Kasey and the Troubled Teen

BY Kimmy | June 12, 2025 | Student Writings

Over five weeks of Spring 2025 semester, Pushkin Industries senior producer and host Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey took selected Berkeley undergraduates through the process of building an audio story — from story-hunting, sourcing, reporting, and researching to drafting and editing. Drawing on his experience making chart-topping narrative shows Revisionist History and The Last Archive and working with authors such as Jill Lepore and Malcolm Gladwell, Naddaff-Hafrey taught his students how to look for stories and build them into full podcast episodes. Workshop participants learned to build audio stories from the ground up, and left the workshop having made a short audio story of their own.

Kimmy Coleman was a student in the podcasting workshop, and she produced this affecting story about her sister Kasey’s difficult experience in a youth treatment facility.

Read the Kasey and the Troubled Teen transcript here.