Imagining First Contact

Most episodes of this podcast unpack reporters’ processes, and focus on one story. This one examines a storied career. Peter Ford retired this year from work that placed him at bureaus from Central America to Asia – and at the center of a number of high-profile geopolitical swings. A return guest, Peter rejoins the show to talk with Amelia Newcomb, a longtime former colleague, about his search for stories of human dignity and credible hope. Plus some peak culinary pursuits, and some hill-climbing, featuring spandex.

Daniel Sneider was the Monitor’s Moscow bureau chief 35 years ago this month when Kremlin hard-liners grabbed Mikhail Gorbachev at a dacha in Crimea, in a short-lived coup attempt. In this special episode, we surface some newly unearthed archival Monitor Radio audio and talk with Dan about what Monitor multimedia reporting looked like (and sounded like) in 1991, about what the story of that era presaged, and about the qualities of Monitor journalism that Dan still holds dear. Clay Collins hosts.

This month’s Trump-Xi summit in Beijing was an important plot point in the long and complex arc of U.S.-China relations. In this episode, Ann Scott Tyson, the Monitor’s Beijing bureau chief, joins host Matt Bell to probe the deeper meaning of the summit, discuss the work of gathering Chinese (and Taiwanese) perspectives, and explore how Ann covers the newly shifting dynamic at the world’s preeminent geopolitical fulcrum.

Movies about aliens have fascinated audiences for decades. But two new movies about alien life – “Project Hail Mary” and “Disclosure Day” – led Monitor culture writer Stephen Humphries to wonder, What does our fascination with aliens tell us about our views of humanity? In this writer’s-notebook variation on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast, Stephen shares excerpts of his conversations with three of the experts in his recent story.

Amid recent ICE operations in Portland, Maine, Monitor staff writer Cameron Pugh and Director of Photography Alfredo Sosa traveled to see how Mainers were responding in the face of the immigration enforcement surge. But the story of one activist, documentary filmmaker, and self-described “African Mainer” offered an exploration of an age-old question: What does it really mean to be an American?

In our last episode, we spoke with a veteran of Olympics coverage, in Milan for his eighth Games. This week, we sit down with an Olympics rookie, also in Milan, who has brought to bear the reporting skills she honed covering hardball national politics. Olympics editor Kendra Nordin Beato guest hosts this conversation with Story Hinckley. They discuss how Story attacked her assignment like a slalom skier running the gates, got thoroughly swept up in the spirit of competition – and learned a few things about herself while delivering some gold-medal coverage.

With the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, Mark Sappenfield has now covered eight Olympics. Those include four previous Winter Games – in Salt Lake City, Turin, Vancouver, and Sochi. In this episode, Mark, the Monitor’s global correspondent, joins Kendra Nordin Beato, our Olympics editor. They talk about why the Winter Games are Mark’s favorite, how he finds distinctly Monitor angles on important stories that are magnets for other professional outlets and social media influencers alike, and what he’s watching for, this time around.

For a few generations of newsmakers and newsgatherers, the Monitor Breakfast has been a place to come together over a meal and parse the big issues of the day. In this episode, the host of this storied event joins her predecessor for a conversation about the Breakfast’s winning formula: Invite a newsmaker and a group of reporters to sit down for an hour and have a conversation, on the record. And to explore how its guiding principle – to generate “light, not heat” – stands today.

In this episode, Howard LaFranchi, a U.S.-based diplomacy writer for the Monitor who’s also an old Latin America hand, talks about waking to the news of Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela and working through how he could best pitch in on coverage with context. He talks with host Clay Collins about the complementary interplay of high-altitude analysis and on-the-ground coverage. About the Trump administration’s evolution of the Monroe Doctrine. About framing reports on the country to which he traveled repeatedly during the Hugo Chávez days. And about the state of a postwar, U.S.-led order historically anchored in law and alliances.

The Golden State is politically blue, and it’s a leader in green energy. It also has a foothold in crude. Reporter Simon Montlake went to a SoCal town built by oil – and to a festival called “Oildorado,” which celebrates that fact – to take the measure of a place that illustrates the trade-offs and halting transitions that characterize the global energy story. He joined our podcast to talk about the cover story that his reporting yielded, and about how he bakes fairness into his work. Hosted by Clay Collins.