Episode 48: Zooming In on Interviewing with Dave Malkoff
Dave Malkoff’s favorite movie, Broadcast News.
Dave Malkoff’s uncle, Peter Hackes, who was in Broadcast News.
How to reach Dave:
Transcript:
Melissa Milner 0:09
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As…podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As… podcast will highlight innovative practices and uncommon parallels in education. In this episode, I talked to Dave Malkoff. Dave is a journalist, storyteller. He's a national correspondent for The Weather Channel and his stories have been seen on NBC today show MSNBC and NBC stations across the country. As his website says, he's traveled the world covering some of the most important stories of our time, including the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, Arctic climate change and the private space industry. Recently, Dave has been producing and hosting several nationally broadcast science documentaries. I'm excited to share our chat with you. Enjoy.
Soundbite
Thank you, Dave Malkoff for coming on to The Teacher As… to share everything that you do.
Dave Malkoff
Well, thanks for having me, Melissa, this is interesting to be on here.
Melissa Milner
So first of all, this is primarily a podcast for educators. So what would you like The Teacher As listeners to know about you?
Dave Malkoff 1:30
Well, what I see myself as is a storyteller, and that is somebody who goes into complicated circumstances like teachers do, and try to make sense of them, for everybody. So you don't have to be somebody working on possibly like a wildfire, or a big NASA event where you're launching a satellite into space, something like that. You can just be the kid sitting in the classroom, or the person sitting on the airplane right now with their headphones on. And, and you can understand this kind of thing. No matter how complicated it is, it's kind of even a challenge that I think of the more complicated something is, it's more of a challenge to make it palatable for everybody.
Melissa Milner 2:24
Right. So making content understandable to everyone is what you do.
Dave Malkoff 2:31
Yeah, the world's a complicated place. So we try to make it a little more easy to understand by going into these actual events that you see all the time on the news and trying to talk to scientists and to people who are working on the front lines of climate change. And, and ask them hard questions. If what they're doing is making a difference, or, or what what we can do at home to make a difference ourselves.
Melissa Milner 3:02
Right, and I'm going to ask you a little bit later on about your tips for interviewing. You just brought up that interviewing piece.
Dave Malkoff
Inside baseball
Melissa Milner
Inside baseball. But first of all, I really… again, teachers are listening and they have students in their class that might be a budding journalist or a budding reporter Did you always love writing and research and being in front of the camera like you are now? you know, what, I've
Dave Malkoff 3:29
You know what? I've always been interested in the technology part of it and the communications part of it. I built a little radio station in my basement when I was in third grade or so and actually transmitted out to the neighborhood. And so I would host a radio show, a podcast if you will, and transmit on an am frequency around the neighborhood and play songs and stuff.
Melissa Milner 3:55
This is this was in Ohio, right?
Dave Malkoff 3:58
Yeah. In Youngstown, Ohio. And yeah, and so I did that for a while, then I built another TV station in my high school, Liberty High School near Youngstown, Ohio. And they called it the WLHS for Liberty High School. And then we did the morning announcements on there and we did like comedy sketches and stuff and that was while I was working at the local TV station running studio camera and doing graphics and things like that.
Melissa Milner 4:29
Wow. So at the high school, obviously when you were doing your third… you know your your radio show on your own you had voice and choice about what you what stories you told and what you covered. But in the high school situation, were you able to make the decisions on what was, you know, what the content was?
Dave Malkoff 4:51
Not really. The content was mostly that the girls basketball game has been postponed till Wednesday. So it's not a big hit. It's not a big hard hitting breaking news story. What we would do is just kind of read the announcements, but we were trying to make it fun. I had a monkey puppet, that would come on every Friday, Friday Phil, and he was very surly, and just angry to be there. And so we would do those kinds of things. We would do these videos on Friday, like a music video. And we would put the credits over that of all the people who had anchored the morning newscast. And I mean, I didn't know that other people wanted to do this at all, I thought it was like my goofy little thing that I wanted to do. And I put up a sign up sheet in the hallway. And then to my surprise, tons of people signed up for it, they all wanted to anchor the morning news.
Melissa Milner 5:53
That's awesome.
Dave Malkoff 5:54
So I would only actually anchor when somebody didn't show up. So mostly, I was directing. Punching the buttons.
Melissa Milner 6:04
Wow. So I know recently, before I get into the interviewing and the writing tips that you might have for teachers, I have really been enjoying your documentaries. And I saw them on your website and started watching. I'm just completely enthralled by them. What started you…it sounds like you were directing way back in high school, but what started you to really understand the storytelling of like a documentary style.
Dave Malkoff 6:30
First I was a producer in Columbus, Ohio while I was going to school at OSU. And then I moved to being a reporter in Champaign, Illinois. And I think a lot of businesses are kind of like this, where when they're kind of craft based, where you you start doing something and you don't really know your own voice, and you don't know how to tell a story. I think I had a leg up because I was already working at a very respected television station, WBNS in Columbus. And it was kind of like journalism boot camp. I learned a lot more there than I did in my journalism classes. To the point where I had to change my major to political science because what they were teaching me in journalism class was different than what they were teaching me at work. So I think I was there at a perfect time with some great journalists who worked there. And they taught me a lot about storytelling and about how to make things interesting to the viewer, because it can't just be a firehose of data. It needs to be a story involving people, for people to actually latch on to these things and understand what you're talking about.
Melissa Milner 7:53
So what are some of those storytelling tips that you learned?
Dave Malkoff 7:57
Oh, I mean, it went from the very early days, I learned about how to write with the most important stuff up top, and always wrap it around the person that it's affecting. And no matter how complicated or technical a story is… say you're doing a story about the… I was just talking to somebody today about the James Webb Space Telescope, which should launch this year. And it's the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope. But that is a very technical piece of equipment. But there are a lot of people who have been working on this project for a long time. And how did those things, working out a project like that affect those people emotionally, and if you can connect to what touches them emotionally, then you can touch the viewer as well with that same emotion of this is going to change the way that we look at ourselves as a species. Because as we look into deep space, we are going to see these hundreds and hundreds of exoplanets that we already know of, and see evidence of life from the Space Telescope, you can see carbon dioxide being produced from some of these exoplanets. In theory, in the future, when the JWST is up there, you'd be able to detect the processes of life out there. So if you see carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet that's several light years away, or hundreds of light years away, then you know that there's only one process that makes that carbon dioxide and that's an organic process, which seems very technical, but if you talk to a scientist about that, it's emotional because it changes the way that we think of ourselves throughout human history.
Melissa Milner 9:55
It kind of blows your mind, but I do wonder, you know, you mentioned it's really about coming back to the people who are involved. So when you're interviewing is that your main goal is to get to the, to the human part of it.
Dave Malkoff 10:12
Oh, yeah, but I do kind of more a technical version of interviewing then say a newspaper reporter, or a magazine reporter would do, or a podcaster would do, where I am looking for specific moments that I can put in the story. And as a TV reporter, that's, that's what we're out trying to gather, we're trying to make these interviews actually as short as possible, because we can't in… because of our time constraints, we can't just go on forever, because in some cases, the story may be airing in a few hours. So we have to kind of focus in on getting these elements that we need. But with an eye on making sure that you're telling the story that's actually happening, and not the story that you thought was going to happen. Because I can't even think of an incident where I've gone out in, you know, as many years as I've been doing this since 94. Really, I can't think of a moment where I've gone out on a story. And I've come back. And it's been exactly what I thought it was going to be. It changes in some way. And in many times, it changes radically, from the point that you start digging into the story to the point that you actually air the story. Because there's so many things that you discover along this process, and you have to be flexible and open to these things changing and to what you thought was happening, being not the case, or, or something completely being different than what you thought it was going to be. That's what you get from talking to the people who are actually affected by these stories. You get to, “Oh, it's not the way that you know, this one newspaper article said it was because… maybe they got it wrong, or maybe they got different information.” But if you track down the person that the tornado or the hurricane happened to you, you can find out what really happened from them. And they'll have video or photographs of that happening. And that's exciting, kind of private investigator work that goes into this type of journalism as well.
Melissa Milner 12:39
It's fascinating. I'm doing a series right now on podcasting with students. And I'd love this year to be having my students start to interview people around town or you or whoever, you know, that they are interested in interviewing. And if there are, let's say in a Zoom call, and should they be just recording the audio, and then listening back and taking notes and then deciding what the story really is and the through line or the theme or the big ideas? Logistically, how would you handle that if you're having to interview someone like on a Zoom call, for instance?
Dave Malkoff 13:23
Oh, there's a great line from Verner Hertzog, who is the great documentarian and he's quoted as saying, “We're storytellers, we're not garbage collectors.” And what that means is our goal is not to collect things that will be thrown out. Because a lot of times when you think, “Wow, I'm doing a great interview, it lasted for three hours.” That's garbage collecting, because you're not getting to exactly what you need to get to. You're not keeping people on track while they're talking. They may be going off onto these tangents that last 20 minutes or so. And that doesn't help you as a storyteller. You need to be the shepherd to keep people on task with the story that you're trying to tell, but at the same time, you need to… you need to be flexible, as to where the story is going to go. You need to
Melissa Milner 14:31
… it's a fine line.
Dave Malkoff 14:34
Yeah, yeah. So you don't want to create a situation where you're filling your narrative. But you also don't want to create a situation where you're just creating a lot of video or audio that's going to be thrown out. But that being said, I collect a lot of video that we don't use but I try to keep it on task. Because if you're collecting so much stuff, it's going to take up a lot of space. And it's going to be very difficult to log, that interview, which is going back and actually listening to it transcribing it, and putting it on tape.
Melissa Milner 15:17
When you do an interview, do you go off the cuff? Or do you have questions or like key ideas written down that you look at, because that's another thing that I'm trying to figure out what to do with students.
Dave Malkoff 15:31
You know, what I would do, instead of focusing on doing Zoom interviews, I would go out to outside events, with a, with a little pocket recorder, and you can use one that you get off Amazon for 20 bucks, and just kind of rig it up in the way that, that you're not getting a lot of wind noise on it. But go out to where the people are doing the thing. Because, well, when you're talking to somebody, as they're doing their thing, they're more likely to be more demonstrative in their speaking than they would be, if they're sitting down in an office somewhere with headphones on, that is a different kind of environment and mentally changes them to, oh, I'm speaking on the radio now. And, and so yeah, it's not as authentic, you have the clanging and engine noise and stuff in the background of say, you're talking to a shrimp fisherman, and you're on the boat with him or you're on the dock. And you hear the ocean in the background, that's going to be way more engaging for the viewer, because it's what we call natural sound. And I try to use as much of that as possible, the sound that's around you. And it's very compelling when you bring somebody into that situation, and you can hear and feel and sometimes smell what is going on around that person because you're in the environment that they're in. So I would ask your students to just go out and get a portable recorder one that just records onto an SD card or micro SD card. And record those interviews like that with people out in the field.
Melissa Milner 17:24
Is that something they could do with like the voice recorder on their iPhone? Or would that not be good sound?
Dave Malkoff 17:31
There are attachments that you can get for the phone that make it a much better more dynamic microphone, like a little lavalier microphone, quarter inch plug and then you put the stereo plug into the thing, or maybe you they have ones that have a lightning version. And you plug that right into your phone, and the phone audio that little tiny pinprick of a hole in your phone is not going to be the greatest audio in the world. It’s going to be really bad. Yeah, what you want to do is put some sort of microphone on your phone and be able to talk to people but that's something you can just look up on Amazon, there's tons of those kinds of things. Yeah, that that is the way to do it, just use the sound recorder. And just talk like that. I just suggest the little audio recorder because then you're not using your phone's battery, and you're actually recording to a card that you can pop out and put in your computer.
Melissa Milner 18:37
Yeah, that sounds like a great and if it's affordable, I could get a few and just, you know, I could like let kids loan it out for the weekend kind of thing. If they don't want to buy it themselves, obviously. Yeah.
Dave Malkoff 18:48
Yeah, they could be as expensive as $300 for a Zoom microphone, which is a brand of audio equipment that doesn't have anything to do with the the teleconferencing Zoom. There are two different companies called Zoom. But there's one that I use called, they call the Zoom F5 and the F one as well. And I use those for field interviews and for gathering that sound. Like say we're on a glacier in Iceland, and you want to get the sound of the water rushing down through the glacier being melted off. Well, you're not going to want to get that with the camera. Because usually when you're on a glacier, the cameras quite small, but you can get a big shotgun mic and get that right down into the rushing water and you can get that sound and mix it in. And so there's those kind of things are a couple 100 bucks, but for what you're doing, it's gonna be a lot easier just to get the little plug in microphone.
Melissa Milner 19:57
Yes, and… but do you just have the questions in your brain or do you know obviously, interviewing is listening and having follow up questions based on what the person says. But what would you tell students? If you were with fourth graders right now , they're about to go out and do an interview? Would you have them write? Like the key things they want to… like key words? Or would you just skip that and have them go off the cuff?
Dave Malkoff 20:20
I would have them not write down the questions. Because if you're writing down questions, and you have a list of questions, you're inherently not listening to the person who is talking. Your goal is to make sure that you say the next question perfectly and you're reading over the question, you're like, Okay, all right. Wow, am I gonna say this? And that? Okay. All right. Now, I'm going to read this question. And then you read the question, then you're immediately on to the next one. That's always a rookie mistake that people make, that they're dealing with what their next question is, instead of listening to the person, and coming up with a next question off the last answer. But you should also go into the story, knowing your story, you should have done the research in the background and be curious enough about it, to have at least a background of what this person does, what their history with this process has been. And what they've done so far. And so you know, your story enough to be able to make points? Well, you're asking these questions. I don't think I ever go into an interview with written down questions. I think the only time that I would do that is if you had an interview with with President or something like that. Somebody really important because you only have 10 minutes to talk to them. That would be the only time that I would do that. A lot of times I'm just talking to people who are affected by a hurricane, or I'm talking to scientists who are working on different technologies. And I just focus on themselves, and how they got into this. And what fascinates them about this project.
Melissa Milner 22:16
Whether you consciously use them or not, you sort of have some go to questions, depending on the type of interview. Is that a true statement?
Dave Malkoff 22:24
Yeah, I always start off by asking the person to tell me, and this is just me, this is just a stylistic thing. And sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't. I often ask somebody tell me who you are and where we are right now. They'll say, Hey, I'm Jim Watson. And I'm a lobster farmer. And we're out here in in Portland, Maine and we're looking for lobster right now. And sometimes I use that as an introduction to the person because I like people to introduce themselves. And sometimes, technically, in the middle of a story, if you want to introduce a new character, instead of just this is just one trick. Instead of spending time… you explaining who this person is, you can drop them right into the middle of a story, introduce themselves, introduce the location, and then just go from there. And it's a way to shorten your storytelling. So you're not spending several seconds explaining where you are and who this person is.
Melissa Milner 23:27
Oh, I love that. That's such a great idea. Cool.
Dave Malkoff 23:30
Yeah, it's just a time saver. I think I've probably learned that more from like, NPR, NPRI podcasts. Yeah. People do those kinds of things.
Melissa Milner 23:40
Very stylistic.
Dave Malkoff 23:41
Yeah. Yeah. And they cut down on the time. I used to use it all the time. But you kind of fall into these stylistic ruts yourselves, I'm always looking for personal cliches. And if everybody's being introduced like that, then it's probably not best to have every story sound like that.
Melissa Milner 24:02
Right. What's your top three tips for students for both interviewing and then writing up that interview for them to then share it? Like transcript…
Dave Malkoff 24:16
Which way? How are they going to share this? What kind of…
Melissa Milner
For a podcast.
Dave Malkoff
On a podcast? Oh, yeah.
Melissa Milner 24:22
So So sometimes they'll be getting audio, but sometimes they'll just be going in interviewing the custodian. Yeah, not necessarily getting audio, they might be just writing the answers. So they should always do audio would that just make more sense?
Dave Malkoff 24:37
Yeah, you don't want to be reading a newspaper report to somebody over a podcast. I like the podcasts where they go out and talk to people like a RadioLab kind of thing. But, I also l like the Shankar Vedantam type of interview where he's in a studio and it's like a Fresh Air kind of interview that he does. And they have a mix of outdoor and indoor kind of stuff. But it depends on which format you want to do. I'm more engaged with the type of podcast where they go out and produce a piece. And maybe that's just my own personal bias, because that's the kind of thing that I do. And I feel that I get more out of a story when I'm out there with the people in the field, even if it's just through my headphones. I get more of a personal touch of those stories. But I would always, I would always suggest to people to be talking over some sort of audio recorder for a podcast, I wouldn't just quote people.
Melissa Milner 25:47
That's really where…where I'm thinking the next steps are. We've only done six episodes. And now I'm gonna have a new batch of students, and what are we going to do this time, some of the same stuff, but also let's get some investigative, you know, and some opinion pieces and other things like that. So any top tips before we move on?
Dave Malkoff 26:07
Yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about doing big stories or like breaking news on these things, I would literally go out and talk to the cafeteria workers with your audio recorder, and just talk to anybody who works at the school, talk to somebody who's in the band, every single person has a story to tell. And you can build a story on anything. And once you get those foundations of how to get the sound, then you can deal with putting it together afterwards. And that's a whole other process. Recently, I'm not sure if you're going to be using any kind of Adobe products to put this together. But I've been using Premiere Pro since 2000.
Melissa Milner
Are you talking about the sound editing or video?
Dave Malkoff
For video, which is what I do. In some of the Adobe products, they actually have a… and this is just within the past few weeks, they've launched a transcription program where it goes up to the Cloud. And by using artificial intelligence called Adobe Sensei, they actually will transcribe every single thing that person says very accurately, and it will delineate between the different speakers. And it will say this person said this, this person said that. You can copy that into a Word document. And you can cut it up that way. Or you can cut it up within Premiere. So that's a huge game changer for me. So the people, the students going forward, won't have to do this thing where they transcribe by hand these stories.
Melissa Milner 27:59
Right. There's a website, there's a few, there's Otter AI, and there's Happy Scribe that do the transcriptions as well. But the Adobe, I know, I think you can do Zoom recording, and you can get a transcript from Zoom or something, it's a new thing.
Dave Malkoff 28:15
Yes, as long as it's time coded, as long as it has a person said this at this time, then you can go back and edit that way. What I think of myself as is the glue to hold the story together. And I try to use as little glue as possible. And just and have the people who are experiencing these things tell their story. And I'm just kind of the shepherd that moves things along and keeps them to the time limit that I have. And I'm not sure how long you're letting the kids go on on these stories, right? You always want to have a time limit, that's probably a good tip. Or you never want to have an open ended thing where pick three minutes or it could be 10 minutes. 10 minutes is way too long and three minutes is a long story. But I guess these types of podcasts where you're interviewing somebody, and it's, it's just a long form, sit down interview, those can go for hours, as long as the person is interesting. Like if you're listening to a Howard Stern interview, it could go for two hours and you would have no idea that you've been listening to this thing,
Melissa Milner 29:28
Mark Maron too. Yes, yeah,
Dave Malkoff 29:30
Yeah, those types of sit down, long form discussions are a whole different kind of storytelling. And you're not just telling one thing, but you're having a conversation.
Melissa Milner 29:44
It sounds like the key for students to really be successful with interviewing, is that they need to be interviewing someone that they're honestly, naturally curious about. So for instance, we have a new principal this year. I know they're going to be curious about learning about that new principal. People they're really curious about and events they're really curious about.
Dave Malkoff 30:09
I think it's good to be curious about everything, but you were saying that talk to the principal. And that kind of makes me smile. Because once you get up into talking to officials, they tend to speak in a different manner, very, very guarded way. And, and you don't, you don't get as much out of talking to a politician or an official who can't freely talk about things, then you do talking to maybe the cafeteria worker or someone on the basketball team or somebody. And it's interesting when you get into these things, and you will do interviews with officials, but that's not really where you want to focus. They can be short sound bites, just to get kind of an official stance on something. But it's very rare when you get a really good emotional interview from officials.
Melissa Milner 31:11
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it would be just to getting to know our principal thing.
Dave Malkoff 31:16
Oh yeah. If you can talk to her about her background and where she came from. And
Melissa Milner 31:21
It's a man, actually.
Dave Malkoff 31:24
Yeah, you can talk to him about his background and where he came from and his interest in education. Right, something that's interesting. But if you want to talk about how are you going to spend the budget, you're not gonna get much.
Melissa Milner 31:40
Yeah, I don't think fourth graders are going to come up with those questions. So what are you zooming in on right now in your work?
Soundbite
Dave Malkoff 31:50
So, I'm the chief environmental correspondent. So it's a wide umbrella that covers all sorts of stuff. I mean, this is the biggest story of our time. And I say that because it encompasses everything on our planet. And it's gonna be something that we deal with as a species for generations and 1000s of years. There is an amount of carbon in the atmosphere right now that we just kind of have to deal with. It's kind of a debt that we that we have to deal with. And it's, there's gonna be a certain amount of warming that we deal with. And is there any way to mitigate that? Or are there ways to, to adapt to the new types of situations that we're going to have in the future?
Melissa Milner 32:39
Is that through the Weather Channel that you're doing that work? Are you doing a documentary?
Dave Malkoff 32:43
No, everything that… I'm on staff at the Weather Channel, so everything I do is for the Weather Channel, and our climate partner, which is a a social media arm of the Weather Channel called Pattern. I do half work for them and half work for the Weather Channel. And we do these long form pieces. And then I also do live reporting from big breaking news events like hurricanes. And so I've got, like, several different jobs that I do. But it's all storytelling about the environment. Everything that I do comes back to how am I furthering this story and creating relationships with people and organizations around the world. So we can keep on telling these stories. As as the whole situation changes.
Melissa Milner 33:32
That's fascinating. As we wrap up, before, I ask you the last very important question. How can people reach you? I know you have I think it's davemalkoff.com. Right?
Dave Malkoff 33:44
Yeah, that's kind of like my personal website that I put up just to, just to showcase some storytelling then. And it’s just a little bit about me. I just started that back when you could still make websites by hand through Notepad on Windows. On Windows, you would actually write it out by hand, recode it by hand. Right, like right at the beginning of the web, and that kept on changing and changing, but on social media, @malkoff on Twitter, and then you can find me on Facebook at DaveNews. Or just look up my name Dave Malkoff. It's facebook.com slash DaveNews. And then on Instagram, it's @malkoffdave
Melissa Milner 34:36
Try to mix it up there. Yeah. Excellent. I'll have that on the episode page for this interview.
Dave Malkoff
The show notes.
Melissa Milner
Well, it's funny because show notes. I have it on my website. I don't have it like in Apple podcasts, you know?
Dave Malkoff
Okay. Yeah.
Melissa Milner
All right. So here's the last question. What is your favorite movie and why?
Dave Malkoff 35:00
My favorite movie. It's gonna seem kind of silly. But um, but the movie that I think of all the time, and that my wife, who is also a TV reporter, always quote, we never get through a day without quoting this movie is 1987’s Broadcast News?
Melissa Milner 35:28
Oh, yeah, wasn't your uncle in that?
Dave Malkoff 35:30
Yes, he was. That's weird that you know that. Yeah. And, and it's, it's not just because my uncle who my son is actually named after him, he was in that movie playing kind of a big role in it. And, um, so it's not just because of that, but it is because I have watched every single movie and TV show about TV news. And the only one that still gets it right to this day is Broadcast News. So it's because of the research that James L. Brooks did with CBS News. And the person who's now the president of CBS News whose is known as Z, Susan Zirinsky. And they spent a lot of time with her when she was a Washington producer. And she's actually the Holly Hunter character.
Melissa Milner
Yeah.
Dave Malkoff
And so, so they got everything. So technically, right 10 out of 10 on that movie, and so perfect. And just by watching that kind of lit a fire in me and going I want to be part of this world. And it's great that I actually am now it's really, really neat.
Melissa Milner 36:55
Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.
Dave Malkoff 36:58
You remember! That's the editor. Yeah. And there are so many moments where, where you have that moment where were you are just about to go on the air and the story's not done. You would be so amazed in watching NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight, where the story that you're watching was just finished.
Melissa Milner 37:25
Joan Cusack running through the halls… literally running.
Dave Malkoff 37:29
With the three quarter inch tape and jumping over people. And everybody's done that. You don't do that anymore, because it's an upload kind of thing. Right? I mean, I've uploaded at the last minute as well, I made it. There was a time when when I was in Iraq, and we were covering the last part of the Iraq War. And there were dust storms. And so you would have to upload and upload and upload over and over again, until you got closer and closer to the evening broadcast. And you're like, wow, this is gonna barely make it. And it's the digital version of running that tape through the newsroom.
Melissa Milner 38:05
Yeah. Oh, my gosh, well, that's the perfect, perfect movie. Just so listeners know, what was your uncle's name? Peter hackus. And
Dave Malkoff 38:14
Peter Hackes. He was a former NBC correspondent out of the Washington bureau for a long time. And he covered a lot of space as well, but he did cover a lot of Washington politics. He was a correspondent. But he was part of that scene that happens at the end of the movie that happens in every newsroom where people get fired en masse. And he was looking for a job and they hired him to play the guy who fires everybody. The president of the news division.
Melissa Milner 38:41
But he's in that pivotal scene, where he says to her, it must be great to be right all the time or something like that. Isn't that him?
Dave Malkoff 38:49
Yeah. Must be tough to be the smartest person in the room. And she says no, it's awful. Yeah. And they did that take about 17 times or 20 times. I was recently listening to the audio commentary on that and when she says no, it's awful, James L. Brooks goes “Take 17.” So they did it over and over and over again.
Melissa Milner 39:19
Oh, it's such a good scene.
Dave Malkoff 39:21
But it was just you needed to get the emotion of that perfect. Yes. But yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it's a really, really great movie and even with the way that the business has changed, it is so still spot on to exactly the way television news is.
Melissa Milner 39:40
Thank you so much, David for everything. And I hope to talk to you again, honestly, because I think you have a lot that you could help teachers with, in terms of, you know, writing skills and this whole idea of researching.
Dave Malkoff
Oh, yes, yeah, researching and listening. Thank you so much, Melissa.
Melissa Milner
Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As… podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating as well if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner, and I hope you check out The Teacher As Facebook page for episode updates. I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In sound bite and my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro. music was Upbeat Party by Scott Holmes.
So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap