Tomorrow, we begin a new chapter at the Telling the Story blog.

The Telling the Story podcast.

I am excited to bring the discussion to audio form, starting with a great first guest. Jon Shirek, a reporter and my colleague at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, joins me for a 30-minute discussion about backpack journalism, the changes in local news over three decades, the crafting of storytelling, and the challenges of leaving a journalistic legacy.

His one sentence that sums it all up? “Good storytelling will always be good storytelling.”

Click the player below to listen to a preview of the podcast, which launches at 8 AM on Wednesday, April 24th. In it, Jon describes his transition to becoming a backpack journalist and why, although he sometimes prefers it, he’s “still not sold on it”:

If you live outside of Atlanta, you may not recognize Jon’s name. But he is a legendary Atlanta reporter whose writing is as exquisite as it gets. Take a look at his reporter’s notebook piece after he returned from covering the movie theater shootings in Aurora, Colo. The line that stood out to me? Jon describes the parents awaiting their children by saying, “Parents weren’t just hugging their kids. They were inhaling them.”

I hope you enjoy the podcast; I am excited to bring it to you.

Matt Pearl is the author of the Telling the Story blog and podcast. He can be reached at matt@tellingthestoryblog.com.