Martine Powers ’11 is the senior host of “Post Reports,” the award-winning daily news podcast from The Washington Post. She graduated from Yale in 2011 with a B.A. in African American Studies. Before joining the Post, Powers worked as a reporter for The Boston Globe and Politico and completed a Fulbright fellowship in Trinidad & Tobago. She’s been at the Post since 2016 and became the inaugural host of “Post Reports” when the show launched in December 2018.
Podcasting has really exploded since you graduated from Yale. How did you end up moving from traditional reporting to auditory media?
I was interested in journalism since high school. When I got to college, I knew that I wanted to work for the Yale Daily News. I had seen Gilmore Girls and thought, this is the path for me. So I was originally focused on print journalism, in part because it felt like that was the only thing that was available to me, but also because I had a sense that I was an okay writer. When I thought about TV or radio news, I thought there was a certain type of presentation—a look and a sound—that you had to have, that I didn’t feel like I had.
I learned a lot at the YDN about reporting and felt like that was my trial by fire. After college, I was a general assignment reporter for a couple of years at The Boston Globe. Every day I was sent out to cover a different story, oftentimes in the greater New England area. I would end up driving a lot of long distances to get to those assignments and because of that, I started listening to podcasts—episodes of This American Life, Radiolab, and other early storytelling podcasts that were becoming popular then.
I would listen as I was driving and I remember feeling this ache of wanting to make things that sounded like those podcasts. I felt like there was this gap between the story I was about to cover, where I was going to talk to someone who had this intense thing happen to them and would hear the emotion in their voice, but my job was to write it down and put it in the newspaper. I felt like there was something missing there. Whereas when I was spending this time in the car with these podcasts—it felt so much more intimate and intense to me.
It took me longer than it probably should have to think that maybe I should be trying to do that form of journalism. I got accepted to a program called Transom, where they train you on radio storytelling and more technical skills like how to collect tape, how to use a mic, and how to use audio-editing software.
Then I came to The Washington Post as a print reporter, covering the Metro section. From the get-go, I was like, if you’re ever thinking you want to do more with audio, I’d love to be a part of it. I think I was noisy enough for long enough that by the time they were starting a daily podcast, they knew I had an interest in doing that.
What is hosting a podcast like? Many journalists have a reporting beat, whereas your job requires covering various topics and skipping from local to international news in a matter of hours. How has this affected how you research and report?
I rely heavily on my experience being a beat reporter. Covering a beat really helps you understand how a story evolves over time. There are waves and peaks and crests of a story, where things come to an end or to a head. I learned how to make clear to readers or listeners what led up to this moment and how to give context with nuance.
The challenges of constantly jumping from one thing to another is the name of the game in this job. I have an enormous amount of help. We have a team of producers who talk to reporters, ask questions about their stories during pre-interviews to get a sense of what the reporter is working on, what they want to discuss, in an effort to make me better prepared, which I’m enormously appreciative of.
A lot of it is about tapping into my natural curiosity. I think it can feel hard in journalism—there is a sense of jadedness that can creep in, like, why are we hearing about this again? The battle is constantly pushing back against that and asking, what is the new thing here? What part of this surprised me? You need to come at stories with an attitude of openness, wanting to be surprised, and being willing to be challenged in your assumptions.
That’s what I try to bring to the job. Most days, I hope I’m successful, but it’s also just a lot of preparation. I’ve been pretty vigilant recently about trying to physically print out stories and engage with them on paper. Since we’re always on our phones, it’s just so easy to skim and be like, yeah, I read that—even if you just scrolled through. Reading more deeply and having the time to think about a story in a more substantive way makes a big difference in the quality of the interviews we do.
How do you feel auditory media and reporting has changed journalism?
That’s a complicated question. As you point out, radio has existed for decades. I think there’s a bit of frustration from people who’ve been in this industry and made incredible work for decades that, all of a sudden, everyone decided one day that audio journalism was the thing. It has been a thing for a very long time.
At the same time, audio journalism from the past was primarily public radio, like NPR and its local affiliates. The fact that a lot more people can make audio in lots of different ways and places has been due to this real infusion of innovation and excitement about audio. But I think the thing that has always made radio great is still what people love about podcasts now. My dad was really into Car Talk, a show that used to be on NPR. The hosts were two brothers and they were just so funny. There was something about their natural back-and-forth and authentic relationship—they would laugh so loud, and not a polite laugh, but a real belly laugh. And that was just so fun to listen to.
I feel like that’s what people love about podcasts now—the authenticity, the fact that you can get a real sense of people’s personalities. When people really love a podcast, oftentimes it’s because they feel like they have a relationship with the person who’s telling the story. It’s the host or the people who come on the show, where you develop a relationship with the person that you’re hearing interviewed. I think it’s that sense of feeling real humanity and understanding the world better through a conversation—like someone is having dinner at your house and explaining to you how the world works over soup or something. That is what’s really powerful about audio and it’s what has made it even more successful and widespread over the last few years.
Podcasts are often catered to a super-busy, connected, 21st-century lifestyle. When people listen to a podcast when cooking or running, the medium risks becoming background noise. Have you found this problematic? Or how does this change your approach to creating podcasts?
I would push back very heavily on that, although I think it’s a really good question. First of all, I think news has always been a form of multitasking, right? People used to watch the evening news while they were cooking or having dinner or doing other stuff. People have been listening to radio in the car since they put radios in cars. What really concerns me is if people internalize the news when they read it on their phones. The Post spends a lot of time thinking about how to reach people on their phones and how to interact with readers on TikTok and X and more. The reality is, people’s attention spans have gone way down. For a person to engage with a written story for more than 90 seconds is a huge win. Whereas when we make a podcast, people listen for 20, 30, 40 minutes. We know from the data collected on podcasts that people are very likely to reach the end of an episode—which is not always true for written news.
So, yes, people are listening to podcasts when they’re running or cooking or cleaning, but I don’t know—I feel like that is really sacred brainspace. People aren’t on their phones and they’re out in the world doing something that doesn’t require a lot of thought, so at the same time they’re able to engage with our audio and the story we’re telling. There are stories I’ve heard on a podcast—maybe from This American Life from 10, 15 years ago—where I can still remember where I was when I heard a certain part of the story. I can remember the street I was walking down or the bus I was on because it sticks out so much in my mind. So what makes me feel so lucky, making audio, is knowing we have much more engaged and focused time with our audience than a lot of other journalists on other platforms.
One of the things that makes podcasts so compelling is the ability to integrate in recorded audio from the events that you’re covering. A recent Post Reports episode on the humanitarian crisis in Rafah featured clips of a speech by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, for instance. How do those real-world sounds enhance your work? How do you choose what audio to include or leave out?
The importance of using those kinds of clips is to give listeners an up-close experience with the news. We can describe a political candidate’s speech or the scene of a conflict, but to hear it firsthand can really grab you.
In some of our stories, it really helps to hear what a person sounds like—so it depends on the story. A good example was our recent episode about the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case around Trump potentially being disqualified from running due to the 14th Amendment. Only recently has the Supreme Court made audio of its arguments public. You can talk about the justices, but hearing Justice Alito grill someone gives you a completely different understanding of who he is, what it’s like to interact with him, what he might care about. I feel like the power of that story was both hearing these arguments about the constitutional question, and also actually hearing the justices and lawyers. It’s tense and it’s cringey at moments. And it’s audio that people haven’t gotten a chance to hear until recently.
How do you navigate editing in auditory media? Do you think your ethical responsibility changes when you are editing an auditory piece rather than a written piece?
I don’t know if it’s changed, so much as it’s intensified. It feels like the stakes are higher, and the focus is even sharper. There’s a lot you can do in print that can have an effect on how your words are taken. It’s not unique to audio that there are ways that you can frame quotes from people that can affect how they’re received and understood. So just like with print editing, we focus a lot on questions like, is this the fairest way to present this? Are we making sure people know how this was intended?
We do have a rule of not editing the President. When we interview someone, we will probably cut out “likes” or “ums,” but we don’t do that with the President or other high-level officials, since hearing exactly how they say a sentence is super important. There is so much power in the editing process, and it’s a huge responsibility. That’s why we take editing so seriously.
Do you think you have a podcast voice, and does it sound radically different from your regular speaking voice?
I try not to have a podcast voice, but I probably do.
If someone’s guest-hosting our show and I’m giving them tips on how to sound their best, I say that you want to sound like yourself, but a more elevated version of yourself. Oftentimes, I tell them to talk like how you would to your new partner’s parents.
When I started this job, I had the experience that I think a lot of people have: I would listen to myself and think, ‘oh, my God, that’s what I sound like?’ I like to call that audio vertigo, where you’re blown away and sometimes horrified by the gap between how you sound in your head and how you sound in audio. That was really painful for several years, but that’s kind of gone for me now. It’s funny because now I listen to myself on audio, and that’s the sound I hear in my head when I’m talking. I think it takes daily, radical, unvarnished exposure to your own voice over and over again to make that feeling go away.
We have a lot of people at The Politic interested in multimedia projects. Do you have any tips for students starting off in auditory and visual journalism? Is there anything you wish you had known when you were at Yale?
I feel like there are so few places in journalism where you have space to play. Maybe the biggest leaps in my learning were oftentimes born out of stories that were supposed to be playful, or things that I made for fun.
Before I came to the Post, I was editing a podcast that a couple of friends of mine made—they all went to Yale, too, actually—and it was this great podcast that I would edit. I wasn’t getting paid, it was completely for fun. There’s a ton I learned in that process that I use all the time about what makes a good interviewer, a good story, a good cut. So, leaning into being in college and the opportunity to play around with stuff. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because nothing ever is, especially early on. Use this time to make weird things—a lot of things—and not worry too much about the things being great, but try out different types of interviews and audio. I wish I had that space again in my life. I think that’s where the best learning comes from.