Storyboard is always looking for new approaches to storytelling that could be useful for journalists, so we were curious when a reader sent us a link to the How Are You Doing project, which invites people to call a 1-800 number and leave a message about, well, how they’re doing. Laura Mayer, a recent graduate of [...]
Category Archives: audio narratives
Interview: Studio 360′s Lu Olkowski on multimedia, poetry and the working poor
We talked by phone last week with Lu Olkowski, a contributing producer with public radio’s Studio 360 and co-creator of our latest Notable Narrative, “Women of Troy.” Here, Olkowski describes how the Troy story came together and looks at its parent project, “In Verse,” which combines photography, sound and poetry to create a new kind of multimedia. [...]
Interview: Ted Genoways on journalism and documentary poetry
Poetry may not be the first vehicle journalists come up with when they think of reported stories—in fact, poetry may not be on most journalists’ list at all. Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways hopes to change that. In addition to garnering three National Magazine Awards for VQR during his reign, Genoways has a book of poems [...]
Poetry as narrative journalism? You’d be surprised.
When people talk about journalism tottering off into quaint irrelevance, there is a tendency to compare journalism to poetry. In a post this week at PBS Idea Lab, Spot.Us founder David Cohn considers whether journalism, like poetry, might not be sustainable. Cohn notes that there is nevertheless no shortage of poetry. And it’s true that people are still writing it in [...]
The expansive, defiant “Women of Troy”
An ambitious effort to present working-class women in down-at-heel Troy, N.Y., “Women of Troy” brings the hard life front and center. The project is the first installment of In Verse, which bills itself as a collaboration between poets, photographers and radio producers trying to create a new model of storytelling journalism. “Women of Troy” casts [...]
CBC Dispatches (Part 3): writing for radio
[This is Part 3 in our series stealing the best tips from the audio storytelling handbook of the CBC's Dispatches radio program. Parts 1 and 2 ran earlier this week.] We at Dispatches have seen thousands of first-draft scripts across the 10 seasons of the program. Most are problematic. Some just require moving a scene or two for the structure [...]
CBC Dispatches (Part 2): composing with sound
[This is Part 2 in our series stealing the best tips from the audio storytelling handbook of the CBC's Dispatches radio program. Part 1 ran yesterday.] The following are things you should start to figure out before you go out and collect your sound. And continue to figure out while you’re collecting it. And consider again when you’re putting your [...]
CBC Dispatches: sounding out your story (Part 1)
Dispatches is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio News weekly show of documentaries, essays, interviews and reports from around the world. Most are by traveling freelancers. Many are from CBC reporters on the trail of breaking news for our newscasts. So we’re mostly at the mercy of where other people choose to be and for how [...]
Joel Achenbach and the storytellers’ union
Lots of the usual suspects are blogging and Tweeting about Joel Achenbach’s piece on the future of narrative journalism that ran in yesterday’s Washington Post. Some people have excerpted interesting bits, such as the great line that “story is the original killer app,” while others have attempted to respond. Today on the Storyboard, we wanted [...]
The Moth’s Lea Thau on storytelling
In some places, the spoken story is thriving. Last night in Boston, that 800-pound gorilla of live storytelling, the Moth, put on an event at the Tsai Performance Center. We decided to ask the Moth’s executive and creative director, Lea Thau, for her thoughts on storytelling. While some of her answers show the unique aspects of [...]
