SP Radio Podcast: Dissecting the SP editorial process

Download this week’s episode here.

On this edition of SP Radio, we take a look at Smile Politely and its role in the local media landscape. The impetus for this conversation was the recent article the site published on Calvin Miller, which drew a lot of local attention and commentary.* Many of Miller’s accounts in that article have been discredited by the recent release of the police video, but does that mean we should not have published it and that his account is not newsworthy? Why did it get published in our Culture section?

We take a look inside the process of publishing this article and why we chose to put it on the site. And instead of focusing exclusively on this one issue, we open it up to a larger conversation about what SP, Halfwayinteresting.com and other online media sites do and how it compares to traditional journalism and activist journalism.

In addition to SP editors Caleb Curtiss and Joel Gillespie, we are joined by Eric Bussell, the founder of HalfwayInteresting.com. Eric is also a frequent commenter on Smile Politely, including many in the Miller article. Eric discusses his thoughts on the publication of the that article and how his site approaches the publishing process.

*The article was originally published on the Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center website.