Running a Newsroom in Minneapolis + How to Make a Game of Thrones For Less

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0:50From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. And today we have two very different interviews that don't really match tonally, but sometimes we just have to roll with it. Up first, a brief dispatch from Minneapolis via Kathleen Hennessey, the editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune. The STRIB, as we call it back in the Twin Cities, has been doing indispensable coverage of what is technically called Operation Metro Surge. It is also one of many sources of news, and a lot of that other news comes from resident cell phone videos filmed on the street.

1:27that makes for a very rich and chaotic information environment, and that is a challenge for Hennessy and an opportunity for her publication to shine. Full disclosure, a long time ago, a very long time ago, I spent a few months as a paperboy in what was then called the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. I was not very good at it. Okay, then I have a conversation with Ira Parker, the man behind A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO's newest extension of its Game of Thrones universe. Like every Game of Thrones show HBO does, it is a very important show for HBO. But it's also, as Game of Thrones goes, a much more modest production.

2:06The shows are shorter, they don't have dragons, they don't have sprawling casts. That makes them all much cheaper than a Game of Thrones classic production, as Parker tells me. Which I think tells you a bit about the business environment for TV these days. Okay, let's get back to reality and Minneapolis. Here's the Star Tribune's Kathleen Hennessey. I'm here with Kathleen Hennessey. She is the editor of the Star Tribune. She's very busy. I appreciate her time. Where were you on Saturday morning when you heard about the latest shooting in Minneapolis? I was at home. I was at home talking to my mom on the phone, just trying to take a little breather.

2:48So I assume that breather gets destroyed. Do you come into the office? How do you manage running a newsroom on a Saturday morning? Yeah. Not immediately. You know, there are a few calls, few checks, Slack channels to immediately sort of look in on it and make sure that things are rolling. There's some security issues we always deal with right away. And then, but yes, I'll, you know, fairly quickly, we move into the newsroom. So I'm just trying to get a sense of how quickly the newsroom, which is already working around the clock on a story that's been you guys have been writing about for two months, how quickly you have to sort of spin up additional resources for something like this.

3:39Well, like you said, we're sort of on high alert at all times. We've already beefed up staffing on weekends and mornings and nights. So for, you know, for this reason. And then, of course, like, this is, this is where this happened, you know, minutes from our newsroom and blocks from where some of our reporters and editors live. so we're fast you know people knew right away we were on the scene very very quickly and I'd say within minutes and how many folks can you you told some before you've got 50 people out of roughly 200 working on the story overall how many were sort of working on the shooting and the angles on that on Saturday yeah and to be clear that's sort of like on any given minute.

4:30I mean, everybody in this newsroom is having some interaction with this story over time. But gosh, I would say, you know, we had 15 people within five minutes probably activated. And by the end of the day, 50 or 60 all in between designers and editors and videographers, photographers obviously um it takes a lot these the story is rolling at a lot of different places that you know there's the whipple building that has sort of a steady protest there's marches happening there are you know we're still getting tips at all times about um sightings of ice agents and arrests and and um so it is a little bit of an everywhere all at once uh feel here which is not sustainable, right?

5:26I mean, you guys are the major newspaper in Minnesota. You're well-staffed by lots of standards, but it's not a huge staff. How do you think about sort of balancing workloads and mental strain and all of that? I mean, the story will go on for some period of time. I don't know when it's going to end. We're definitely staffing for it, right? Like, we're not constantly just reacting. We're making sure that people are on and looking for news at at times when, you know, three months ago, we might not have been in the same way. All of our editors are paying very close attention to where everybody is at any given minute.

6:05And if we, you know, anyone who knows reporters knows that if you're not paying attention, all of a sudden, you know, someone will be out working on their, you know, 18th hour and not complaining or, you know, so I've asked everybody to just really keep close tabs. And sometimes we have had to just, you know, not gently and forcefully and with love and respect, tell people to go home and take a break.

6:34We're also receiving just an extraordinary amount of support from journalists all over the country and newsrooms sending us food at, you know, at all the time and And an extraordinary amount of notes and appreciation, and that really does help people keep going. We feel a little bit like we've had, you know, kind of the journalism world is wrapped their arms around us, and that feels great. So as everyone notes, this is something that is being documented over and over by residents in the streets on their phones, many, many angles of the shooting on Saturday, available on people's cell phones. um so on the one hand well i think it's all good personally but but um in that this information is documented and it's a resource absolutely it is also i assume a challenge for you to say well this is a video that is widely distributed on reddit it seems crystal clear that there's a man being shot by by federal agents um how how many checks in a case like that do you have to put in before you'll publish a story saying this is what happened versus there's a video that appears to say the following?

7:42Oh, we're pretty, I mean, we are very careful with knowing that a video that appears to show something does not mean that that is exactly what happened, right? And our language is careful. And we recognize like we're not going to be, to have every single video first, obviously. I mean, the video is sort of popping up on accounts all over the place. I mean, I really, We know that our job is to verify it and to watch it closely and to slow it down a thousand times and to try to get the rights to it and to call the lawyers and figure out who took it right to do the to do the hard work. And inevitably, that just means that, you know, we'll be slower than social media, but we'll be more accurate and more careful and fuller.

8:28Is there a frustration either on your end or the one that you pick up from your readers that say, well, I'm seeing this thing on Reddit or Instagram. Why don't you guys have it? I mean, it never. Why can't we? Why can't we publish this? It's already out there. No, no, of course. I mean, just as a journalist, it never feels good to have somebody send you an account and say, like, see, look, this is what happened. Right. And you're like, yeah, I guess we're not quite reporting it that way yet. Right. And we're all competitive and we know the importance of speed. But we're really trying to hold to our process here.

9:01And just minutes before I called in here, I was going over what will be our sort of first really complete sort of forensic analysis of the video of the Preddie shooting on Saturday. And I'm okay. You know, that's taking us some time. And there's more video coming in all the time, right? That it's worth taking a beat and going slowly for us, I think. There was a great line in the interview with Max Taney on Saturday about chasing ghosts when you're trying to verify these tips. Give me an example of a ghost that was hard to track down one way or the other. Oh, gosh. Well, some of this is just, and I'm speaking really for our photographers and reporters who are out, and certainly not me, but a lot of the story, as everyone knows, is sort of being reported through these signal channels that various activists and neighborhood groups are on, and they're saying, I see, you know, I supported here, I supported there.

10:07And you either get there instantly or you're there in the aftermath, right? And they maybe were there or maybe it wasn't or maybe it was just somebody else in a rental car driving. So there are a lot of outlets. I don't want to start to be, but everybody else that is spending hours every day sort of just driving around town chasing those kinds of tips. And I just think that's the nature of this. that it's a hard story to cover that way. I think actually we're better positioned than some outlets because we're just closer to the community. We know these neighborhoods. We know what's real, what's not.

10:47We have had some luck in sort of getting ahead of that and getting sort of better and more solid information first. Have you thought about saying, at some point saying, well, look, if this stuff's all going to exist on social media, Why don't we find some way of sort of collecting it and provide? Because I mean, I'm a news junkie. I see a ton of this stuff. But most normal people don't see all of the stuff all of the time. Do you ever consider saying, let's just assemble all the reader submitted video. We'll collect it. We can say it's not verified, but you ought to see it. Yes, we're having those conversations.

11:25I don't, I'm not yet at a place where I don't think people come to us for unverified information, right? I mean, our job is to show them what is verified and what is real. And we've all had that experience where we've seen a video on social media and then we want to be like, wait, what is that? And then we go Google, like, the real thing, right? So really, our job is to be additive and to confirm and to name places and dates and locations and get reaction and comment from federal law enforcement officials or federal immigration officials and others, right? And to really, like, paint the fuller picture.

12:07Um, so yeah, so we are not yet at the point where we're trying to just gobble up all the UGC, all of the video and throw it on our site and say here. But we are collecting a lot of it for the production of journalism, you know, going forward. Yeah. And you said people do come to you for verified information. Do you think that is the thing people value most above all versus timeliness or seeing something that confirms what they believe to be true? um look i think people are coming to us for a lot of things we have had a running live vlog now for since mid-december um that is by far our most uh visited most trafficked uh piece of journalism and people are coming back several times throughout the day i mean they want they want video but they also just want news they want to they they want a whole mix of of how we're telling this story and they want interviews with residents and, and the latest news from Walls or from Trump.

13:12And, and I think, um, but yes, it's, I think they're coming to us for, for verified reporting. And I think we, I hope what we're also finding is we're introducing some readers who aren't familiar with our work and maybe even younger readers to what verified reporting looks and feels like. Uh, last question up until last spring, you were an editor at the New York Times. You have not yet finished a full year at this job. When you think about working the Times with an enormous newsroom, but obviously has to cover the world versus the 200 folks you have in Minnesota with a much narrower focus. Do you ever find yourself going, man, if I was the Times, we could have done this much quicker or use this many more folks here?

13:58Or the New York Times has no idea what the Whittier neighborhood is. And that's our advantage here. Yes, to both of those things. I mean, I certainly didn't feel like I would get into this job and then suddenly feel like I'm competing with the New York Times and that's not always pleasant. The Times has done extraordinary work on the story. They have a fantastic correspondent who's here. They know Minnesota very well at this point. So no shade on them at all. But I would say I covet their and others sort of video forensic skills. We don't have a visual investigations team. And so we have an extraordinary video producer who has become one of like a single one woman video investigation.

14:47Your forensics team is a woman. Well, it's a few, I should say. It's a few. But it's, you know, that was not our area of expertise in the same way that certainly is the Times and the Post has done great work on that. So, yes, there are things that we are learning on the fly that take us a bit more time. And I'm fine with that. I'm comfortable with that. And then there are all kinds of other stories that we're telling that other people aren't getting to. And we are just a little bit deeper on this story than the times can be. And I appreciate that. And our readers appreciate it, I think. I appreciate your work.

15:24I started subscribing. I think last week's publisher, Steve Grove, put something out on social media. and I said I should subscribe as well. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Peter. Take care. Thanks to Kathleen Hedese. In a minute, you're going to hear from Ira Parker, the showrunner of HBO's A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. But first, a word from a sponsor. When you think of the most influential American politician of the 21st century, you probably think of a man. But there's one woman who might fit the bill. She never thought she'd be in politics, but went on to break what she calls the marble ceiling.

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18:46Ira Parker, you are the co-creator and showrunner of The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is another way of saying you've made HBO's newest Game of Thrones show. That is a big job. It is. It has been. A very fun job. Very fun job. But it can be big sometimes. And you were just telling me you're working on season two now. Season one is debuting in January. So you've already answered my first question. Okay. We're keeping it going. We're going to try and get out one of these a year. Is that really the pace? Do they expect one of these a year? Yeah, look, I'd say it's probably going to end up being closer to one every 18 months or so.

19:24But we could do one a year. But this is not like a previous HBO big series where sometimes there'd be a two-year wait or longer in between series. They want this to sort of come out at a pace. Yeah, look, it's I'd say it's probably going to end up being closer to one every 18 months or so. But we could do one a year. But this is not like a previous HBO big, big series where sometimes there'd be a two year wait or longer in between series. They want this to sort of come out at a pace. Yeah. So maybe it's everything changes. It's tough to say. Game of Thrones, the original came out every scene. I don't know how they did it.

20:01Those are 10 episodes hour long. And they did that for a long, long time. Um, and, uh, house of the dragon, there's so much, I mean, it's the biggest episodes of television anyone's ever shot in the entire world. So they need a little bit extra time and we are quite smaller. We are quite simpler in our approach. We're a little, uh, grittier, uh, of the earth. And, uh, uh, so we can, uh, a little more classically shot. We could turn these out, uh, uh, at a faster clip. Yeah. You're telling me a lot that I was going to get to, uh, I want to talk to you about the, sort of smaller scale this but let's let's step up and explain this show for a normal person who probably watched game of thrones or at least knows what it is they've heard this is part of that universe what what is the what's the what should people know going into this show if they're going in pretty cold and so it is game of thrones was quite big and sprawling and epic and our show is a lot simpler.

21:01It follows instead of all of these families all around the realm and everyone is battling everyone and lots of politics and the dead are coming to kill mankind and there's dragons. And we follow one guy and he's from the shittiest part of the whole realm. He was an orphan kid and he's not a secret anything. He's just, he grew up with nothing and he now finds himself at a crossroads where the last person he knew in the whole world is gone and he has to figure out what he's going to do with the rest of his life. And so he sets off to this tournament with some aspirations of entering the joust, entering the lists.

21:41But of course, I think like a lot of us, when you go to try and do something hard like that, you know, there's also a lot of self-doubt that comes with it. And so that's the journey that we followed the whole season. and it's kind of a buddy comedy and it's it's it is funny um what what big picture for for you and hbo you know game of thrones is a huge property hbo warner brothers discovery huge company what what what do they want out of this series what do they want out of you they're still making other game of thrones stuff they're still making house of dragons what sort of the expectations for sort of what this show is supposed to do for HBO, for the franchise.

22:25Look, I will say this is George's last unadapted prose within this world. So it was a very George R. Martin. Yes. And so that was obviously a big part of it. But these stories are beloved by people who have come to them and not a lot of people have come to them. I mean, certainly a lot less than even A Song of Ice and Fire. when that first came out. And so, but it has, I think, almost a broader appeal in a certain way because it's a simpler story to become engaged with. You're just, you're following one guy and it starts a little lighter too. Game of Thrones, obviously, the original, the pilot starts with a bunch of mutilated bodies at a camp and the dead and, you know, it ends with a kid getting thrown out of a window.

23:17So, you know, we we we start it's it's there is a buddy comedy, you know, aspect of this. It's two young kids setting off to a tournament. They're going to Coachella. They're going to Glastonbury. They're having fun. It's knights and lords and ladies all camping next to their servants. It's muddy. Everybody's enjoying themselves. Everybody's drinking. Of course, you know, in George R. R. Martin's work, everybody things turn dark quite quickly. and we do get to those elements that I think all the true Game of Thrones fans are going to love. But at the beginning, it's a nice on-ramp and hopefully bringing in a new generation, maybe even a younger generation to this universe.

24:01And the way I think about it is you could watch this show without knowing what a Targaryen is or any of the lore or backstory. You could just access this show right away, which I assume is intentional. No, look, absolutely. And again, we're just we're following the novella and whether or not that was George's intention or not. I actually think he was just trying to write a fun story within that wasn't following the main characters. It was from a different POV than you normally get. It's not the lords and ladies and kings and queens. It's not the higher ups takes place at the bottom. It's a shitty end of Westeros at the muddy end of Westeros.

24:39And so there is hopefully that allows a lot of access. Hopefully that allows people, you know, more people to discover the show. You mentioned George R.R. Martin a couple of times. He's had various relationships to the Game of Thrones properties on HBO over the years. Is he involved in this and who are the other key stakeholders? Again, with a franchise this big, how much leeway do you have to sort of follow what you want to do versus going up to Casey Bloys or George R.R. Martin saying, can we do this? Is this acceptable? Look, there actually is a lot. And one, that's just a function of being at HBO.

25:16They are very much artist first and they trust their artists. It's the best place to work in television, I think, in my opinion, at the moment. But of course, this is the biggest franchise that they have, and you don't want it to go off the rails. And we were certain we weren't going to do that because obviously this is George's novella. The underlying material is just so lovely that we all agree that we wanted to follow that roadmap, that the story is the story. The beginning is the beginning, the middle is the middle, the end is the end. And we're just filling it out. We're filling it out with characters that you just see little snippets of in the novella.

26:01And we get to spend more time with them. We get to meet a little bit more of Dunk and Egg, our two knight and squire in the story who we're following. And we get to sit down and just actually hang out in Westeros, have a little fun in Westeros, which you normally don't get to do when the stakes are so high every single moment. so how much of and you've mentioned that this is smaller scale and and sort of the reduced stakes and more of a hangout um and that's the point of the novellas george r r martin wrote or he didn't write it for that reason but he wrote those stories how much of the this the idea of reducing the scale and presumably the cost goes into your thinking and hbo's thinking about about this show A lot.

26:45Probably priority number one. Yeah. Make it cheaper. Oh, yes. Yes. Very, very, very much so. And which at the beginning was quite daunting. I'd say we probably have about a quarter of the amount of money that a minute of Westeros television costs. And you're making shorter episodes, too, right? Yeah. Previous seasons were an hour. That's right. And that's all factored into everything that we're trying to do. but it is tricky it's it's obviously it's very period it's it's it's 14th century ostensibly uh it's uh there's a lot of horses there's a lot of mud there's even in our field there's a lot of action there's uh people hitting each other with big sticks and we do this shit for real you know so it's uh it gets very complicated it costs a lot of time and we also have our second lead is nine years old and so uh you can't shoot and you wouldn't want to shoot full days with somebody that age because they still need to go to school half of the day and they still need to have a life and be a normal human being and so that slows everything down and obviously that costs more money uh so to do this for that budget was very tricky until i think what we all really took on here was to make this show a reflection of its lead character which is uh dunks or duncan the tall this scrappy kid from Flea Bottom from the slums of King's Landing.

28:11He is in himself a little simpler. He is himself unpolished. He's gritty and he's certainly imperfect. And so that became the look of the show that informed everything from the cinematography to the music to how we shoot our action sequences. I suppose it has even maybe a little bit of an indie feel to it. the speed at which we had to work and the vibe of this following one person cutting from dunk to dunk. So it looks premium when you watch it. You don't watch it thinking, oh, this is a cheap Game of Thrones show. So behind the scenes, what are you, when you're making something, a Game of Thrones show for 25 % of the cost of Game of Thrones, what are you going without?