Deez Interviews: Meet the Pop-Up Magazine exec editor with a penchant for the “surprising” side of every story
Happy Friday, Deezers! This week’s interview is with Pop-Up Magazine’s Anita Badejo, who talked to us about the signs of a good Pop-Up story, how she got into live storytelling, and the fall issue — and first themed tour: The Escape Issue.
**Speaking of which, if you can make it to one of their September/October dates (in San Francisco, Oakland, LA, D.C., NYC, Chicago, San Diego and Vancouver), use this ~fancy discount code~ SUPPORTER for $5 off each ticket (And if you’re going to the NY one, we’ll see ya there!).
If you’ve never been to a Pop-Up mag event, just know it’s exactly how Anita describes it: “it's like a concert, play, podcast, comedy show, and documentary film all wrapped into one.” You’ll love it.
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The interviewee: Anita Badejo (follow her @anitabadejo)
The gig: Executive Editor & Co-host at Pop-Up Magazine Productions
Usually, we ask interviewees about a "typical day" at their jobs, but given Pop-Up Magazine's issue cycle, I'd love to know what a typical “season” looks like for you. How does your role change as each issue comes together?
Pop-Up Magazine tours the country three times a year, in Winter, Spring and Fall. Given that we tour so often, our team of story producers and I are constantly hunting for pitches and looking for interesting storytellers for the show.
About four months before each tour, that process really ramps up. It involves many days of phone calls and emails with potential contributors, and internal meetings to evaluate pitches and decide with stories we want to assign. Every story goes through a full editing process, as well as fact checking.
We're also thinking about how to make each story come alive on stage in an interesting way, which in the past has included everything from dance, puppetry, and opera to interactive / sensory moments like glow sticks, scent cards, and marshmallows. During the production process, we're also working with our art and photo teams so they can commission original illustration, animation, and photography to accompany each story. Our music director, Minna Choi, will also listen to mockups and compose a unique score for most of them.
I wear a lot of hats in my role. I oversee all of our producers and lead our editorial planning, and am constantly checking in to make sure folks have what they need to produce the best stories and tours possible. I'm also communicating with our art, photo, music, production, and events teams to make sure all the elements are coming together. I'm top editing stories by producers, as well as occasionally producing stories of my own: working on script edits, making story mockups, and rehearsing with contributors. And the night of the shows, I'm the person you see on-stage — usually co-hosting with another one of our awesome producers.
Before Pop-Up Magazine, you were editing features at BuzzFeed. What inspired you to make the move into the world of live storytelling?
I have always loved longform, narrative journalism, so being a features editor at BuzzFeed News was, in many ways, a total dream. Our audience and focus was so far reaching, so I edited stories about a really broad range of subjects, and never really had an opportunity to be bored.
Because I was so features-focused, at a certain point, I realized that I had come to conflate length with value in storytelling. I thought the best stories all needed to be at least 3,000 words long. I wanted to expand my range as an editor, and work on stories not just with varied lengths, but with varied mediums as well.
Pop-Up presented a really unique opportunity to explore the best way to tell any individual story, and to get to do so with the instant gratification of seeing an audience respond to those stories in real time. It also just seemed so innovative and exciting — how often as a journalist do you work with a live band? Or brainstorm the best method to get an audience to vote in a Choose Your Own Adventure-style story?
In an interview with Shondaland, you talked about how the show is loosely structured to feel like a print magazine, with front-of-book pieces and classic tropes like how-tos or advice columns. What other formats inspire your vision for Pop-Up?
The idea, since its founding, has always been to bring together journalists and storytellers from all kinds of backgrounds. That started with writers, photographers, documentary filmmakers, and radio/podcast producers and hosts — but we've since worked with comedians, actors, playwrights, poets, musicians, chefs, even dancers and magicians.
I always tell people who have never been that it's like a concert, play, podcast, comedy show, and documentary film all wrapped into one. We've paired an actor with a journalist to play the subject of a story who was in prison and thus couldn't be recorded onstage. We've paired an opera singer with a radio producer to embody the great opera diva Maria Callais. We've visualized a reported story about memory loss through shadow puppetry.
You've been producing and editing stories for the show since 2016, so I imagine have a sixth sense for when a story would be good live. What are the tell-tale signs?
A classic Pop-Up Magazine story is one that's informative (most of our stories are reported), visually beautiful and exciting, emotional (people typically laugh and cry during the same show!), and, perhaps most importantly, surprising.
"Surprising" can mean it's a story about something you never even knew existed, or it can be a story about something familiar — told in a surprising, fascinating way on the stage, that turns whatever you thought you knew on its head. We want audiences to walk away from the show — which is unrecorded, and therefore ephemeral — feeling like they can't think of whatever person, place, or issue in the world they were faced with in the same way as they did before they walked into the theater.
Finally, this fall's issue, The Escape Issue, will be a first-ever joint issue between Pop-Up Magazine and The California Sunday Magazine. What's the story behind this partnership?
We're really excited to be collaborating with our sister publication. California Sunday's executive editor, Raha Naddaf, and I came up with the theme together, and their October issue will also be themed Escape.
We wanted something that felt contemporary — that spoke to this particularly complicated time in the world — and could lend itself to both print and live. Escape is something that's on so many people's minds — which one of us can't list five things we'd want to escape from right now?
A handful of stories will be in both the print magazine and the live show, and we're excited to experiment with telling the same story in two different mediums. We're really interested in the audience experiencing a story — spoiler: for instance, a story about animal escapes — told both in print and live.
And in general, Pop-Up Magazine's Escape Issue is going to be a special one! We've got stories from comedians Jo Firestone and Jordan Carlos, poet Sarah Kay, musician Nat Puff, writers Chris Duffy, Clio Chang and more. As for what to expect from the theme... we'll have stories about escapes big and small, physical and mental, daring and mundane. Think everything from fugitives to memes to New Age hippies. And if you make it to the show, please find me and say hello!
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Don’t forget to follow @anitabadejo and get your tickets for the Escape Issue, stat!!! Use that discount code, people!
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Welcome back to "Seriously?", Karen's week of Deez Links guest posts about media news that deserve a second look.
It's Friday. A truly exhausting week filled with horrific events that will horrify us for many more months to come. [This is the bad place.gif]
I don't think anyone expected how jam-packed this week would be in the media industry, so this last guest-post is long. Every story is worth your time and please subscribe to your local newspaper working on increasing diversity.
Joi Ito still hasn't resigned from MIT after two of his senior staff at the university's Media Lab stepped down after news broke about Ito's multiple professional and financial relationships with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Ito is also a board member of the New York Times, the Knight Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Columbia J-School professor Bill Grueskin's annotation of Ito's apology is worth reading.
Security camera company Ring is hiring a producer/on-camera host, for some reason. Ring is owned by Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post. It's worth revisiting the This American Life report on how television shows like Live PD and Cops use, narrate, and edit police and security camera footage. (h/t Sam Biddle)
Cheap labor is a sad, but widespread tradition at pretty much every college and university. Now the exploitative practice is extending to sports journalism, with the yesterday's launch of ESPN's ACC Network. Deadspin reports that "the network, which includes a linear TV channel and a digital streaming platform, will be owned by ESPN with revenues and cost split by ESPN and the ACC, but the specifics of that arrangement—who bears what costs and who gets what percentage of the revenue—are unclear."
And the News Observer reports how ESPN clearly loaded the economics of expensive digital broadcasting studios onto participating schools, even when they renovated existing spaces: "N.C. State did that and still spent approximately $6.6 million. UNC built a new studio, adjacent to the Smith Center, and spent $15 million. Both UNC and N.C. State will have to pay off that debt before realizing any profit from the network."UK entertainment journalist James Dyer live-tweeted his experience of being stopped by a Customs and Border Patrol agent at the Los Angeles International Airport who accused him of being part of the "fake news media.”
Apple TV's The Morning Show and Lionsgate's Bombshell are two high-profile Hollywood projects starring A-list white actresses about #MeToo scandals in television journalism,. But while The Morning Show's show runner, executive producers and directors are mostly women, journalist Erin Gloria Ryan rightfully points out Bombshell (about the Roger Ailes crisis at Fox News) is helmed by a male writer and director. "One of the most obnoxious things about the current era in entertainment is that the same execs who were complicit in a culture of sexism that went unchecked for years are now profiting off girl power stories that functionally act as smokescreens," she tweeted.
Journalists will undoubtedly be interested in both, but it will be interesting to note how prominent the male gaze will be in Bombshell, and how both projects deal with the issues of power and deeply problematic men.ESPN's Ariel Helwani spoke to MMA fighter Conor McGregor, describing it as "a 41-minute, wide-ranging interview on many different subjects, including the video released last week in the bar and his fighting future." Helwani also publicly thanked McGregor for the access and his time. New York Times reporter Kevin Draper pointed out that ESPN's write-up of the interview makes no mention of McGregor's previous arrest for a sexual assault investigation. "Imagine being a journalist, getting the first on-the-record with McGregor in months, having him for 41 minutes, and not asking about this. Unconscionable," he wrote.
The Hill reports former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will officially become a Fox News contributor, even making her debut appearance on the network on Fox and Friends on September 6. Panelists on the show recently confused Iceland and Greenland, and have a history of saying things the President will repeat minutes later.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists withdrew its sponsorship invitation to Fox News to the Excellence in Journalism conference, citing Fox News Radio Host Todd Starnes' multiple racist statements against Latino immigrants. The move cost NAHJ $16,666 (its one-third share of the $50,000 sponsorship), but conference co-presenters SPJ said it would not rescind its sponsorship invitation, citing "the spirit of free speech inherent in the First Amendment".
In a statement, SPJ National President J. Alex Tarquinio wrote, “Although it is unfortunate when the principle of free speech collides with the basic moral standards of civil debate, we will not exclude any media organization from the Excellence in Journalism conference based on their commentators’ points of view.”
Tarquino also cited the SPJ code of ethics, stating that "the Code tells us to support the open and civil exchange of views, even views the reporters find repugnant."
Let's be clear: Starnes unapologetically stating that America has “suffered” from the “invasion of a rampaging hoard of illegal aliens”, and claiming that most “illegal immigrants” are violent criminals is not a civil or open exchange of views, and the journalists who suffer the most from these views are not reflected in most of SPJ's board of directors.
It's not enough for SPJ to be "sympathetic to the concerns" of NAHJ, while also stating that "journalists must take a more measured approach" to covering immigration. The Trump administration is currently denying the flu vaccine to migrant families in border detention camps and FRONTLINE and the Associated Press recently co-reported dozens of cases where migrant kids were sexually assaulted in foster care after being separated from their parents.
What NAHJ did took a lot of guts, especially with the ongoing training and work they do towards increasing diversity in newsrooms. It's sad, but not surprising, why SPJ didn't have the same values.
Karen K. Ho can be found on Twitter.