Kierna Mayo is the showrunner and head writer for the Lena Horne Prize for Artists Creating Social Impact. She is the former editor-in-chief of EBONY and Honey Magazine, which she co-founded at age 27.

Guest host Patrice Peck is a freelance journalist and writes the Coronavirus News for Black Folks newsletter. Her most recent article is "Black Journalists Are Exhausted," an op-ed published in The New York Times.

“Advocacy is not a bad word. Telling the truth about a particular slice of life is what my career has been. That slice of life started about young people who were partaking in hip hop culture. Most of them were of color, most of them were poor. So that was a perspective. If you begin to tell the stories of those people at that time, that begins to have an advocacy feel and taste and touch. Not even with a consciousness to it. Because this is a lost voice. This is a lost point of view. It is not in the mainstream. It is not being centered. No one is telling it. So the mere act of shedding light journalistically in places where there has been no light before is advocacy. Sorry, journalists. Sorry, all you impartial, fair-and-balanced folks.”

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Laura June is author of Now My Heart Is Full.

“Parenting wasn’t considered literary fodder for a long time. I think women in particular are raised not to complain. Which is not what I was doing. If you have to boil it down, it’s base emotion. Then you’re complaining about how hard it is. Or, the opposite end, you’re bragging. There’s no in between. Most of my writing is in between.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Read This Summer, Google Play, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Dan Rather is a journalist, author, and the former anchor of CBS Evening News.

”I knew that being named to succeed Walter Cronkite would put me in a position of inhaling—every day—a kind of NASA-grade rocket fuel for the ego. And that could be dangerous…. In the end, when the red light goes on, it's just you. You're by yourself.… And the longer you're in that role, the more difficult it is to stay true to yourself and to remember who you are and who you want to be.”

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Jesse Coburn is an investigative reporter at Streetsblog. He won the Polk Award for Local Reporting for "Ghost Tags," his series on the black market for temporary license plates.

“You can imagine this having never become a problem, because it’s so weird. What a weird scam. I’m going to print and sell tens of thousands of paper license plates. But someone figured it out. And then a lot more people followed. It just exploded.”

This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

Mitchell Prothero covers intelligence and crime for Vice News. His new podcast with Project Brazen is Gateway: Cocaine, Murder, and Dirty Money in Europe.

“I’m really interested in transnational networks—crime, intelligence. I’m fascinated by the gray. Like, when is something legal and when is something illegal? One thing with this Gateway project [was that] nobody could ever tell me that moment where money goes from absolutely being illegal to being legal.”

Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosopher and journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The Verge, The Believer and many other publications. Her new book is Easy Beauty.

”I literally didn't talk to anyone in my life about disability until I was, like, 30. Ever. Not my husband, not my friends, as little as possible to my own mother. I had this very bad idea that what I needed to do in every single social situation was wait until people could unsee my body…. And it was all in service of trying to be truly recognized or truly seen. And, of course, what was happening is I was involved in a complete act of self erasure because my body and my real self are related…. There is no real me without my physical self…. I did not think I was going to ever write about this, but once I started, it felt like I met myself for the first time.”

Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and has been reporting from Ukraine for the last several weeks. His most recent article is "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine."

“I’m not at all a conflict reporter. I don't like it, though who would like being in these situations? But this is the story, right? If you cover this part of the world, if the war in 2014 felt like the tectonic plates of history were shifting, now they're just erupting, crashing. This is the asteroid-impact event for this part of the world with effects that will last similarly long going forward.”

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman are reporters at BuzzFeed News. Together they won this year's George Polk Award for Business Reporting for their coverage of Facebook's handling of disinformation on its platform. 

This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

Kiera Feldman is an investigative reporter. Her latest article is "Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection."

"I used to have a lot of anxiety that I don’t seem like an investigative reporter. Utlimately, my reporting personality is just me. It’s just, I want to be real with people. And the number one rule of reporting is to be a human being to other people. Be decent. Be kind."

Thanks to MailChimp, RXBAR, and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

For the first time, Janet Reitman discusses her Rolling Stone cover story on accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

"My editors, myself, a lot of people who work for the magazine — we lived through an act of terrorism. We know what it feels like. There have been accusations to me personally of being insensitive, and I can tell you that I'm far from insensitive, not only to the political realities of terrorism but to the personal realities of terrorism. I breathed it in, literally. … The cover elicited an emotional response from people; that is not always what magazine covers do. I think it's great on a certain level, because terrorism is emotional, it's real, it affects us. It is not something that happens just overseas or just to people who are somehow "Other." If you talk to terrorism experts around the world, what they will all say is that the vast majority of people who are involved in these violent, extremist acts are what we would consider otherwise to be very normal people. One of us. Part of our community. That's a reality, and it's a very emotional thing and it makes people very uncomfortable. I totally understand that. But that was the point of my story."

Thanks to this week's sponor, Squarespace.