People

Veteran journalist Stuart Watson started his ManListening podcast after his wife told him he was absolutely not an “empathic listener.”

PEOPLE EAR OPENER

Veteran journalist Stuart Watson’s podcast challenges men to drop the mic and let women say their piece

BY GREG LACOUR

AFTER FIVE EPISODES of his ManListening podcast, veteran Charlotte journalist Stuart Watson arrived at a stage common to anyone’s self-funded, self-driven venture: He was ecstatic about what he’d done and the enthusiastic reception from friends and loved ones—and horri ed at the possibility that his passion project, which he’d worked on for the better part of two years, would lose money. When we speak in early February, he struggles to focus on the idea that animated the project in the rst place: that women have stories to tell, and men need to learn to shut their traps and let women tell them.

“You have to know why it is you’re doing something,” he says. “I’ve had to say, ‘I’m doing this because I genuinely want to learn to listen better.’ Once I’ve committed to doing that, at the end of the year, if I’ve spent a whole lot of time and energy and money, and all I’ve done is lose money, I have to be at peace with it. As soon as I go down that path, I’ve sold myself out. The reason I’m doing this is that it’s the right thing to do.”

ManListening—it’s a play on “mansplaining”—launched in early January with its rst full episode, a 52-minute conversation with “Tina,” a recovering crack addict, “about life and death and new life.” Subsequent episodes relay similar stories of growth through di culty: a Nashville teacher who persisted through school gun violence; the struggles of a fellow investigative reporter over a long career. Watson, who turns 61 this month, has driven that kind of road himself. He was a xture for 16 years at WCNC-TV, where he worked as the station’s primary investigative reporter. He specialized in breaking stories about high-pro le gures and their nancial excesses, like the $1.6 million Waxhaw mansion of Elevation Church pastor Steven Furtick and the more than $1 million pay-andbene ts package of former United Way of Central Carolinas CEO Gloria Pace King.

In 2015, the station red him as part of a newsroom downsizing, and he turned to more personal work, including a 2016 documentary that traced his own history as an adopted child and recovering alcoholic. (He’s been sober since the early 1990s.) Watson jokingly refers to himself as a “media mogul” but in reality owns a “very, very, very, very tiny media company,” he told me. “And this is the rst product.” When he decides on others, he says, he’ll share the details.