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 [...]
Tag Archives: audio narratives
How are you doing? Laura Mayer shares the stories that rise out of small talk
February 9, 2010 – 1:13 pm
CBC Dispatches (Part 3): writing for radio
December 4, 2009 – 5:09 pm
[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: sounding out your story (Part 1)
December 1, 2009 – 3:39 pm
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
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?
