An (unofficial, subjective, I know) ranking of the best 10,000 episodes of NPR’s All Things Considered

Joshua Benton
191 min readOct 24, 2017

Not long ago, I saw this tweet from Mike Janssen, an editor at Current, the outlet that covers public media:

If you’re a journalist, you know how terrible it feels when you get scooped by a competitor who’s working on the same story! As it happens, I’ve been working on my own list for the past few years — spending a few hours each weekend tinkering, reordering, rethinking, confronting my own biases (I met Bob Edwards once). But I’ve been hesitant to publish, wanting to get it perfect before sharing it with the ATC bootleg-trading community.

I know this is a subjective list! Your mileage may vary. But I think the top 20, at least, are acknowledged classics that all fans can agree on (even though we might have vigorous arguments over their ordering!). A few rules I followed in making this list:

  1. I’m using the original East Coast broadcast here — no accounting for overdubs for later rebroadcast.
  2. Weekend ATC counts just as much as the…

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Joshua Benton
Joshua Benton

Written by Joshua Benton

Director of the Nieman Journalism Lab (@niemanlab) at Harvard. Proud Cajun. Cat-sharer with @leahalexis. Building websites since 1994.

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