Planet Money: A case study in taking risk | Adam Davidson | Big Think

Planet Money: A case study in taking risk Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adam Davidson, staff writer for The New Yorker and co-founder of NPR's Planet Money, was raised in an environment in which everything was grounds for discussion — except money. So, of course, money was what he took an interest in. The idea for Planet Money came from a place of frustration that Davidson and his friends felt toward the shortcomings of current business coverage. They aimed to breathe new life into the field. Planet Money's road to success has consistently involved a team that holds each other to a high standard of thoughtfulness, intelligence, humility, and impeccable storytelling. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ADAM DAVIDSON: ADAM DAVIDSON is the cofounder of NPR's Planet Money podcast and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers economics and business. Previously he was an economics writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has won many of journalism's most prestigious awards, including a Peabody for his coverage of the financial crisis. Check Adam Davidson's latest book The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century at https://amzn.to/2X31pv5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: ADAM DAVIDSON: I think when you're a creative person and you're starting something new and you want to do great work it can be a little terrifying. You have yourself, maybe a small team. What are we supposed to do to be great? What are we supposed to do to be fully ourselves? It was looking back at Planet Money that I created with a small group of friends where I saw so many lessons in what you can do early on that sets you up for success. Creating Planet Money came out like a lot of things out of frustration that I felt, I wasn't born interested in business. I grew up in a home of artists who could care less about business. In fact, I grew up in a world of artists where everything was open for discussion – sex and drugs and art and everything except money. Money was this lame, horrible thing that no one wanted to talk about. So I, of course, became fascinated by the lame, horrible thing no one wanted to talk about. But I didn't particularly care what the stock market was doing on any given day or what the Fed policy was. I had to learn to find that interesting. And when I did find it interesting and I found that business is directly tied to every aspect of our lives. It determines how much comfort we have and in many ways it determines who we marry, how many kids we have, where we live, how we live. And business itself represents dramas that the characters in business and in economic policy have their personalities and their emotional states and all of the things that make a good drama. The drama is there. It just requires translation. And as I began to feel, that and then I would think about most business coverage and it was so lifeless. Just the stock market did blah, blah, blah. The Federal Reserve blah, blah, blah announced this policy. And it just made me frustrated. It made me really, really frustrated. And surveying the landscape I felt not in every case but in a lot of, in many cases there was either serious but really boring and hard to understand business coverage or there was fun, lively business coverage that was sort of silly and thin. And so we, I guess it was an experiment but we felt like it would pay off. What if we just started the most of both. We wanna be very substantive, very serious, very grounded in smart, thoughtful stuff, but also fun and exciting and filled with drama and characters and all of that. And what if we just refused to accept that there's a tradeoff and just insist on the most of both. And it's not that we always succeeded or every episode succeeds but setting that as a bar allowed us, frankly, to just not give up early in the process. And I've often said there's not a Planet Money way of telling a story. There's a lot of little tricks and gimmicks and approaches we came up with but it really is just a group of people who agree we're going to hold ourselves to this really high standard and we're just going to keep trying until we succeed. And that's true for every individual episode and then it's true for the show as a whole. And that's by the way what I've noticed, you know I've worked at This American Life, at The New Yorker. I've worked at places that, the New York Times magazine, that... Read the full transcript at https://ift.tt/39Y3vz2