[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 [...]
Category Archives: sound
CBC Dispatches (Part 2): composing with sound
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 [...]
Confessions of a podcaster
by Clark Boyd |
October 20, 2009
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?
The best-kept secret on medical narratives
A doctor gets shingles and finds himself unable to refuse unnecessary tests. A student in need of a kidney transplant gets offers of marriage, with free health care attached. A national news celebrity struggles with bipolar disorder.
You might not expect to find these stories in a research and policy journal. But since 1999, Health [...]
8 Reasons to put noise in your narrative
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 [...]
