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 [...]
Tag Archives: The World
Interview as story: on radio, online and in print
December 16, 2010 – 3:40 pm
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 [...]
Confessions of a podcaster
October 20, 2009 – 12:03 pm
Long-form, narrative radio—that’s the kind of radio many of us dreamed of doing when we started in 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?
8 Reasons to put noise in your narrative
September 29, 2009 – 4:05 pm
Let me set one thing straight: I don’t believe that audio is necessarily the best way to tell a story. But I’ve spent more than a decade in this beast called radio, or “the theatre of the mind,” as it was described to me when I started, and I still harbor warm and fuzzy feelings [...]
