How would you categorize How Are You Doing?

I would call the How Are You Doing project an audio art project. There’s a lot of technical elements, and some sound mixing you don’t usually hear in regular radio—whatever that is. But also I think it’s an art project that considers how we talk to each other on a daily basis. There’s a magic and beauty in small talk. In that way this project also brings to the fore things that you otherwise wouldn’t consider special until you sit down, listen and think about them.

How long have you been doing it?

It’s actually going to be the year anniversary on February 13th. So, one year.

How did you come up with the idea for the project?

Last year I was a senior in college and had just started working in an office environment and got into being a small talker in earnest. It occurred to me how much of our days are small talk and how rarely we really sit down to listen to one another. I remember one day I particularly didn’t feel like going to work,  looking in the mirror and thinking, “If someone were to ask me how I were doing today, I would totally shut them down. I wouldn’t feel like listening to them or saying anything to them that was meaningful.” And then I really started thinking about “How are you doing?” as more than a filler phrase.

That night, I came home and realized it would be easy to set up one of these toll-free hotlines. So I had the idea and set it up in the course of a day.

Does it have any funding, or is it just you?

It’s me. Briefly, for the first month, my parents were my angel investors. They gave me $25. But I fund it myself. I pay $26 a month for the hotline.

I see you have a donate button. Has anyone donated yet?

Not yet—that’s very new. The Web site redesign just launched on Sunday, so no one has donated. But they can if they want to!

How do people find the How Are You Doing number?

Initially, it was word of mouth. I made a bunch of stickers. I used to live in Chicago, and I remember on Valentine’s Day 2009, I went around and stuck stickers in bathrooms and bars and restaurants. That was my initial guerrilla marketing, and I do still get calls from those numbers sometimes. But primarily people find the project from StumbleUpon. It’s really active there, and many people come across it by chance. It’s usually a lot of young people, both men and women, mostly university students. That’s the primary referral area to the site.

On the site, you call it art—do you see it as journalism, too? You studied journalism, right?

I studied journalism at Medill, at Northwestern. When I think of journalism, I think that it’s something that’s rooted in truth—at least I hope. In that sense, the How Are You Doing project is as truthful as it gets.  It’s something that we can all relate to, and all these calls, as far as I can tell, are people who are taking the question seriously. In that sense I would call it journalism.

But I think that just because the question is lifted so far away from reality, from how we actually ask each other, it moves away from being a journalistic or documentary project.

The stories sound very intimate and mundane in ways that would be hard to make up, but there’s no way of knowing if the stories are true, is there?

I guess there is no way to really get to the bottom of whether it’s “truthy,” whether this is the truth. But I like to think that people are actually talking about their days. Even if people are making up some of the calls, the ones I pick are the ones that from my own subjective view ring especially true in the day-to-day situation.

If someone did make it up, there’s truth in the fabrication—them feeling that they need to come up with a good response to that question. I feel like that’s the other side of the coin for responding to the question—you either shut people down and move on or you feel like you need to explain yourself in a way you’re not usually asked to.

It’s not like they’re online and they press a button and enter in something to make sure they’re not a robot. In order to go to the trouble of responding, there are multiple levels of engagement. Hopefully they’re listening and seeing the site. Then they have to enter the information into their phone and make the call. I’d like to think those extra hurdles help make sure they’re taking the project seriously.

While digital media is opening up new approaches to narrative, many people think that some kind of shaping, in the form of editing or curation, is still required to create stories. How much thought do you give to story structure and narrative when you assemble an episode?

In terms of a call-by-call basis, I really try to avoid editing within the call. With some exceptions for really big time issues, pretty much all of them that you’ll hear are presented as they are on the hotline. What I do really consider is how the calls are placed next to each other—the arc that listeners are brought through as they listen to a given episode.

A good example of that is the Thanksgiving episode—I got such a wide variety of calls. I didn’t stick to the chronology of when they came in. There were so many people calling in and so many different experiences. I really wanted to drive that point home. If you listen to the calls, it’s a happy one and a sad one, somebody in a particular position and then someone in a totally opposite place.

That’s the extent of the editing I really consider, the way the stories are presented, but that’s a huge part of it. If I didn’t edit it, I if didn’t consider what was going into the podcast, it would just be an exercise in people checking the voice mail I listen to. So, I think in that way, and in the calls that I choose, that’s a huge curatorial effort for me. What I’m looking for are things that ring true. Whether they’re fake stories or true, the stories that we tell over and over again. And the ones that are really special are the ones that make you think of the person as a person rather than just someone answering a prompt in a really flat way.

What would you say to someone who suggests this project joins Twitter as and Facebook as fetishizing  mundane life—what people ate for breakfast, what they’re watching on TV? Why do these things matter?

I think that it’s the medium that’s important with the How Are You Doing project. Hearing the voices, having a one-to-one relationship with the caller. I understand the similarities with Twitter and Facebook: you’re posting something for potentially the whole world to see or hear. But I think there is something so much more personal about a phone call, about really taking the time to talk it out, to process.

It’s what I said earlier. It’s not like people are just answering these questions by clicking on a button on a comment box. A lot of times when you listen to these calls, you can hear people sort things out that they never would have really considered before. When people are leaving messages, they’ll say, “I’m doing fine,” but then they’ll detail exactly why on a step-by-step basis why their day wasn’t actually fine, and they come to a different conclusion.

So I think what the project offers that Twitter and Facebook and other “this is how I am” social networking tools don’t is the ability to really see the personal sorting out that happens, the personal process that people go through in coming to terms with how they’re really doing.

What do you hope to will happen with this project? Why are you doing it?

I want to keep hearing the stories. I would love it if I could get an organization to help me pay for the hotline, but I just would like more people to hear about it and to really consider the “How are you doing?” question—how it ties us all together. I hope that more people will call and more people will listen and more people will think about what brings us together on a day-to-day basis.

Is there anything about the project that people should know?

When I listen to these calls, I’m still shocked by how seriously people take it and how few of the calls I get are crank calls. You’d think that with a toll-free hotline, people would use it to be silly with their friends, which does happen. But I’d say that’s only 20 percent, or maybe 15 percent of the calls. It’s really heartening to me that people take the question and the project seriously. I think it has something to do with the telephone and how it is a more personal thing than sending a text message or sending an email or entering text into a form box.

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 to click into place. At other times we’ve had to make the reporter tell us the whole story again to find why we assigned it in the first place. When it’s the dog’s breakfast, we look for some kind of order: Chronological? Sensational opening? Two funny scenes that just have to go together?

As in billiards, when you break the proverbial rack, tracklines for writing sharpen up once a few items fall into place. From here, give and take between a reporter and producer becomes teamwork rather than confrontation. This is the start of what we call the vetting process, where the reporter and the producer work together to brainstorm, reorganize, and negotiate until they get a structure that works. 

We on the desk like to think of the vet as the guts of what we bring to our pieces. But we know the best vets happen after the reporter does a good job in the first place (see parts 1 and 2 in this series).

After vetting the structure, the writing is what fills in those tracklines. We’ve figured out tips to help you avoid a few of the standard “tripping” points.

Tell the truth that you know. Report what you really see and can verify. “The overworked officer approaches a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk”  might not work so well—you actually often can’t verify he is sleeping, or homeless even, or that the officer is tired. Try:  “The officer is in the 12th hour of an overnight shift. He approaches a figure—bare feet sticking out from a pile of old blankets and newspapers on the sidewalk.” 

In the first description, a listener’s pre-formed opinion of police and homeless people will shape his value judgments more than your description does. In the second, you’re not only more accurate, you’re in better control of the subjective aspects as well.

Create the image you saw and want the listener to see. Start with a lot of details; you can edit it down in the re-write, or save them for the print edition. Picture those details when you’re reading your script too.

Read your script out loud, in your real voice, while you write it. Then try it out on a partner or colleague. Don’t be shy; after all you’re going to read it on the radio.

Don’t be sentimental. Your writing and characters must provoke emotion. How do you know when you cross the line into sentimentality?  Drama teachers tell us that sentiment is unearned emotion. Earn emotions. Also, avoid assumed emotions, such as: “He was devastated.”  Try: “He was so upset that he…” or simply just describe what he did “…so he broke it into little pieces.”

Move the plot along by pointing your sentences. Pointing is moving the writing along via logical baby steps—each sentence or clip ends with an image or thought that points to the beginning of the next sentence or clip, or the next sound we hear. Don’t make big leaps or refer back to things we heard a while ago or won’t hear until the end of the clip that follows. Again, it’s all right to flip sentences inside a clip to achieve this, as long as you’re not distorting anything.

Write into the sound. Write from the sound. Yes, set up sound, but don’t telegraph new sound. Let new sound happen before you address it. Don’t tell us what we’re going to hear next. Let us hear it; then fill us in.

Avoid passive voice and long subordinate clauses. Make new sentences.

Use more verbs and fewer adjectives. Verbs show people doing things. Vivid verbs work better than dull ones.

Write to the ending. An important thing that narrative journalists teach us is to avoid the inverted-pyramid structure–where all the best stuff is at the top, and the disposable stuff is at the end. We want strong endings. When you know the ending, a lot of the earlier writing is easier. It also helps you choose the telling detail your ending will reinforce, so you can find the right place in the story to foreshadow the ending.

All the above (including the material in Parts 1 and 2 of this series) add up to a lot of time and effort, especially in the field. But these strategies save time in the writing, vetting and production stages. Not to mention the next time you do a piece.

At Dispatches, compiling these thoughts has given us a common language to use when we talk shop.

But most of all, we believe it pays off for the listener. 

_____________________

Here are some examples of reporting what you see:

Michael McAuliffe in Baghdad Children’s Hospital (January 28, 2004). One prolonged scene, one character–but a story with a wallop. Michael dropped in on the hospital on a whim. He got an hour of walk-around sound with an English-speaking doctor. We cut it by half. Then Michael listened to it in his earpiece, and simultaneously recorded a running commentary on another mini-disc. We cut and mixed the two tracks back in Toronto and ran it the next day. That voicing is also a great way to achieve a personable storytelling tone, speaking in natural voice.

Jared Ferrie in Guinea Bissau (November 24, 2008). Jared found this basket-case country is a major packaging place for illegal drugs bound for Europe. Even though a lot of his recorded material was wiped clean by police working with the druglords, he got great scenes, because he took risks and remembered the details. His first radio story.  The PM was assassinated a month or so after this ran.

David McDougall essay from Congo (November 17, 2008). David was doing mostly print work in Congo when he was invited to in meet the crazy warlord Laurent Nkunda.  It’s a good example of recalling personal reactions and impressions and noticing some telling details–even though, as you hear, he lost his equipment in the end. That’s why it’s an essay.

Both David’s and Jered’s pieces are triumphs of naivety.

 [You can also listen to a single podcast with all the stories referenced in this series.]

After 10 seasons, we’re getting more pitches than we have time or money for, so we wanted to formalize some of the standards we use to decide what to do and how to do it. We also wanted to share with our contributors some of the thoughts about craft we’ve had over the years.

We wanted a document that aimed for high standards, yet offered help for people risking their lives in places they’re just learning to spell the names of—to grind out $100-a-minute pieces for overworked editors with short deadlines and dwindling budgets.

We’ve included some pieces to listen to at the end of this post. They don’t correspond one-to-one with the points we make, and they aren’t all spectacular. But they’re the kind of stories most professionals are capable of doing, and they serve as good examples of how to get more out of a piece by using a few simple strategies.

What is a dispatch?

A dispatch is a report from a specific place – by a narrator telling us things only someone who is there could tell.

Good dispatches include vivid images, tension, change, conflict, contradiction, or irony. Humor is always welcome. A surprise isn’t bad. The most memorable dispatches contain a strong “Who knew?” factor. The best ones shine a light into the lives of people.

A radio dispatch gets its veracity from the authentic sound of the reporter being in the scene—even interacting with others in the scene. That means, in a dispatch the sound doesn’t stop. We don’t broadcast “script & clip” items (where the reporter reads a script in a studio and plays clips).

Except for host interviews and on-scene conversations, our contributors talk directly to the audience. We don’t use generic sound effects or music beds under the clips (unless the music is from a scene, or part of the story). And we don’t put reporters or characters into scenes they really aren’t in.

Be crafty and creative

We’re telling people about the state of the world by taking them to the rarest of places, inside a stranger’s life. How can you do that?

Flesh out your characters. Ask subjects about the things that define them. Hopes. Fears. Food. Heroes. Music. Weapons. Family. Childhood.

That’s how you find out that your Congolese driver hasn’t had three meals a day in 30 years. And the 11-year-old guerilla doesn’t like the AK because it pulls high and to the right. These things might work into a clip. More often they work into your narrative, alongside the other things we like. For example, physical descriptions: hands, faces gestures, habits, tics.

Sticking with stuff you actually see shouldn’t be restrictive. If the subject is audibly spitting tobacco juice during the interview, don’t stop him. If a subject tells you how best to anaesthetize a pygmy elephant, it’s probably worth a mention. For God’s sake, tell us something we don’t know.

Your presence is organic to the piece. Insert yourself in it. Leave some questions in your clips, so we hear you learning and thinking out loud. Leave in the ragged, unplanned moments that add to the intimacy.

If the nervous woman in a Sarajevo church suddenly tells you to shut up because a stranger has walked in, then she grabs your mic and causes some nasty hand noise—it’s a telling moment.

Structure is your friend

We use elements of good narrative to pull these pieces together, starting from the simple fact that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

The beginning tells us what’s at stake in the story and gives us reasons to care about what happens. It introduces characters and sets up a conflict or a challenge. It might be the start of a journey, the middle of a standoff or the result of a troubled history. But, as a beginning, it engages us, makes us want to know what comes next, and how it got that way. It also lets us know what kind of a piece we’re in for, and sets a mood.

The middle is about people working through this situation. In a good story, this leads to moments of suspense – turning points, at which the story could go one of two (or more) ways. Those turning points, as short story masters have learned, are the opportunity for digression—back stories, facts, history. There’s usually a dramatic “what it’s all about” scene in this middle part.

The end does double duty. It’s the conclusion of the story and the last thing you leave the listener thinking about. Conventional news reports just trail off or embrace some rhetorical form of “Time will tell…” closing. We want to boost the effectiveness of Dispatches endings. Don’t be surprised if we ask you what the closing scene is before asking for the opener.

Your dispatch might not be a full-blown narrative piece. It might be a simple report of an event, or a profile of a person, or a complex account of a developing situation. To succeed, though, it most likely will employ some of the things that make good narrative journalism work—things that you can easily incorporate into your story.

Here are some sample clips (some may take a minute to load):

Be in the scene—Connie Buys A Burka (Oct 15, 2003). For Connie Watson, things were pretty cool in Kabul in October 2003; but she learned if you’re going to Kandahar , you best pack a burka. So she went shopping. It’s good example of being with people doing what they do for a living—even though most of it was scripted and voiced later.

Let people tell the story—Mender of Lost Hearts (Part One – January 2009). Samite Mulondo is a Ugandan refugee and now a professional musician based in Ithaca, New York. He worked with former child soldiers in a recording project in Congo.  We let him tell his own story – and the stories of these kids, in two parts.

Use personal experience—Anthony Eats Penis (April 4, 2006). Anthony Germain stretched his assignment as CBC’s correspondent in Shanghai to sample some of the organs on the menu.  It might have shades of cultural snobbishness, but it’s good storytelling, which reveals a lot about himself.

Narrate your story—Jody’s War. In early 2007 Dispatches host Rick MacInnes-Rae interviewed a Canadian Afghanistan amputee in a Toronto hospital. Jody told his own story. Rick broke it up using the simple technique that comes straight from the narrative journalism bible: stop the story (in this case a simple monologue) at key points of suspense to digress into scripted background. Then continue.         

Part 2 of this series ran December 2, 2009.

Alan Guettel has been senior producer of CBC Radio News’s Dispatches since 2001. He compiled this guide for contributors with the assistance of Dispatches host Rick MacInnes-Rae and producers Steve McNally and Donna Cressman.

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

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

Clark Boyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, is this great podcasting?

Who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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