Madeleine Baran, the Voice Behind the In the Dark Podcast

Madeleine Baran, the woman behind the APM Reports podcast In the Dark, could be the most important Minnesota journalist of our time.

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Most important Minnesota journalist of this century? It’s got to be south Minneapolis’s own sparkling, blue-eyed, fearless Madeleine Baran. 

You may know her from her work exposing routinely covered-up sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis—and exposing it so thoroughly that victims’ legal cases became irrefutable, leading the archdiocese to declare bankruptcy in 2015. You may know her as the host and lead reporter of American Public Media Reports’ In the Dark, the podcast that has won two Peabody Awards (the Pulitzers of broadcasting) and been downloaded by 70 million people (and counting). Perhaps your favorite season is the first one, the one that replaced Minnesota’s shared Jacob Wetterling narrative, rewriting “Life’s greatest mystery” as “Good God, what a tragic and incompetent police failure.” Or maybe you prefer the second season, in which Baran’s work on the case of Curtis Flowers, tried six times for one dubiously constructed murder case in Mississippi, brought to light such multilayered racial bias that Baran’s material went all the way to the Supreme Court. Her work—which got Flowers released from death row, to the tune of Justice Brett Kavanaugh scolding the state of Mississippi for its “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals”—would forever provide adequate precedent to get such jury convictions overturned. Baran’s work also exposed tens of millions of us to a fog of racial bias in the legal system like a suffocating cloud. 

Could one argue that Baran, through In the Dark, has done as much as anyone to shift the national narrative of a police and justice system from “generally as good as it can be” to “as flawed as all human creations”? And as a result, eventually seeded the massive conversation and shift we are seeing worldwide in all topics related to police, prosecution, and prison? Yes, I say you could make that argument! 

Or perhaps you could make the argument that Saturday Night Live made in 2018 through some gentle ribbing of Baran in a sketch called “The Poddys” (think Oscars for podcasts). “This year, social justice podcasts shined a light on corrupt systems and dangerous places,” says one of the Poddys’ emcees. “Here are the nominees for Best Nervous White Woman in a Place She Doesn’t Belong.” The camera lands on Heidi Gardner, who’s playing Baran, “for the true-crime podcast, They Gone.” Distantly, everyone in that fictional audience hears a dog barking, clearly outdoors, in the country. “Hi, I’m looking for Curtis Wilson?” comes the actor’s voice in the sketch, neatly transposing “Curtis Wilson” for “Curtis Flowers.” “Who’s asking?” replies a dangerous, gravelly voice. “I’m a journalist,” says the podcaster’s perky, girlish voice. “I’m trying to track down the Leave Me Alone Killer?” The deep voice growls back: “Leave. Me. Alone.” The Poddys’ audience laughs—clearly this perky-voiced lady is in danger.

Anything like the SNL bit annoys Baran, because it lumps her work in with true-crime podcasts, that well-worn genre of podcasters reading books or articles written by journalists. Despite my protestations that it was about awe for her bravery and my assertions that no other Minnesota journalist has been such a part of the national conversation that they caught the attention of Saturday Night Live, Baran still didn’t like the “true crime” thing. She also sees the whole SNL affair, in a general sense, as trivializing and not good. Alas, I admitted she was probably right, as Baran generally seems to be right about things, and we turned our attention to food and companionably ate lunch at World Street Kitchen. It’s one of her favorite Minneapolis spots when she is in Minneapolis, which is not too often when she’s working on something top secret and hush-hush. 

Who is this local titan of journalism? The answer I discovered over lunch is that Baran is private, mainly. She would rather let her work speak for her than speak about herself, which is why she’s never been the subject of a real profile story before, but I pried out what I could. 

The child of two Milwaukee-area French professors, Baran left for Hampshire College to study literature and philosophy, writing her senior thesis on Dostoyevsky, who also had a few thoughts about crime and punishment. She went on to grad school at NYU, focusing on French studies and journalism and becoming increasingly fascinated with the work of writers like Seymour Hersh, whose world-shaking investigations, such as exposing the My Lai Massacre, changed their time. 

“It sort of slowly occurred to me that I was very interested in history and culture, but I wasn’t a fiction writer,” Baran says. “Journalism gives you this crazy opportunity to enter into all these different worlds. It appealed to me because it was hard and involves a lot of strategic thinking. It’s not just about interviewing. Or writing.”

She goes on to add, “I also just think there’s a reason journalism is a protected, a special type of institution according to the government. It’s because it plays this role in democracy. The idea that you would have this opportunity to figure out important things that are being hidden seemed like something I’d want to do. My interest in finding things out that powerful people would rather you not know has been there for quite some time.” 

After graduation, Baran joined friends in Minneapolis and eventually, in 2009, got a foot in the door at MPR, landing a job at the very bottom of the newsroom ranks, as a part-time online news reporter. “My feeling was, if I get into a good newsroom, it doesn’t matter what job I’m initially hired for. In a good newsroom the best story rises to the top. I knew that it was a bad idea to say, May I please be an investigative reporter? out of nowhere. It made more sense to just be an investigative reporter, and so that’s what I did.” 

She dug in and did her job. “On the edges, I would be doing records requests or I had a list of things I was looking into. And then I could bring them to the editor and say, ‘Can I finish this up?’ And then at that point it’s basically already finished up anyways. So, you start to build stories that way.”

That’s roughly how all Baran’s world changing began. Soon she found projects that bore fruit, like an investigation into the St. Paul police department’s crime lab that revealed drug-testing machines contaminated with drugs and an investigation into a Shattuck-St. Mary’s teacher sexually abusing students. A cold call to MPR from a whistleblower formerly within the archdiocese got routed to Baran because of her Shattuck-St. Mary’s story, and that turned into the beginning of an investigation that eventually brought in 15 additional MPR staffers, working under editor Chris Worthington, with Baran leading the reporting. Baran and Worthington then went to the newly formed APM Reports, the entity that creates In the Dark.

The idea for the first season of In the Dark, the Jacob Wetterling series, surfaced during that extremely Minnesotan activity known as: Taking a walk with a coworker through the skyways. Baran was walking with Samara Freemark, now the show’s managing producer, who joined In the Dark after years at Radio Diaries and a few years at APM. Broadly speaking, Baran leads the reporting for In the Dark and Freemark is in charge of the sounds. When that SNL sketch played with sound—a dog barking in the country, those natural sounds, the way the voices sound, the room sounds and silences—you could say SNL was ribbing Samara Freemark, too. 

“Even before I met her, Madeleine was someone I was very intrigued by because she was very badass, working on this top-secret project, rushing around the building, and there were whispers going around the office that something big was going to drop,” Freemark told me. On that walk in the St. Paul skyways, Baran pitched her big question about the Wetterling case: not the obvious Who did it? but the socially resonant Why wasn’t it solved? “Her framing of the question was such an interesting one, and one I had never heard asked before,” said Freemark. 

Freemark describes Baran’s greatest strength as a faith in her convictions and ideas. “Once she decides something is the right thing, that thing will happen, despite all obstacles,” Freemark says. “She goes into situations with a deep confidence that the things that should happen will happen. There’s an Evangelical term, convicted, meaning someone with great convictions. I think of Madeleine as convicted.” 

That initial walk not only turned into season one of In the Dark, it also birthed a particular working style. To make a season, Baran and Freemark lead a core group of five, four of whom are women, first through the selection of a topic and then through the investigation of it. The selection of a case requires its own pre-reporting to determine if it’s worth a year-long (or more) deep dive. “A story for us has to be something that, in depth, illuminates something important in the middle of our public conversation,” Baran told me. Pre-reporting the story can take months. 

Then comes the investigation, which takes as long as it takes—maybe a year or more. In the course of the reporting, Baran can tap additional APM resources on top of that core team of five. During the Curtis Flowers investigation, much of the team lived together in a moldy house in a little town in Mississippi called Water Valley, sleeping on air mattresses and eating granola bars. In hindsight, no one can agree about how much mold there was, though they all agree it was months of 12-hour days.

“There was a little mold, some mold,” Natalie Jablonski told me. A producer on the show, Jablonski has been a core part of the team ever since the first season. “We would get up early, pack water, pack peanut butter crackers, peanut butter sandwiches—so much peanut butter—and head out talking about the reporting plan,” she says. “The thing that’s amazing about Madeleine is she can keep a lot of information in her head all at one time. [The Flowers case] was a really complicated story, but she had the ability to keep all the people, their individual stories, straight in her head, so all the facts were always at the ready.” That meant dozens of actors, some in the justice system, some outside it, all with different complex histories and probable motivations. 

Still, simply knowing all the stories in the bigger story isn’t enough to coax out fresh information. Jablonski figures Baran gets the goods through her particular way of being during interviews. “She’s extraordinarily present, genuinely curious, and genuinely interested,” Jablonski says. “She’s super persistent and doesn’t get discouraged.” If they were trying to find someone and weren’t sure where the person lived, they would sometimes need to just show up places and hope. Jablonski learned an important quality from Baran in situations like this, a patient determination and positive belief that eventually this person will be home. And when that person is finally home, Jablonski says, “Madeleine is so empathetic that people really open up to her. She has this quality of really listening that makes people want to be heard.” 

When asked about the Water Valley mold situation, Samara Freemark recalls a great deal more mold. “There were days we spent just disinfecting the black mold growing on the walls—it needed to be beat back constantly. I mean, it might have been holding the house together; that whole house was a fire hazard. But it was cheap,” she says. “A typical day was: Parker, who did jury analysis, out the door at 6 am, and then Madeleine and I or Madeleine and Natalie would spend the day driving around to talk to people for 12 hours. We’d bring sandwiches and eat a lot of granola bars in the car. By the time we got back to the house, maybe we’d make spaghetti and sauce or more often we’d just collapse. It was really good that everyone on the team is so easy to spend time with, especially Madeleine, because it was really difficult, time-consuming, absorbing, but good work—pretty much around the clock. ” 

The team eventually returned to Minnesota with thousands of hours of audio and thousands of pages of documents. A new sort of around-the-clock labor began. To come up with a season’s worth of episodes, Baran and Freemark need to comb through their material and transfer everything important to hundreds of index cards. Then comes the process of structuring the different episodes, the different story arcs, and the different questions and moving index cards here and there. Hundreds of index cards are culled to around 90 on the walls of the APM Reports offices inside MPR’s St. Paul headquarters. After a rough storyboard of the whole season is fleshed out with a rough script, there’s a group edit with the rest of the core team, the editor, and some of the larger APM/MPR team to find out whether the story, as constructed, makes sense and whether there’s sufficient drive and energy within the tale. 

Once the basic structure and sequence of facts are agreed upon, Baran and Freemark write an outline from the index cards and hole up at Baran’s apartment for final writing and preparation for production. “For three months, literally, I’d be at her apartment at the dining room table before 8 am, and we’d be working till 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning,” explains Freemark. “She’s not a high-drama person, she doesn’t get angry about things, she doesn’t get stressed about things. She’s just very even-keeled and believes in open communication. She has a very funny sense of humor, and there’s not a lot of separation between her work and her life—the way she is on the podcast is the way she is in real life. Calm, inquisitive, and generally curious is just how she is.” 

Which brings us to the other big deal that Madeleine Baran is, on which that SNL sketch neatly put a finger—in their phrasing, a nervous white woman in a place she doesn’t belong. Baran is not nervous, but American society, or at least the SNL writers’ room, is certainly nervous to find a woman who sounds like just any everyday woman questioning the ways of police and justice. What is a woman who talks like a woman, sounds like a woman, has the vocal cadences of a woman, and, heaven forfend, consults and hangs out with other women even doing asking such hard questions of police, courts, and justice? 

I share my observation with Baran, noting that the way her very voice sounds is inherently new—a gentle, calm, plainspoken girlish earnestness never before heard speaking truth to police departments. She hates this observation. Because, as someone who hates systems of injustice, she super hates the injustice in the premise of this question. Madeleine Baran is not the kind of reporter to be stopped by a few centuries of precedent rooted in bias. “This idea that reporting is this aggressive profession where you go and kick in doors and show up to ask jerk questions to someone—my approach is always to be quieter and less assuming,” she says. 

“One type of feedback I really like is from women who have heard me and thought about being investigative reporters. Maybe they’re in school or early in their career, and they tell me, ‘I didn’t think I could be an investigative reporter because I thought that I needed to be an asshole. Or I thought I needed to be super aggressive, almost to the point of threatening, physically intimidating.’ But it’s like: Not only do you not need to do that, you shouldn’t do that. It’s not going to make you very successful.” 

Samara Freemark told me that having In the Dark voiced by Baran is critical to its success and integrity. “It can be difficult for people to hear a woman’s voice and hear it as a voice of authority,” says Freemark. “But what I find most powerful about the persona she has developed on the podcast is that she’s one of those new voices podcasting has made possible. For most of history there have been gatekeepers for what people should and should not sound like, and that has been intentional, guarding who has power.” Freemark believes there’s no reason a person who has a voice that has a higher pitch can’t have their own show and be authoritative. “For years, radio has had a big layer of female producers and reporters doing the work, while the people at the top are men. But people are hungry for different voices,” she says.

Is it meaningful that the most important Minnesota journalist of this century is a small, polite, and earnest woman who speaks like a woman and works on a tight and supportive team of mostly women, mainly in a St. Paul office and a Minneapolis dining room, and that she’s doing such big work it shakes the state of Mississippi, echoes in the Supreme Court, and rivets the attention of New York’s most elite comedy writers? I would argue it means a lot. It means Minnesota has changed who gets to do serious journalism and how—and it means the national conversation about power and justice will never be the same again. 

This article originally appeared in the August 2020 issue.

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