There are some things most people don’t want to talk about, because it’s uncomfortable or it pushes their emotional limits. Well that’s usually where things start for me and my long time collaborators at IJB and TVO. It has become the hallmark of our work together.
A few years ago Robert Cribb, IJB director and my longtime friend and colleague suggested we should do a podcast about doctor assisted death. As a creator and showrunner, I did a double take. I knew it would be very difficult. People don’t like talking about death. But that’s why we went for it. We started with the most basic question. What would you do if someone you love asked you to help them die? The Ultimate Choice was the resulting podcast series. The IJB team’s incredible access allowed us to get deep into the lives of Michael and Ann to understand their motivations. Together we created an award-winning podcast which allows the listener to enter a world they might avoid discussing even with their own families.
With Arachnid, my second major collaboration with IJB we dove right back into another world most people shy away from, the proliferation of illegal child sexual abuse material. Every day tens of millions of images of child sexual abuse are circulating on global online platforms. To most people it’s a hidden world. They might think it has nothing to do with them. And yet the proliferation of these images is getting worse every day, as AI technology and deep fakes create an ever-expanding epidemic of online child sex exploitation that affects more and more kids.
One key question focused our storytelling. What if the worst thing that ever happened to you plays out every day, countless times, on anonymous computer screens all over the world?
None of these series would be possible without key relationships and the courage of the people at the heart of these stories. They live it each day. As journalists who spend months and months crafting this work, we have the unique privilege to meet incredible people. They allow us to sit with them, talk with them and sometimes cry with them as they confront their own trauma and share their stories. They push away their own pain because they want to allow others to understand how they are held hostage by these disturbing images in spite of available technology which can detect and remove them.
Our team travelled to Winnipeg multiple times to immerse ourselves in the work of the Canadian Center for Child Protection. They help survivors in their long shot fight against the tech companies who continue to enable the global trade in child sex abuse imagery. These are moments I will never forget. They drove the creativity to create the Arachnid series with the artful talent of Bruce Edwards, who wove together the voices in a superb mix that compels us to keep listening.
Host Robert Cribb visit to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) in Winnipeg
Our series is named Arachnid for a reason. It’s the name of the mother of all webcrawlers built by the team in Winnipeg. We sat in a room to see Arachnid do its work in real time. There are moments in life where time stands still. This was one of them as we watched the horrific tik tok of hundreds of thousands of downloads of key series of images that were harming some of the survivors like Sage, who was willing to participate in the Arachnid series. Sage’s story inspired the Arachnid technology which you can hear about in episode three.
That day I was so struck by trying to find a way to allow the listener to “hear” how Arachnid works that I reached out to some key creative collaborators to help us create the soundscape of Arachnid. Michael Corey, a senior data journalist based in Minnesota helped us analyze the massive amounts of data shared by Lloyd Richardson from the Canadian Center for Child Protection. So when you listen to episode three, which takes you into the amazing creation of Arachnid you will hear the data sonification come to life in a unique way.
Music is another key creative signature of our series. The original music is composed by Allison Leyton Brown. The original themes and compositions of The Ultimate Choice and Arachnid are as vital as the words we hear. Allison’s unique ability to translate the environment we are trying to create into music allows the listener to navigate challenging environments and truly come to understand the emotional depth of our stories.
We know our listeners are engrossed in the narrative. Turns out once they start listening they generally listen through the entire episodes, which is quite something given that it’s something most people don’t want to talk about.
Thanks for listening,
Susanne Reber
Creator and Executive Producer of Arachnid and The Ultimate Choice
The Investigative Journalism Bureau is a non-profit, impact-driven newsroom telling deeply-reported stories in the public interest.