![]() They had done some preliminary reporting. Yes, they had settled on the story maybe two or three months earlier, so I didn’t see any of the story selection process for Season 2. When you arrived, had the “In the Dark” team begun reporting on the Curtis Flowers story for Season 2? It all happened very quickly. I started in July of 2017. After J-School, I freelanced for a while, then got an internship at NPR’s National Desk in early 2017. I had heard “In the Dark” Season 1 and loved it, so when I saw that they were hiring, I applied for the job. How did you end up at APM Reports and “In the Dark”?Īt journalism school, I focused on longer-form investigative work as well as audio. We spoke to Parker about her job at “In the Dark” and how her time at Berkeley Journalism and the Investigative Reporting Program, where she worked as a research assistant, has influenced her work: Episodes of “In the Dark” have been downloaded more than 70 million times. Season 2 of the podcast won the prestigious George Polk Award, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and an RFK Journalism Award. Then, last fall, the Mississippi attorney general dropped all charges against Flowers and he was a free man at last. ![]() In December 2019, Flowers was released on bail to await a possible seventh trial. In 2019, the court overturned Flowers’ conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial for him, after finding that the prosecutor had systematically – and unconstitutionally – excluded Black jurors at Flowers’ sixth trial. Reporting from “In the Dark” was cited in briefs connected to Flowers’ appeal when it went to the U.S. ![]() The 2018 podcast brought national attention to Flowers’ case and the prosecutor’s jury selection practices. Flowers had been incarcerated for more than 20 years, mostly on Mississippi’s death row. She immediately began reporting for Season 2, which focused on Curtis Flowers, a Black man tried six times by a white prosecutor for a 1996 quadruple murder in Mississippi. But she never would have predicted that just two years out of journalism school, her work would help to overturn a murder conviction and set a man free.Ībout a year after graduating from Berkeley Journalism, Yesko landed a job as an investigative reporter at APM Reports’ “ In the Dark” podcast. Parker Yesko (’16) always knew she wanted to be a criminal justice reporter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |