Ask Bay Curious Anything: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Making of Our Podcast

For the final Bay Curious episode of the year, we created an AMA (“ask me anything”) episode to answer some of the questions we get asked most often about how we make the show. Olivia Allen-Price, the show’s senior editor and host, and Katrina Schwartz, the editor and producer, sat down to chew on your questions, and share some big news about something exciting coming in 2023!

This is a transcript that has been edited for clarity.

How does Bay Curious choose which questions to answer on the show?

Katrina: It’s really hard because we get a lot of questions. We have over 5,000 questions in our database and many of them are really good, but we’re only two people that make the show, so we have to pick and choose. When we pick questions, we’re thinking about a couple of things. We try to cover topics that we haven’t covered before. We try to take people around the region and not focus in one place too much. We also look for questions that have a bit of complexity to them, that we can tell a story about for a number of minutes. So if it’s too simple, it might not be one we choose. And then there needs to be an answer to the question. Sometimes people ask us things that are a little bit subjective, like “What’s the best taco in the Bay Area?” That’s hard to answer.

Olivia: But it would be really fun to report!

Katrina: And then, of course, the other thing is that we’re an audio show. So we’re trying to find stories that will have a fun audio element, something we can go to or experience.

Olivia: We should note that we are trying to answer more of the questions that don’t have audio elements to them in our newsletter, which goes out once a month. And we’re also trying to do more on social media.

Question from Ben Hilmer: I think [the show has] moved a little bit away from oddities-type questions, and you’ve definitely touched on some more heavy-hitting topics. How much of the story drives that direction, and how much of your direction drives that change?

Olivia: We have evolved over the six years we’ve been around. The beginning of COVID was a big moment for change for us because it felt like our show was out of place with what was happening in the world at the time. We put out a number of episodes that were what we think of as “news you can use,” “how do you survive this moment?” quite literally. We felt that was where we needed to go at that moment. And then on the heels of that, there were the protests for racial justice after George Floyd was murdered, which jumpstarted this important national conversation about race and equity. That conversation was also happening in our newsroom, and at least for me personally, I questioned what an appropriate response from me was in that moment. Not just as a podcast maker but as a human.

I am a white woman, and I kept coming back to thinking, “Well, we have this platform, and we tell a lot of stories about history.” Our show is explanatory, and explaining something thoroughly usually means digging into the history. I started to question if we were telling incomplete histories, and leaving out certain voices … voices that tend to be left out of historical documents or the narratives that we read in history books. We pledged that we would try to look at history more holistically, and at all the different people who were impacted by different moments. If there was a racial equity issue that was in the story, we would present it. What has surprised me, and really been a rude awakening, is just how prevalent those issues are in stories, sometimes where we don’t expect to find it.

So that’s a long way of saying that I think that we have driven to some degree the direction of the show. But I will also say that we’re getting a lot of bigger, meatier, more cultural questions from our audience and that’s driving our direction too.

Do you get stupid questions?

Katrina: Well, I wouldn’t say stupid. But we definitely get questions where my first reaction is, “Why didn’t you just Google that? You’ll get an answer much faster than putting it into this form on our website.”

Olivia: OK. I guess I’m like an elementary school teacher on this one. I don’t think there are stupid questions! I think every question is valid. I think a lot of times people ask a question because they want to hear how Bay Curious is going to answer it. We hope the answers we give are a little bit more complete, a little bit more nuanced. Hopefully delightful and interesting. Even when we are covering those tough topics, we hope you still come out of these episodes with a feeling of satisfaction that you have learned something. There’s a joy in understanding something.

Katrina: Yeah, you’re definitely the nicer of the two of us.

What have we learned over the years of making Bay Curious?

Olivia: I think one thing that I am always surprised by is even a story that seems like it’s going to be mundane, once you really start digging, it always gets interesting. The world is just like a very interesting place. There’s never a lack of a story.

Katrina: I have learned that there’s a lot of fun, quirky people in the Bay Area, both question askers, and sources, and people that you meet while you’re reporting. There’s just so many interesting people here, and I love that this job allows us to get out and talk to them and see them doing things that they’re passionate about.

What challenges does Bay Curious face in reporting, and how have we tried to solve for those?

Katrina: I think one big challenge is that a lot of our stories deal with history, and sometimes there’s no record of it in an audio or video form. Those are newer formats where you have to get to the ’70s or ’80s to find archival tape of things. So it’s hard to make some historical stories come alive. Then we have to really focus on the writing or maybe finding a really great historical source that can tell the story in a vivid way. But it makes it much more challenging to build an audio story that’s fun to listen to.

Olivia: I would say another challenge is that historic accounts tend to focus on one perspective. The mainstream media was covering one point of view, and that’s largely what’s been preserved. And so, if we are trying to find the nuance …. “How did different people from different vantage points see this one historical event?” … It can be really difficult just because a lot of those things have not lived on in recorded ways that are easy for journalists to access. A lot of it lives on as oral history. So we have to put in more legwork on our part to go find it.

What’s the most fun thing you’ve gotten to do as part of the show?

Olivia: I got to play a theremin in the studio. Amanda Font, one of our reporters, did a story about how the water in the bay used to be more blue, and it’s kind of become more green over time. We were playing a lot with watery sounds and decided we wanted to try to make some of our own music that we were going to use in the piece. She happened to have a theremin that she was given years ago, which, if you don’t know, is an electronic instrument where you basically wave your hands in the air to play. I described it as an air harp to a friend. It’s super fun to play.

Katrina: I’m actually working on the story about fishing in the Bay Area right now. This morning, I put on a wetsuit and I paddled out into the bay and I dropped my first crab pot. It was a beautiful, clear morning. I saw dolphins. I had a really nice patient teacher. And, you know, I learned how to fish!

Olivia: And you got some crabs, right?

Katrina: I did!

Question from Julian: How long does it take for a question that won a voting round to be made into an episode?

Katrina: Sometimes it doesn’t take that long at all if we have a reporter who can answer the question or has done a lot of reporting on that topic already. A great example of that is when we bring Dan Brekke in to talk about BART. He knows everything about BART, so we can usually answer the question more quickly. But there’s a lot of questions that we just need to dive into more, find the right sources, figure out how to tell the story in a fun way. That can take months. And we’re working on a bunch of stories at the same time with a bunch of reporters who also work on other things. So it’s not like we’re just heads down on this one story until it’s done. Usually we have ten stories going at a time or so.

Olivia: We’ve had stories that take three weeks. We’ve had stories that take a year. We have a few stories that are especially tough to answer that taken several years.

What is your favorite episode of all time?

Olivia: I mean, this really is like choosing your favorite child, so I find it extremely difficult. I was able to pick a top three for different categories.

One of the things we like to play a lot with is sound, and one of the pieces I think we did a really good job with sound [in is] this piece about calling POPCORN. It was just super dynamic, lots of fun archival sound, dial tone. I do want to call out Christopher Beale, who was the reporter and did a lot of the production on that episode. So yeah, super fun episode sonically.

My favorite story is probably our story about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s experience in San Francisco. You see their faces everywhere, you hear their names all the time, but in this episode we tried to step into their shoes and experience what their time in San Francisco was like. Marisol Medina-Cadena was the reporter on that story, and it was a finalist for a NAHJ [National Association of Hispanic Journalists] award.

And then a lot of what I do on this on the show is also scoring … so picking the music selections for the episodes. My favorite episode from a scoring perspective was our two-part Donner Party series, reported by Carly Severn. You really get to think about the atmosphere you’re creating as you’re selecting the music.

Katrina: A lot of my favorite episodes come from questions that kids asked us. Bronwyn asked about what the Bay Area was like during the Ice Age. I loved the episode because we had a lot of fun with the sound on it. We imagined ourselves going back in time to the Ice Age, and it was just really fun! I learned a lot. Stuff like the bay didn’t used to be there, it was just a grassy valley. Or that you used to be able to walk out to the Farallon Islands. My mind was blown by the things in that episode. Daniel Potter was the reporter on it, and he’s got a really fun, quirky style, which I loved. Overall, I just thought it was a great episode.

What are you most excited about for the next year?

Olivia: We wrote a Bay Curious book! It’s called “Bay Curious: Exploring the Hidden True Stories of the San Francisco Bay Area,” and it features a bunch of news stories that I’m just really excited about. It’s also a really beautiful book. It has these gorgeous illustrations by a local illustrator. The book comes out in May, but you can preorder it now at these places: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, Chronicle Books. International buyers, go here!

Katrina: I’m excited to go to parts of the Bay Area that we don’t go to that often. I’m thinking of like Richmond or Vallejo, Fremont, San Mateo. These are parts of the Bay Area that we don’t get a lot of questions from. So if you live in those places and you’ve been wondering about something, please send them in, because that’s really where our story ideas come from!

Thanks for reading and listening to the podcast. We’ll be back with a new episode in January. Happy holidays!