Start Here / Never Stop Podcast: Jeff Mittelstadt '12 (M.A.)

This is the Start Here Never Stop podcast with Dean Susan King of the UNC School of Media and Journalism.

00:00:14 Dean Susan King: Hello, I'm Susan King, the Dean of the School of Media and Journalism with one of our Park Fellows, Jeff Mittelstadt, Class of 2012. And congratulations on a master's degree from our school with that Park Fellow denomination. Pretty nice, huh?

00:00:28 Jeff Mittelstadt: It was absolutely amazing from day one.

00:00:32 King: And why would you say it was amazing in one sentence?

00:00:35 Mittelstadt: In one sentence? Opportunity in terms of the people that I got to learn from, but also the connection with the surrounding community, especially when you're going into documentary journalism. The surrounding community is very open to everybody who works in the School of Journalism.

00:00:54 King: I can see that it really changed your projection. I could tell that when I read your bio. And the reason I asked you for one sentence was when I look at what you've done over the last number of years – and you're not very old – I thought this is the Renaissance man.

00:01:10 Mittelstadt: Well, thank you.

00:01:11 King: You've done energy, you have done sustainability, you have done green door. You're now a documentary producer. That's a pretty amazing, eclectic kind of career.

00:01:21 Mittelstadt: Well, thank you, but it all connects to me. When I was a kid, I fell in love with wildlife. And from that point on, I wanted to understand human behavior and how we interact with the environment and wildlife, and just different people's opinions and different people's perspectives and life stories. So it all connected to me.

00:01:42 King: But when you got out of school, you went in a more traditional track rather than just a storytelling track in a way, right?

00:01:48 Mittelstadt: When I got out of journalism school?

00:01:50 King: Well, no. Before you came here and then put a cap on it with the direction, which is why I think you said opportunity is the first word that came to your mind with Park. But you worked in that environmental space is the way I would put it.

00:02:03 Mittelstadt: Yes. Yes. Well, I was a psychology major in undergrad, and I was interested in how humans behave, how we see things. And then I realized that I needed to connect that with what I love, which is wildlife and the environment. And so when, I went to school for environmental management, resource, economics and policy, worked for the EPA's Office of Inspector General.

00:02:29 King: See what I mean? The EPA's inspector general and you've become a documentary producer. Wow, you know.

00:02:36 Mittelstadt: So and then went and realized I needed to understand another stakeholder group. And so I went into business in order to do that and did some consulting and worked in green building, like you said, and sustainable manufacturing, but the whole thing throughout all of that was understanding different perspectives. And how do you bring people together who have a different view of the world to find solutions to the world's problems?

00:02:59 King: And then you wanted to bring it to them up close and personal, rather than, I guess, just through a policy, huh?

00:03:04 Mittelstadt: Correct. And I felt like I really like working with people in a room together. How do I work with people who aren't here with me? So how do I learn how to communicate issues and different people's perspectives to the masses, if you will.

00:03:21 King: So when did it come to you that you actually defined for yourself that you wanted to be a documentary producer out of this? I mean, was it the storyteller gene?

00:03:31 Mittelstadt: Yes, that's one piece of it. And quite frankly, I was getting a little sick of being in offices and boardrooms and cubicles. And so, I mean, I spent a good six to eight months thinking about, "OK, how do I utilize everything that I've gotten to experience and gotten to learn and apply it to something that would just make me extremely happy every day that I got up?" And after all that research, I came to documentary journalism.

00:04:01 King: And what I love is the name of the company that you created. You are the founder and the president of WildSides.

00:04:09 Mittelstadt: Yes, I think it's catchy, I'm told. And it really, really brings in the idea that we concentrate on human wildlife conflict issues, but all the sides of those issues, so every stakeholder's perspective.

00:04:26 King: And when you make a film, and I want you to tell me just a, you know, a few minutes about that. What motivates you most? Sort of how it will fit into a larger question that you're dealing with? That it's just a good story? How do you think that? Because you do have this policy background, so I get the sense that you want to motivate people by really exposing them to things in a way that's very engaging.

00:04:48 Mittelstadt: Yeah. One of the things that I always tell people is just that – one thing that's bothered me throughout my life is that we've become more and more polarized as a society. And what's the one thing that really can grab anybody's attention, regardless of what they think about an issue? And that's human stories and human interest stories that relate somehow to that person. What I'm finding on the red wolf issue, for example, is that there are similarities among people on either side of the issue. And that if we can show those people's personal stories and their perspectives, that people on the other side of the issue might connect to that story still.

00:05:35 King: So tell us a little bit about this red wolf work. You are producing a documentary, but you're actually producing more than one documentary. So tell me a little bit about that.

00:05:44 Mittelstadt: OK. Yeah, it's going to come back to the journalism school. Come back to here is that in March of 2011, was the first time that I filmed on the red wolf issue for a class here at UNC-Chapel Hill. And I've been filming with people on all sides of the issues, so red wolf biologists, advocates, and wildlife advocates, hunters, trappers, landowners, people who don't want the red wolf around and people who have dedicated their life to the red wolf. And I have gone down to northeastern North Carolina to cover the red wolf issue since then. And the one thing about that issue is that predators are always very divisive. Wolves are always very divisive. And it was tough at first to find those similarities. But the more time I spent with them, which is what I learned here in the multimedia program especially, is that the more time you spend with somebody, the more you get into their story, and then that way, you really find those similarities across differences. And one way to explain that is that a red wolf biologist, who has dedicated his life to red wolves and saving red wolves, grows his own food for his family, goes out and hunts one or two deer every year for venison for his family, and I was sitting down with a hunter and trapper and told that hunter and trapper that the red wolf biologist had just gone out to hunt for deer. And he stopped and he just paused and he looked at me and he said, "He hunts for venison for his family?" I said, "Yeah. So what do you think about the red wolf program?" And this is a red wolf biologist who has dedicated his life to saving the red wolves. But it's that kind of pause when you find a similarity on different sides that really has motivated me to do these stories. So those stories include the overall conflict of red wolves showing all their perspectives. The Fish and Wildlife Service federal agency is doing an evaluation of whether or not the red wolf recovery program will even continue. That's due in September, so we're covering that. There are three lawsuits against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by wildlife advocacy groups challenging the Fish and Wildlife Services management of the red wolf program. I'm doing a story on a hunter and trapper and the transference of hunting traditions from generation to generation. And then the more urgent story, because of timing that I'm working on right now, is that a red wolf biologist was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) in June. And once he was diagnosed, he asked me to tell his story.

00:08:43 King: And so his ability to even talk is going to be minimized at a certain point.

00:08:47 Mittelstadt: Yes, he cannot speak anymore.

00:08:50 King: So it sounds like you're not trying to come out and tell people the truth of the story. You're trying to reflect all the different perspectives on it, as you say in these very things. That people see a bigger story, not just your point of view.

00:09:04 Mittelstadt: Definitely not just my point of view. We try to keep WildSides out of the points of view. Our job is to tell the points of view to to provide transparency and to translate data and legal issues so that the regular person on the street can understand them.

00:09:23 King: OK, but you yourself probably want to keep these wolves still roaming somewhere, right? You've got a passion for them or?

00:09:33 Mittelstadt: I have a passion for wildlife, and it's really important that I keep what I want out of it because I don't live there. I want humans to be able to live in concert with wildlife. But there are a lot of different things that come into play. And so I really try to just take myself out of it now. Hunters and trappers when I first went down there, they didn't trust journalists. And so they asked me, "What are you doing here?" And I said, "Well, I'm a wildlife person. But you have a story that I don't know or understand yet that the world needs to know and understand if we're ever going to figure out solutions to these issues."

00:10:15 King: So I don't wanna go into objectivity, but I'm a journalist and I get what you say. Because sometimes you're driven by more than anything to help people understand other people and to make decisions because that's what's great about democracy. So tell me what brought you to that, or how you think of yourself in there. What is your own describer for yourself in this, you know, kind of divisive debate, as you say?

00:10:39 Mittelstadt: Definitely. I think that this is going to be a long-term project. I think that if we can start to get people to see each other as people on either side of these kinds of issues, and to see those similarities that we'll start having more conversations that are not as polarized. So I'm hoping that in the future, what's going to come from this is that we'll learn from this project from the red wolf issue, so that we can better manage predator-human relationships going forward. And so I really do think that if we take the time to tell all the stories and to share data as well, and research and do so in an engaging manner that connects to people who might not be interested in wildlife at all, that we'll be able to get to that point where we can have solutions that are less divisive. That's my hope at least.

00:11:39 King: So I'm going for nice philosophical moment to one that's kind of practical. Some of my students are going to be listening to this.

00:11:45 Mittelstadt: Definitely.

00:11:46 King: How are you making money?

00:11:48 Mittelstadt: Well, that's a great question. So far, everything's been done out of my own savings. We are in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign right now, and we are in the middle of applying for grants. And going forward, there are opportunities for not only grants, but also for sponsorship of pages, but you really have to look at who's sponsoring each of those pages. That's a longer-term project in and of itself.

00:12:23 King: But you're doing what you love now, and that pays pretty well. So the last thing is people think out there, "Hmm, master's degree. Should I get a master's degree?" It was a pivot point for you. So what would you say to people about taking two years off and following something like this?

00:12:42 Mittelstadt: If you love it, do it. I mean, for me, I spent those two years thinking of it as work. So even in my application to come here, it was, "I'm going to create a nonprofit." I didn't have the name yet, but I'm going to create a nonprofit that covers human wildlife conflict issues from every perspective. And that was part of my application when I applied. And I wanted to create the business plan for that. And I incorporated creating the business plan for that. I incorporated learning obviously how to do documentary journalism into everything that I did during those two years. I never really thought of it as taking two years off. It was a job to me, but a job that I loved so.

00:13:23 King: And it was a way to turn your career from EPA to director of sustainability at college to inspector general into a future that you could define.

00:13:36 Mittelstadt: Yeah, exactly.

00:13:38 King: That's pretty worth it.

00:13:39 Mittelstadt: Absolutely worth it.

00:13:40 King: I’m going to end by just saying yes, siree. Jeff Mittelstadt, 2012 Park Fellow, Renaissance man. Thanks for being with me.

00:13:47 Mittelstadt: Thank you so much.

00:13:51 King: So it’s Mittel. Mittelstadt, I guess, yeah.

00:13:53 Mittelstadt: Mittelstadt.

00:13:54 King: Mittelstadt.

00:13:55 Mittelstadt: And we Americanized it a little bit. My dad still says Mittelstadt.