So much of journalism is about objectivity. But measuring one story against another is deeply subjective. I mean, what does it mean for a news story to matter? To have impact on the listener, on the reader? I mean, does it have to be about a person who's been wronged or an institution caught in a cover up? Do you need to feel like it could affect your life personally? Well, these are the kinds of questions I have wrestled with as one of the national judges for the Livingston Award for young journalists. The award was established in 1981 to reward excellence in journalism from reporters under the age of 35. And no, I never won it. But you do know the names of journalists who have: public media's as Ira Glass, New Yorker editor David Remnick, CNN's Christiane Amanpour. So for today's episode, we are going to feature some of this year's winners, because their work is very much in line with what our vision is for this show: trying to figure out how to tell stories that matter with the voices of the people who have lived them. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. Talking to kids isn't easy. Talking to kids going through puberty about going through puberty honestly seems terrifying, at least for most parents.

Your mom told me a little bit about going to the doctor. Are you okay to share some stuff about going to the doctor for going through puberty early?

So we went to the doctor. I forgot what it's called. And they just tell me, "your bones are two years older than you." And I'm like, "How is that possible?" Like, was I just pure bones in a pile in my mom's stomach? And then I started forming?

And why did your parents take you to the doctor?

This is Allison Behringer. She and Lila Hassan are this year's Livingston winners in the category of national reporting. And, unusually, it's recognition for their podcast. It's called Bodies, and it explores medical mysteries of a sort. They're the stories that we hear about in passing, or rather, in private. Stories that we aren't always comfortable talking about, like, say, postpartum mental illness or abortion or early onset puberty. Now, Allison had many jobs before journalist.

I taught, grade five and six in Thailand. I was teaching English as a second language, which was a total joy. And then, I also taught in New York City, 10th grade English, which was a joy in different ways. And then, yeah, but I had taken some journalism classes in college, and I always felt like, oh, like I love teaching, I love this, but I also wanted to give journalism a try.

So at some point, you had to think about the kinds of things you wanted to talk about and, and the way you wanted to talk about them. And can you remember as that like it started to form for you?

'Yeah. So I first got the idea for Bodies because I went through my own health question, medical mystery. And that's what Bodies is. And so when I was in my mid-twenties, I had a problem with painful sex. It was a it was a really difficult time and I didn't know what was going on. I tried googling it. Nothing really came up. And then actually, through a friend of mine, she had had the same issue and it turned out for her to be the birth control pill. And I that was like a total light bulb moment for me. I had never considered that the birth control pill might have side effects, like, it was always just like, "oh, take the pill, don't worry about how it works. Just take it." And I went on to find out about a lot of, a lot of sexual side effects of the pill and, and non-sexual side effects. And so the very first episode, I tell my own story with painful sex, and then each subsequent episode is a different person, kind of going into their medical mystery.

And the thing about a medical mystery show is that it does involve an investigation, which Lila Hassan has some experience in, after career in human rights investigations and in journalism.

Allison had already set up something super interesting about the human experience. But what I brought to the episodes that I worked on was, well, how does the system play here? Or how does the larger government play here? Or how does the environment play here? How does research play here? And so it was really interesting to explore this because I had never done health reporting before. And I think it's one of the most difficult kind of reporting to do. There's so many multitudes of issues that can affect any one health condition or any one experience.

All right. So I'm going to talk about two episodes that I found really fascinating. One was called Early Birds. And you guys speak to fifth graders, really, to young, very young people who have experienced early puberty. First, this is one of those weird zeitgeist issues where everybody has read a magazine clip somewhere that's mentioned this, but not really explained what's going on or why. And for you, what was the question you had going into it? The medical mystery, so to speak.

So many questions. Why is early puberty happening so much earlier and to so many more kids? What we kind of quickly realized was that all these news articles and clips that that you're referencing Audie didn't really have the voices of kids in them. And so that's what we felt like. We could we could contribute. We weren't going to get to the bottom of why is early puberty happening earlier and to more people. Like we kind of accepted that. But what could we add? And we felt like we could add the voice of children to this.

They do still feel like kids. So in particular, Allison, there's a conversation with a fifth grader named Isabella, which, now that I know you spent time teaching fifth graders, I sort of have a better understanding about how you were able to have this conversation. Can you talk about what that how that conversation played out?

I mean, I've spent a lot of time with children. But it was the first time I had interviewed kids, and I reached out to a friend of a friend who's done a lot of work with kids for advice, but their main advice was just like, treat them like any interviewee and just give them space, give them time. Ask open ended questions and just like, treat them with respect and know that they know their experience best. I think we also we wanted to get into the hard stuff, like what is it like to have your body change before everyone else? Some of the harder topics abound around being sexualized, but we also wanted the listeners to get to know these these children, which is why we asked, how do you describe yourself? What are your hobbies? And we got to hear these amazing stories like, the short stories that, the second child is writing. And Isabella is like, hilarious things, like weird things that she does.

Do you feel like your brain is kind of similar to the other kids your age?

No. I have really crazy ideas.

Like what?

Once I step into the toilet and once I touched my poop and, once I tie dyed some old scraps of fabric, stuff like that.

So we wanted to, like, make space for them to just be kids. And then what was so spectacular was that they played along and they were silly and goofy and really showed themselves. And then they also were so wise, like they were they they had so many, so many insightful things to say.

'P-u-b-e-r-t-y. Okay. I need to face. I need to say it. Puberty. I think puberty is your body growing and changing into, like, more quote unquote, advanced. That feels good sometimes. And sometimes it's sad.

Just no matter what age you are, it's not always easy to speak publicly about things. One thing I found really fascinating was an episode about abortion training, and especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade. There has been more and more conversation about what does this mean for providers, so to speak, the people who actually, actually perform abortions? And you guys managed to find some medical residents who talked about this, which is like, again, a hard thing to do, right? What did you find, for instance, when you were talking to residents? Especially in kind of conservative states in the South. What is it you wanted to tell about that story?

Abortion can feel so sterile, like this topic can be so serious. It's hard to feel, like, connected to these stories. And there's a lot of reasons why people don't speak out. They're afraid. And all of this. And, to me, it felt like talking to the residents who, by the way, are kind of at the bottom of the the power hierarchy in medicine. Medicine is a hierarchy, too. These people are kind of at the bottom. They really often don't have a voice. A lot of the other reporting was talking to the the seasoned OBGYNs, the residency directors, but it felt so important to talk to the people who were like, in the midst of their training. And, you know, there's there are some people who talked about, like, the fear that they're learning under. And there's one person who talked about being able to go to an away rotation outside the state where she was learning in, and just feeling like this weight come off her shoulders and that she was finally able to, like, learn in a good environment.

'I expected myself to feel like this wave of feelings afterwards, but I wouldn't say that. There was like a moment where I was like, oh my gosh, I just did something so profound. It just it just felt like going to work and providing medical care, which we do every day. It was a constant reminder that abortion is common and it's normal and it's safe. And I left that day feeling so like light and happy compared to what I normally feel in my home state, where sometimes I carry home this burden of like I spent a lot of time at home thinking about like like I wonder if they're going to try to self-manage their abortion at home, like I wonder what they're going to do. Whereas in this other state, I knew the end to those stories because they chose them in front of me with every piece of information available.

It just felt really important to have the voices of residents who are going, going through this, because actually like their emotional experience training is very important. If they're feeling so much moral injury that they can't even like, every time they try to help someone, they can't help them, that is going to have huge ripple effects down the line. So I think it's super important that we pay attention to how residents are kind of, navigating this time.

Lila, you know, it's interesting the kind of journalism that wins awards usually is big and investigative, often into institutions, right? Prisons or the Supreme Court or just things that have the big impact where there might be hearings of some sort. And that isn't this story. And I was wondering sort of how you're feeling, right? Coming from the world of investigations and, and how it made you think differently about this kind of work?

This work really revolutionized the way that I was thinking, because there was so much that I wish we could demonstrate. I wish the reporting itself could be a story. And what Allison was talking about in terms of moral injury and what it was doing to an already incredibly depressed body of people, you know, residents and medical students or some of the most prone to suicide in the country, and for them to feel the moral injury on so many different levels, which is also what they spoke about. You know, it's not just that they're, you know, they're failing. They're they're failing their patients. They're failing as doctors, they're failing as students. It was just so compounded and so heavy. And so for me, coming from a little bit more, I don't want to say sterile, but like a little bit more straightforward, dry, drier kind of reporting that, you know, focuses on like accountability and standards and wrongdoings. This was just so much more messy and so much more complicated, but that it was so much more raw and real. It really represented, you know, an issue without an answer.

Allison, what have you learned from this experience of embracing stories that, like, don't have an answer necessarily, or at least not the one we might expect?

You know, I think that a lot of the stories that we've done on bodies are powerful for the way that they expose facts, wrongdoing, etc. but powerful actually just in the sense that we are sharing stories that don't get a lot of attention in the media otherwise. So I think I've, I've kind of always had that belief. And that's always kind of been my North Star and just, yeah, focusing on on people and learning the journalism more as I go.

That was Allison Behringer, host and executive producer of the podcast Bodies, which is supported and distributed by NPR station KCRW. You also heard from journalist Lila Hassan. And both of these reporters are recipients of this year's Livingston Award in the category of national reporting. We'll have a link to those stories in our show notes. We're going to take a short break, after which we will be hearing from this year's Livingston Award winner in local reporting.

I had several counties tell me they could not tell me how many people were alive or dead under guardianships in multiple counties.

'Stay with us. Welcome back to The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish, and I love to get your letters and pitches for ideas on this show. And the best questions are often the ones that feel a little bit personal. Samantha Hogan knows what it's like to get those notes. She got a lot of them when she was covering the state criminal justice system for a small non-profit newsroom called The Maine Monitor.

And throughout the three years that I was reporting on indigent public defense and recordings of attorney client phone calls at the jails, I was also getting tips from families saying, "once you're done with that, please look at the state's probate court system."

Yeah, I know probate court. It's like messy and personal, but also not so easy to understand. And that world is in this kind of strange legal space between our lives and our deaths.

So I had a woman reach out to me about her father's estate, and she was suing in the state court about how his will had been probated and how a woman had ingratiated herself with her father after he had had strokes and changed everything about how her and her sister's inheritance was going to change.

And it wasn't like my dad is dating someone new.

No. So this was a woman that, on the admission paperwork at the hospital, was listed as a friend. And then when he, after he had had the strokes, after the medical procedures, was listed as a fiancee and took over complete control of his life after he was incapacitated, and then over the ensuing decade, changed wills and changed how property was going to be divided up. And at the same time, I was also being reached out to by another woman whose mother had died and was unhappy with how that case was being probated as well. And then along the way, I also uncovered numerous instances where individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities who were being placed under guardianship.

These are the kinds of stories that when they come to you in a letter, they feel kind of isolated, like, oh, it seems bad for these families, but it seems like a family problem in some way. Can you talk about sort of what was forming in your mind in terms of like, actually this seems way bigger. Because I think some of us are hearing about conservatorships maybe., right, because of Britney Spears' problems. When did you start to think, "am I looking at a broader issue?"

So it became apparent very early on that these were not just isolated family disputes, that there were systemic failures with how the probate courts in Maine were set up. So because the judges are elected and they're the only elected judges in Maine, and because they only work part time and because they also keep law practices open and because there's no clerk staff, really, or not enough clerk staff for them to look at the documents critically and to even keep track of people. I had several counties tell me they could not tell me how many people were alive or dead under guardianships in multiple counties.

It sounds shambolic, right? Like it sounds like a system that had not been modernized in any way.

It's a relic of a completely different era. 57 years ago, voters in Maine approved a constitutional amendment that would change probate judges from these part time elected judges into a full time court system. And the state had studied it a half dozen times, and it had always reached the same conclusion that it would be a better system that was more ethical and also had better oversight of the judges and the cases that they were responsible for if these judges were full time. And I really wanted to understand why they were not changing this system, and they were continuously rejecting these recommendations. But then on top of it, who are the people that were trapped in this incredibly dysfunctional system?

And then there was the, like, personal care part of it. Like, you found that people actually died in the state's care.

'I think that was the most shocking thing for me, was to find out how eight individuals under public guardianship had died. One woman's story really resonates with me, and that's Laurie Wall. She was a profoundly disabled, non-verbal woman with cerebral palsy who had been in state care since she was two years old. And medical examiners had determined that she had died of acute intoxication of multiple prescription drugs at age 51 while she was living in a private foster home. And what my reporting uncovered was that the Maine State Police had actually been investigating her death for two years, and had not completed that investigation yet. And really, unless I had started doing this reporting, and I had really started looking at whether or not the state was, looking into deaths of people under public guardianship, we might not know Laurie's story.

I also learned that in Maine, like, death certificates are not public information. So even learning about that was complicated, figuring it out?

'Yeah, it was incredibly complicated to try and figure out who was dying under guardianship. Because unless you're a family member of the deceased, you you can't get copies of these death certificates. So to try and look systemically at people under guardianship dying, that was really difficult. So what I did get was a bunch of de-identified data which show that the majority of people were dying of natural causes, and nothing suspicious was going on. But when I was receiving that data, I was told that the Attorney General's office wanted to withhold eight cases. So obviously those were the ones that I became incredibly interested in and wanted to know more. And when the data was eventually released to me, the Attorney General's office inadvertently released the names of those eight individuals. And that's how I found out that there was this homicide that was not going to be criminally prosecuted, and that seven other individuals had died, predominantly of medication overdoses, and that their deaths were undetermined. They could not exactly say how those individuals had died. And there really was no public scrutiny of this information, and it would have passed under the radar had we not done that reporting.

What kind of response did you get from readers? What kind of response did you get from lawmakers?

So lawmakers were understandably outraged when I reported about the eight deaths that they had not been alerted to. And they did hold a public meeting where they called the attorney General's office, the Medical Examiner's office, the probate judges, advocates all into one room. And they they asked them some tough questions about how the state needs to go about improving oversight of guardianships and how do they bring lawmakers into that conversation to ensure that people just aren't dying quietly, and that they are not becoming a victim to the system? How could they improve that? And so that work is still ongoing. I will say that I heard from numerous families afterwards, thanking me for shedding a light on on this system and just reporting about a court process that goes under the radar and doesn't get a lot of attention. I think people really were happy that I humanized some of these stories, that they just weren't court statistics. That they were real people with real lives and how they died mattered.

The Livingston Award is for kind of reporters early in their career. But in the end, why do you think you were drawn to this story that was really about people in the last chapters of their lives?

The first internship that I actually had was with The Washington Post, and it was writing obituaries. And on my first day, the editor sat us down and he said, "this is the last thing that's going to be written about someone. You better get it right." And that has been a mentality that I have taken with me throughout my entire career. This idea that we really, as journalists, need to do justice to the stories of the people whose stories we're telling and we need to tell them accurately, and we need to tell them fairly. What bothered me at the beginning of reporting on the probate court system was how many of these people's stories were just tragic and not being told. And there had been so many studies of the statistics and the economics and the how just the court system, but no one was looking at the people that were being harmed by how the system continues to be.

You sound a little riled up by the idea that, like, this is doing the opposite of what you had learned, right? It's disrespectful. Like what was happening to people was fundamentally disrespectful.

I really did feel that some people were disrespected by the probate court system at the end of the day, and I hope that I restored a little bit of dignity to their stories by how I reported it.

'Samantha Hogan is this year's Livingston Award winner for local reporting. She's now an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And that's all for this episode of The Assignment. We, of course, want to know what kinds of stories resonate with you. What kind of assignments do you want us to work on next? Please give us a call. Share what's on your mind. The best way is our number (202) 854-8802. You can text us, call us, leave us a voice memo. Text us the voice memo, whatever you're comfortable with. And of course, we might use your voice on the show. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Carla Javier. The senior producer is Matt Martinez, and Dan Dzula is our technical director. Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN audio, and we all get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish, and thank you for listening.