Radiolab's Abumrad and Krulwich, with dance troupe Pilobus (photo by Lars Topelmann)

Yet as Abumrad and his co-host, Robert Krulwich, stepped out onto the stage for “In the Dark,” I remember thinking how much shows like these do, in fact, change everything. The show, which has been on tour on and off for a little less than a year, takes Radiolab’s  exploratory storytelling mode and expands it with a troupe of dancers, a rock band, and an audio-laden laptop.

I agree with some reviews that the show could be more – more visual, more daring, better paced to match the itchy needs of an audience stuck in seats as opposed to your average multi-tasking podcast listener. But the content and presentation were almost beside the point. The audience – a surprising number of excited teenagers and their equally excited parents and grandparents –  were seeing the human manifestations of Jad and Robert, previously just voices in their heads. And just as importantly, Jad and Robert were seeing them.

Almost all of broadcasting’s basic vocabulary comes from the stage – we produce “shows” and “programs.” We have “hosts” and “audiences.” But despite many productions that still bear the live-radio torch – A Prairie Home Companion, Whad’ya Know?, or the new series Wits,  for instance – most radio has been severed from its theatrical roots. We producers spend far more time interacting with our recording gear, our editing programs, and each other than our audience. And the truth is that after a while, “audience” can recede into a dark, nebulous cloud somewhere far beyond our glass-walled studios, a cloud that largely tends to emit bursts of irritable calls, comments or emails.

A live event turns that dynamic on its head. Live events tend to attract core listeners: people who can give isolated producers a different kind of feedback. “It’s really important to be able visualize who you’re talking to every week,” says Chris Bannon, WNYC’s vice president for content development and production – one of the managers here who prods shows to do live events.

Like more and more public radio stations, WNYC has built its own performance space. When a locally produced program such as Studio 360, for instance, does a live show there, Bannon says some of the most valuable moments come afterward, during the spontaneous “hanging out” time with audience members. “They begin to tell us about their lives, and many of them are creative. They listen to us while they paint or while they garden or while they repair the car. You start to think, ‘What can I do that will turn what they’re doing into something that would be interesting for the rest of the audience?’ ” The result has been more listener engagement projects on the regular, pre-produced version of Studio 360.

But a producer or reporter doesn’t need an entire stage show in order to benefit from live storytelling. WNYC transportation reporter Jim O’Grady regularly wins storytelling bouts at The Moth. It’s great to see the glint in his eyes as the audience laughs at his descriptions of PSE –  his “Pre-Sexual Era,” or his portrait of a formidable yet cat-fearing nun. In fact, O’Grady says, live storytelling gave him the skills he needed to make the leap from print reporting to radio. Here are the main things he says it taught him:

Story structure: “In (print) journalism, the lede is paramount,” he says. “Not so in storytelling. Of course, a strong beginning is better …  but far more important is the end of a spoken story. The way you end a story is what the audience is left with.”

Voice work: To meet The Moth’s strict five-minute story limit, O’Grady learned basically to memorize his work. But of course, to engage the audience, he had to learn to sound the opposite. “Be prepared, sound spontaneous,” he says. The approach works as well when he goes on the air: “The more relaxed you get, the more you can forget yourself. That takes so much practice.” O’Grady also learned to vary the pitch and speed of his read, to lose the monotone delivery that kills even the best-written story or radio feature.

Failure: “Everyone bombs,” O’Grady says. “If you do this long enough, you will bomb.” One night at The Moth, O’Grady says, his story fell flat, and he immediately knew why: “I overreached. I tried too hard for effect. I went for the maudlin and sentimental instead of something more truthful.” So he rewrote the story – the audience reaction immediately helped him.

This risk of failure is by far the most important benefit of live performance. In our age of digital permanence, a deadly perfectionism becomes almost irresistible. But we can tweak the life out of our stories – which, in the end, not everyone is going to like no matter what. That spontaneous, uncontrolled moment of creation between listener and producer, audience and performer, is what makes audio such a powerful medium. When radio storytellers put out the immense effort and take the risk of going on stage, they remember that. Plus, if they’re lucky, they get something very rare in this business: applause.

Then they head back to their quiet studios, stick on their headphones, get back to work.

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads Storyboard’s “Audio danger” series. She last wrote about Radio Diaries and the Olympic boxer Claressa Shields.

The story aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Feb. 27, as part of the ongoing project “Radio Diaries” produced by Joe Richman. Richman created NPR’s groundbreaking “Teenage Diaries” series after working on programs including “All Things Considered,” “Weekend Edition Saturday” and “Car Talk.” For the past 18 years, Richman has been giving recording devices to people − mostly teenagers − and crafting stories from the results. More below on what makes Richman’s genre of audio storytelling special. First, let’s look at “Teen Contender,” which Richman co-produced with Samara Freemark and Sue Johnson at womenbox.com.

Claressa Shields is a high school junior in Flint, Mich. Early in the piece, we hear her singing along with her morning alarm:

Claressa doesn’t have to tell us her life hasn’t been easy − we can tell right away, by listening to her describe her living arrangements. We then hear, through her energetic teenager’s voice, how she manages to set the chaos aside and focus on her goals. This establishes the narrative hook: The character wants something. How will she get it? What stands in her way?

She heads through the snow, singing a little, to her dad’s house. He’s a former “dirty fighter” who once made the rounds of illegal boxing matches in abandoned warehouses and Army bases. He served time in prison and got out when Claressa was 9, at which point they developed a rapport:

Claressa goes through all the things that boxers do: practice-sparring, working out, enduring endless lectures from coaches. But she also goes to a black church in Flint to raise funds for her Olympic trials. Claressa’s coach provides another layer of narrative substance by telling us there is much more at stake than a boxing match:

Claressa tells her own story in her own way, answering questions that have not explicitly been asked:

“When I step in the ring it’s like I step into a whole different dimension. It’s like everything outside the ring’s black. Can’t nobody else get in there and help you. Coach, he can’t get in the ring and fight with you. You don’t have your dad, mom. When you get in the ring, you don’t have nobody but yourself.”

What we don’t hear at all is Richman: He does not narrate any of his stories. He’s among a small, talented group of public radio documentarians (among them the Kitchen Sisters, Long Haul Productions, Love and Radio) committed to staying behind the scenes in their work.

People in the radio world call their work “non-narrated,” but this is a misnomer, since stories like “Teen Contender” do have narrators; they’re just the subjects of the stories themselves. I prefer the term “unscripted,” because what sets these stories apart is not their lack of narrator, but their lack of writing. And the script is the place where audio producers write, as opposed to fiddling endlessly with sound files on a screen.

For those of you who’ve never encountered a radio script, here’s the first page of one I just did for PRI’s “The World.” It maps out all the elements of the story: the reporter’s narration (tracks), excerpts from interviews (actualities, or “acts”) and natural sound (ambience, or “amb”):

Barton

As you can see, narration is a big part of the story, as it is for most public radio features. I came to radio from print, and I love writing the script. This is where I get to take control − finally shaping my mess of research, recorded interviews and observations into a story. I try to keep my voice tracks to a minimum but can’t help thinking of them as my little darlings. Yet as I listen to unscripted stories like “Teen Contender” I realize how much writing is the enemy of so many audio narratives.

First of all, words work differently on the page than in the ear. (For example, with its long introductory clause, not to mention parenthetical nature, this sentence that you are reading right now would be a broadcasting disaster. As are the estimated 145.7 million figures, percentages, and dates presented in the passive voice by radio reporters since 1968. Those numbers are total bullshit, of course, but were I reading this paragraph on the air, you wouldn’t be paying attention by now anyway. Wait, did someone just say “bullshit?”)

Also, writing can stand between us and our audio and tempt us to tell stories like a puppeteer. “I’ll use character A to make this point,” our writing brain thinks. “Then I want to get to this funny moment − that dude will crack people up.” Characters come and go without really inhabiting the listener’s mind.

Delivery can stand in the way of story power, too. There’s that whole voice-acting business of reading our writing aloud. A “natural”-sounding script takes more work − and creativity − than you realize.

Yet when a character like Claressa Shields narrates, we’re put directly into Story.

So why don’t more radio producers ditch their scripts and work with pure audio? Many reasons. First of all, it can be very time-consuming to do well. For “Radio Diaries,” Richman says he and his team sift through, on average, 80 minutes of recorded material for every one minute that makes a final piece.

Secondly, the form just doesn’t work for many types of stories, especially news features or stories with many characters or complicated timelines. Richman says he feels the strain when he produces historical documentaries. He and his team once spent a year and a half gathering stories and material about Nelson Mandela. They originally intended a biographical series, but the more compelling material revolved around the larger story of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. Most of the biographical bits about Mandela eventually had to fall away. “You can’t do the tangents as easily,” Richman says. “You can’t do the side roads. With a script, you can say, ‘While this was happening, this was also happening.’ (Without a script) you sort of follow this one train, this one narrative train, and it’s hard to get off it.”

With unscripted work you’re stuck with what you’ve got, and woe to the producer who isn’t thinking ahead while out in the field. Interview questions need to elicit the complete responses that will stand alone. Subjects need to describe their worlds in a clear way, without all the digressions and backward references that muck up so much of our natural speech. The producer has to listen closely to help people open up in a way that will carry a story.

Producers who do unscripted work tell me there’s a certain joy in trusting their interview subjects that much. And that trust is clearly reciprocated in the stark, truthful moments that often appear in these stories. Producers Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler once spent two weeks interviewing people in Chattanooga for an unscripted NPR story about homeless people who live along Main Street, resulting in a moment like this from a man named Ernest:

“I’m ashamed of it, but it don’t change nothing. I’m a drug addict. I’m going on a drug run. Honesty is what y’all are looking for in this, right?”

When audio storytellers disappear behind their narratives like this, they give the world a gift. In “Teen Contender,” by the time we hear Claressa actually fighting in the Olympic trials we’ve been living in her rough world for a quarter of an hour. We step into the ring with her. We want to see her make it to the Olympics. We want Flint, Mich., to watch her in the Olympics. My palms were actually sweating as the story built to its finale with suspense and grace and the hard exhalations of this teenage girl.

I still can’t say I’m a fan of boxing, but I’m now a big fan of Claressa Shields − and of producer Joe Richman for bringing me into a story I otherwise would have resisted.

Julia Barton (@bartona104), who writes Storyboard’s Audio Danger column, has been writing and producing for more than two decades. Her work airs on PRI’s “Studio 360,” “The World” and other programs including “99% Invisible.” She’s been an International Reporting Project fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a staff reporter at WHYY/Philadelphia and an editor at American Public Media’s “Weekend America.” She’s also led extensive media training in the former Soviet Union. 

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

Great audio, as I’ve previously written, transports us to an imaginative place somewhere between the story’s world and our own. If you’re driving down the road in Florida but hearing a story about Siberia, it feels as though you’re floating above place and time. But beneath that floaty feeling stands a whole system that’s actually obsessed with time, down to the millisecond, it seems.

Just take a look at these program clocks from National Public Radio. They dictate exactly when everything you hear, every day, must start and stop. So, for instance, the NPR newscaster has to “cut away” after 2 minutes and 58 seconds – not 57 seconds and not 59 – so that local stations, often using an automated system, can step into the flow and do their own newscasts. Every program, even freer-form ones like “This American Life,” has a clock. You could call any broadcast network one Big Clock.

This affects content in both good and bad ways. I can complain like any other reporter about having lopped the limbs off a nice story to fit it in a 2-minute, 20-second “hole.” But like any other frame, the Big Clock imposes healthy discipline and rhythm.

The problem with frames is that they can end up swallowing the organizations that build them. That’s one way of looking at what happened to public radio in the 1990s, when many eclectic or music-heavy public radio stations switched to an all-talk/news format. You can blame Congress, ratings researchers or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but format-standardization was also the inevitable process of Big Clock grinding down all the weird, rough edges that interfered with its smooth machinery.

Anyone who wants to understand the full possibility of audio storytelling needs to step away from Big Clock now and then. Because audio truly wants to be weird. It’s in the DNA: In audio stories, we get our information from only sound and voices, with no visual cues to help us judge and categorize the speakers. And although good producers will help set the stage, we still have to fill in most of the details with our minds. We’re in the dark, weaving the story with the teller, and that requires a lot of trust.

People on the radio have been playing games with our imaginations, and trust, for a very long time (see Welles, Orson). It’s impossible to tally all the mind-bending audio that issued from college stations and the then-FM frontier starting in the 1950s, but many people re-remembered it when Peter Bergman, a founder of the ear-tripping “Radio Free Oz” and Firesign Theatre, recently passed away. Perhaps it’s this dark, freaky side of audio that pushes outfits like NPR and the BBC extra hard to sound respectable (only to have the freaks mock them on “Saturday Night Live” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”).

Still, public radio used to allow a lot more overlap: remember Ian Shoales? I do. In fact, his oddball commentaries – abruptly ending with “I gotta go” – are some of the only things I remember from hearing NPR as a teenager. Shoales (a persona of San Francisco writer Merle Kessler) and his compatriot Dr. Science (Dan Coffey) made no sense to me. Were they real? They seemed to imply they were not, yet their voices were right there alongside Nina Totenberg’s, demanding that I take them seriously. Some adolescent piece of my brain is still trying to figure it out.

By the early 2000s, this kind of performative strangeness had all but died on public radio, except for lonely islands like Santa Monica’s KCRW, home to the dark-humor-wizard Joe Frank and acerbic satirist Harry Shearer.

My favorite refugee from this era is Benjamen Walker, who started out more than 10 years ago as a producer at WBUR in Boston. After finishing his day job there, he would use their computers to smuggle out intellectually weird radio. Walker’s latest program, “Too Much Information,” now airs weekly on the volunteer-run WFMU in Jersey City, but most people find it on iTunes. Walker can produce explanatory audio like the best of them – he tackles complicated philosophical concepts for The Guardian. But on “TMI,” he does as he pleases. Sometimes he adds fake embellishments to otherwise true stories (check out this one from Siberia, if you’re driving down a road in Florida); sometimes he stages whole interviews. The pleasure for listeners is figuring out his game. Or being suckered.

“In America it’s like, if you hear it on the radio, it must be true,” Walker shrugs when asked about the whole truthiness thing. “That’s not my fault.”

Meanwhile a whole other genre of transgressive audio has re-emerged from the world of comedy. Why should serious journalists pay close attention to comedy podcasts? First of all, they’re hella funny, and we need a laugh. But comedians also have the storytelling and verbal skills to chop us to bits. They are brilliant at deconstructing the bones of what we do – and sometimes what we do lazily.

It’s also worth paying attention because you could define a surprising amount of what happens on these podcasts as journalism. Listen to episode 190 of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, and you’ll hear an incredibly powerful story of depression and recovery from “The Onion” founder Todd Hanson. When actor Gary Anthony Williams talks about his rural childhood with comedian Aisha Tyler, you can’t get the images (slaughtered pigs, cow mucous) out of your mind. These stories emerge in a natural, digressive way, without the presentational pressure of the Big Clock.

I have little patience for self-indulgent rambling and do end up editing many podcasts with the “unsubscribe” button. But in the good ones, I find a verve, honesty, and above all, sense of surprise that’s lacking on much of terrestrial radio. I wouldn’t be shocked if one day, after the bad boys and girls of podcasting are through interviewing each other, someone hits on a formula to get them out of their garages and into the wider world of stories. When that happens, I hope Big Clock is ready for them. Or it may be in big trouble.

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads the “Audio danger” series on Storyboard. She also has an occasional, recreational podcast that she knows deserves far more attention from her than she gives it.

A ghostly crowd of voices parades across the public radio airwaves every day: politicians and hosts, foreign correspondents, callers, singers. Sometimes they catch our interest, but as soon as one voice is gone and replaced by the next, it’s usually forgotten.

Not so the voices in Daniel Zwerdling’s stories. They persist. They are not especially remarkable people: a veteran’s wife who insists on huge holiday displays although her family is poor; a military doctor giving a dull PowerPoint demonstration. You may not remember their names, but you have imagined them – their voices stay alive in your mind.

This is because of something we call, in the business, “good tape.” Good tape is the golden currency of audio stories. Without it, they are just another forgettable drop in the day’s torrent of sound.

Zwerdling, who started out as a staff writer at The New Republic, is now part of NPR’s special investigative unit. Zwerdling’s reports on topics as diverse as NASA, pesticides and the Department of Homeland Security have won nearly every broadcast prize, including the DuPont, Peabody, Polk and IRE awards. Maybe it’s just the result of more than three decades in the field, but he seems to get great tape no matter what he puts on the air. So I called him to see if I could glean the Yoda-like secret of his craft.

Turns out, the Yoda thing is not exactly a joke.

“I’m short, and I have short, stubby arms,” Zwerdling admits in his trademark amiable voice. “And in order to mic (interview subjects) closely – because I always mic closely to get very clean sound – I sit right, like, almost on their laps. Big, burly generals will literally grab my arm and start pushing me away and say, ‘Do you have to do this?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, but it’ll make you sound better!’ I’ll sit right next to them, as close as I have to, to hold the microphone right at the side of their mouths. So it’s very intimate.”

There’s no getting around a central factor in audio interviews: Microphones make most people nervous. And, although broadcast journalists may not like to admit it, the act of recording – with all its cables and headphones and microphones and checking input levels – makes us nervous, too. Zwerdling says he learned how to face down these jitters from another Jedi master.

“Robert Krulwich taught me my first day at NPR, which was in December 1980 – he took me into a little room and said, ‘Don’t just walk in and have pleasant chitchat, and then say: ‘All right, now we’ll do the interview.’ … Walk in, and as you’re chatting about whatever – cupcakes, the weather – as you’re unzipping (the equipment) bag, taking out the microphone, you know … scratch your back with the microphone.’”

Seriously? Scratch your back with it?

“No, really,” Zwerdling says. “Show it’s an extension of your body. So that’s sort of what I do. I call it the Robert Krulwich Moment.”

One thing that’s clear as Zwerdling talks about interviews: He listens on many levels. He’s fascinated by what people are telling him, and comfortable if they get emotional. But he’s also thinking about the needs the rest of us will have later – the way that we require concrete information, chronological accounts and vivid details to enter another person’s story. If Zwerdling has to ask basic, “obvious” questions over and over to break that story down on tape, then it’s fine with him.

When sources stare at him like a simpleton, Zwerdling tells them, “You’ve got to remember, my listeners are driving in the car, they’re making dinner for their family. They’re distracted – you’ve got to grab them and tell them, ‘Folks, THIS is what happened. This is why it’s important!’ And then they kind of get into it.”

All of Zwerdling’s interview and reporting skills are on display in a story he did with T. Christian Miller of ProPublica that aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on March 22, 2011. “Suicide by Cop” is nearly 20 minutes long and worth your time. Go ahead and listen. We’ll wait.

The piece is part of an ongoing series about an epidemic of traumatic brain injuries among recent combat veterans, and the veterans’ struggles to get diagnosed and treated. “Suicide by Cop” starts out, literally, like an episode of the reality show “COPS,” with the ragged sound of a police radio in North Dakota. The main subject of the story, an Iraq veteran named Brock Savelkoul, is standing by his pickup truck with several guns, surrounded by officers in a standoff. We won’t know until almost the end of Zwerdling’s piece whether he lives or dies.

Along the way, we learn about Savelkoul’s life from his sister Angie and his father, Bruce. We hear how he and his fellow troops sustained concussions after a rocket blast near their Army trailer, and how Savelkoul started to break down later, while on leave in Thailand. We hear how he walked away from a treatment facility in California and ended up back home, discharged from the military and more than 200 miles from the nearest VA hospital. And then we hear how Savelkoul’s father came home one night to find his son gone and their shared home trashed.

The clip of Savelkoul’s father speaking lasts 90 seconds. It’s rare, in a story on a nightly news program, to hear any one person talk for that long. And it would have been easy for Zwerdling to cut the last several seconds, when Bruce Savelkoul, a licensed gun dealer, describes the features of each weapon his son took out of the house that night. Zwerdling’s original draft of the story was far too long, and he needed to make cuts. So why did he save this part?

“I wanted the details. Let us really confront what guns they had in the house, and what guns the soldier put together, and why a bunch of people with the highway patrol would feel so threatened by him,” Zwerdling says.

Great tape torques our minds in different ways all at once. On the one hand, we’re getting all this detailed information about the firepower Savelkoul carried. On the other, we’re noticing how his father takes the time to list each gun. Beyond that, in the rhythm of this story, such a long piece of tape hammers at our subconscious expectations: It goes on for too long. As will the 2 1/2-hour standoff with Savelkoul about to come.

Zwerdling often interviews people while they look over original documents, photos, or videos. In the case of this story, it was dashboard footage from the North Dakota Highway Patrol – no easy thing to score, as any journalist who’s worked with police departments can tell you. Zwerdling sat down with state trooper Megan Christopher to watch the standoff. Christopher recalled how she tried over and over, in the dark sleet of an empty field, to get Savelkoul to give up his weapons. He finally did – at which point another officer rushed out and tasered the veteran. This is painful to hear. But then we learn what Christopher did next.

It is at this point, nearly 18 minutes into the story, that the chaotic impact of a faraway war fully punches us in the gut, along with relief that for once, it didn’t result in more tragedy. Only after that, in the last two minutes of the story, do we hear directly from Brock Savelkoul. First he’s in the VA hospital where he’s finally getting intensive treatment. Then a few months later, he’s on the road to recovery (literally, in the truck where he piled all those guns the night of the standoff) hoping to become an advocate for other veterans with brain injuries.

Zwerdling says he probably got 12 hours of raw tape for the 20-minute final story. He made three trips to North Dakota over a few months. Sometimes we get great tape through luck, but usually, Zwerdling says, it takes persistence, time, and someone higher up willing to spend the money for that. But of course there are other factors money can’t buy.

“The most important thing about interviewing is that you, the interviewer, be really interested in what these people have to say. Genuinely interested,” Zwerdling says. “If children can spot a phony from a mile away, adults can, too. If you come in with some kind of persona that’s not you, then nothing will happen.”

As Zwerdling watched video of the North Dakota standoff, he sat close by trooper Megan Christopher’s side. “We would start the video and then stop it, start it and stop it. And then when I could feel something changing in her body language, that’s when I would stop it, get away from the video, turn to her and just talk together,” Zwerdling remembers, and then pauses. “I just got a Christmas card from her today.”

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads the “Audio danger” series on Storyboard.

© National Public Radio, Inc. Excerpts from NPR news report titled “‘Suicide by Cop’ Leads Soldier on Chase of His Life” by NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling and ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller were originally broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered” March 22, 2011 and are used with the permission of NPR. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

The title of this series, “Audio danger,” is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But not in the case of Kelly McEvers. McEvers now works as one of NPR’s correspondents in the Middle East, and she’s opened the network’s first bureau in Beirut. But I first ran across her name in 2006, when she was a freelance journalist in Russia on an International Reporting Project fellowship. McEvers had been detained in Dagestan, a rough part of the North Caucasus along the Caspian Sea. Local officials with the FSB, the federal security services, accused her of traveling in neighboring Chechnya.

“They interrogated me for like 14 hours a day, and then at night they’d say, ‘You’re free to go,’ but they had my passport. And then they would follow me home. The car would stay parked out front for a few hours, and then they would call the next morning and say, ‘It’s time to go.’ ”

McEvers didn’t suffer any violence during the four-day ordeal, but the threat of it was very real. (She also had to surrender all of her notes and equipment before she was allowed to leave Dagestan).

These days, McEvers interviews many people who’ve been through horrible experiences: child brides who’ve survived rape in Yemen; protesters tortured in Syria. McEvers lets their stories unfold with an understanding of the way real danger – unlike the kind we often see in the movies – has deep effects that can make it hard to talk about.

“I can see when someone has experienced trauma,” McEvers says. “I think I’m able to empathize a lot more with people because I have been through some of this stuff.  Nothing like what they’ve been through – I mean, people aren’t cutting my relatives into pieces. But I know what it’s like to just be numb, or to blame yourself.”

McEvers’ patience paid off last year with this feature she pursued for months in Iraq. It introduces us to Uhud, a 19-year-old woman from a tribal area of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. Uhud fell prey to a sex-trafficking scam, the details of which we will never figure out. That confusion, in fact, is central to the story.

“Some of what we’re about to tell you might not actually be true,” McEvers says at the very top of the piece. “The reasons for this will become clear as the story unfolds.”

According to Uhud’s convoluted account, she was kidnapped at gunpoint while out shopping, then beaten and later taken to Irbil, in Kurdistan. There she says she worked in a Christian-owned café somehow affiliated with a brothel. A famous soccer player later rescued her, Uhud says, and a few months later she ended up back home in Diyala.

“When she first came, the whole family had one thing in mind: We assumed she had been raped. So we thought of killing her,” one male relative tells McEvers in a matter-of-fact way, via an interpreter. “She has a brother who would kill her as easily as drinking a glass of water. But then we calmed things down.”

Sort of. When we revisit Uhud a few months later, she’s basically living under family house arrest. She says an uncle spits on her whenever he sees her and threatens to slit her throat if her story doesn’t check out. As McEvers leaves Uhud, she’s up on the roof setting pet pigeons free. “They fly in the sky for a while, then they come back home,” McEvers translates for Uhud over the sound of flapping wings.

We’ll never know Uhud’s real story, but of course that’s not the point: By living with her for seven minutes, we viscerally feel the way shame and sex-trafficking thrive off one another.

Foreign correspondents for radio face special hurdles. The people they interview often don’t speak English, so we lose the direct narrative force that propels so many audio stories. And most of us have never been to places like war-torn Iraq, so even with great descriptive copy, our minds still tend to fill in the background with stereotypical images from TV news or “National Geographic”: deserts, burqas, bullet-pocked walls.

Of course, correspondents can’t only focus on personal narratives, and McEvers does her share of big-picture, geopolitical reporting. But stories like Uhud’s are one way to slice through the obstacle of listener confusion (and, let’s face it, indifference) when it comes to reports from abroad.

“I try to make those personal stories have a larger point, but just to reach that point through personal narratives. People in Dubuque are going to remember that more than a talking head,” McEvers says.

And radio has one major advantage when it comes to McEvers’ frequent focus on the plight of women in the Middle East.

“A microphone is so much easier than a camera,” she says. “You never get to take pictures of these women. Never. Especially those women with a shameful story.” McEvers sometimes spends a lot of time explaining to her sources how they will sound on the other end in America. “You know, ‘It’s just your voice – it’s going to be dubbed into English.’ I draw pictures of what it’s going to sound like, (their voices) fading under (the translation).”  Sometimes reluctant sources will agree to whisper, or speak broken English, to hide their identities further.

But especially as the Arab world changes so rapidly, McEvers says she can face a different problem – people so desperate for someone to hear their stories, they won’t let her leave. “In Iraq, there are so many widows, or mothers who’ve lost children. No one’s listening to them.”

These days McEvers’ own personal narrative is affecting the way she thinks about trauma and danger in her profession. She now has a 2-year-old daughter. Questions about her ordeal seven years ago in Dagestan elicit a snort.

“It should’ve been instructive, but it’s not. I didn’t learn my lesson,” she says. “But none of us do.” It’s something few foreign correspondents talk about openly, McEvers says: Simply put, editors – and by proxy, the rest of us – too often reward them for putting their lives at risk in pursuit of the story.

“When you have little children, you think a lot about positive and negative reinforcement,” she says. “And we foreign correspondents are positively reinforced for bad behavior.”

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads the “Audio danger” series on Storyboard.

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

But it’s very hard to accomplish, especially these days, when more and more audio comes to us via that distraction machine, the Web. Hence these posts. In the Storyboard spirit, I’ll be talking with audio producers and editors about how they accomplish their best stories, what obstacles they’ve overcome and the strategies they’ve learned along the way. I should point out that conversations about audio craft have long been underway on sites like Transom and airmedia.org. And there’s a great new podcast, “How Sound,” from longtime audio instructor Rob Rosenthal, who also interviews intrepid producers. In the posts I’ll be doing for Storyboard, I’ll simply be adding to (and sometimes echoing) all those worthy explorations.

I got my start in radio in 1995, while pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Doing airshifts at WSUI, the university’s then-analog AM public radio station, was for me just an amusing side trip on the way to a blurry future in magazine writing. But then we started airing a new show, “This American Life,” at 6 a.m. on my Sunday shift. I had a huge list of things to do during that hour, but I kept forgetting about my impending newscast and listening to the radio instead. The stories, at once mesmerizing and funny and surprising, actually endangered my work. So I had to start putting TAL on cassettes to hear later, like a portable, or pocket – or what’s the word? – cast.

Since those days, I’ve been a radio reporter, an editor, and contributor to such programs as PRI’s “Studio 360” and “The World.” Still, every time I sit down to craft a new audio feature, it feels almost as hard as the first time. Every piece is its own hellish puzzle.

That said, audio – especially broadcast radio – is a pretty conservative medium. Listeners appreciate familiarity and tend to punish experimentation (see below for one example). On the upside, I really don’t have to try anything new. On the downside: well, not to offend anyone, but there are plenty of places on the low FM band where, format wise, it remains 1979. That’s fine for many; I don’t want it to be fine for me.

So I sometimes go in search of the subtle shifts that amount to major trends in our hidebound world of audio storytelling. To that end, I talked with two people with their ears especially open: Julie Shapiro, the Artistic Director* of the Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF) in Chicago, and Roman Mars, who was a judge for TCIAF’s awards competition this year – and who produces a successful and innovative podcast of his own, “99% Invisible,” about design. (Full disclosure: I’ve edited Roman’s work and also did a story for him).

Hundreds of aspiring Next-Big-Thing audio producers submit their best work to TCIAF from around the world. When I asked Shapiro and Mars what trends they’re hearing, most of their answers fell under one surprisingly simple category: the “Radiolab” Effect. WNYC’s “Radiolab,” in case you haven’t heard it, is an occasional broadcast and regular podcast about science, and it’s as highly produced as anything on the radio. Most “Radiolab” stories are crafted from hundreds of hours of audio, a ratio that that’s hard for even the most accomplished programs to pull off. Ira Glass recently confessed in Transom, “If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio.”

So Shapiro and Mars aren’t hearing a replication of of Radiolab’s labor-intensive production values, but they are hearing another trademark of the show, its conversational style. You’d think, since the talk radio format is mostly talk, that this would be a given. But radio evolved in the age of oratory, when a stentorian delivery helped pierce the broadcast static, and that’s what listeners still expect.

In the age of HD and earbuds, though, producers are finding they can sound more like themselves. “Radiolab” co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich break down complicated stories through a relaxed Socratic dialogue, an approach that’s also been popularized by NPR’s “Planet Money” and APM’s “Freakonomics.”

“People are starting to recognize you can have fun and talk about interesting things as well,” Shapiro says. Or as Mars puts it, “In America, we explain things a lot. So much that we need two people.”

Shapiro and Mars also hear a big “Radiolab” Effect in the deeper integration of music and storytelling, far beyond the musical scoring that’s a hallmark of “This American Life.” You can hear Jad Abumrad’s Oberlin music composition degree in the show’s use of original music to explain concepts (this segment from the episode “Loops” is a good example). That technique is showing up in more TCIAF award winners, like this independent piece, “Kohn,” about a man with a disability that causes him to speak slowly but also causes his brain to hear himself as speaking like everyone else. Producer Andy Mills reached out to the band Hudson Branch to compose a song about Kohn’s brain, and the spoken story acts almost as a setup for the performance.

TCIAF’s winning story this year, “The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt,” takes the musical approach a step further, remixing whole swaths of an interview with an underworld character who runs (or ran) a strip club out of his Detroit home. The nervous, disorienting result crystallizes at the point when Thunderbolt pulls a gun on his interviewers.

“None of us could stop listening,” Mars says of the piece. “It solved problems in really creative ways. Almost every step was chancy.”

“Chancy,” of course, thrills the veteran producers behind TCIAF, and it’s their job to reward it. Yet flagship programs such as NPR’s “All Things Considered” get a lot of flack when they showcase even mildly risky work. So it’s to the show’s credit that it teamed up with the independent producers at Long Haul Productions to air their story about the relationship between hydraulic fracking and earthquakes in rural Arkansas. The piece breaks many formats: it’s non-narrated, meaning interviewees and “found sound” do all the talking; and it features a commissioned song interwoven among the interviews. Listeners were quick to vent their fury at NPR. “I don’t want artsy, stylistic reporting; I want factual reporting,” said one.

“How Sound” podcaster Rob Rosenthal later interviewed the producers, Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, about the experience. The upshot? It sucked, but ATC’s editors are standing by the team, and maybe next time they’ll make more effort to explain experimental formats ahead of time.

At least the angry ATC listeners were, well, listening. And maybe catching a whiff of how dangerous that can be.

*Julie Shapiro was initially described as the head of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Her title has been corrected to Artistic Director.