without all the technology, all the requisite. technology for podcasting. Which is crazy after a year of not having any sort of home base.

I managed to muff it up at the exact, at the end. But I'm at the Jersey Shore, which is, I feel like is my ongoing project of explaining New Jersey as a new New Jersey and people is a remarkably beautiful place that bears only the faintest resemblance to everything that I would have thought it was before the first time I came out here. So this is basically just a pro Jersey Shore PSA. it's an amazing place to go. Oh, wow.

We lived in New York for like 20 years without ever like whiffing the Jersey Shore. You know, I mean, it just seemed like a place that you would never go or never think to go. You know, right on a like an Apple truck out to Fort Tilden before you would ever, you know, take a train to the Jersey Shore. It's beautiful out here. That's it. You should come to the Jersey Shore the next time you're on the East Coast. Wait, so this is just a straight PSA. I was waiting for the journalism hook.

Like I picked up. I spent the whole week looking for a journalism hook. And there's no journalism. I mean, I could make it about, like, report, you know, like, tell the truth. Don't, you know, quit hiding behind your lies and your assumptions and report what the real Jersey Shore is all about. But maybe people just want to keep it a secret. The lazy tropes of the mainstream media relying on the old reality show when they should be doing. I'm at a, and I'm at a, it's actually sort of almost comical.

I'm at a place called Ocean City, which is a one may be responsible for some. of my, you know, rosy-eyed view of the whole thing, but it's a dry part of the Jersey Shore, specifically so that, you know, there's not restaurants with booze, there's not bars or whatever, and it's just so that, like, families can come out and have fun without dealing with the riff-raft, but every time you tell somebody in advance that you're going, like, literally anybody that has ever been to the Jersey Shore, if you say you're going to Ocean City, they're like, oh, yeah, that's the, that's the dry place, right? Like, they're all disappointed, but it's just magical. Like, you actually hear people saying out loud, like, this is how the beach used to be

when I was a kid and stuff. It's just, it's a great place to be. I think you should do some Jersey Shore diner journalism like people used to do in Trump country where you go in and see if people are talking about Biden's infrastructure plan, see if they're talking about critical race theory. What is on the mind of people in the Jersey Shore diner? That's what I want you to come back with next week to the ringer.

I don't know that diner is the place to go. I can go to like the pizza. I can go to Manco and Manco. One of like the three Manco and Manco is on this stretch of the Jersey show, which by the way, pizza journalism, I don't know why hasn't found its way out here. This is actually the best pizza in the world. Yeah, unfortunately, Dave

Portnoy kind of cornered that market. That's right. He's probably been to Manco and Manco. Coming up on today's show, we answer your listener mail about topics ranging from post-Trump White House journalism to NBA playoff coverage. A member of a beloved band adds to our list of only in journalism words. And this is exciting. A press box post-game interview with the New York Times geniuses

that wrote the greatest headline about Moray Eels in journalism history. All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here along with our producer, Erica Servantes. David, you want to answer a little listener mail before we get to today's big interview? Okay, here we go.

From Mr. MediaX. see we have some really famous reporters who listen to the press box but they don't want to be named on the press box they prefer a pseudonym so this is from mr media x famous reporter at a big newspaper that's all i can say it's maggie haverman just go ahead and say it out loud well i don't know about that we are almost six months into a new presidential administration mr media x writes and one of the things you discussed on the show a while ago was whether or not the end of the prior presidency, which consumes so much media attention, would bring new oxygen and life to non-White House subjects and coverage areas that have been largely drowned out

over the past four years. Do you think that is happening? Do I think that the oxygen is returning to the areas that were previously neglected? Is that the question? I think so. Yeah, I kind of feel like with a vengeance, right? I mean, I feel like maybe I'm a, partial, I mean, an odd view of this, but I do feel like people are, like, when you go on vacation, if you're like a real life, if you work out a lot and you go, I'm on vacation right now,

you go on vacation. Wait, is this Rosillo or is this David talking to here? Yeah, if you're a Rosillo, if you go on vacation, you're like looking for ways to get your exercise in, even though, like, if you're an avid cyclist and suddenly you're at the beach, like I am now and you're like, I'm not going to get my cycling in. Like, what do I do? Do I just go for an up tempo walk? I do feel like there's all this energy that the news media is trying to get out.

energy that was that found its appropriate tempo with our previous president, right? Or maybe not, or it was, or was created by the tempo established in our previous presidency. And now there's a sort of antic energy that people are trying to discuss, you know, bipartisan infrastructure deals with the same sort of, yeah, energy as they would deal with, like, you know, Trump literally telling people to murder journalists or whatever, you know, I mean, it's a whole different set of stories, but they're trying to find the, appropriate footing for it. And it just feels very sort of like there's, I mean, they're putting more energy into kind of basic political discussions than people were willing to do four years ago or

eight years ago or 12 years ago. So yeah, I do think that I do think we see a real eager investment in the normalcy or the normal aspects of presidential governance. And I think it's even more so than it was before. My slightly different take is that I wonder if Trump-era journalism was really that weird in retrospect, because in a way, what was absolutely consumed by Trump was cable news number one and Twitter number two. I think if you opened the New York Times, New York Times was maxing out on Trump like basically any subject other than a war or a terrorist attack, or something. And yet I could still go to the Science Times and find lots of other stories. I could still find a huge international report every day in the front section.

But it was a particular part of the media that were just mainlining Trump news. You're right, though, it's funny now because it's not like the people that were covering Trump. I mean, some of them are still covering Trump. And you mentioned Haberman, some of them are writing books. Okay. But the political press court, it's not like they're like, okay, we're going to take a walking journey across Europe and write something else for a change. They're still covering politics. So we just replaced one political story with another political story.

And I don't know that I don't know that there's like new breadth in the political media, that they're talking about things that they wouldn't have talked about under Trump. In fact, I think it's just different political stories for the most part about the Democrats, about Biden, about the Republicans using critical race theory, all those kinds of things. have sort of filled the void to me. Sure. And I mean, and obviously we all look at this in a very personal way, right?

I do think that the, you're right, they weren't pulling people off of the local beats just to like cover Trump's tweets, or at least they didn't do it on some sort of like apocalyptic scale. So yeah, I mean, there was probably a lot more,

the political journalism landscape was probably changed a whole lot less than maybe it seemed in real time. Again, I think it's particular parts of it. Like if you watch cable news, it was just all about Trump. Trump said blank, you know, for a long part of it, and at least until those kind of cable networks got a little bit wise to the game. But I think if you just read quote-unquote normal organs of journalism,

I don't think they were as Trump focused as we perhaps think they were the whole time. I think they were a little more focused than they would be on a normal president, but I don't know that they were just completely, you know, the sports page was not Trump. Well, I guess it kind of was. You're right. And to a similar degree that, I mean, you said cable news and you said Twitter, right? And cable news, I think it's, I mean, that's obvious. I think with Twitter, too, it's not even so much what the media outlets are doing as the way that political journalism is being received.

And it's being received in a, I mean, by you and me and by everybody else who is, you know, following the New York Times on Twitter in a very, well, Trump-centric or post-Trump sort of way, right? I mean, we're all engaging. I think there's a whole sort of generation of very public writers and thinkers and just personalities that are engaged with politics in a different way or in a new way than they were four years ago. So yeah, I think that it's, I think that there's a lot of runoff there too. This is from Jay Fisher. There seems to be a lot of coverage about Conan O'Brien ending his TBS show, even though he's still going to have a new show from the same media company. Why such a big deal about a talk show host who really isn't going anywhere? Well, there's two, I think there's two different ways to answer this question.

One is because they're, I mean, they're positioning it as an end, right? And so, like, and so by virtue of the existence of the press release, if anybody's reacting to it, everybody's reacting to it, and now we'll have to deal with it. But I think there's a much sort of deeper question, and I say this only semi-jokingly, you know, whoever the first boxer was that decided to retire, post-match knowing full well that it wouldn't be the end of the road, they got it right? Because it was, they figured out that if you retire at the end of the match, you have the most eyeballs on you. And your retirement, and so your career means more than it would have if you waited six

months, decided that it was really over and then retire, right? And then when you come back, the comeback is the story. And it's even bigger because you retired in front of millions of people. It's a great way to drive ratings, right? It's a great way to drive eyeballs, attention, or whatever else. But even more significant than that, it's that we as a journalistic class and as a viewing public have much more fun

eulogizing somebody where they're not dead, right? I mean, it's a much more, it's a much more, listen, writing a coding career retrospective two years ago would have gotten, wouldn't have gotten very many people to read it, right?

But doing it now because he's, quote, unquote, retiring, of this and there's multiple pieces and you're weighing them against each other and you get to think and enjoy and watch all the YouTube videos of all your favorite Conan moments and you get to do it as if he's actually done or as if he's actually dead heaven forbid but you don't actually have to deal with any of the gravity of that situation it's like it doesn't matter that he's leaving and coming back or leaving for good or whatever it's like somebody just announced that this was national Conan O'Brien Day and we're all taking off work to celebrate and like get drunk

It's fantastic. Totally. And the irony is that he has spent the last decade doing a show that as far as I can tell, nobody is really watching on TBS. Like Rob Harvilla wrote this great piece early in The Ringers life cycle that was like, by the way, Conan is doing a show every night. And, you know, all you people who were way into late night and way into the whole tonight show succession thing.

he is still working. He is still doing this show, but you're not really paying attention. And it's not penetrating, you know, the Twitter world as much as Colbert and those guys are on a nightly basis. And it was just so funny that now we're all sort of like,

it's kind of like Letterman, right? The last decade plus a Letterman was awful. I mean, just, just at the, in fact, the last show of Letterman was like,

this is the best you could come up with. These jokes are terrible. But it's like now we sort of, we do that thing where we forget the lean years and we're like oh my god conan o'brien remember watching him in your dorm room in the 90s when he was doing the year 2000 and triumph and the george w bush thing with a mouth and all that stuff you're like oh my gosh this is incredible conan o'brien and it is and it i mean i do get the point uh that jays making but conan has hosted a late night talk show since 1993 so he's

even though it's a different show with the same company. I get all that, but that is, I guess, a big deal that you're shoving off. Yeah, it is. It's a big deal.

And we love Conan, and I'm excited to have read every piece, and Rob wrote a new piece yesterday about it. I'm excited to read every piece I get to read about Conan, and I'm glad that this holiday was announced, regardless of whether or not he's actually leaving. And regardless of whether or not, you know,

like you said, you believe him to have been in retirement. You'd be forgiven if you thought he retired eight years ago or whatever. But he's a, you know, this is, this is, we all get to celebrate together. That's the joy of it. Late night succession is one of those subjects that still carried like tons of journalistic weight even after it mattered way less in actual practice. Like Johnny being replaced by Jay or Dave.

That was a huge deal because there were still lots of eyeballs on those shows. The networks were still pretty vital. Now, as demonstrated by God, last decade on the air, people don't care about that stuff at all. At least they don't really care about it other than the random clip they see on Twitter. Yeah.

And yet you can still drive a ton of eyeballs, just like you came with like cable news succession or cable news behind the scenes, with late night stuff. It's like the late night beat never got turned off even when people literally turned off the late night shows. It's just very funny to me. Yeah. Yeah.

it's like i mean it does seem at times that people are much more interested in like you know s andl casting decisions or who's hosting the show and performing on the show then they actually care about the show there's a great one s and l it's like this huge journalistic like the new york times is still recapping every episode of s andl you're like really okay that's interesting this is from bpm twitter uh forget tv ratings what happens to local media when untraditional teams make deep NBA playoff runs. How many people in Atlanta are being shifted to hawk stories? Are people in Phoenix angling to get on the sun's beat and hope the team sustains

a la Golden State Warriors becoming a media career maker? Oh, that's a good one. Well, I think this is different than Golden State because it's, at least at the moment, because it's a little bit more out of left field for both those markets. Golden State was a sort of as soon as Steve Kerr was hired I mean they had a ramp up under the previous

Mark Jackson administration and you know and Curry was there and the kind of the hype was growing but sort of as soon as Kerr walked onto the court they were suddenly just this you know just monolith you know I mean they were just this I mean such a

just monster out of nowhere in the NBA and they changed the way basketball was played and all this other stuff was going on so that by the time they got started making runs in the playoffs the journalistic infrastructure was already sort of established there right and it was and it did make careers and it was a big deal also you know the Oakland I mean the Bay Area is was growing was then growing is constantly growing at least in terms of wealth if not in terms of you know just population but and so there's there's the urgency there I mean, and there's probably the ability to have more beat writers covering the team. So, yeah, there's a lot of reasons why that was making careers and why it seemed like a sort of bigger deal at the time. These two, you know, Atlanta and Phoenix, I mean, Phoenix was the number one team all season, but Phoenix is always kind of seen as I think there's a different perception about that team. Atlanta certainly come out of nowhere. And Phoenix can also be covered by the West Coast newspapers. So I don't know.

I'm sure there are people in Phoenix that are that are angling for that job. And I'm sure that, you know, if this team stays together, that the Phoenix newspapers will probably staff up a little bit more. But we might be past that point. We might be past that point of any media market really staffing up a whole bunch more based on the success of a team. Because, you know, it's place, it's other, you know, kind of national internet outlets that are going to be staffing up there. Yeah, I think it's moving chess pieces around maybe more than staffing up. hey, you know, you, the backup, the person who swings around but does a lot of backup diamond backstories, we're going to need you for the next couple of weeks.

You're on the sons. Hey, you know, person who's the third sportsperson at the local affiliate. Just you are camping out on sons for the next couple of weeks. Kind of all hands on deck. We're not necessarily adding bodies, but all the people we have in our diminished capacity, they're going there. It is absolutely a career maker. This is one of those things that it's funny.

You can be the exact same NBA writer in Minnesota as you can be in Phoenix. And if Phoenix wins the NBA finals and goes to a couple more, you're going to have much, much better career opportunities if you're in Phoenix. That's how this has always worked. You're just going to have way more eyeballs on you. The other part of this, David, that's interesting, I think, is the national, companies moving resources around. Because you and I both know ESPN and everybody else, they're much more ready to cover a deep Lakers or even Clippers run

than they are to cover a deep Sons and Milwaukee Bucks run. They have Lakers infrastructure. Lakers are good. Ramona Shelbourne, Baxter Holmes, Dave McMinneman's already on the team. We got people in L.A. Everybody's ready to go.

And those people can kind of shift over and do the clippers too. The sons, essentially you are taking people that are semi permanent LA basketball Lakers, Clippers, writers, and then having to, you know, put them into Phoenix, where they may not have the contacts and the, in the experience just because they don't report on that all the time. So that's kind of the other interesting part of the story. And you remember ESPN did it with, with the Warriors back in the day. Ethan Strauss and Chris Haynes were on that beat. Yeah. at the same like we was like wow we need

we need bodies here that we don't have because A these teams are good but B this is this is going to be this is going to be the website and sports center every night so we have to take resources and put them over there it's an it's an interesting thing

I mean is that a thing if you were running an outlet let's say if you're running something as big as the athletic is that a way would you staff with that in mind I mean they have all these like hyper-focused you know specialized beat writers but would you but is it worth having just like the hit squad who you didn't mean it's just like

10 writers that you just move deliberately as a unit where they are needed you know it's like the A team when trouble calls or whatever they just go in and just hit the ground and start covering it wall to wall or is that too hard is that too is that too much to expect of

people who are not doing it day covering the market day in a day out if you have NBA content and if you can find them call the A team too do do too too yes and I think there's probably an argument in our leaner times for doing that rather than staffing every team all the time like in an ideal world and we've seen this at various iterations of ESPN we've seen this with the athletic basically all the way through you just have a person everywhere

so somebody's doing it and then you can move some pieces in i think the stripped down version of that is uh-oh and we've seen this like when the pelicans were in the playoffs a couple years ago uh-oh we don't have a pelicans writer But let's get so-and-so down there quick and do that, right? So it's almost like how many bodies can you spare? If you have people, you haven't there all the time. I think that the athletics, I think that the athletics Phoenix writer left before the season and wasn't replaced. So, I mean, there's definitely some instances of that going on right now, too. We've been doing this only in journalism list, David.

These are words you read in an article in a piece of journalism, but you never use in real life. This might be the most popular thing we've. ever done on this podcast just judging by the number of tweets I see every day. Would you like some additional words for the only in journalism list? Please. From the New York Times, his very own Kevin Draper stave off and emblazoned. Stave off and emblazoned. All right.

We got as a synonym for signed, like signed a contract, inked. Chris Paul inked a deal with the Phoenix Suns. Yeah, it's correct, yeah. That one seems to me to have probably originally come out of headline writing where you have a very confined space. So you, you know, signed a contract as long so you do inks packed B-A-C-T. Yes. Just so you can fit it all in. A few more, fracas.

Freakus, which is a funny word. That's another one that I almost would dispute your pronunciation if I realized that I realized I never heard it out loud so I don't. Frakis? Yeah. Frakis? I would have said fracas. Bleagerd.

Mm-hmm. It is a great one. I love this. War chest. Especially any reference in sports writing to draft picks. Mm-hmm. War chest. And the most amazing contribution we got this week was from John Flansberg.

A member of the band, they might be giants. Oh, yeah. John Flansberg has checked in on Twitter. Twitter. He writes, Re the Words Only in Journalism List. This is a start if anyone wants to complete. Are you ready for John Flansberg's personal list? Yes, I cannot believe this is happening right now. Let's go.

Absconded. Bedlam. Yes, correct. Bedlam. Disgraced. One of our favorites. Demurred. Firebrand.

Really fantastic. only in journalism word there. Flack, flummoxed, indelible. You only write indelible. You'll never say the word indelible.

Plethora. Myriad. And if it hasn't come up before, he writes, I suggest stymie. Stimmy. Stimmy is another one that has multiple pronunciations

that just don't, none of them quite seem right. It seems like, It's like pecan and pecan where it seems like their truth musselized somewhere in the middle, but you can't quite make your mouth say it. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard Stimmy a lot. That is unbelievable.

I can't believe that we got, they might be giants is out here. Yeah. It was a, listen, a lot of contributions to the only in journalism words list. Keep them coming. We love it. Landsford. Geez, we're going to have to revisit the official band of the press box. I know.

Although we did listen to a whole lot of gin blossoms on the way. out here. So we'll see. They were playing at half time of the Sun's game. The gin blossoms were? Yeah. Wow. Wow. Of the in the previous round. I did notice, by the way, the gin blossoms unfollowed us on Twitter. So we may be

in the market. Yeah, well, I think we can use this to our advantage. All right. Here we go. Who really wants to be the official band of the press box? David, let's do the overword Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious.

But all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to At the Pressbox Pod, where they are always, always gratefully received. News here from the Daily Beast, David, I got to read this to you. A massive country music festival in Kentucky this past weekend started off on rocky footing. Police found meth, marijuana, and an open bottle of alcohol in the first vehicle they stopped at a traffic checkpoint.

and one of the two people in the car had two active warrants out for their arrest. Continuing with the Daily Beast here, police said that by the end of the five-day bash dubbed the redneck rave, one man had been impaled, one woman had been strangled to the point of unconsciousness, and one throat had been slit. This is the so-called redneck rave in Kentucky. It was an overworked Twitter joke to call it Yaltamon.

Yaltamon. Thank you to Derek Burke for that one. And finally, David, certain headlines are just going to be magnets for overworked Twitter jokes. There was one from the New York Post this week. It reported that David Byrne, former Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, has bought a mansion in Los Angeles for $5.5 million. $1. Seemingly innocuous piece of real estate journalism.

I know what's going. It was an upward Twitter joke to remix talking head lyrics for David Byrne's new house. Now, I'm not sure I can do David Byrne as well as I could do the Gaston song, but here we go. I'm going to try. You ready? He will not find himself living in a shotgun shack. David Byrne may find himself in a beautiful house. So this is David Burns' beautiful house.

And Byrne was heard asking, well, how did I get here? Thanks to Ping 33 for that. That was a little bit more Larry David than David Byrne. I need some advice. I've listened to less talking heads at this point in my life than I have Beauty and the Beast, which says something about me. If you marked the occasion of Brian's final musical performance, congrats.

You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, on Tuesday, the New York Times published a story about how moray eels can hunt not just in the water but on land. Now, you had our clicks right there. But the story also contained this gem of a headline. When an eel climbs a ramp to eat squid from a clamp, that's a moray, as in moray eel. Now, the Twitter reaction to this headline was even bigger than when one of your journalist friends has some personal news. quoting one, the rest of us should take the day off because we'll never top this. Another person said, next year's Pulitzer settled real early.

And my own reaction was that whoever writes the Marine Life headlines of the New York Times should be the next editor of the paper. I'm absolutely convinced to that. It was, I think we could say, the greatest eel-based headline of all time, and we're joined by the duo behind it. They are Sabrina Imbler and Michael Rosten of the New York Times. Welcome to the press box. Hey, thanks for having us.

Thank you. Can we start at the beginning here? How did the eel hunts on land story get assigned in the first place? So our colleague Carl Zimmer, who is kind of the every man of science journalism and has just covered everything for a very long period of time, tweeted this video of these. moray eels doing this very wild thing where they were climbing up onto some sort of land surface and eating bits of squid. And I saw this video. Maybe it was a Friday night. I can't remember when. And I just thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. And I think in part because I've spent a lot of time on the internet and I'm a former social media editor and so on. My head immediately went into thinking about

that's a more a tweets because it's pretty common that when there's some sort of strange eel related content out there particularly about moray eels that people will start talking about this this longstanding pun format and it turned out that you know the research itself that underlied these videos is pretty interesting so Sabrina I can't remember if I talked to you on Monday or if I talked to you at some other point but I said you know we we thought this was pretty interesting and assigned it, just knowing that it would be sort of the nice combination of interesting science, great visuals, and the potential for a lot of silliness that can occasionally make for a good short science item in this format that we call the trilobites.

That's how it got started. I mean, I think Sabrina can talk a little bit more about how they wrote it. Well, it was a gift of a Slack message to receive just an eel video unsolicited. Yeah, and it was a joy to report. The researchers spent six years training these eels, which is a really, really long time. And, I mean, there were lots of eel mishaps along the way. But, yeah, Michael had the vision for the meme that would govern the story. So the piece started out, I mean, the headlines started. out as a, or the piece started out as a headline, or is it the search for a headline? Is that the

right way to say it? I think there's a little bit of that dimension to it that I think we're both, I mean, I don't think either of us wants to claim that, you know, we're the original author of this, this format of, you know, that's a more a, you know, headlines. I don't, I don't know if it's been used as a headline, you know, in sort of, you know, traditional media before, but I think there's certainly been a lot of, you know, great tweets and, you know, Tumblr memes and things like that that have gone around for a number of years that have sort of played on the Dean Martin song, That's Amore. And I'm a great lover of these jokes when they go around.

I enjoy making these jokes. But, you know, I think we're also just sort of interested in Moray Eels as a species. So I think that I think even if even if we hadn't, you know, had this headline in mind, I think seeing the idea that Moray Eels can sort of clamor up on land and this is how they do it, that, you know, researchers had spent all this, as Sabrina said, very intensive effort to sort of understand how is it that these sea creatures are able to actually get up on land and actually eat something because biologically you would think that they have to sort of suck in water in order to eat. And it turns out that actually they don't.

That's kind of unusual. And, you know, the visuals were great. So I think when you put the whole package together. It was worth doing. Sabrina, this is a corner of journalism that David and I are not familiar with at all. So what's the process of reporting a story about Morayeels? So this is a story based on this study. So I reached out to the researchers on the study who sort of shared like, I mean, yeah, they talked about the training process. This researcher worked with like a rotating cast of undergrads who were the ones who were sort of putting the squid on the ramp.

so the eel could clamber up and eat it. And then I talked to one of the other authors on the paper, Kyle Donahoe, who was the one who sort of developed a very intensive training regimen for the eels. And he was working with Rita Mehta, who is the other author in the paper. And Kyle had previously worked with training pinnipeds at a pinniped lab. So he worked with seals and sea lions. And apparently, like all of the same skills that you need to train marine mammals, like also work with eels, which are just like very specific regiments, like same time every day,

same amount of squid, and just a lot of patience. I love that the eel is called a snowflake, Moray eel. Such a loaded term here in 2021. It's an eel that was made to be memed. Yeah. And Sabrina brought the Bucatini into it, which is another sort of crucial 2020 pasta. Pasta of the year. That was an excellent metaphor, right?

off the top. Well done on that one too. So, I mean, that's incredibly interesting how you went about researching the whole thing. And it does give sort of, you know, a weight to the story. It's, I mean, it was incredibly fun read with without the headline.

But do you feel what's the sense of accomplishment that you feel when the headline, when the story goes viral to the degree that it did? It's horrifying. My second week working here. And it was so overwhelming and I have done no media training. So I hope, yeah, I hope everything goes okay.

But I've never received so many messages from like my high school model UN chair. Like people like in a frat, like from my college, just like people I have never thought of in years, sort of reaching out to talk to me about eels, which is wonderful and also scary. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I think there's a lot of ways to get recognition in journalism. And, you know, this was a fun one, although I think sometimes I joke around about the idea, you know, that you're using your 15 minutes of fame on the wrong thing. So, you know, maybe, you know, we hope there's still some time left on the clock for both of us. Well, we've been, I mean, this podcast has not been exist. existence for a terribly long period of time, but we have, in its short life, charted, like, the, the death and rebirth of the art of headline writing, right? I mean, it was, it was,

we have discussed in a relative long form how, like, SEO came to dominate the headline game in the past, I mean, honestly, the past five years, but, you know, the past decade for sure. Do you feel like you're kind of, like, fighting the good fight back against that, or do you feel like the tide in a more broad sense has turned against as? SEO and pro poetry. No pun intended on the tied part, but please continue. Well, we're fortunate, I think, that we've got various tools and various ways of expressing ourselves, you know, so it's like, I think one thing that we do spend time thinking about,

at least in the editor's desk, is what's the headline going to look like on the website, and what's the headline going to look like downstream on social media, and what's the headline going to look like on search engines when it surfaces on those platforms. And even in some cases, what's the headline going to look like in print? Because at least for the Weekly Science Times section, I'm involved in a lot of those discussions about how this stuff is going to get laid out ultimately. So I think you can sort of walk and chew gum with both your main jaws and your pharyngeal jaws. if you are more, you'll, you know, I think you can do that because there is the ability to sort of think about very different formats and how to reach people on a variety of different platforms and audiences all at the same time. You know, because I'm interested in exposing our reporting and our journalism to new readers.

And I'm also interested in, you know, satisfying the readers that live primarily on our platform, you know, New York Times.com as well as, you know, our apps. And so I think, you know, an editor these days kind of has to think about all of those things. You know, personally speaking, I sort of thought this headline, you know, sort of was optimized for SEO because it had the word eel in it and had the word moray in it. You know, so I think, you know, for people who are searching for those sorts of things, they might have, you know, found this kind of story. But at the same time, it also had, you know, this sort of fun phrasing. So I think you really can do all of these things sometimes. and it's sort of good to look for opportunities like that when it's possible to do so. And is the thinking, Michael, that people will click on a story if they find it on social media because the headline is funny?

Sometimes, right, but I think sometimes it's just the most appropriate way to engage people with a subject. It's a subject kind of unusual. You want to sort of pull them in that way. I don't, I mean, personally, I don't try to write a punny headline for every single kind of story that I edit. or that I assign because I think sometimes you can just try too hard and it can seem that way. But I think other times there are just sort of opportunities because something is sort of strange and delightful.

And you should try to communicate the strangeness and the delight at the same time. And I think that's one of the wonderful things about working in science journalism. I've worked in other fields of journalism pretty extensively before I became a science editor five years ago. I was a social media editor. I worked in a lot of politics and breaking news coverage, things like that.

And I think one of the great things about science journalism is that there's just so much wonder in a lot of the discoveries and trying to sort of conjure that that wonder is something that I really aim for with a lot of the headlines that I write for certain kinds of science stories. More wonder than perhaps headlines about the infrastructure bill this week. But that's also a wondrous thing. well for certain people i do want to note the additional layer of genius here which is not just the top headline but the fact that the bit was continued throughout all the captions in the piece i can read a few of these if the squid is too flat there's no problem with that that's a more a if the squid is so big it still eats like a pig that's a more a whose idea was it to keep going even after the great idea right at the top oh well i i guess i take credit for that

I think I sent Sabrina a Slack message that said, we're going to run this into the ground. And we sort of kept it going throughout. I think part of it was when Sabrina first put story together in our content management system, they wrote this series of tweets. And I looked at that and I thought, oh, well, that would make a pretty good Twitter thread if we just did all of those that's a mores, like back to back to back on Twitter. And then I got to thinking, well, why not put it on the page two?

You know, why not both, as the classic, you know, Twitter taco meme goes. So, so yeah, I think there was an opportunity to do more with it. And so we did. You talked about conveying the wonder of it. I think Sabrina did a pretty good job of conveying the horror of the, you know, the social media impact. that this sort of thing can have. I think the real horror is probably going to come when this article pops up on like a PowerPoint presentation from somebody in the e-suite of the New York Times, you know, six months from now when they're trying to explain to people how to how to make it, you know, drive ad revenue or something. And that'll be its own sort of horror.

But, you know, Sabrina, you said you're two weeks in. I hesitate to make this too much of a horror story about you. But is this going to affect the way that you do your job now that you see the sort of response? that a piece like this or that a piece driven like this can get? I mean, I hope not. I love eels. I love writing about strange creatures that might not be considered like big news or like breaking stories. And so it was really, it was actually really wonderful to see so many people engaging with

more eels and their second set of internal jaws, which is like something that I find very cool and fascinating and I learned that people find like grotesque and monstrous. So it's been fun to see the differing reactions to the actual videos of the different eels, sort of hawking back the squid, like pulsing their neck to get it down. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like I feel a renewed belief in the commitment to a bit to just taking a bit to its final stages in the paper of note. And I'm, I'm excited for all the headlines to come. And you've got a book coming on Undersea Life. Is that correct?

I do. Yeah. What is the appeal of that subject for you? I just love the ocean. I've been asked that a lot of times. And I don't know if there's like a single origin point, but I love being in the sea. I love seeing all the weird creatures.

I think I have like a special fondness for invertebrates. And anything that kind of slimy on the outside, like I really dig that concept as a body plan. or body texture. So yeah, I really, I really love sea creatures and I'm excited to be able to write about them outside of work and also for work. I was asking Michael a little bit about this before the podcast started. This is not the first marine life headline at the New York Times we have celebrated here

on the press box. There was one in 2019 that I made David guess. It was about sea snakes. And it was also brilliant. It was, she studies sea snakes by the sea floor. a great pun on she sells seashells by the seashore Michael you did not write this you you write you wrote the one you co-wrote the one great marine life headline but you did not write this previous

marine life headline is that right that was not one of mine I'm not sure if that one was was written by our colleague Alan Berwick or not I think he edited that story I think the story was written by Debbie Lockwood who I think like Sabrina was was a a reporting fellow for the Times previously. And I don't know if that was a collaborative effort between the two of them or not. But yeah, certainly a fun one.

When I asked Michael about this off the air, he goes, I don't know, we had multiple sea snake stories that year, which I really appreciate coming from the New York Times. Is that the one about the grannies who were studying sea snakes? No, that's a different one. Oh, that's the other sea snakes. Yeah, there were two sea snake stories. But yeah, the fantastic grandma's was the other one about the. the, you know, the grandmas that the researchers sent out, you know, into the coral reefs to look for sea snakes.

And they said that they were easier to work with than graduate students, which I thought was kind of funny. When we talk about the way that the office has changed in the sort of coronavirus era that we're all in Zoom and Slack and anything else, now, this is what we miss. We miss being in person with their coworkers to talk about all the different sea snake stories that have come across our desks in the past year. I'm making it really serious. This is the most fun of that. Just overhearing people talk about work and over a year. Thank you guys so much for coming on and doing this. You have, you have, I know that you said, Michael, early on,

that you weren't the first person to use that that's a more a headline formulation. In when discussing Eels. But, you know, Michael Jordan didn't invent the slam dunk. He just perfected it, you know? And you guys have reached a level of aesthetic or artistic or artistic. perfection here that I think you should both be really proud of. Well, thank you so much. Stay tuned.

We hope we have some more fun for everyone, you know, who visits the trilobites section of the New York Times or our science and health pages in general. We will be watching the trilobites. I was reading through the comment section on the article, which is generally a bad thing to do. But in this case, it was really lovely. But I did see that someone suggested that we should win a Nobel Peace Prize, which I'm open to. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I'll, I'd be happy to share that prize money with you. The Pulitzer was just the start. It really is the Nobel Prize we're going for here. You know, we want, we want the P-GOT. Sabrina and Michael, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Take care. Thank you.

All right, it's time for David Shoemaker, guesses. The strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about a thief who was busted after posting a photo of Stilton cheese was cream. doesn't pay. Today's headline comes from the LA Times, David, and it's a special occasion because I was informed this week that Steve Horn, who is a longtime editor on the LA Times Sports Desk, is retiring. Oh, wow. Okay. Now, you know how the LA Times sports headlines,

the really punny ones often make their way to Twitter? Many of those are the work of Steve horn. And in fact, people around the paper when they see a particularly wonderful, clever dada sports headline say, ah, that's a Steve Horn headline. So I thought I would do an LA time sports headline here in honor of Steve Horn's long and illustrious career at that paper. This is from Wednesday. You remember the DeAndre Aiton, J. Crowder, Alleyoop that ended game two of the Western Conference final. the Suns beat the Clippers. Now remember,

remember this is the LA Times, the Clippers' hometown newspaper reporting this story. What was the LA Times' strained pun headline? Wow. I'm thinking like, I immediately go to like, don't forget to tip. Don't forget.

Don't forget to guard the tip. Yeah, don't forget the tip. Let's see, tip in buzzer beater. last second um uh eight

there's some good aton options where you gotta give me some guidance here hmm all right so what was it it was an alley oop is an alley upe is an alley uf so that's going to be that's going to be a thing here oh like oops they did it again is it an alley is it like an alley come on now i just saluted steve horn oops they did it again no alley you do you remember the funny uh jerseys that or not funny jerseys, but the special jerseys Phoenix has worn because those sons?

Yeah, no, no. They say the valley. Oh, yeah. Right? So it's not alley-oop. It's no valley-u. And in the Clippers lost, so it's valley. Oops. Valley. Oops. That's a lot going on there. Valley, oops. Congratulations on a brilliant career, Steve Horn. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Monday. more loopworm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Bright.