I was asked to do something very familiar to lovers of All Things Nieman: “Give readers a sense of how you can use podcasts to do true narrative that includes elements of classic storytelling (introduces characters, makes use of scenes, or immerses listeners in not just sound bites but a story).” 

After much typewriting (nod to Truman Capote), I realized that this is just… not… my… thing. There are plenty of good purveyors of this advice in the public radio world already. They give seminars and talks. They have staff. They have marketing teams, nice hair and therefore aspirations to television careers. They win awards, and even have time to accept them.

Clark Boyd

I have none of that, but especially not the time or the hair (these may not be unrelated).  So, I’m going to do the only valuable thing that 14 years of daily deadline journalism have taught me. Quit fighting the assignment, turn the damn thing on its head, and see what happens…

Great radio does not equal great podcasting. There, I said it.

Let me explain. All of those wonderful things I was asked to talk about above? They do make for great radio. More specifically, they make for great long-form, narrative radio. That’s the kind of radio many of us dreamed of doing when we started the business, before so much of it, for reasons both economic and stylistic, became four and a half minute chunks of airtime filled with cribbed wire copy and bad phone tape. Both the great radio and the mediocre get turned, often auto-magically, into mp3 files. Those files are then shoved up on a server somewhere for you to download to your PodBerry or whatever.

And this, they will tell you, is podcasting. Or maybe they’ll be a little more truthful and call it “time-shifted” radio. I sometimes call it “recycled” radio.

Don’t get me wrong. Recycling is good for the audio planet. It’s great that you can stuff hours of potentially quality stuff onto a minuscule machine, encase it in a sweat-proof nano-sheath, and then listen to Diane Rehm while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. (Remember, the p-o-d in podcasting stands for “Portable On Demand.”)

But that’s it? Seriously? That’s all we are going to do with this amazing new medium for engaging unsuspecting audiences in unexpected ways?

When I started producing a weekly technology podcast four and half years ago, I wanted to take a different approach. Not radically different, but different. Sure, I wanted to base the podcast around technology stories I had been working on for the show, but I did not just want to run those pieces one after another without doing all those narrative tricks that help create a more cohesive, and above all more personal, listening experience.

First, I decided to host the podcast myself. At the time, nobody knew what a podcast was, so nobody stopped me. The first few episodes were, as you can imagine, rough. But I quickly learned some tricks. Podcast listeners engage with the material in a radically different way than broadcast listeners. My podcast audience, for example, is much more engaged with the technology content. That means I could tell the stories differently, and go places that I couldn’t on the broadcast. And that’s when the second big revelation hit me: the time limits of radio were gone.

I experimented. I started including longer versions of interviews that I had done for the radio pieces, going into greater depth with the subject matter. That proved popular with listeners. I shunned the original overly scripted leads and instead opted to make the intros more personal and more in-depth. As I recorded my intros, I would think to myself: you’re sitting at the bar, and the person next to you asks, “So, what are you working on? Why?” Listeners loved that too. I started to get emails saying, “The thing I love most about your podcast? I feel like you’re having a conversation with me, not talking at thousands of other listeners.”

Bingo. That’s solid gold to those of us who care about audio storytelling, because it means the listeners are really engaged with the tale we’re telling. They’re taking it personally. So personally that they started suggesting original ideas for interviews, segments and stories without being prompted. Soon, I realized that every podcast episode should have a podcast-exclusive interview, preferably one suggested by listeners.

In fact, I now like to say that the podcast is as much the listeners as it is mine. I’ve even started a new series focused on tech podcast listeners and the amazing jobs or hobbies they have. Talk about some natural storytellers! All I have to do is remember to just stay out their way as much as possible.

So, is this great podcasting?

Who knows?

I do know that others here at The World have taken my lead, and are producing some quite original online work that combines all of the elements of great storytelling with the best in beat reporting. Just check out my colleague Jeb Sharp’s podcast, called “How We Got Here.” Each week, she takes an in-depth look at the history behind the international news headlines. Also, Patrick Cox does an original podcast on global language that’s really worth a listen. It’s called “The World in Words.”

“So what?” you say. “What’s so big about a few disgruntled hacks who get a big head, and decide they can host their own revue shows off Off-Broadway style?”
 
Well, if you’re a public radio listener, you might just be hearing more of that informal style and content. Podcasters here at The World are now actively contributing what was once considered only “podcast material” to the Big Show. Apparently, the show’s producers like the tone we’re striking in our podcasts, and find the content “quirky, yet compelling.”

So maybe, in a real twist, recycled podcasts are now making great radio?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I will say this: here at The World, the feeling among the podcasters themselves is that the process of creating these different kinds of audio offerings is making us more creative storytellers. Our pieces for the show are increasingly written in ways other than the standard “read copy/play tape/read copy/play tape” format. (For someone else bucking the trend, sometimes beautifully, check out Nate DiMeo’s podcast, called “the memory palace.”)

That’s a direct result of having space in the audio sandbox to play around a bit. It’s strange, and a bit sad, to think that some of the finest audio storytellers aren’t taking more advantage of the freedom that sandbox can offer. I even hear things like “podcasting is so 2006.” We make great radio, the thinking goes, so just let the software slap the audio online and be done with it. 

Sure, it’s easy, in the same way that the Dark Side of the Force is easy.

The truth is that audio storytellers who do that are missing a great opportunity. And the void that is left is being filled by print and pixel outlets such as Slate, The Guardian and The Economist. Which are, ironically, some of the best places for creative audio storytellers to look for work these days.

Clark Boyd covers technology stories for Public Radio International’s The World and was a 2006-07 Knight Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each of his weekly podcasts averages 50,000 to 60,000 listeners per month.

Clark Boyd

Let me set one thing straight: I don’t believe that audio is necessarily the best way to tell a story. But I’ve spent more than a decade in this beast called radio, or “the theatre of the mind,” as it was described to me when I started, and I still harbor warm and fuzzy feelings for it.

Truth be told, based on most of what I hear these days, I have to call BS on that “theatre of the mind” thing. I find very little theatrical about twenty-second clips of experts (sorry, “pundits”) interspersed with 40 second bursts of some whiny reporter (sorry, “personality”) reading his or her all-too-precious copy. Repeat that formula in four minute intervals for an hour or two, add a “host” with a “younger voice,” and you’ve got yourself a whole public radio show!

Or, better and cheaper: just turn on a microphone on, “open the lines,” and let idiots spout invective and childish name calling for hours on end. That’s called commercial radio.

Despite my cynicism, I do think that audio narrative is better (or at least more fun) for some stories. Here’s a list of reasons, in no particular order, you should consider adding audio to a narrative news project. Bear in mind I see the following through my own public radio prism:

Anthony Cordesman. If you’re going to fill a radio piece with pundits, you might as well get somebody who “gives good tape.” Cordesman, an expert on military affairs, does that, and more. It’s not just the gravitas and cadence of his sound bite, it’s also the hint of disdain for the stupid question he’s just been asked. Delicious. You can see him quoted in the NYT a million times, but until you hear him, you don’t truly understand.

Animals. Sure, television can give you cuddly videos of pregnant pandas, and the Internet is awash with LOLcats using bad grammar. But only with sound can you sit in traffic in the depths of summer, your hybrid’s air conditioning broken, and let your mind wander to the great frozen north via the snuffle and shuffle of, say, cute little harp seals across the Canadian ice. Thanks, radio! [Downside: in the theatre of the mind, it’s often hard to tell whether those animals are procreating or fighting. But then again, that’s why the whiny reporter is there.]

The audio “stand up.” This has pretty much been outlawed in American public radio, but it’s alive and well elsewhere, particularly in the BBC. It would make for a great drinking game: every time you hear an audio piece begin with unidentifiable sound, then the phrase, “I’m standing here,” you drink. My favorite of all time was a variant which featured the muffled rumblings of someone walking and huffing and puffing, followed by “I’m climbing a giant mountain of Romanian trash just outside Satu Mare.” Indeed. Drink.

Going live. There is nothing that can beat the electricity of going live, although in public radio we often try to avoid it. What if we stumble? What if we hit the wrong tape? What if, horrors, we sound human? Instead, we spend hours crafting scripts that feign the sound of spontaneity (down to writing “uhm” in the script!), and even more hours pre-recording interviews and then cutting them to make them sound “as live” as possible. But when you hear 3 ½ minutes of an anchor and a guest going live on a breaking news story, the urgency of that conversation makes you sit up and listen. And actually care. More, please.

Uighurs. Sure, it is fun to spell it for print, but trust me, it is even more fun to say. Try it yourself: <WEE-gurz>. This is also true of the Hmong <MUNG>, the Chechens <CHEH-chuns>, and a few other beleaguered world minorities that take up an inordinate amount of airtime on public radio. I don’t mean to make light of their particular plights. Giving far-flung people a voice, literally, is one of the most amazing things that radio can do. When you actually hear someone tell his or her story, in his or her own voice, you can hear when that voice breaks with fear. You can hear the four pack-a-day habit. It’s hard to get that kind of immediacy on the printed page.

Music. A tune can sell a story like almost nothing else. It’s a joy to get use it on an almost daily basis. Of course, it can backfire. From an actual email sent to The World: “You play loud, obnoxious, repetitive percussive music for stupid people, and I invariably turn the radio off and miss the program.” Oh, Margot LePine, you make me want to listen to Hüsker Dü with the volume set at 11.

Geeks and gear can take you there. Audiophiles love their stuff; we cherish both our mics and our methods. I once saw a sound engineer cover a $1,500 microphone in a thin piece of plastic, seal it with rubber bands, and then submerge it in a tub of water, all in a bid to capture the sound of loud music being piped through that water. Why? We wanted to illustrate how fish “hear.” It took five hours to get it right. At least, we hope we got it right. We’re not fish, after all.

You can release your inner Hemingway. I suppose this last entry is more of a “how-to” tip—my nod to the craft of writing for radio, the current “rules” of which are both blessings and curses. The latest from the primer: Never start a piece with sound (hackneyed). Use one thought per sentence. Include active verbs whenever possible, and try to keep it subject, verb, object. For those of you used to having free reign with dependent clauses, this should be fun. I suggest re-reading Hemingway, or going into video production instead.

Much of this list is tongue-in-cheek. But each item has an element of truth. At its best, audio narrative doesn’t just immerse you in a place and time, but does so using the voices that best know and understand that place and time. There’s a saying in my business (slightly outdated now in the digital world): “let the tape tell the story.” If you judiciously apply some of the ideas above, you’ll find that the mediating effect of the whiny “personality” can be minimized, and you can allow the listener to get that much closer to the story. My advice to all young radio reporters: stay the hell out of the way as much as possible.  

I would be interested to hear about efforts by non-radio folks to incorporate the spirit of audio narrative into their work.

Clark Boyd covers technology stories for Public Radio International’s The World and was a 2006-07 Knight Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.