Professional Wiki: Ben Burke from TPR by Leah Freeman

Profile of Ben Burke, reporter at The Public's Radio 89.3 FM based on in person meeting and his LinkedIn

The field of audio journalism

• The implicit and explicit boundaries
  • Implicit (implied) boundaries:
    • Genre constraints and requirements
    • Ability to socialize (with strangers) and chase a story in unknown territory
    • Ability to "catch the story"--not sure how to explain it but he trusts he always will
  • Explicit (obvious) boundaries:
    • Team resources and finance
    • The state of the world (economically, if there is a pandemic, etc).
    • If your skills match up with the job's requirements
• The artifacts these professionals reference

In his LinkedIn, which acts as a professional profile for many people, Ben Burke refers to his own stories he creates, along with the first-account resources that provided the information for the stories (documents, interviews, etc.). This is shown in post examples such as:

• • "Fall River's seen more evictions executed in the past 10 months than Boston, a city six times its size. I spent the summer asking why one court in Massachusetts evicted so many more tenants than the others."
  • "I worked very hard reporting this story about suicides in the Bristol County jail. Balancing allegations about miserable jail conditions with denials from the sheriff's office is a struggle. These reports often turn into a 'he said, she said' dialogue, which only reaffirms what people on each side of the issue are already thinking. This story, I believe, gets past that by assembling facts from a diverse set of sources that haven't been reported yet"
  • "I got a tip that New Bedford was losing its ferry to Martha's Vineyard. I checked it out, and learned this was a scare tactic politicians were using in a fight with much lower stakes. If nothing else, this story was a window into the realpolitik of New Bedford's waterfront."
  • "Two cops told one story. Six eyewitnesses told another. What really happened to 19-year-old Larry Ruiz Barreto? This is my latest investigative piece"
• The identities these professionals assume
  • reporter
  • interviewer
  • investigator
  • spokesperson for people
  • entertainer (sometimes