🤔 Podcasting, Persistence, & Breaking Big Stories w/ Denise Chan

Presented by Podcast Movement Evolutions

👀 We Become What We Give Our Attention To

Your podcast, your creative energy, your ideas—they’re all shaped by what you feed them. If you marinate in noise, in trends, in chasing algorithms, your work will feel hollow. But if you give your attention to depth, to curiosity, to the craft itself, you create something that lasts.

Attention isn’t passive, it’s an investment. Where you place it determines what grows. You want to be a sharper storyteller? Listen to the best. Want to sound more natural behind the mic? Pay attention to the voices that draw you in. Want your podcast to matter? Focus on making something you’d actually want to hear—not just something you hope gets clicks.

Your work is a reflection of what you’ve been paying attention to. Choose wisely.

🎙️ Signal Flow: Denise Chan

Industry game changers and valiant minds share their wisdom, adversities, and paths to innovation.

Denise Chan is a journalist and audio and documentary producer. Denise has produced two of Wondery’s top-charting podcasts on Apple, including the #1 hits Fed Up and Over My Dead Body: Gone Hunting and is the host, lead reporter, and producer for the Wondery podcast Scam Factory. Her investigative documentaries for KCET’s esteemed news show, “SoCal Connected,” have delved into critical issues across various industries, such as recycling, college admissions, cannabis, and law enforcement. Denise’s work has earned a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Investigative Reporting, a Golden Mike Award for Best Television Medical and Scientific Reporting, an LA Press Club Award, and multiple Emmy nominations. She was born and raised in the 626 and is based in Los Angeles.

With Scam Factory, I wore so many hats—writer, producer, host. It’s a lot, but I love it. One minute, I’m reporting, interviewing sources, and building relationships. The next, I’m writing the script, shaping the tone of the show. And then I switch into performance mode, delivering the story the way I want it to be heard. It’s a balancing act, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to have that creative control.

I think one of the biggest surprises for me was discovering who’s really behind scam texts. Like everyone else, I used to just ignore them. But when I learned that thousands of people are trapped in compounds in Myanmar, forced to scam for 14–16 hours a day, it completely changed my perspective. The perpetrators I assumed were criminals were actually victims. That’s when I knew I had to dig deeper.

The story took shape when we met Max and Jane, two people who had just escaped a scam compound. During our interview, Max kept glancing at someone off to the side. After we stopped recording, we found out that person was his older sister, Charlie—who not only helped him escape but had played a much bigger, more complicated role in the entire operation. That’s when we realized we had something huge.

When you’re reporting on something this intense—human trafficking, organized crime, lives on the line—you have to compartmentalize. There were moments in the booth when I had to check myself. Sometimes I’d deliver lines too empathetically, and my EP would stop me: “Denise, you sound too sad here. The scene needs a different energy.” You learn to adjust, to stay in the moment but not let emotion take over.

Podcasting is so intimate—it feels like your best friend whispering a story in your ear. That’s why I got into it. My background is in documentary work, and I’ve done investigative reporting on domestic issues, but this was my first international series. Scam Factory is a global story. It’s about human rights, organized crime, and the direct impact on people around the world—including us.

When we hit the top of the Apple charts, it felt amazing. This series was over two years in the making—so many all-nighters, 3 AM interviews because of time zone differences, countless drafts. But the best part is hearing people say, “I had no idea this was happening.” That means we did our job.

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The biggest fear when starting a new project: energy. There are endless stories out there, but investigative work like this is all-consuming. I have to ask myself, Am I ready? Am I rested? Because once you start, it takes everything. But it’s always worth it.

To refill my creative bucket, I unplug. I travel. I spend time with friends. And most importantly, I give myself permission to do nothing for a little while.

Accolades are nice, but they’re not the goal. What matters is visibility. When a show reaches more people, awareness grows. If Scam Factory makes people think twice before chatting with a stranger online, before trusting a crypto scheme—that’s the real win.

The most valuable skill in nonfiction storytelling is building trust. Our sources escaped scam compounds run by criminal syndicates. They were terrified. They had been through trauma. It was my job to create a space where they felt safe enough to share. That’s not something you can rush—it takes time, patience, and real listening.

Journalism isn’t about gatekeeping. Anyone can be a journalist if they’re willing to do the work. The difference between an average person and a reporter is the willingness to verify, to dig deeper, to fact-check relentlessly. It’s not just about telling a story—it’s about making sure it’s true.

My biggest fear as a journalist is getting something factually incorrect. It’s what keeps me up at night. Every time I put out an investigative piece, I triple-check everything. I go through the script again and again, making sure every detail is right. You have to.

Not every source is happy with how they’re portrayed. That’s a tough reality of this job. My job isn’t to make people look good—it’s to tell the truth. As long as I know we’ve reported the story fairly and accurately, I stand by it.

At the end of the day, storytelling is about responsibility. The best thing Scam Factory can do is make people more aware of the scams in their inboxes, of the human rights crisis behind them, of the global networks at play. If we can get people to pay attention, to think twice, then we’ve done something worthwhile.

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