At The Pudding, Diehm has created data-driven stories about pockets, gayborhoods, and memes to start larger conversations about gender, sexuality, and other social issues:
Sometimes you can't come out with those big words because they're scary. It's an immediate shutdown. It's a fight or flight moment for a lot of people where they're like, I don't want to talk about that serious stuff. So you've got to kind of come in through the back door.… It helps let their guard down.
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Transcript
Ellen McGirt
Hey, everybody, I'm Ellen McGirt,
Jessica Helfand
and I'm Jessica Helfand.
Ellen McGirt
And this is The Design of Business | The Business of Design. The Design of Business | The Business of Design is brought to you by MailChimp. So you want to grow your business. Now what? Mailchimp's all-in-one marketing platform allows you to manage more of your marketing activities all in one place so you can market smarter and grow faster. Now what?
Jessica Helfand
Maichimp. That's what.
Ellen McGirt
Learn more at Mailchimp dot com. So, Jessica, before we get into this amazing interview with Jan Diehm, I wanted to ask you about your career in journalism, because I tend to forget that you had one.
Jessica Helfand
I had one, right. With my first job after graduate school. And I think it's the best job I ever had. I loved being in a newsroom. I didn't study journalism in school. I didn't work at a school newspaper as an undergrad. I was thrown into this newsroom and I was the only trained graphic designer at the time. And just to listen to everybody's point of view and the fact that the economics and the delegation of the newsroom, I was at a weekly Sunday magazine for a national newspaper, the idea that you couldn't actually climb the ranks, you just had to change roles. The tennis writer became the Berlin correspondent and the you know, the food person became the tennis writer. And it made for a really lively conversations with people because people were really adept.
We use the word agility to mean something quite different now. But I think there was a kind of cultural agility and a kind of intellectual agility to those people that I heard a lot in our conversation with Jan Diehm today. And if you look through her body of work and you see all the different people who participated in the symphony that are the stories that she creates, one can really detect a kind of agility to which I would now add coding and music and sequence and storytelling that has a whole kinetic component because, of course, we're accessing it online. But it is no less real as a truthful kind of journalism that I remember so fondly from 30 years ago.
Ellen McGirt
What really stood out to me, too, from what Jan was talking about, was this really rich and deep commitment to making sure that the issues that had been hiding in plain sight are surfaced and that she tackles them with her team. They tackle issues of inclusion and equity and justice and race and gender and really fascinating ways. She used the word whimsy. I would say whimsy is her secret way of welcoming people into really complicated and often triggering subjects and helping them find rich understanding without turning them off.
Jessica Helfand
Whimsy is a pretty good way in.
Ellen McGirt
It really is! It's welcoming. It immediately signals, hey, just relax, you're going to get through this. But we are going to talk about race now. Lets meet, Jan.
Jessica Helfand
Jan Diehm, she's a journalist and engineer with Polygraph and the Pudding, where she uses data to craft visual stories.
Ellen McGirt
And they are amazing. Her work has looked at everything from pant pockets, to gayborhoods, to how people draw vulvas.
Jessica Helfand
I think that's the first time that word has been mentioned on this podcast.
Ellen McGirt
Yes!
Jessica Helfand
Jan, Welcome to the podcast
Jan Diehm
Thank you all for having me and for that wonderful introduction. Definitely hit on a lot of the high points of my work there.
Jessica Helfand
Can we ask you geographically where you're dialing in from today Jan?
Jan Diehm
I'm in South Texas, San Antonio. My wife and I moved here after spending about a decade in the Northeast, in New York City in particular. We're both Southerners. So this is a little bit of a return to home.
Ellen McGirt
So I'm curious about, as you're looking ahead in your life in San Antonio, what your new location means for you in terms of what you can and can't do or do you miss the Northeast or do you see a full creative life unfolding for you there?
Jan Diehm
I think both my wife and I kind of moved to the Northeast, we met in New York City as kind of like an escape hatch. I feel like a lot of queer people do. And after 10 years there, we had a conversation and we were just like, what are we climbing for? And we didn't know anymore. And it felt like we needed to return to our roots to be able to to make the impacts and have the day to day conversations with people pop more. It felt like we were going through the motions in New York City and so we moved to San Antonio. And it's been just so easy to find people that we just love working with, some of probably our best friendships of our lives have been formed in like the last two years here.
Ellen McGirt
Wow.
Jan Diehm
It's just it's a little bit more effortless. I think that we you know, we were doing a whole lot of extra work in New York that maybe we didn't need to do to have the relationships. I think, you know, the pandemic has taught us, you know, one silver lining is that you can kind of work remotely from anywhere in a lot of different jobs. And so I think hopefully we'll see more of that flexibility come into the job force, and in journalism in particular,
Jessica Helfand
I read that you did some time at the Hartford Courant.
Jan Diehm
Yes, my first stop out of school. So first stop in the Northeast. And I was a newspaper pagination, so, you know, getting my hands dirty in the ink and everything. And I feel like my career's kind of tracked the same as the business side of journalism in general, because there's not too many newspaper designers out there in the wild anymore. We're a rare breed.
Ellen McGirt
You sure are. And you hit it just at the at the tail end. How does that understanding of how the way newspapers had been constructed for oh so many eons impacted the way you think about media today?
Jan Diehm
I think coming in and kind of designing newspapers was really an exercise in fitting all the puzzle pieces together and kind of understanding how people consume the news, where they want to see it. And so I think a lot of that translates to the audience or user experience side of news design today and hoping to bring some of the tactile and the whimsyness to the Web.
Jessica Helfand
How early on as a pageanator did you see that there was maybe this new way to do things that you wanted to get your hands involved in all the doing?
Jan Diehm
I think it was it was forced after kind of a year at the at the Courant I've experienced my first layoff situation and I've had three in my 10 year career. And I think it's, you know, not the exception to the rule, probably is the rule. And so that layoff situation made me reexamine myself. And each time that I've had had that happen, it's like, OK, what do I need to take from the toolset that I have and build out and readapt and redefine? I think throughout my career it's always been visual journalism. I want to tell stories visually. That hasn't strayed at all. It's just been the medium that I've kind of continually tweaked.
Ellen McGirt
So we should probably dig into how you actually work. You've got two businesses, Polygraph and The Pudding, and for anyone who has not checked at The Pudding, go check it out, and come back with your heart filled with new information and whimsy and courage. So which came first, The Pudding or Polygraph? And can you tell us how they're related to each other, please?
Jan Diehm
They're kind of like dual tracks. The Pudding came first because it was home for some of the visual tinkering and visual storytelling that the founder, Matt Daniels, was doing. That kind of work, especially around hip hop lyrics, song music and data, caught him the attention of of some bigger companies that allowed us to spread into the studio territory, which is the Polygraph side. So if you think about a traditional newsroom divide, you've kind of got the editorial and the advertising. And that's really what we're trying to recreate with The Pudding, which is our editorial operation, and then Polygraph, which is the advertising studio equivalent. We don't have that wall there that a lot of journalism places have. Our team of journalists and engineers operates across both Pudding and Polygraph, and we really do similar stories on both sides. The differences, The Pudding is more passion driven. And we get to tell our own stories. And the Polygraph side is we're telling other people's stories, but we really try to keep them, you know, mission and purpose aligned with with all of our values on The Pudding side.
Ellen McGirt
So really, Polygraph is a creative studio. You're not placing advertisement within the work that you do in The Pudding, which I think is a pretty big distinction.
Jan Diehm
Yes, definitely. We do have an occasional sponsored post here, there. But those are rare. And it's usually because a company that we want to work with has a proprietary technology or data set that you can't get access to as the public. And so we do something kind of on the Polygraph side for them. And then we have like a sponsored post on The Pudding using their data.
Jessica Helfand
Let's talk about pockets. Can you tell us a little bit about the pocket story where it originated?
Jan Diehm
Absolutely. My colleague Amber Thomas and I were walking down the streets in New York and I almost lost my phone because I went to put it in my pocket and it fell out. And that just got us started on the gripe that every woman or person that that wears womens' pants knows to be true is that there's just not space. There's not space to carry the things that people normally carry on them: phones, chapstick, keys. And so that was the spark of it. And we couldn't stop thinking about it. And everywhere we turned, there was like a woman on the Internet griping about pockets. It was on Twitter. We saw, you know, threads. It was on Instagram, it was just everywhere. And so we were like, OK, this is something that's like really resonating with a lot of people. And we didn't see it in data anywhere. So we took the story to our colleagues, our male colleagues, and we're like, hey, OK, I think we want to do this. And their initial response was, I don't know, it kind of feels like something that everybody knows. And and we were just like, no, no, no. Like really like you need to go check this out. And so they came back the next day and they all realized and after talking with some of their partners and stuff, they're like, yeah, not a day goes by that we don't get asked to hold their things. So it turned into not you know, a water is wet, not an obvious situation anymore, it turned into something that was almost like a rallying cry.
Ellen McGirt
I think the thing that's great about the pocket story is that you take data that is really hiding in plain sight, but that describes the way people live. It describes an injustice. It describes an imbalance of power. It describes an inequity. And through what I can, you know, a truly whimsical presentation, you take that data and you you give us an opportunity to look at something deeply, understand it quickly. But you take out the sting of having, of someone who might be resistant to understanding what this actually means. And what this actually means— you know, the pocket and women's pants and, you know, the stiletto, whatever it is that we are ornamental creatures designed to be in service to the truly powerful men who rule the world. It's reflected in the simplest thing, the pocket. It Is a beautiful, beautiful way of doing journalism. I'm curious now about, well, the response to the visual story. And is there a formula for you as you look at the world looking for the perfect story?
Jan Diehm
Oh, I'll hit the response first. There's been so many stories— I've had friends in their two year olds who are now griping about their pockets and, you know, unfair not being able to hide their candy under their rocks and stuff. I've spoken to so many impassioned young women for high school projects and middle school projects. I think that kind of gets that like meeting people where they are opening the world of data journalism to people who think that data journalism has to be numbers and math and highbrows is the wrong word, but, you know, the very kind of like statistical sound minded, serious topic when data journalism, you're right, it's it's kind of all around us. What I really try to do is, is avoid directly confronting people with, you know, racism and sexism and the patriarchy, because it's a turnoff for a lot of people, especially in the last couple of years, like as a white woman talking to other white women, like trying to pull them along, kind of kicking and screaming. Sometimes it's like you can't come out with those big words because they're scary. It's an immediate shutdown. It's a fight or flight moment for a lot of people where they're like, I don't want to talk about that serious stuff. So you've got to kind of come in through the back door. And that's where confronting something as simple as pocket sizing or a meme that you see on the Internet comes into play because those are things that people see in their day to day lives. It helps let their guard down.
Jessica Helfand
The Design of Business | The Business of Design is brought to you by Mailchimp. Let's take a moment to hear from a Mailchimp customer about weathering this period of crisis.
Cedric Brown
I'm Cedric Brown founder of Cedric Brown Collections and I'm based out of Atlanta.
Jessica Helfand
Cedrick talked about how he sells the clothing he designs.
Cedric Brown
My dream is to definitely be one the top fashion designers in the world. The normal way, how I make all of my money was doing these pop up shops nationally. As you know every big pop up shop, art festival, music festival — all my events got canceled. At first it was scary, you know, like, how am I going to make money? I had to introduce some new items, such as a face mask just to go with the times. And I have different age groups that buy things for me. And sometimes from the older age groups, you know, they were like, I don't want to trust swiped my card online. And I feel like this pandemic forced every age group, no matter who it was, to shop online. And now that they are being forced to do it again, they're getting more comfortable with doing it, they may not even want to leave their house anymore.
Jessica Helfand
Cedrick Brown relies on MailChimp to run his business.
Cedric Brown
I spend time building my emails, I gathering content, so I often is in the draft mode of my campaigns, just working on some good things to put in there. So I love it a lot, its very easy.
Jessica Helfand
Know what, MailChimp? That's what. Learn more at Mailchimp dot com. Do you ever find that you are confronted by resistance, by your collaborators, by your editors, by your audience, do you receive pushback for going too far, going too deep? I'm thinking in particular of the Guardian story on the drawing of the vulva, which I'd like you to talk about briefly.
Jan Diehm
Most of the time, I think I've I've been in a position where people are like that might be a little bit weird or odd or maybe I haven't thought about it before, but there's never been a pushback. And I think I've just worked at places that want to take risks. And so with the Guardian story that was built off of a video series talking about the vulva and the vagina and in a way that hadn't been done before. Again, another attempt to take away the subject that might frighten some people are, you know, seemed taboo or something and just put it out there in a very welcoming way. And that series was done by May Ryan and Mona Chalabi. And so the interactive team was throwing around ideas about like, well, what can we do that gets at the core of what they're trying to say through that video series was really it was like we should be talking about this. This should be equally as important as the men's health that we talk about in sex education classes. And it seemed so male focused. And so one of the things that we kind of kept coming back to was the idea that, like, it's really common to go around and exist in life and see drawings of penises everywhere, like, you know, middle school boys on there everywhere, you know, scrawled into the dirty windows of cars and notebooks and graffitied on to, you know, mailboxes. It's just there. And so we started kind of thinking about that. And it's like, what if drawings of vulvas were everywhere too, would it take it and make it not taboo? Would it take it and make it something that was just like part of everyday life, which is what all the dicks were! Can I say that?
Ellen McGirt
Yes you can!
Jan Diehm
But its just, you know, so we wanted a way to just throw it out there. So with that project, it was like not only asking women to think like men for a second there and like draw their anatomy for the world to see unabashedly. But it was also forcing kind of the world to see it in its collective state. And how how many women and anybody that has vulva, you know, we exist, we're here and we want to talk about it.
Ellen McGirt
I do love that. And I also can imagine that your Karen project created a bit of buzz. It's similar to your other work in that you're taking something that's already out there that's keeping them in the meme, The Karen, you know, the white woman who's racist, who's causing problems, you know, that's the name that we call them. And you flipped it in such an interesting way. First, you help us understand why Karen was the perfect name. It was just such an interesting way of walking into a very powerful topic, which is the sensitivity of a white woman where a group of white women who were suddenly being profiled or stereotyped based on the idea of a name which doesn't happen for white people. Can you talk a little bit about that project and the reaction to that one?
Jan Diehm
That was, you know, another project that I had just kind of continually seen a groundswell of conversation around, you know, not only because all the videos just, you know, one after the other of black people being harassed by white women, but also just like it seemed like everyone knew a Karen and what Karen personified. And so we started to talk about, well, you know, what is Karen at its core? And then what is the male equivalent of Karen? The idea that what a name embodies and there's been, you know, great work around names way before this, and so I wanted to to uplift some of that research. And I think it was also a chance to be very personal because, like, everyone has a name. So why does this name strike such a visceral reaction in a lot of white women? And I think that's you're right that it's because it's the first time that they've really confronted stereotyping that's not based on on gender. Being able to look at the data on that one and see like, OK, well, I know that Social Security Administration has baby named data, so let's go look and see what the shape of Karen looks like. And are there other names that have that same shape? I think in doing some of the preliminary research, my full name, Janice, actually came up as a potential Karen. Or a past Karen for like 20 years prior to the Karen. So it's kind of those names that have that like the decade hold where it's a big spike and then a sharp drop off. So Janice was in like the 1920s, 30s. What Karen is is for like 1950s, 60s and then kind of what like the Jessica is of my generation.
Jessica Helfand
In 30 years from now those, Jessicas, are going to be in trouble.
Jan Diehm
Yes, sorry to drop the truth on that one,
Jessica Helfand
I — no, I'm glad I've been warned. I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you a question that I found myself asking when I was looking at how your work translates into video. Do you find yourself making things differently, knowing that the experience is not only interactive but kinetic?
Jan Diehm
Absolutely. Every medium that we tackle has to be different. One of the things that I think about a lot is just how do I connect with people. Even from how I design things. A lot of them, like the Pockets piece, is kind of designed with some thread and harkened back to Pockets themselves. A lot of the pieces are designed in style that you would have like a nostolgia trigger or something to design, to kind of evoke in emotion. And so I think I approach the medium in the same way. Again, I don't want to be shouting at anybody, like, here's my content. Here's what you need to pay attention to. I want them to come and unwrap it in a way that they want to. So when you think about video, it's much more passive experience. You know, you want to guide somebody through it. It's more top line. When you think about an interactive piece, you often think back to the inverted pyramid or the pyramid style of journalism writing where you start up with the most important thing and get bigger as you go. So I think you're absolutely right that the medium dictates how we tell stories and I think about them each differently. Video is kind of a new medium for me. And in fact, most of the videos that we have done have been done in code. So we render them out in code, on a Web page, and then we like screen cap it, and stitch a series of of images and animations together. So it's definitely adapting. I— just hands up to to all the video editors out there because what little bits I know of it, it's really time consuming to get it right.
Ellen McGirt
So we should talk about really the future of journalism here and how you think the changing business models are going to be helping or hurting the cause. I know that we've seen a huge shift into paid subscriptions for newsletters and newspapers, you know, and a lot of independent journalism, a lot of hybrid creative agency plus journalism such as yourself. I know you have a Patreon. How is your business functioning and are you happy with your options and what do you think the future holds?
Jan Diehm
I think that we're lucky in the sense that we have the Polygraph studio side of things that operation entirely funds The Pudding. We do get some contribution from Patreon, but it's small and we try to inject that back into The Pudding by hiring freelancers to come on and take stories on on our platform. So I think the larger conversation that we have to have is about, you know, what is journalism? And I think there's conversation starting about what is objective journalism. That's kind of the wall that's keeping the two separate right now. And I think that you can be an objective journalist and have influence. We're all human, right? So, like, I have an Apple phone. Does that mean I can't cover Apple stories? I think it's kind of a false wall that we've put up. I'm a queer woman. I remember working in traditional newsrooms when the marriage equality decision came down. We were given a little bit of guidance, like, hey, don't really go on social media and be really excited about this because it could come off as partisan. And I mean, that's like awful. Recently, you know, there's been stuff with black reporters covering the Black Lives Matter protests and how they can't be objective in the moment because they're too close to it. And I feel like that's a false equivalency, like it's our job to be objective when we need to be. But we're also human. And so I think the idea that you can be a good journalist and be a good human really need to be to re-examined and reshaped. And I think that might actually open a lot of funding doors to us because journalism has kind of existed in this black box and the public really doesn't know what it is. We all have an idea of us doing a noble profession and that it's, you know, a calling. But I don't think that translates. People don't know the practice of journalism and all the rigor that goes behind it. Some of the things I've seen recently that get at that funding model a little bit and kind of open up that gate is the The Guardian has a big callout box at the end of each story. That makes it an emotional plea to people. They don't have a paywall, but they do have a contributor model. It's an emotional plea of like saying here's how much it takes to do this kind of work. I've seen the Tampa Bay Times had a big investigation piece, and at the end of that story they laid out a big box. And just like, you know, our records request takes X amount of money. We spent X amount of time on this project, really pulling back the curtain at the people behind this and the salaries that you're paying. I feel like people aren't willing to pay for news because we've taken the humanity out of it.
Ellen McGirt
Mhmm
Jessica Helfand
Your own journalism education is interesting to us, were there questions that came up for you that made you realize this was the burning light you had to follow to the end of time?
Jan Diehm
I got into journalism in high school, I had a wonderful teacher, Judy Stanely, and she just unlocked doors. She was my English teacher, my journalism teacher. I remember that my senior year of high school, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was going to speak at the commencement ceremony at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. And she just said, we're going. She got a sub for her class. And her and I hopped in a car, drove an hour and went. And we convinced the Secret Service to let us go in and get press access and cover it.
Ellen McGirt
That is hard to do.
Jan Diehm
Yeah, it was, you know, probably a little bit less restrictive than it is now. But we got in and I was able to take pictures and interview people because I think having those people that are willing to knock down those walls, wow, that was a game changer for me. And so I'm hoping that, you know, I can continue that knocking down those walls for other people.
Jessica Helfand
There's an underside to the work you do that is penetrating and hard and you're not afraid to interrogate your assumptions about things. I think that is the thing about the kind of work you do that I find fascinating. So my question to you would be, what keeps you up at night?
Jan Diehm
Oh, everything. Is that a legit answer?
Ellen McGirt
It is, it is a legit answer.
Jan Diehm
I mean, I think it's just things that have a personal tie and throughout the pandemic just have been way more introspective, just about interrogating everything that I thought I knew to be true about my upbringing and and how it's changed over time. Moving back South, as a queer woman, has been eye opening for me. I grew up just north of Nashville and I'm going to date myself here, but I remember driving like two towns over to the Best Buy to go physically buy an L-Word DVD, because I wasn't out yet and I couldn't have anybody in my small town know about it because I felt like it wasn't safe. And so being able to come and reconnect with that, like, oh, I both can be Southern and be queer at the same time. Trying to find those intersections is what makes the connections.
Ellen McGirt
That was that was an absolutely beautiful answer, even when you speak, you take us on a journey and I could see you as a young woman sneaking out that DVD.
Jessica Helfand
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Jan Diehm
Thank you all so much for having me.
Jessica Helfand
Ellen, Jan spoke about how people don't understand what they're necessarily paying for in journalism. The interesting thing about sort of free real estate and news, what do you think about the sort of economic presenting face of journalism and where it stands today?
Ellen McGirt
It was a fascinating piece. She's really thought this through. And I would say that nobody— in a world where everybody wants everything to be free, remember remember when the Internet first was born? It's like information wants to be free. It's like really? Because reporters want to be paid. What are we going to do about that? Where do you think the shit comes from, honestly?
Jessica Helfand
So how do you get through that? How you cut through that?
Ellen McGirt
Well, you know, her her answer was transparency. You know, tell people, share the ala carte menu of what this cost. Just the data collection alone cost us this. Just the software to do this cost us this. You don't have to do it every single time. But she wants to offer ideas that can move easily to solutions. But to do that, you have to understand what it actually took to gather the information about that idea. And that's where trust comes in. If you tell people that you're spending time and money, real equity in creating a piece of journalism, they're more likely to trust you. They're more likely to ask better questions along the way and not just go for the big brand, you know, what's on fire or the easy way that we're seeing in a divided world where people just get their news at places that seem to ideologically agree with them.
Jessica Helfand
I found myself wondering if cumulatively, if you look at the body of work, of these kinds of forms of inquiry by interrogating our assumptions in the way that these these visually interactive, multidimensional, multimodal frequencies of these stories give us, do you think that over time it makes us interrogate our own assumptions in a better way, almost unwittingly, that we actually start— if you start to look at this enough, you start to absorb some of the mechanics of inquiry and not just go after it. Based on what's being brought to you like that, to me would seem like a really good,
Ellen McGirt
a good outcome.
Jessica Helfand
If we all become more scrutinizing in the things we read.
Ellen McGirt
I agree. I mean, that's a good outcome. And I think if you put people through a storytelling process, a legitimate storytelling process, which is of course why propaganda works, but you add in that extra element of, you know, here's how we know what we said is true. Here are some other facts. Here's some context for you. Here's the editorial decisions that we made and here's the investments that we made, which is really what Jan's talking about here. Her things said, what did she say? I don't want to be shouting. I want them to unwrap it. And that's precisely the outcome that you were describing, is that as you go through the process of a well told, well reported story, you emerge. It's a journey, you emerge at the other end in a new place. And I think one of the things that I do worry about or think about going forward, there are people who are really ideologically rooted, really dug in. How do you get them to go on a journey and survive it? Because it becomes an identity loss.
Jessica Helfand
That's the piece of this kind of journalism that I find the most fascinating. I think I think that it is kind of the gift that keeps on giving in that way, that they keep finding ways to tell stories in unusual ways that oblige you the reader, to think with a more circumspect, sort of multidimensional lens. And I think that's an incredible skill.
The Design of Business | The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. You can follow us on social media, but we were here long before social media.
Ellen McGirt
So better yet go to our website, designobserver.com, where you can sign up for our email newsletter to keep up with everything that's going on at Design Observer.
Jessica Helfand
Here's a little thing going on at Design Observer: I just published a new book of essays with Thames and Hudson. I wrote it during the pandemic. I wrote it with a not present but ever present co-author Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose canonical essay on the subject of self-reliance is at the core of this book. My essays accompany it and they are about something I talk about often and write about even more often, which is what it means to have a daily creative practice. You might find some use in this book. You could find out more about it at Design Observer dot com.
Ellen McGirt
If you like what you heard today, please follow this podcast. You can find The Design of Business | The Business of Design, on Apple podcast, Spotify, or however you listen.
Jessica Helfand
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Ellen McGirt
A DBBD dot Design Observer dot com. That's D-B-B-D for The Design of Business | The Business of Design, you'll find one hundred more conversations with all kinds of interesting people about business design and so much more.
Jessica Helfand
And if you enjoy today's conversation with Jan Diehm, check out our conversation from last season with the journalism scholar Alissa Richardson. Great insights and a wonderful teacher and writer and thinker. You can find it along with all the others that Ellen mentioned, at DBBD dot Design Observer dot com,
Ellen McGirt
Yes you will. And please consider subscribing to RaceAhead, my regular column on race and leadership at Fortune dot com slash get race ahead.
Jessica Helfand
A wonderful column and you should all be reading it daily.
Ellen McGirt
Thank you.
Jessica Helfand
Design Observer's executive producer is Betsy Vardell. Our theme music is from Nigel Stanford's album Solar Echos. Additional Music by Mike Errico. Julie Subrin edits the show. Our associate producer is Adina Karp. And the executive producer of this podcast is Blake Eskin of Noun and Verb Rodeo.
Ellen McGirt
Come back next time when we'll be talking to Deb Willis about looking at history. See you then.
Ellen McGirt
So better yet go to our website, designobserver.com, where you can sign up for our email newsletter to keep up with everything that's going on at Design Observer.
Jessica Helfand
Here's a little thing going on at Design Observer: I just published a new book of essays with Thames and Hudson. I wrote it during the pandemic. I wrote it with a not present but ever present co-author Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose canonical essay on the subject of self-reliance is at the core of this book. My essays accompany it and they are about something I talk about often and write about even more often, which is what it means to have a daily creative practice. You might find some use in this book. You could find out more about it at Design Observer dot com.
Ellen McGirt
If you like what you heard today, please follow this podcast. You can find The Design of Business | The Business of Design, on Apple podcast, Spotify, or however you listen.
Jessica Helfand
And if you already follow us. Thank you. You're what we podcast people used to call subscribers. Now go and tell your friends about us. Or even better, go to Apple podcast and rate us, which is a great way to let other people know how and where to find the show
Ellen McGirt
A DBBD dot Design Observer dot com. That's D-B-B-D for The Design of Business | The Business of Design, you'll find one hundred more conversations with all kinds of interesting people about business design and so much more.
Jessica Helfand
And if you enjoy today's conversation with Jan Diehm, check out our conversation from last season with the journalism scholar Alissa Richardson. Great insights and a wonderful teacher and writer and thinker. You can find it along with all the others that Ellen mentioned, at DBBD dot Design Observer dot com,
Ellen McGirt
Yes you will. And please consider subscribing to RaceAhead, my regular column on race and leadership at Fortune dot com slash get race ahead.
Jessica Helfand
A wonderful column and you should all be reading it daily.
Ellen McGirt
Thank you.
Jessica Helfand
Design Observer's executive producer is Betsy Vardell. Our theme music is from Nigel Stanford's album Solar Echos. Additional Music by Mike Errico. Julie Subrin edits the show. Our associate producer is Adina Karp. And the executive producer of this podcast is Blake Eskin of Noun and Verb Rodeo.
Ellen McGirt
Come back next time when we'll be talking to Deb Willis about looking at history. See you then.
