I'm Mason Adams.

I'm host of Inside Appalachia.

Inside Appalachia is a radio show and podcast that is by and for and about the folks who live in the Appalachian Mountains.

I found it as a podcast years before I worked for it and began listening.

While I would listen to it while I was milking goats in the mornings So I did a little bit of work within that Appalachia.

Previously, when Jessica Lily was host, I did some reportin on the Mountain Valley pipeline.

Was interviewe by then environmental reporter Brittany Patterson.

I then became one o the first of Inside Appalachia folkways reporter when I applied for the program in 2018.

My first story aired in 2019, and then in 2020, I became co-host of the show along with Caitlin Tan.

Caitlin has eventually left, and now I host Inside Appalachia myself.

the Folkways Reporting Core i a program that started on inside Appalachia that airs on the show.

But it's kind of its own thing as well.

It is essentially a citizen journalist training program where reporters are trained about folklore, about culture that's passed from one person to another.

Some of them are print reporters transitioning to audio.

Others are first time reporters.

We've even had folklorists that then work with an editor and work with our team to produce stories that then air on Inside Appalachia.

Yeah.

I grew up on the Virginia West Virginia border and actually went to school for wildlife but I was drawn to journalism.

It wasn't just a job for me.

It was a calling.

And one of the things I really was into was these bigger picture stories about the Blue Ridge, about Appalachia.

So when I made the decision to leave wildlife biology and get into journalism, it was really important to me to tell regional stories.

Something I've been pursuing throughout my career as a freelancer for newspaper and now with Inside Appalachia.

This is really my dream job in a lot of ways.

It's why I got into journalism.

So there's so much focus on national news.

Everybody follows what's happening in Washington, D.C.

and the big East Coast metros, and that's important.

But Appalachia is a whole region.

And it's people have often been overlooked through the years, or they've been not allowed to tell their own stories.

So inside Appalachia is an avenue to tell Appalachian stories.

With this kind of we have this ethos of all y'all.

We feel like all of these perspectives are important across geography, across race and class and ethnicity and gender.

Everybody's got a story to tell, and we want to tell the authentic story of Appalachia as told by its folks.

And so that's an important platform.

It's an important ethos for us on this show.

And it's it's something we're going to keep doing into the future.

history and institutions and events are all important, but at its heart our show is really about people.

by Appalachians, for Appalachians, about Appalachians.

Really, the essence of a story is about that person and the human experience.

That' how we connect with each other.

You might have a story that seems very detaile and niche, but if that person's enthused about it and excite other people can relate to that and that that grounding it in people helps these storie transcend where they're based, what exactly is happening when we record them?

We look for these transcendent stories about connection and people coming together.

do think Appalachia is different from other regions.

Some of these mountains are older than bones.

There's a famous meme that likes to say.

And these mountains and the the hollers and nooks and crannies shape how people live when it comes to the people.

How do almost argue that Appalachia is maybe th most American region in America?

Because you have it spans the north and south.

It spans the East Coast.

In the Midwest, you have people coming in from all sorts of backgrounds and really, in a lot of ways, the essence of Appalachia.

This story of Appalachia, to me is people bringing, coming in, bringing their culture with them.

And it all kind of boiling together in this melting pot.

I mean, people bringing English and Scots, Irish ballads, mixing it with the African banjo.

That's mountain music, mountain string music.

But it's it's not just that.

It's the Mexican family who's migrating here and bringing their culture with them.

It becomes part of the whole.

Every single Appalachian small town I know has either a good Chinese restaurant or a good Mexican restaurant.

That's part of the story of us two.

And we want to make sure to tell that stor and its richness and fullness.

So the first stories I produced for Inside Appalachia, I found pretty hard to do.

I was just I had done some audio editing and recorded.

I was decent at capturing sound, but telling a story for radio is different than writing it in a newspaper or for a digital magazine.

And I had I was fortunate to have Ibby Caputo as an editor, and she was hard on me, but it made the story so much better.

And I remember thinking o my third or fourth draft like, this is so hard.

I'm putting in so much work and but it made the story so much better and I would not be where I am now if not for my work with Abby.

Early on.

the first story I did for Inside Appalachia was about the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

I've done a few stories since then, and they're difficult to report.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline goes through where I live.

I can see it driving by it every day.

And, you know, honestly the protesters were very strict about their security culture.

They were very careful to let me in and very careful about what they told me.

I feel like those stories were really good and pretty awesome, bu they were hard to get at times.

the high school where I grew u in Allegheny County, Virginia, our rivals growing up, the Allegheny Mountaineers, are rivals where the Covington Cougars, the county has lost population, and those two schools had to consolidate.

That was hard for a lot of folks my age, Gen-X and boomers and and even millennials who were embedded and invested in that rivalry.

I went to the homecoming gam just to see who was coming home, because the alumni who were coming had previously played against each other, and it was a little dodgy when I first got there.

None of the people my age or older are really much younger than me.

Wanted to talk, not because they were afraid of of talking on air, jus they didn't want to stir it up.

There been so many hard feelings about it.

What worked for me though, how I got past that, was just going to the student sectio and just standing near the band, listening to the cheerleaders, watching the color guard, especially the students cheering behind me.

And they were all too happy to talk to me.

So for for some of that initial trouble, I had getting that story, I kind of just floated around.

And once I found the student section, everything opened up for me.

But, you know, you go and talk to the high school kids.

They just want a good, good high school experience.

And also their football team was awesome after they consolidated.

So the kids were stoked, which made me kind of stoked about it too.

That was that was another one of my favorite stories.

Nicole Musgrove di a fantastic story about a punk rocker who took up banjo playing during the pandemic, only to find out his family's connection to a legendary banjo maker and this punk rocker.

Learn how to start making banjos and has taken up the craft.

That was an awesome story.

But for me, the best stories come from just listening and finding stuff that resonates with me.

And that's interesting to me.

If it's interesting to you, it's probably going to be interesting to somebody else.

I hope I'm filling Dave's shoes well, today.

This doesn't come easily for me.

I feel like I have, a face made for radio, but I appreciate the opportunity, and I'm excited for Dave.

Dave, please come back and take back over.