This newsletter lives on! We'll be using this space to share information about the best audio documentary storytelling from NPR and our station partners around the country. Today, we have the newest series "Buffalo Extreme" from the NPR podcast Embedded.
What happens after a racist mass shooting in your neighborhood? On May 14, 2022, the world changed for residents of Buffalo, New York, when a white man approached the Jefferson Street Tops supermarket and started shooting. He murdered ten and injured three people, almost all Black. That same day, teenagers and children — members of a Black cheer team called BASE — were at their gym around the corner.
"Buffalo Extreme" is a 3-part story where NPR hands the mic to the girls, their moms and coaches as they navigate the complicated path to recovery in the year after.
Episode 1: BASE Ayanna "Yani" Williams Gaines is the coach and founder of Buffalo All-Star Extreme, a Black competitive cheerleading and dance team from Buffalo, New York. Williams Gaines started the gym as a space for Black girls to feel safe and to thrive in the predominantly white world of cheer. In the wake of the massacre, feeling like a target, Coach Yani and her cheer families are faced with the challenge of making sure their cheerleaders feel safe and confident, on and off the stage.
Illustration by Kristen Uroda
Episode 2: Do Good, Get Good How do you make sense of something terrible that's happened—and move forward? From the cheer gym to the therapy office, we follow the parents, coaches and kids of Buffalo All-Star Extreme in the year after the Tops massacre. The mass shooting set back the cheerleaders' training schedule by months, and now competition is just weeks away. After everything that happened to her community, Coach Yani wants her team to win more than ever.
Illustration by Kristen Uroda
Episode 3: Winners It's competition season, and the girls say they're over what happened at the Tops supermarket last year. “I’m fine!” But then the shooter has his sentencing hearing, and those feelings come flooding back. When they hit the stage — they're wobbly. And argumentative. The girls and Coach Yani open up about the hard truth: where they really stand one year later.
Up Next
Our next series in Embedded will premiere in July and is from our friends at NPR's Rough Translationpodcast. "Love Commandos" follows the rise and fall of a group committed to a “love revolution” in India, and the con game they were accused of running against the couples they vowed to help.
Co-hosted by Gregory Warner and author Mansi Choksi, Rough Translation’s approach to international storytelling takes on true crime in this plot-driven limited series. “Love Commandos” draws on years of in-depth reporting by NPR’s longtime India correspondent Lauren Frayer.
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