Hyperlocal Listening

The Montclair Pod brings audio journalism to small-town obsessions.

Last September, days after students returned to classrooms from their summer breaks, Ruth B. Turner, the superintendent of schools in Montclair, New Jersey, sat down for an interview with a hyperlocal news podcast called The Montclair Pod. Montclair, an affluent town of forty thousand people about forty-five minutes by train from Manhattan, had been facing a serious school budget deficit. At the time, the deficit was reported to be around eleven million dollars. But the number was actually “about eighteen million dollars,” Turner told the podcast’s cohosts, Farnoosh Torabi and Michael Schreiber. Hearing Turner blurt out that figure, Torabi and Schreiber—who have both had children in the Montclair school system—knew: this was huge. “We broke that news,” Torabi told me, “and it went wild.”