In this episode, our Head of Story, Leah Sarich, talks to Dr. Geoffrey Ching about the power of storytelling to create impact in the world, her move from broadcast journalism to venture capital and how journalism is essential to our democracy.

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Listen to the podcast here.

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Time Stamps:

01:39-03:13 - Christopher Plummer - one of Leah’s favorite stories - and her love of the variety of stories she helped tell throughout her career.

04:05-04:42 - Summary of what Leah does, as explained to a five-year-old.

04:43-05:31 - Leah’s journey into journalism and broadcast journalism.

05:47-06:56 - How Leah found her way into health journalism.

07:01-08:04 - What kept Leah in health reporting and “news you can use”.

08:15-09:49 - What is unique about health journalism? Leah loves the knowledge translation - specifically the challenge and building trust.

09:50-11:00 - How to maintain trust in journalism despite the pace mandatory in the field. Leah states that getting it right and taking time to understand how to best convey the information accurately to a lay audience.

11:00-13:08 - How do you make health stories most compelling and relatable? Leah asks for a patient from a study/with a certain disease so that she has the patient's perspective, and the common challenge of translating expert jargon.

13:08-14:31 - Why it is helpful for a journalist to stay on the same beat for a long time - the body of knowledge for a beat is quite useful to do journalism efficiently and effectively.

14:31-16:08 - “I like to say that I specialize in relationship building” - the importance of building relationships in storytelling.

16:09-19:11 - Leah reveals the pivot that she took, like other journalists have done, into communications. The twist? Her pivot was into venture capital. Leah tells the story of how and why she joined Thin Air Labs.

19:12-20:47 - What does Leah do with Thin Air Labs? Leah shares the importance of storytelling with the companies and investors under the Thin Air Labs umbrella and in the innovation ecosystem.

20:48-22:22 - What’s a story to a pitch? Leah shares some news you can use when it comes to making a pitch golden.

22:23-24:43 - Why emotion when data is so important? Leah reiterates the importance of emotion in remembering start-ups and their pitches.

24:48-26:46 - Leah details her feelings about “going over to the dark side” in communications, and the role of scalability of impact in her decision process.

27:01-29:09 - Leah’s love of learning makes it easy for her to absorb the new language of VC, despite the remarkable differences between VC and broadcast journalism jargon.

29:09-31:13 - Where are young journalists going?

31:27-33:00 - How can journalists make the leap into VC to help companies make scalable impact more efficiently and effectively?

33:00-34:15 - What is the difference between a communicator and a marketer? Leah explains how the two specialists can target different outcomes, but a good story always wins.

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