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.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll refer to linear narrative as a story with a beginning, middle and end. Think of it as going to the theater to watch a movie. You go into the room and the movie starts. You might be watching “Memento,” a traditional nonlinear screenplay, in which the movie goes forward and backward in time. But as a part of the audience when you see “Memento,” you go to the theater and watch a story, without interruption, regardless of how the story is told. It unfolds for you in a linear fashion.

Likewise, when describing nonlinear narratives, I’m not referring to their timelines but to interruptions of the story experience, as if you went to the movies to watch “Memento” and were interrupted in the middle by a documentary about the film itself.

Interrupting stories

Take a minute to think about a great lecture you’ve attended sometime in the past. What made it a brilliant storytelling experience? Apart from content and the speaker’s ability to deliver a good story, a good lecture is a linear flow of information, with a beginning, middle and an end. Those are the basics of a story; we’re familiar with them from an early age.

Let’s look a little deeper. At the beginning of a lecture, the speaker will introduce a subject step by step. Most talks these days are accompanied by visual aids, with the speaker sharing either the key points of her talk or visual information that clarifies the knowledge that is being shared.

Now imagine yourself in a lecture hall. The room is packed and the upcoming talk is the one you came to hear. The subject is something you are interested in, and the speaker is the best in the field.

The lights go out; the audience is quiet except for a cough here or there. The speaker takes the stage with an ovation.

She begins by introducing her subject. The speaker metaphorically takes the audience by the hand, strolling around. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence – “and so we can conclude that…” – the speaker stops. She then says, “You know what? I’ve just remembered that I have this amazing picture somewhere on my computer that relates to this subject.” She finds the picture and displays it for the audience. It does make sense, and the picture has added another layer of information. But then, after she shows the picture, the speaker starts talking again, right where she stopped the sentence before.

Now imagine that this talk, the one you and the rest of the room were really looking forward to, continues to be interrupted again and again. The speaker keeps throwing in stuff that relates to the subject and the story, but with no regard for the interruptions.

The storytelling would be awful. The narrative would be a mess.

Here’s a graphic visualization of such a narrative:

This example likewise illustrates how we present or consume news on most distribution channels right now. In print, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with them, the presentation and consumption of a story become a nonlinear narrative experience. Pictures, text, captions, etc., all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its nonlinearity.

Consider the following layout of a magazine story. It has some of the content you would expect from a magazine: flowing text in columns, pictures with captions, graphics and a box with a related story.

Every aspect of this story is related to and enhances the information being communicated. But since we are presenting all of this content on eight pages, some compromising must be done. Graphic designers must find the best way to make this story presentable, readable and compelling. Working within the physical boundaries of pages, the text is set in columns and flows from one spread to another without much control over where it breaks from one column to the next, from one page to the next, or even from one spread to the next.

Furthermore, in order to lay out all of a story’s elements, designers must ensure that a graphically “important” element is presented on each spread. This means that the pictures of the story will be placed on the spreads to favor visual enhancement. The same happens with the secondary story and the graphic in our example.

What does this mean for the reader’s linear narrative experience?  Since every bit of the story is laid out across the spreads, pictures and other relevant information will rarely be presented in the best place for the storytelling experience. Readers will have to stop reading the main text to absorb the picture information, or will have to read further until they find a “safe” place to stop reading the main text and thereafter read the secondary story, etc. The narrative is a broken one, and representing it in a graphical way would resemble the previous representation of the bad lecture.

On most websites, sadly, the same nonlinear experience takes place. Sites present stories using a top picture and a scroll-down text column. If the story has secondary pictures and texts, these items are presented alongside the long column of text or, in the case of secondary pictures, by making the top picture a slideshow. Even on the iPad, most publishers approach tablets using a print or a web paradigm.

Optimizing interludes

It doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s go back to the first example and imagine a good linear narrative for a lecture. Here’s a graphic visualization of what it might look like:

In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an ideal location. For example, imagine a story about a family facing economic stress. Suppose it includes a video of a family member talking about how having been fired made things worse. In a linear narrative experience, the video would only be presented to the audience at a certain point in the main narrative. When telling about how the family was facing stressful problems not only because they lost their savings but also because a family member got fired, that would be the place to show the video. Think about it as a part of a lecture: “Let’s see a video on why losing her job only made things get worse.”

The main narrative of a story can be imagined as a string of scenes or episodes, like a TV series, where every added item is placed either at the beginning or the end of each episode. Every episode is structured so that it can be interrupted without breaking the narrative thread.

With the story broken into scenes or episodes, you can then place additional material in the intervals. You can break the blocks to have the intervals where you want them – before and after scenes, wherever it makes perfect sense to add the story-enhancing media. Clever tricks exist in television to cope with the temporal “amnesia” that audiences face on consuming a story in sequential blocks. You can use similar solutions to create a linear flow, once you’ve used the spaces between scenes for added material.

Digital narratives

But how can we do this on a digital distributing device? The most important aspect of a story is the subject of that story, the content. It follows that if we want to change the way we tell our stories, we’ll have to start with that basic concept. Every storyteller must first come up with the content. She then will be able to break the story into blocks, or episodes of content – not only for the main narrative, but also for the added material. For each episode, the storyteller must decide on the best technique to communicate her story. In a digital narrative, storytellers aren’t obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each part. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader or moved through without losing the narrative thread.

The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available. Using a TV series season approach, the storyteller will present her story, one episode after another, in a way that will not break the flow of the narrative, regardless of the technique used for each episode. Each part will be placed after the previous one, at an exact point in the story that best maintains flow. Intervals will be used for added material. Readers will be able to choose the amount of time they take to consume each episode of the narrative.

We need to radically change the way we tell our stories. It doesn’t make sense to keep using old paradigms on new devices. Our main goal is to learn the best way to tell a story and stop using techniques that worked only for one platform (be it text and pictures in print, video on TV or audio on radio). With digital distribution we can mix all these techniques in a way that enables our storytelling. Those of us in newsrooms also need to change the way we plan, produce and present our stories.

Here are a few iPad applications that do a great job nailing this kind of storytelling:

France24’s “Rape in Congo: Peace Violated” is more than a year old. It comes from the early days of the iPad but provides a nice example of a linear narrative. You can see the TV documentary roots of this application, but it also draws from the feel of a magazine.

The narrative begins with examples of rape stories and allows users not only to read information but also to hear, firsthand, stories from the victims themselves. Using strong pictures to set the mood, every now and then readers encounter audio or video. Text introduces each chapter of the story.

Users learn about the rapes, the medical and psychological support given to victims, and the medical and judicial efforts to find and punish rapists. There’s a look inside a court hearing on a rape, a visit to a Congolese jail and, finally, a look at how things are outside the big cities. This application delivers a powerful, terrible story.

The second application I want to highlight is “Money & Speed – Inside the Black Box,” by VPRO (a TV broadcaster) and Catalogtree (a data visualization studio), both from the Netherlands. This app takes us inside the finance world and the fastest and deepest U.S. stock market plunge ever.

“Money & Speed” uses video as its core narrative medium, but what’s really innovative about its storytelling approach is the ability to stop the video and explore interactive data graphics about the stock market plunge. Every time a new data set is discussed on the video interviews, the app allows readers to open and explore it. Yet if someone doesn’t want to explore the data visualizations, the video chapters by themselves suffice to tell the story.

The project that comes closest to the approach I’m advocating is the Atavist, a publishing house for long long-form articles (described as 6,000-30,000 words). The Atavist offers the possibility of enriching a narrative with supplementary text, pictures and videos.

These added elements can be presented in a linear fashion – on a screen by themselves – or within the text via highlighted words. This approach to producing (mostly) text-based narratives allows for a wonderful storytelling experience on a digital device.

Let’s take one of the Atavist’s articles, “Lifted,” as an example: the tale of one of history’s most elaborate heists and the race to unravel its mysteries. The storytelling experience begins with a video of the robbers in action, filmed by surveillance cameras on site. The video helps to set the mood of the story. Swiping the page, the user can start reading the article. Important relevant details – such as a Google map with the locations mentioned in the article – appear when users touch a word in the text related to the information.

The story is written in chapters (episodes), and between these chapters at strategic points, users are presented with pictures related to the previous chapter. In “Lifted,” the storytelling is enhanced with videos, related texts and pictures. Users can also opt to hear the author narrate the story.

The final app I want to share is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” by Moonbot Studios. A simple kids’ story about people who love books and the way books return their love, this application offers a digital narrative approach that goes beyond what is usual on iPad book apps. Each page is filled with a big picture and some text. Most of the pictures offer interaction and animation.

Furthermore, sometimes users must interact with the picture and discover small “secrets” in order to turn to the next page. At other times, such as with a playable piano, the interactivity on a picture is there just for user enjoyment and does not directly advance the narrative. This moving story is filled with wonderful illustration and animation, and is one of the greatest examples of thinking outside the box when it comes to digital storytelling for the iPad.

The fact that a few storytellers have taken advantage of digital opportunities to structure great linear narratives that flow – narratives whose possibilities we could only have imagined in the past – should encourage us all to rise to the possibilities of these new platforms.

Pedro Monteiro is a graphic designer who has worked in the publishing business for more than 14 years, mostly at the Portuguese newsmagazine Visão. Named one of Businessweek’s 21 Heroes of Data Visualization in 2009, he blogs at Digital Distribution and is a consultant with Innovation.

Monteiro would like to thank Barry Sussman for his edits, Vasco Ferreira for his “lecture” insight, and Joana Maciel for her assistance with this article.

Immersion journalism was the theme of this year’s Mayborn. Attendees heard accounts of journalists being pushed, falling or jumping into stories, courting the unexpected consequences that make immersion narratives riveting – and sometimes problematic. We’ll be writing up several of the sessions in the coming days and weeks, but here are a few highlights:

Gene Weingarten presented the audience with real-world ethical case studies, using moments from two stories in his own career. In one he said he was offered (and took, and smoked) a source’s hash pipe, which he knew constituted a firing offense. In the other, he extracted evidence of corruption and bribery from a delusional patient in the hospital, a man who believed Weingarten was a doctor even after he had explained that he was a reporter.

Joshua Foer entered a memory competition for a story he was working on – and unexpectedly won the contest. “I had been approaching it thinking I was writing about this bizarre subculture of weirdos,” he said. “And now I was their king.”

Mandalit del Barco played an NPR piece that rose out of her carrying letters and gifts between Haitian and Los Angeles County schoolchildren after the 2010 earthquake. Using storytelling soundscapes, she showed how audio paired with a story script can carry listeners into another world. “If you close your eyes now, what can you hear?”

Ted Conover talked about traveling an unpredictable path from observer to participant: riding the rails with hobos, crossing the border with coyotes, and getting slugged by an inmate during an undercover stint as a prison guard. “This doesn’t require an advanced degree,” he said, “just the willingness to do something crazy.”

We think the subtitle for this year’s conference should have been “When Things Get Messy.” Stay tuned for in-depth posts on these presentations and more.

The evening offered a mash-up of topics, from the iPad as “salvation, almost” to Moby-Dick, McPhee and Milton. Despite the differing needs of radio, television, digital and print entities, several panelists were quick to agree that it is, in fact, possible for long-form to be too long.

Engelberg recalled an argument he had with a reporter over story length, saying, “The Internet may be infinite, but my attention span isn’t.” Aronson-Rath noted that several times, “Frontline” had done a long (approximately 90-minute) and a short (approximately 52-minute) version of the same documentary for broadcast. Of those, she could recall only one in which she thought the long version had been better. Remnick described Lawrence Wright’s recent exploration of Scientology – which clocked in at more than 20,000 words – as an anomaly. “In the world we live in,” he said, “5,000 words is the norm.”

While some outlets have stopped running even 5,000-word pieces, “long-form is absolutely not dead,” noted ProPublica’s Engelberg. “What’s dead is bad long-form.” He sees the market as clearing out the pieces that shouldn’t have been long in the first place, while leaving room for the good.

The people formerly (still?) known as the audience

The panel spent a lot of time addressing the elusive goal of getting and holding audience attention. Talking about the virally successful “Giant Pool of Money” episode from “This American Life,” Glass explained that the piece was framed around a single question related to the economic crisis: “Who should we hate?”

Variety, too, has a role, said Remnick. “It can’t be all brown food; there needs to be different colors and moods and varieties and intellectual aspirations to it.” Otherwise, he suggested, “the reader, meaning me,” gets bored.

Pondering audience size for long-form, Engelberg asked, “Are we reaching a mass audience with all this material? I don’t think as much as we’d like.” Look at the collective audience of the editors and producers onstage, he suggested, and compare it to the broader swatch of America – “call it elite, call it select, call it small,” it would be just a fraction of the potential audience. Tools like the iPad and Kindle, Engelberg noted, offer organizations another chance to reach new groups of people.

In reference to the word “elite,” Remnick had a different take: “‘Moby-Dick’ sold 3,000 copies in Melville’s lifetime. It was an enterprise worth doing. … This word ‘elistim’ is used like a baseball bat. It’s used like a political weapon.”

The shifting storyscape

The group also discussed changes in technology and the news cycle. Glass offered an upbeat note, saying that the 24-hour cycle, with all its shouting, leaves people wanting substance and step-back and quirk. “It’s really been good for us as a business.”

Still, some kinds of storytelling are changing in response. Aronson-Rath said that documentary film used to be more focused on plot and tension. Filmmakers would save their best stuff – or at least some of it – to the end, to give viewers a payoff. Now, she said, “I really expect to know a little more sooner,” suggesting that a film has to be more aggressive from the start because the assumption that the audience is captive no longer holds. Still, Aronson-Rath believes that new possibilities of “things like the iPad and the tablet are a salvation, almost, for documentary film” and that new devices will allow for a 3-D documentary experience.

Remnick described himself as more resistant to the trend toward new graphic and interactive storytelling models. “Language is still the greatest invention we have,” he said. “It’s still the most complex and richest invention we can imagine.”

Money and long-form

Moderator Stewart reminded the audience that New York Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati has stated that a good piece of long-form nonfiction can cost $40,000 to produce. Engelberg seconded Marzorati, saying “$40,000 is cheap, cheap, cheap.” He added, “You can’t do the same work with half the number of people – particularly when you’re asking them to do twice as much.”

In terms of long-form funding sources, Glass referenced the recent debate over public broadcasting, saying, “Our situation is great! The United States Congress just loves us.” Aronson-Rath noted that “Frontline” receives 80% of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and that due to the subject matter of its documentaries, the show has a hard time getting corporate sponsorship.

So you want to be a rock and roll star?

Remnick talked about learning from John McPhee at Princeton and described how the experience transformed his understanding of nonfiction, likening the analysis of writing to dissecting a frog in order to examine muscle structure. In response, a despairing viewer wrote in to the webcast to ask, “How does one learn the craft of long-form journalism, short of teaming up with John McPhee?”

As luck would have it, the panel answered a similar question from another viewer. Asked whether he would recommend going to journalism school or getting an MFA to become a good writer, Remnick stressed the importance of reading voraciously, saying “I don’t understand people who want to be writers who don’t really read very much.”

Engelberg said that at one point, he got 1300 resumes and read every one of them without concern for whether the applicants had gone to journalism school. Similarly, Aronson-Rath said that film school was not a requirement for working with “Frontline,” that having an eye and being a keen reporter were the most crucial qualities. As for what makes for a good reporter, Remnick used the word hunger and said that “without that stuff-gathering, without that harvesting, without that dumb stubbornness – do something else.”

Glass suggested that when it comes down to it, the best way to begin in journalism is to “start making stuff. That’s the advantage of the media landscape we’re in.” On the disadvantages of that same landscape, Glass noted that the permanent news cycle lacks plot and characters and storytelling, as well as “a sense of discovery or sense of joy.”

Remnick suggested that the problem may lie less in the 24-hour news cycle than in “screaming & yelling at each other like idiots.” The world keeps moving, he said, so the job of a long-form journalist is to step out of the cycle of life – to some extent, to stop time.

For more, watch the video of the event or see comments and tweets made during the discussion. You can also check out our earlier post on a radio conversation with Raney Aronson-Rath and Steve Engelberg.

Thanks to Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber, who made significant reporting contributions to this post.

First up is this trailer for the feature-length documentary “Nou Bouke,” produced by The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. “Nou Bouke” (which essentially means “We’re tired” in Creole) marks the one-year anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, but the film takes the long view on the island nation’s past, present and future. The movie premiered last night and will be shown again on some PBS stations on Jan. 13.

“Campaign Season: The 2010 Race for Governor,” a joint Newsday/News12 documentary, follows the New York gubernatorial contests in real time. The seven chapters of the film were produced in concert with print stories as the race took place.

Reporter Thomas Maier wrote to tell us that “this Newsday project pushes the marriage of print and video farther than anything we’ve done before at our paper,” noting that some film chapters delivered breaking news as quickly as print pieces done by Newsday competitors.

“The End,” an audio slide show from the Sydney Morning Herald, includes photos by Steven Siewert and reporting by Julie Robotham and Kimberley Porteous. The story looks at challenges facing elderly patients and doctors providing end-of-life care.

Also on the Sydney Morning Herald site is a retrospective audio slide show celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Reportage Festival, with fascinating, award-winning pictures of sex workers in Pakistan, soldiers in Afghanistan, Jewish Moroccan synagogue workers, attendees at a Kansas art exhibit for the blind, and other exquisite, intimate images.

“Diary” is an almost anti-narrative film by Vanity Fair photographer and war correspondent Tim Hetherington. The way in which the disjointed visuals and audio skitter between conflict zones and life away from the action create a dizzying but moving effect. We first came across Hetherington’s video via The New York Times Lens blog profile of it.

“Koci 365” is another kind of diary: a Photo-a-Day commitment from Richard Koci Hernandez, a Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. (Tip: We swipe some of the most interesting videos we highlight from @koci’s Twitter feed.) If you’re looking for inspiration and a late New Year’s resolution to take up, you can read more about why Hernandez is doing it and see work from some students who have joined him.

Saturday, January 1st, 2011 (Richard Koci Hernandez)

]]> http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2011/01/12/what-were-watching-newspapers-go-documentary/feed/ 1 http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2010/12/17/public-radio-internationals-lisa-mullins-on-interviewing-for-story/ http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2010/12/17/public-radio-internationals-lisa-mullins-on-interviewing-for-story/#comments Sat, 18 Dec 2010 02:10:36 +0000 Andrea Pitzer http://niemanstoryboard.us/?p=7431 Lisa Mullins, chief anchor and senior producer for Public Radio International’s “The World,” spoke with Storyboard by phone last week about taking a narrative approach to interviews. We included some of her comments in an earlier post on “Interview as story.” While we don’t want to present this as her carefully considered interviewer’s manifesto, she said a lot of interesting things about how she interviews for story, and we thought we’d pass some of her tips along to readers.

Whatever your medium, if you interview people for your stories, there’s probably something here for you. These excerpts from our conversation have been edited for clarity and structure.

Some craft tips for pulling narrative from daily news Q-and-A’s:

I tell them ahead of time what I might want. If we’re on deadline, and the person we’re going to be talking to is what we call a kind of “normal person,” maybe part of a couple in Dublin who is talking to us about how the seismic financial cuts are affecting them personally, they may be reluctant, they may be shy, they may be reticent to reveal too much. If I say, “What I’d like to leave the audience with is an idea of what your life is like right now,” then they will start telling me the information I need in the form of a story.

Then I become the person who teases them along and directs them in terms of questions, who fleshes it out. They become much more relaxed, so they’re going to make it more of a narrative. They’re not on edge, thinking that I’m going to ask them a question they can’t answer or that’s beyond them. They know that what I want is just a personal tale. It’s much easier to elicit from somebody when you give them a heads up that it’s not a gotcha interview.

On the other hand, if it is a gotcha interview, if it’s a government representative, or the foreign minister of Finland, or a State Department official, you can still have a narrative, and you can plan for the narrative, but it’s easiest in the execution when you can get the subject disarmed enough to just have a conversation. Sometimes that means interrupting a bit. Sometimes that means saying, “Hold on, I want to ask you about that in a few minutes, but let’s get back to this other point.”

Then people will speak more naturally to you. They’re not going to talk sound bites. You have a conversation where you can take yourself out or leave yourself in, but the idea is to get them on the bicycle with you and pedaling. And then, even if there are significant challenges, or even if you take a little side route, you can easily come back, because they understand the thrust. You can intentionally move someone off to the side and then move them back in when you’re engaging them more easily.

In terms of a long or more documentary-style interview:

Again, sometimes I give people a heads up on what I want to get out of it. Usually I’ll speak to them off the top of my head, so they can get an idea of the natural cadence in my own voice as I’m talking to them. We like to have our introductions written ahead of time, something like: “OK, we’re rolling tape in three, two, one:  I’m Lisa Mullins. This is ‘The World.’ In Uruguay a group of high school students has been learning a lesson in finance…”

With that kind of intro, suddenly things become arch and uncomfortable. I want to have set the tone prior to that, so that someone knows my regular conversational style, and they’ll get in sync with me as soon as I ask the first question. I’d like to keep that conversational tone going. That’s how you get the narrative; that’s how you get someone to start from the beginning, to tell you the story, and not just give you what they expect you want to know.

When they’ve practiced or repeated so much of what they have to say that they’re speaking on automatic pilot, that detracts from the interview. When I can get them speaking in terms of chronology, in terms of a thought process, in terms of watching a story unfold and then maybe bringing it back to the beginning, that’s when the audience is naturally going to listen. People have an ear for storytelling, and everybody wants to hear a good story.

I find Q-and-A’s incredibly intriguing, written Q-and-A, because they’re easy to follow. There’s a logic to them. I’d say the same thing for Q-and-A’s that you hear on the radio, even more so, I think, than on television. You get nuance, you get meaning in silence, in pauses and sighs, in tension. You can hear conflict when there’s nothing on the air.

If there’s a sense of conflict in the interview, very often listeners will listen even more carefully, and they’re surprised there might be a resolution at the end. “Gee, the person was taken aback,” or “Maybe someone was drawing the wrong conclusions.” And “Hey, at the end, it wasn’t as bad as all that.”

So, look! You were transported somewhere. There was a different end to the story from what was expected, based on not just what was said but what wasn’t said, where the silent irritation was, where the withdrawing was on both sides. I think that’s as much a part of the narrative of the story as anything.

Ideally, I would love to have listeners come into an interview and feel intrigued, maybe projecting where they think the interview might go. And then at the end not even being aware of how much time has elapsed, thinking, “Wow. Where did I just land?” That usually happens when you’ve taken them on a mini narrative journey.

Generally speaking:

I want the producer to find everything that he or she possibly can about the subject that we’re going to be talking about. I read as much as I can and have time for, but if the interview is bearing down on me, I just start a mind purge and write down questions immediately with the ones that are most obvious to me. Those are the ones our listeners will probably be most interested in.  I will type out several questions of my own. I get everything in front of me, and sometimes don’t even look down again after the first question. I do like to have a solid launching point for the first question, though, and I try to figure out where I want to go.

How many angles are too many angles? When is this going to be watered down because I’m putting too many hats on this person? The job for me is to contain information and to keep it on a straight road, almost putting blinders on. You remain open to any slight turn or twist, but you have to be as disciplined as possible to know when you’re letting yourself go too far in one direction or letting the interviewee go too far, for a bunch of reasons:

One, it doesn’t serve the audience. Everything’s being diluted if you don’t have the trajectory. Two, my producer is going to kill me, because the piece is going to be cut down to 4 1/2 minutes regardless of how long we record. Also, because I want to have a story, a nugget, from that person that people will listen to.

If I’m disciplined, and they kind of know what I want, then they’re not flailing around. A lot of the fear in interviews happens when the interviewee doesn’t know if he or she is giving you want you want, and there’s a lot of meandering and uncertainty. Even the most kind of squidgy seemingly open-ended interview really has to have a certain amount of discipline around it to be successful. It’s a lot harder than doing a “What did the White House say today?” interview.

Narrative doesn’t mean arduous planning necessarily. Narrative means having your path cut out for you, but not necessarily knowing where exactly it will take you, just that you want a place to touch down. By the way, that end point may lead you to infinity – to more tension or some nonresolution. Everything doesn’t have to be tied up in a bow, but I want us to be able to land somewhere at the end.

Insane Clown Posse

Whether they use full-on storytelling or just crib a few literary devices, interviews have their own narrative arcs and angles. From political drama (think the Frost-Nixon standoff or “The Fog of War”) to Studs Terkel’s cultural layering, interviews create a kind of permanent present-tense experience for viewers.

Two recent magazine interviews underline the narrative potential of the form. The first, “Insane Clown Posse: And God created controversy,” runs through a dizzying talk with the rap duo on The Guardian’s website.

The conversation jumps off with the acknowledgement that despite their ultra-violent lyrics, the pair are evangelical Christians. Reporter Jon Ronson moves on to reveal that the performers suffer from depression. As the story unfolds, even those who contest the importance of hate-spewing clowns may find the interview compelling, funny and disturbing, and perhaps not in predictable ways. Here’s an excerpt of Ronson’s dialogue:

Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. “Who looks at the stars at night and says, ‘Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium’?” he says. “No! You look at the stars and you think, ‘Those are beautiful.’ ”

Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the video is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I have a similar motive?

“I don’t know how magnets work,” I say, to put him at his ease.

“Nobody does, man!” he replies, relieved. “Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this Earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It’s right there, in your f**king face. You can feel them pulling. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t touch it. But there’s a f**king force there. That’s cool!”

Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.

“Gravity’s cool,” Violent J says, “but not as cool as magnets.”

The struggle between interviewer John H. Richardson and actor Christian Bale in Esquire’s December issue is more convoluted. As Richardson attempts to build a narrative that illuminates Bale as a person, the temperamental actor throws up roadblocks, refuses to participate, and ends with an insult to his interviewer’s efforts to reveal anything at all about him.

The narrative builds and destroys itself, eventually piling up a kind of story:

BALE: Why are you questioning those things?

ESQUIRE: Just curious.

BALE: Why are you putting all that muddle in your brain that’s not needed to be there?

ESQUIRE: I guess you just look at the choices people make and wonder, What’s up with that?

BALE: But why are you worrying so much about everybody else? Let’s start looking at you for a minute, all right?

A standoff ensues not unlike the scene in Antonioni’s The Passenger when Jack Nicholson is interviewing a witch doctor who clearly thinks he’s an obnoxious idiot. “Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers will be about me,” the witch doctor says, turning the camera around so it’s pointing at Nicholson. Major existential moment as Nicholson stares into the abyss between sign and signifier. But we have seen this movie, and it does not turn out well — the spell must be reversed.

BALE: It should just happen. It should just happen. If something’s true and sincere, it happens regardless of marketing. The more I talk about it, the more I’m telling people how they should react. And that is an asshole.

ESQUIRE: Not to argue, but that’s not really true.

BALE: Are you calling me a liar? Am I lying?

ESQUIRE: Sometimes the ground needs to be prepared. And you’ve laid down these onerous rules on me — all I can do is a Q&A.

Actually, these are forbidden words that you are reading right now. Bale is in the habit of requesting that his media interviews be printed in a Q&A format. He also prefers to conduct them at the same five-star luxury hotel in Los Angeles, and makes it known that he dislikes personal questions.

Both these interviews end up far afield from straight transcription. The interviewer’s after-the-fact insertion of connective tissue between segments of the Q-and-A shape the story arc and set the tone.

Very long long-form

“Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager” a book-length series of interviews, falls into an even longer-form category. Keith Gessen, editor of the political and cultural journal n+1, conducted a series of interviews in which a financial player chronicled the economic collapse and its aftermath.

In a phone conversation last month, Gessen described how in small and large ways, events in “Diary” began to take a narrative turn – not just in chronicling the meltdown but in the hedge fund manager’s outlook and life. Asked to what degree he imagined the book as narrative during the interview process, Gessen said,

I was very much thinking of it in terms of Studs Terkel, and there’s another book that I read some years ago, an updating of Studs Terkel called “Gig.” That book is amazing. These people have these crazy jobs, and as they talk about them, details of their lives emerge.

With “Diary of a Very Bad Year,” initially, I just wanted to find out what was going on with the financial crisis. I knew I didn’t know what was going on, and I had this sort of acquaintance who I thought could explain it. After I did the first interview and transcribed it, I was surprised. It had a lot of information. He had a very charming way of explaining the financial system. Some very talented financial people need to be able to tell stories about what they’re doing – that’s just part of him being good at his job. He was so good at explaining it that you could see how he thought, his mind at work. I thought that was exciting.

At first, I just thought we’d put the interviews in the magazine. Halfway though, he became very frustrated with his job. At the end, he quit. I didn’t know for sure where we were going initially, but when he decided to quit, we had a whole narrative arc.

Contrasting doing long-form interviews with the kind narrative features he’s written for the New Yorker, Gessen noted the different goals of the interviewer:

I’ve done a fair amount of traditional journalism where you’re interviewing people. There’s a very specific way in which quotes are used in a New Yorker article. They’re partly there to be informative; they’re partly used to reveal the character of the person who’s being informative.

When you do those interviews, you’re looking for a particular thing, a particular moment, from that person. You more or less know what you want from your subject. And I wouldn’t say it’s manipulation – that’s too strong a word – but because the frame that you’re putting on the story has so much weight, your subjects become characters in the story and have particular roles to play in it. When you’re doing those interviews, you’re waiting for them to say a particular thing, as if they were fictional characters who were uncooperative.

With the hedge fund interviews, I wasn’t waiting for anything. I was waiting for him to be interesting. I wasn’t waiting very long. In a way, it was more pressure doing those interviews, because I wasn’t going to be able to write around him. So he had to be the one who was interesting.

Gessen was pleased enough with the hedge fund interviews that he searched out people from other fields, only to find not everyone was as engaging when it came to talking about work. But with the right interviewee, “to hear a live and intelligent and very particular human voice,” Gessen said, “that’s very exciting to a reader and very immediately accessible – as accessible as anything.”

Radio Q-and-A’s

Though they have a long tradition in print, interviews own a sizable share of other media, as well, and many of them are narrative. Lisa Mullins, chief anchor and senior producer for Public Radio International’s “The World,” makes it a goal to frame real-time narratives as she interviews subjects. Talking by phone last week, she outlined her approach:

When I’m preparing an interview, I want a beginning, a middle and an end. It may not stay that way when I actually execute the interview, but it always helps to have an arc to the story and have some kind of a narrative. Sometimes that narrative centers on a subject – meaning the issue that we’re talking about – or sometimes the narrative unfolds from the person’s own thoughts and history. It can go either way, but I like to have a start and a finish and then a takeaway – something that the audience will come away with at the end.

I honestly don’t believe that we always need a neat and poignant ending. We need some kind of end that doesn’t sound random. It has to be something that makes the interview whole, that gives it a sense of direction and gives listeners a sense they’ve taken a mini journey someplace, even if they haven’t gone anywhere, even if it’s just a Q-and-A on the telephone.

Mullins doesn’t employ storytelling out of a sense of duty to tradition. Her motives, she admits, may be a little more selfish:

One of the reasons I really cherish the practice of interviewing as narrative is, frankly, ego. A lot of what we do is to convince people that they will be interested, entertained and edified by whatever we’re presenting. But it’s not a given. I don’t take that interest for granted.

So my goal is to give them what I know is going to attract any listener: a really interesting story, especially around an issue they didn’t know they could be interested in. By working with this rubric of storytelling and narrative, no matter what you’re doing, you’re going to get a much better interview for yourself, you’re going to have a more cooperative interviewee, and you’re going to get the listener paying attention. It’s not like they’re being spoon-fed; they’re just being informed and entertained in the most natural way of all, and that’s through storytelling.

Mullins also emphasized the real-time role of the interviewer and the importance of discipline when a Q-and-A is going to be the final product – not to block spontaneous surprises from emerging, but to string a narrative thread that the audience can clutch, giving listeners “a place to touch down.” Interviewers have a narrative role to play, even when they’re not the ones telling the stories.

[For more on interviews as stories, read Lisa Mullins' tips for doing narrative interviews.]

It looks as if your project got started in 2009. What inspired it, and what has happened with it so far?

When we met in July 2009, we didn’t know each other, but we already shared the same views about our job: Journalism is in bad shape, it is difficult to find regular freelance work, and working for mainstream media is both unchallenging and boring. So we created a project to do what we like to do: meeting people, portraying people, telling stories, all that implying the humanist view we had in common.

And there we were in September 2009, creating a website to give our pieces of work an audience. We knew we wanted to make films mixing still and animated pictures, and sound. The name “Brèves de Trottoirs” was inspired by a book “Brèves de comptoirs,” which compiles quotes heard in bars.

Luckily, when we launched the website in December 2009, people interested in new media and Web documentaries liked our work and spread the word. We had a few articles (Le Monde, La Croix, 20 Minutes), the video-sharing website Dailymotion made our first feature about Papy Dance their home page video, and “Brèves de Trottoirs” became kind of famous.

Francois and his marionettes perform on the streets of Paris

We continued working on the project. We got a grant from the CNC (a French publicly-owned establishment, which notably provides economic support of cinema, audiovisual and multimedia arts) in late January. We met the multimedia production company Darjeeling in April, and decided to continue the project by launching a new platform in September 2010. In May, we met the Parisian branch of the national television channel France 3 and they agreed to co-produce “Brèves de Trottoirs.”

Monday, Oct. 4, 2010, we launched the new platform, which offers one new episode per week for 18 weeks. Short edits of our features will soon be broadcast on the French television channel France 3 Paris Île-de-France, and we’re planning to make a documentary in 2011.

So in brief, our small homemade project became kind of big and is now professional at least in terms of production.

Are you familiar with The New York Times’ “One in 8 Million” project? How do you see this as similar or different?

As we have been interested in new media for a long time, we do know the “One in 8 Million” project, but when we elaborated “Brèves de Trottoirs” we didn’t try to make a French version of it. People often ask how much we took from that project to build ours.

It’s true we share the same aim: telling stories of characters in a big city, but there is no comparison between two young French journalists and The New York Times. So that is the first difference. We didn’t and we still don’t have a hundredth of their experience, their technical means, their audience, their money, etc.

Also, we decided to build a trip in our website. That’s why the map plays a central role in our narration: You are randomly clicking on a pin, here more than there, sometimes the contrary. These are the fortunes of life.

In addition, our stories are longer (six to eight minutes), “One in 8 Million” doesn’t use video, and its pics are always black and white.

So of course “Brèves de Trottoirs” has similarities with “One in 8 Million,” and we are clearly impressed by the quality of this project. We would have loved to do it, but we tried to create something different, something unique in terms of atmosphere. That’s why color and style are so important to us. It’s an old Paris we wanted to build, a entire universe where people feel comfortable, and this is maybe the only thing we regret about The New York Times’ project: It doesn’t give that about the Big Apple.

I see that you’re in partnership with a French television station, and it looks like you’re heading into other platforms as well. Can you talk about the future of the project and where you hope it will end up?

We feel very lucky to have this partnership with France 3 Île-de-France. It gives a wider audience to “Brèves de Trottoirs” and it allows us to think we’ve succeeded at making this small homemade project something interesting and appealing for television stations.

Since the launch of the new web platform Oct. 4, every week a new character will be online (19 new characters until January). Then we will consider this is the end of the (first season of) “Brèves de Trottoirs.” A television documentary will follow in February or March in order to create a longer feature about the topics we are exploring in our project: how to live in a modern megalopolis? Why choose a different life? We are also preparing a book that compiles pictures and short texts, and a multimedia exhibition. All that is planned for spring 2011.

Talking about a second season of “Brèves de Trottoirs” is too soon and probably not a plan for us at the moment. We surely want to continue working together in this “webdocumentaire” way, but we would like to focus on different topics. Why not cover an electoral campaign or a sports event, for example?

Olivier Lambert & Thomas Salva

An element of surprise seems to be an important part of most of the stories you tell. Can you talk about your approach to storytelling?

Storytelling plays a key role in our project. Both of us are storytellers, whether using pictures, words or sounds. The interview is the base of our story. We’re editing an audio outline that is clearly the backbone of the film.

At a minimum, we have 45 minutes of interview, sometimes up to 2 hours. Building the story, we try to present the character as he appears in the street, but there is always “something else.” This is the element of surprise that gives depth to the character. We try to confront the public vision of a character and his true reason to be in the street: Elie, Papy Dance, is dancing in the street because he lost his wife; Patrick is homeless but he plays in the stock exchange.

We also try to play with images to build our storytelling. We often confront what is being said with what is being seen. All that creates a story, our aim is that at the end of the film you know not the entire life of the character but almost all of it. We also try to be minimally intrusive, for it’s not our story we are telling.

Who is your favorite character thus far?

Salva: Patrick the hobo is the one I like the most. I think the film is our worst in terms of quality, as it was the first we made, and we were trying many different things. However, Patrick’s life is so interesting: He is homeless, but he rejects social concerns. He plays with his money in the stock exchange. He wants to do it all by himself. He stands up for his voting rights. He has a lot to say and we spent a lot of time with him. I’m glad he gave us so much of himself. It was really fulfilling.

Lambert: In terms of result, I think the film about François is one of our best. We have made something really good, and the character is amazing. He is a marionettes master who rides 60 kilometers a day on his bike to put on his show. François is very shy, but he gave us a lot, and he moves me a lot. Elie, Papy Dance, is also an amazing character to me. His story is so hard but also full of hopes.

What advice would you give to those who have trained and worked in traditional formats if they are considering beginning a massive, multi-platform project?

Salva: To reconsider their project maybe!? Web documentary is something so unclear; everyone wants to do something. Interactivity was the big thing at first but now it has many different shapes. “Brèves de Trottoirs” is linear. You can’t create your own storytelling. That’s what we like to do. For that reason, our storytelling is not different from a traditional documentary. But a true multi-platform project lets you do anything, create anything. We have decided to put together audio, video and still pictures, but we could have thought video, graphic design and 3D, everything is possible. The Internet is great for that, everything is reachable, you just have to know a few things to create a website. That’s what we did when we built “Brèves de Trottoirs.”

Lambert: Telling stories is our job. Whether you have trained in traditional or new formats, the first thing is to find a good story. Then to me you just have to adapt yourself to a new medium: what can I add to my feature to make it better if it’s on the Internet ? To my mind digital era journalists/authors/photographers/… have an interesting period to explore ways to tell stories, and they should work together to make their project happen! But traditions stay, and even in 3D first thing to do is being in the field to collect facts, quotes, the atmosphere…

Are there any particular challenges have you faced in getting video for the project?

Salva: Photography and video are very close, but it’s not the same grammar. Even though I was able to find some similarities, to build a frame for example, I was disoriented by the animated language. Using a DSLR like the Canon 5D Mark II was a good thing to start making videos, but it was also difficult, as I didn’t know how to handle this camera. As our films are very intimate, I can’t carry my full equipment, so I stay very light with a steady-cam which allows me to switch modes quickly. It’s both positive and negative: to focalize or to stabilize are difficult. But I’m glad to have a photographer’s approach with a short depth of field or an eye for details.

Can you talk a little about how you approach when to use still photographs versus video?

Salva: To take a picture or videotape a scene is a key question. I use video to create a link between still images. I focus on “instantanés” which fix you in a moment, in the present. When I feel a moment is deep, a picture is better because it stays, you can take a break and explore it.

A video is 25 frames per second, life is there and you can’t stop it! I keep video for interviews and moving scenes, whereas I like taking pictures of places, close-ups of details for it gives all the dimension of a character.

Switching from the photograph mode to the video mode is compulsory. Canon 5D Mark II offers a way to take pictures while videotaping. To me it’s just crazy! The photographer doesn’t see things with the same distance a cameraman does. You have to choose what to do. How can I enrich my photographs with a video? This is what I like and what is interesting to me in this work.

Can you talk about writing for a web-focused format and how it is the same or different than your prior writing experiences?

Lambert: The Internet is the land of free. You’re free to write 20 pages, add 100 links and references, take 1000 pictures. To me writing on the web must be short and trenchant. You only have a few lines, sometimes just a few words to catch the interest of an Internet user. They often don’t have time and don’t want to scroll down a page to read something. So I propose short texts to illustrate every single character. There is also a bonus section where visitors can find more details. This offers two levels of reading: I’m in a hurry I want the all thing as quickly as possible vs. I want to take my time and explore the website.

I think media in the Internet have not yet started to think about that. In France it fills me with despair to see long articles on a website. I think again it is a question journalists must ask themselves : how can I make my work evolve to put it here more than there without losing what I want to say?

Why did you start doing the Totally Hip Video Book Reviews?

My family and I used to do this kind of thing for my extended family and friends. We would do parodies of holidays, based on TV shows or things like that. We hadn’t done any since we moved down here from Boston to D.C. And about six weeks ago, we were sitting around on a Saturday. I was frustrated that I hadn’t done anything lately. I’d had this idea for a comic, satirical book review character. I said to my wife, “Why don’t we just throw this together?” So we literally just broke my review for that week down into scenes, filmed it around the house, and posted it on YouTube.

This wasn’t your Post overlords saying “Do your multimedia this week”? It was done on your own?

I had no idea the Post would be interested at all. In fact, I thought they would see it, be embarrassed and tell me to stop. A few days went by, and it got lots of hits on YouTube – this was on my own account. I bet it wasn’t two days later that somebody from upstairs – the fifth floor, where all the important people work – called and said, “Hey, we’d like to take this over.”

So now, at this point, are you still scripting? Who’s behind the camera? How’s it put together?

The Post offered to take over and produce it, film it, edit it, the whole thing. I just could not take on any more work, and I knew that would involve other people’s schedules. It would become one more duty.

I pretty much wanted it to stay fun, so I said, “No, my wife and I will keep doing it whenever we want and however we can. If you’re interested, post them. If you’re not, don’t. Let’s just leave it very casual.” So my wife does the filming, and I write up the script and we race around the house, and sometimes around town, and do it ourselves.

And you edit it yourselves as well?

Right. It’s just Final Cut Express and a digital camera.

Your tag line is “fast, fun and totally hip” – but as often as not, the shell of parody and self-mockery seems to contain a serious review. Do you have an approach you’re trying to take to the substance of the material, in addition to this character you’ve created?

It’s an awkward fit, to tell you the truth, to try and wedge a serious book review, sometimes about a serious book, into what is a parody of my industry’s hysteria and collapse. So I’m still working that out, and I don’t honestly have any particularly sophisticated critical theory behind all this. I’m just doing it week by week.

Some weeks it works better than others – Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” for example. I was so moved by that book, and I thought it was so powerful and so devastating. I couldn’t see any possible way to put it in the context of a parody about book reviewing. So that week, I decided to talk about other things and run through the Booker short list. I think it kind of worked in that setting.

Are you typically taking the review you’re doing in the paper each week for the focus of your video? Or is it not that fixed a schedule?

No, it is that fixed. Every week, the video that goes up is based on my review in that day’s paper. My reviews come out on Wednesday in the Style section, and the videos go up then – sometimes they go up a few hours before, but they’re pretty much coordinated to that.

Did you get all your tips for scripts from Dana Milbank?

[Laughs] No, I learned it all myself, just from filming my family.

Obviously you’re having fun, that’s what makes it engaging. But what are you hoping this will do?

Honestly, people have attributed to me all kinds of much more complex motives. We really just do these for fun. There’s so much to parody about journalism, particularly the book section, and the book review industry itself – I don’t know if you can even call it an industry anymore, the way it’s fallen to its knees in the last 10 years. But there’s a lot of material here. I think a lot of it is pretty insidery, but at least there are still enough people on board to enjoy this kind of gallows humor.

What kind of response have you gotten from readers?

A lot of very nice responses from publicists, editors and publishers, and even some authors. It’s the kind of thing that I don’t think could have existed before Twitter, oddly enough, because I would have had no way to publicize it and to hear back from people or to contact them and let them know it’s out there.

So the bulk of your audience comes from your Twitter feed?

Yeah, but now the Post promotes it pretty heavily, even on the home page some weeks. On those weeks, I’m sure the bulk of the audience goes beyond my book friends. But the people I have direct contact with come almost entirely through Twitter.

Has anyone taken umbrage? I’m thinking particularly of authors.

No, I have not heard any complaints … yet. The last one I did, I think, was Danielle Evans. She’s a young woman here in town – she had a collection of short stories. I praised her book really heavily in the paper, and so I heard from her publicist that she was delighted and thought it was funny. Publicists will tell you whatever you need to hear, of course, but that’s the only time I heard directly from an author.

Actually, no, I did hear from another one. Lily King was mentioned offhandedly in one of the episodes, in a joke about what my wife was reading. And she wrote to me, too, and thanked me for mentioning the book. But Jonathan Franzen has not contacted me yet, alas.

No “Oprah” show for you.

Too bad [sniffs].

Here at Nieman Storyboard, we’re always interested in the narrative angle. When you’re putting these together, it feels like there’s a storytelling sensibility working in the background. Is that a conscious thing you’re trying to do?

That’s a conscious thing. I am trying to tell a story, both about this character, this ludicrous book reviewer who’s so vain and so insecure. And then you can probably notice that there’s always this abrupt, rough transition, where I move into a few minutes of more serious review of the book. That’s more in my own voice.

I don’t want to just be silly. I also want to convey at least a little bit about some of these books that I’m reviewing. But it remains a fairly rough narrative.

It seems like social networking tools provide a useful outlet for you to reach people with this information, but at the same time, they’re part of what you’re mocking in this character that you’ve created.

Yes. I thought that was particularly awkward in – I can’t remember which episode it was – where I made fun of all the other things that people do about books other than actually read books.

Where your wife is sitting reading her book, and you go off and have all these non-reading literary adventures?

I thought that was a bit awkward, because of course those things are engaging people, but I do think there’s at least a funny joke to be made about the fact that really all we need is a book, some quiet time and a chair, and all these other things we’ve invented are essentially distractions.

So what’s the best that could happen for this character you’ve created?

Oh, probably a spot on “Saturday Night Live.”

So you’re dreaming big?

Well, you asked for the best. Actually, I think that I’ll do a few more episodes, and then it will peter out, and I’ll be either condemned for some slip up, as usually happens with these things, or I’ll just be exhausted and not be able to think of anything more to do.

But the real problem is the sort of sensitivity, and I tried to address that straight on in the last episode about a white reviewer reviewing a black author’s book and how anxious we all are. I thought that was fairly risky, but apparently it didn’t offend anybody. Everybody seemed to get what I was making fun of there.

Here at the Post, when you think of the four or five missteps where people have been fired or reprimanded or put on leave, it’s really hard. Our overlords are telling us to be radical, to be hip, to be spontaneous, but at the same time not to ever, ever make any mistakes. And that’s just impossible.

That’s a challenge a lot of people are facing, especially when things are done on top of their regular duties.

Yes, even my reviewing is on top of my regular duties. My actual job is to assign and edit book reviews. I do all my reading and writing at home for the Wednesday reviews, and the videos are done at home on weekends.

Even though your character is part of the exact thing you’re mocking, the videos are pretty dynamic.

This whole emphasis on doing everything so fast, the whole 60-second joke, which I’ve probably milked way too long –

That will make it perfect for “Saturday Night Live.”

Right! But you see this all over the Internet – people doing things in 60 seconds or a minute. I guess it’s a reflection of our desperation for the one thing we can’t manufacture any more of, which is time. People only have so much attention, regardless of how many things they can buy. We only have 24 hours apiece. It makes us all crazy.