With a lot of journalists pondering narrative in the digital era, we thought it would be interesting to highlight a March collaboration between NPR business reporter Adam Davidson and video producer Travis Fox. As part of a joint effort by Frontline and NPR, Fox and Davidson went to Haiti and ended up creating audio-only stories [...]
Category Archives: audio narratives
Planet Money’s Adam Davidson solves a Haitian mystery and beats expectations
Great storytelling sometimes reveals itself by what it leaves out, and so it is that our latest Notable Narratives shine by not focusing on post-earthquake death and devastation in Haiti. Last month, PBS’ Frontline sent video producer Travis Fox to the Carribean to meet up with NPR’s Adam Davidson, who was there reporting for Planet Money. [...]
Paul Raeburn, Ira Glass, and just some of the ways a story can go wrong
Yesterday, Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker took the stuffing out of a New York Times medical piece. The story, by Gardiner Harris, reveals a secret recording of a 2007 meeting between a cardiologist and executives at a pharmaceutical company. Raeburn dinged it for both structure and content, writing that “sometimes a poorly [...]
How are you doing? Laura Mayer shares the stories that rise out of small talk
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 [...]
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.
How [...]
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 droves—as [...]
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 its [...]
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 to [...]
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 piece [...]
