Call The Midwives, But Ring The Doctors, Too
NPR's Planet Money team specializes in making complex economic stories compelling and understandable. That often means stripping stories down to essentials and using anecdotes as a story device (the "show, not tell" school of journalism). The approach, which is dependent on deep reporting and very precise and tightly constructed storytelling, has worked well for a decade.
So it was unusual that a recent report for Planet Money's The Indicator podcast â which looked at the implications of the licensing of certified professional midwives in Alabama â generated a good number of complaints (most of them were directed to Audience Relations, but a couple came to my office).
The news hook for the report was making it legal for certified professional midwives to deliver babies in Alabama, once a newly created licensing, which added, "About a third of babies born in the U.S. are delivered via C-section. But a recent study suggests that number might be too high. More midwives could help get that number down, and cut healthcare costs."
