Miranda Kennedy for Vox.

The Vox Explainer is a newsletter exclusively for Vox Members. We are sharing a sneak peek into the latest edition in which the Today, Explained team takes us along on a reporting trip to Chicago for the 2024 Democratic National Convention. To get access of future versions of the Vox Explainer and other member benefits, become a Vox Member today.

Hey there, Vox Members! 

I’m Miranda Kennedy, executive producer of Vox’s daily news podcast, Today, Explained. I just got back from a trip to Chicago for the DNC. I traveled there for the week of festivities with a small podcast team: host Noel King and producer Hady Mawajdeh. We’d planned to attend well before Vice President Kamala Harris was named to the top of the ticket; originally, we wanted to report on the protests against the war in Gaza and President Joe Biden’s problems with Black voters. Well, when we got there, we found that both of those issues are still very alive and active for Democrats — even now that Kamala is the Democrats’ candidate for the top job. 

You can listen to the Today, Explained episodes from the DNC here. 

—Miranda Kennedy, executive producer of Today, Explained

FIELD NOTES

WITH MIRANDA KENNEDY & TODAY, EXPLAINED

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18

5:40 am ET: Catch a Lyft ride to DCA airport in Washington, DC. Being DC-based, both Today, Explained co-host Noel King and I had very little choice in our flights, due to the overwhelming demand for DC-Chicago routes ahead of the convention’s start. (It was the same on the way back, too!) Producer Hady Mawajdeh was traveling from Dallas, and he had only marginally more choice. It was a packed convention! 

9 am CT: Arriving at my destination in northwest Chicago, I check out my gear. I do not usually do the work of a producer, but our team is lean and mean for this convention, so I’ve prepped by digging out my fuzzy microphone from my daughter’s playroom where it's been living for the last several years, since she discovered how much fun it is to play with the “dead cat” (as audio people call it). I double- and triple-check my battery supply for my recorder.  

3 pm CT: Back in Dallas, Hady spends the afternoon prepping for the trip. As the lead/coordinating producer, he needs to bring a huge amount of gear with him. For the delegate roundtable we’re taping on Monday alone, he needs four mics and mic stands, cables, recorders, and extras for when something goes wrong. He’s been working with our audio engineering department for weeks to get and test all the right equipment. He even made a TikTok displaying his complicated gear-assembling project. 

Hady's full gear outfit for the DNC. Hady Mawajdeh for Vox.

MONDAY, AUGUST 19

7:40 am CT: Noel arrives, having woken up “before God and the birds,” as she put it, to be able to fly into convention central in time for Monday’s reporting. She takes an L train to her hotel, dumps her bag, and rushes back out with her equipment to meet me. 

9:30 am CT: Noel and I meet at Chicago’s Union Park, a quarter-mile from the United Center, where the DNC is being held. Union Park is the starting point for a large coalition of protesters called March on the DNC, who have been planning protests for over a year. The focus of those protests, of course, shifted toward Gaza and away from other issues in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and launch of Israel’s war on Gaza. The park is full of protesters milling around, grabbing water, and listening in to a press conference held by the organizers. Afterward, they march along a city-approved route which has them “in sight and sound” of the convention hall, as they put it, even though Chicago did not allow them to get as close to the DNC itself as they had hoped. 

Scenes from the March on the DNC protest. Miranda Kennedy for Vox.

10:45 am CT: Noel and I cut short our interviews to grab an Uber to a nearby WeWork, where we need to upload some of our reporting, asap. The starting time of the march was a little too late for the Today, Explained radio deadline of 1:30 pm ET. We have to go through our tape and get Noel’s tracking (which is what we call her voice tracks) uploaded to our team back in Washington, who are finalizing Monday’s show. We pass a card reader back and forth between us on a table in our shared workspace, call our engineers in a panic, and quickly approve text for Noel to read, so we can make the deadline. Our show for Monday is a mostly prerecorded interview about the comparisons to Chicago hosting the DNC back in 1968. But we were determined to update it with sounds of the protests on the streets at the convention in 2024. 

1 pm CT: Hady has arrived in Chicago, and we meet him at an office downtown where we are going to conduct a delegate roundtable with three Black women delegates. We have been planning this roundtable for weeks. Hady conducted dozens of pre-interviews with delegates and other convention attendees from all over the country, in order to pick three strong speakers who will represent different age groups and regions of the country while talking through what Kamala Harris’s candidacy represents to them and the future of the US. Noel interviews them at length across a wide table, until the most high-profile of the women — the lieutenant governor of Illinois — has to dart off to a meeting at the convention hall. 

Recording the roundtable. Miranda Kennedy for Vox.

3 pm CT: We make our way back to the WeWork, to go through our tape and make a plan to edit down the interview into an episode size. Also, importantly, to order Sweetgreen. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 20

8:30 am CT: Noel writes and tracks a radio promo for our Wednesday episode from her hotel room before leaving for the day. We need to provide our 120+ radio stations with promotional materials each day for the next day’s show. All of our shows this week are featuring political themes from in and around the DNC, but Tuesday’s show is luckily being produced from DC and New York, featuring Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram asking writer Jonathan Chait about the future of the Democratic Party. 

10 am CT: Noel heads to the L train again, to do some reporting on Chicago’s South Side. This is for Thursday’s episode, which is a look at the complicated relationship between under-resourced Black communities in Chicago and the almost 50,000 migrants who have poured into the city in the last two years. It’s difficult to get people to talk about it, and many of Noel’s potential interview subjects back out at the last minute. To be as nimble as possible, she is walking around the area on her own trying to grab interviews. 

12 pm CT: Hady heads out to interview an older Black couple at their beautiful home on Chicago’s South Side. Because public transportation isn't great in the area, he actually rents a bike and cycles there, with all his gear in his backpack. 

Hady's interview subjects. Hady Mawajdeh for Vox.

4 pm CT: After the day of interviews, we all meet back at the WeWork to go through what we have. We need to finalize the audio for that show before it airs Wednesday. And Noel and Hady need to upload the mountains of interviews and outside “ambi” (or street sound) to our servers so we can write it into radio scripts, which our engineers back home will then make sing for radio and podcast. 

7 pm CT: We consider, and then decide against, attending one of the many convention parties. Tonight we have too much work to do and are too worn out to make it.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21

7 am CT: The team writes and tracks our Wednesday episode and our Thursday promo from our respective hotel rooms, before heading out for another day of reporting on the streets of Chicago. 

12 pm CT: I hop on a city bus to meet Noel at an interview for our Thursday show. We are meeting a Chicago-based Latino academic at a South Side church that has helped shelter migrants. But, due to convention scheduling snafus — the academic is attending some events at the DNC — we are unable to get to the church in time, so we just meet him outside the United Center. The streets are mostly empty, having been closed to most traffic, so all the delegate traffic is foot traffic. The quietest spot we can find for the interview is a bench on the pavement; to get the best audio, I kneel and sit (alternately, in an effort to be less uncomfortable) on the sidewalk and stick my fuzzy microphone in our guest’s face while he tells us about the migrant situation in Chicago. 

8 pm CT: After another afternoon of working together in our Chicago WeWork, I pack up my gear into a messenger bag and head to a watch party at a nearby hotel. This is one of dozens such events each day this week, and it's one that convention-goers are especially hyped up for: It's Walz night! I take the elevator up to the 27th floor of the swanky hotel, into a music-pumping, high-energy penthouse room full of well-dressed, young convention goers. The night’s events are being projected on five or six different TV screens around the room. There was so much excitement for Oprah, but Harris’s running mate Tim Walz was clearly the star of the night.  

It's Walz night! Miranda Kennedy for Vox.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 22

8 am CT: I start editing the work that Noel and Hady have done overnight. Both of them were up much of the night working on the structure for this somewhat complex reported piece on migrants in Chicago. 

12:30 pm CT: Even after several days in Chicago, we still struggle to remember that our deadline here is one hour earlier than it is back home on East Coast time. Due to convention traffic and logistics, I end up having to approve final versions of the show from the L train — and miss my stop in the process!

10 pm ET: We all tune in to Kamala Harris’s late-night speech at the final day of the convention, and wait in vain for Beyonce to show up. Whoever started that rumor definitely fooled my team.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 23

8 am ET: Noel does an interview with her co-host Sean about Harris's speech — the mood in Chicago, the top takeaways, and whether she hit all the notes she needed to. 

1:30 pm ET: The Today, Explained team scrambles to get our final convention-themed show on the air by our radio deadline. Making a quick-turn show is always tricky, because we have so little time to turn the material around. But it's that much tougher when everyone is worn out from a frantic week of convention reporting. We’ll all rest well this weekend. 

The Today, Explained DNC team: me, Noel, and Hady. Miranda Kennedy for Vox.

Listen to Today, Explained episodes from the DNC  here.