Question Everything Won Best Reporting of the Year!

For Robyn Semien's investigation into the first American reporter arrested by Israel.

What a week.

Question Everything won an Ambie Award from The Podcast Academy on Tuesday — this is like the Oscars of podcasting — for Best Reporting. The winning story was executive producer Robyn Semien’s two-part series about Jeremy Loffredo, who at the end of 2024 became the first American journalist ever arrested by Israel. It was produced by Zach St. Louis, and edited by contributing editor Joel Lovell, among others on our team.

If you didn’t catch these episodes when they came out last January, go check them out now.

Part One:

Part Two:

What's so remarkable about these episodes is that Robyn started telling Jeremy's story because what Israel did to him was so messed up. But once she started investigating, she found that Jeremy, and the outlet he worked for, The Grayzone, also did some messed up stuff. It didn't justify what Israel did to him at all. But it was important to shine a light on, even if Jeremy and The Grayzone didn’t like us doing that.

It's a story that challenges easy lines of thinking, which is what we're always striving for with our show. It’s awesome that a group of our peers agreed when they voted.

In addition to Robyn and Zach, I'm so proud of our whole team at Placement Theory, and our partners at KCRW (including Arnie Seipel, Jennfer Ferro, Tejal Ajmera, and Nathalie Hill) for supporting this kind of ambitious, and award-winning (!) reporting.

Robyn and Zach couldn’t make the awards in Brooklyn, sadly, due to the blizzard, so I did my best to represent with our contributing editor Neil Drumming.

We have another big two-part investigation that we just dropped: the story of Mario Guevara, a journalist arrested last year…in America. Jailed for his reporting.

You can hear those episodes, reported by Sophie Kazis, here - Part One, Part Two - they’re excellent.

I promise not all of our stories will be about journalists getting arrested but unfortunately this is a growing activity of oppressive governments right now, and you know what they say, about first coming for the journalists…and then…

Brian

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