Finding your way into a workplace ft. Rebeca Ibarra
Hey y'all!
I’m writing to you from my back porch in North Carolina. It’s finally warm enough that I can do one of my favorite things — drink my morning coffee on the back porch while looking at my little garden. It sounds terribly sentimental, but this is the kind of thing I could only fantasize about during the early days of COVID in my small Brooklyn apartment.
When I moved back home to North Carolina I thought it would be for six months. I told myself I’d move back once we had a vaccine and I got a job offer back in New York. Both of those things happened and yet I kept delaying, finding excuses to stay down here until it became clear the change was permanent.
I was no longer afraid that leaving New York meant I’d never get invited to the Cool Kids Table of Radio and started obsessing over other things, like how to save the seeds from last year’s tomatoes. You scoop the jelly out of the center of the fruit and put it in a jar to ferment for a few days. The viable seeds sink to the bottom, the ones that will never germinate float to the top. You skim off the fungus and dead seeds and strain out the healthy ones, leaving them to dry for a week or so before carefully slipping them into an envelope and waiting for spring.
This is all to say that I don’t really have professional ambition anymore: the urge to hear my name in the credits of a particular show or see my project at the top of the charts. I want to get better at the craft, to have a healthy work environment where producers are valued and to grow something beautiful come spring.
I’m so inspired by this month’s interviewee, Rebeca Ibarra, the host and producer of Insider’s The Refresh. Rebeca and I were co-workers at WNYC and I found her to be warm, generous and a fierce advocate for her co-workers. We talked about how to make tough professional judgment calls, how being a union steward changed the way she approaches her work, and the power of taking a break.
Alice: Will you run me through the different jobs you've had in public media? I feel like you've held pretty much every role that you can have on a show.
Rebeca: I should start by saying that obviously my experience isn't universal. I went back to school in my mid-twenties and I decided to study journalism. I think I had the life experience and the confidence that comes with being in your mid-to-late twenties, which is different when you're fresh out of college.
During school I got a fellowship at CUNY which landed me an internship at WNYC in 2015. I was an intern at the education desk. I basically just did anything that was requested of me. I was able to do a little 90-second story, which I can't listen back to because I assume it was absolutely hideous and I'm embarrassed, but I was still very proud of it. And then after my internship, I got a job at The New York Daily News making $40,000 a year. The big bucks! Before the job at the Daily News, I worked as a bartender. I never thought in terms of salary, I thought in terms of what you could make in a night and what I needed for a week.
I quit the Daily News in December because Richard Yeh offered me a freelance position at WNYC, which paid a little more, around $50,000. And then I was relatively fortunate because an opening became available in the culture and business desk a few months later. I applied and got the job. I was an assistant producer, producing business and culture stories, producing a weekly business show.
So, my time as a freelancer was very short. I also became a reporter, then I moved up to production to produce podcasts, and then I became a host. So I've had all those jobs mostly through skipping around the newsroom.
When the pandemic happened, I had been working on a pilot for WNYC Studios and then Paula Schumann left and Studios was a mess. I came back from vacation and I saw myself very easily being jobless. I messaged Sean Bowditch [an editor in the newsroom at the time] and I was like, “Isn't it cool that I'm going back to the newsroom?” And he's like, “Oh yeah, I think I heard about that.” So I was like, “Oh, it's great to be back in the newsroom. What do you need?” And that's how I ended up going back into reporting and producing the news at the height of the pandemic.
So again, maybe none of this is useful, but just to paint a picture — I think a lot of things I've done [have] been finding a crack where I can fit and then going, “Hey, isn't it great that I'm here?”
Resources
Creative, immersive sound design is one of the things that sets apart a perfectly fine podcast from an excellent one. It’s a place where so much artistry shows up. It’s an area that I am still playing around in, so this month I’ve gathered some resources from Transom on sound design.
A Rob Rosenthal Triptych:
Sound Design Basics by Rob Rosenthal
Avoiding Cheesy Sound Design by Rob Rosenthal
Sound as the Protagonist by Rob Rosenthal
Manifestos on Sound Design from:
Classifieds
Internships:
Intern, Walking Cinema ($20 - $25/hr)
Newsroom Intern, St. Louis Public Radio ($15/hr)
Talk Show Intern, St. Louis Public Radio ($15/hr)
Fellowships:
Multitrack Audio Producer Fellowship, (Fellows are paid at the Living Wage or London Living Wage)
Second Century News Fellow, Wisconsin Public Radio (46,000/yr)
Lee Ester News Fellowship, Wisconsin Public Radio (46,000/yr)
AIR New Voices, AIR Media ($1,000 stipend)
Associate Producer:
Associate Producer, Walking Cinema ($25 - $40)
Associate Producer (Temp), Marketplace, American Public Media Group ($22.62 - $27.52)
Associate Producer/Host, The Current, American Public Media Group ($20.19 - $30.29/hr)
Assistant Producer, New York Public Radio (NYPR did not list pay rates)
Associate Producer, The Brian Lehrer Show, NYPR ($69,900/yr)
Associate Producer, The Takeaway, NYPR ($69,900/yr)
News Reporter, Mississippi Public Radio ($38,000.00 - $40,000.00/yr)
If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.
Rebeca recommends:
Wild Boys: one of the complaints or main insecurities a lot with audio makers have is: "My idea isn't original. It's been said before." To which I say: NOTHING IS NEW! Embrace the freedom in knowing and making peace with that! Wild Boys is the perfect example of a show that takes a story that's been reported before, and re-tells it in a way that's personal, funny, surprising, and just damn entertaining.
I go to FANTI when I need a brilliant, hilarious, and acerbic take on what's happening in the world/culture. As well as Still Processing and Decoder Ring.
The shows that I go to when I need a balm for my soul right now: This is Love. And the whole back catalog of The Anthropocene Reviewed.
I gotta plug Dead End: A New Jersey Political mystery. Before you say “weird self promotion!” Yes, I produced the early episodes of that show, But then the pandemic happened, and then I left WNYC, and then Nancy just continued her reporting and great storytelling. So I have no idea how it ends and I'm enjoying the ride!