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.

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.