We tell stories in sound for many, many reasons. For our listener's hearts and minds. For community. For self-expression. For the democracy. For listener's ears. Yes. Their ears. On this episode of The Sound School Podcast, Rob relishes the ear catching qualities of work from Delia Derbyshire (BBC), Michel Martin (NPR), and the Making Gay History podcast. 

Say you're listening to a great narrative podcast. The host has really grabbed your attention and you're pulled in. Then, out of nowhere, the narrator swears. Not once. Not twice. But three times. Including f-bombs. Is that a turn off for listeners? Should narrators swear? Dan Taberski defends his swears in his latest podcast. 

Deadlines, production meetings, staff management, show scheduling... in any given day, there's rarely time to pause and consider the craft of audio storytelling. Of course, PRX and Transom hope Sound School provides an easy opportunity to do that. On this episode, we'd like to introduce you to another podcast with the same mission: Sound Judgment hosted by Elaine Appleton Grant and featuring an interview with Jonathan Menjivar about his podcast Classy.

Cleaning out the "closet" of audio stories and found a few choice cuts to share from podcasts like Resistance, Louder Than A Riot, and Latino USA.

Chana Joffe-Walt is one of my fav writers. She excels at portraying character. Chana and I listen to some of her ninja moves from "Nice White Parents," the podcast she reported and produced for Serial and The New York Times.

If you were producing a podcast on climate change, what tone would you choose to approach the topic? Serious, right? Well, there's a lot of serious reporting in Gimlet's "How to Save a Planet." And there's also a light, "chatcast" feel woven throughout the show. Gimlet co-founder and co-host of the podcast, Alex Blumberg, explains why in this episode.

Step 1: Find a comfortable place to sit. Step 2: Make sure you’re free from interruption. Step 3: Put on headphones. Step 4: Place a mask over your eyes (or just close them). Step 5: Listen to Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff of The World According to Sound take you behind the scenes of the online audio event they produced during the pandemic.

What do you get when you mix folklore, radio journalism, and a pear? An award-winning story from Canadian producer Rebecca Nolan that brings it all together in an unexpected way.

 

From time to time, you might learn something unfavorable about a character when reporting a story. Inevitably you ask yourself: should I include this detail or not? To help answer that question, take the squirm test.

History podcasts face a serious problem: sound. So much documentation from the past lacks audio. The Last Archive solved the problem in a very unique way: Produce the podcast like it's a radio drama from the 1930s. But, how do you do that? Producers Ben Naddaff-Hafrey and Sophie McKibben have the answer on this episode of HowSound.

There needs to be a radio and podcasting merit badge: reporters and producers earn one when they stretch above and beyond for a story. If there was one, I would present it to Lauren Chooljian of New Hampshire Public Radio for a pandemic diary she produced.

Rob's secret hope with every HowSound is that you'll hear creative storytelling and production and think "Oh wait! I wanna do that!" He has no doubt that Fiona Benson's and Mair Bosworth's sound poem about 17-year cicadas will do just that.

Emily Green says she "walked in the margins" of journalism ethics to report a story on kidnapping at the US/Mexico border for This American Life. Emily and producer Lina Misitzis join me on this episode of HowSound to parse out how they navigated the reporting and how TAL addressed it in the story. This story was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning episode -- the first for audio journalism.

Have NPR's news magazines occasionally been sounding more radiophonic lately? Rob thinks so. He's collected a handful of satisfying moments of writing, production, and reporting from several reporters: Daniel Estrin, Avery Keatley, Andrew Limbong, Barbara Moran, Ari Shapiro, and Andrea Shea.

This American Life's Sean Cole is the guest on this episode of HowSound. Rob dug this one out of the HowSound archive from 2010. It features a fantastic story Sean produced in '05 as well as a discussion about the value of including a reporter's question in a story.

This episode is aptly named: “A Feast For Your Ears”. Rob features a handful of ear-catching clips. From a psychedelic road trip in Australia in the 1970s to a crowd-sourced poem produced by NPR to.... well, you'll have to listen!

You may know Jay Allison for his work on the Moth Radio Hour and in his role as the founder and executive editor of Transom. But, back in the day, Jay produced a trove of strange and ear-catching pieces about dog's dreams, talking horses, and freaky neighbors. Headphones on, people.

Selly Thiam says producing an LGBTQ podcast in Kenya is incredibly challenging. There's homophobia, government censorship, and a potential audience that still doesn't quite know what a podcast is. And, yet, AfroQueer, the podcast Selly hosts and produces, is winning major awards for the reporting.

Why do you report a story or produce a podcast and send it out into the world? What gives you purpose? What do you stand for? Rob finds meaning from the original NPR mission statement. He talks to Bill Siemering about writing the statement in 1970, the first broadcast of All Things Considered, and what inspires Bill to work in radio for several decades -- the power of the human voice.

Because of COVID 19, Reporters are scrambling to figure out how to report from home given social distancing guidelines and shelter in place orders. In response, reporters are devising clever ways to record and keep their stories sound-rich and engaging even though they're reporting from a closet at home.

This historic moment may be a good time to reconnect to the sonic environment. The latest episode of HowSound provides inspiration to do just that.

Narration in stories is usually just that - narration. Someone in a booth reading or ad-libing a script. But, "Borders Between Us" is different. Producer, Saidu Tejan-Thomas, uses poetry to tell the story. HowSound's Rob Rosenthal can't think of another piece like it.

Two stories, produced in a week by Transom Traveling Workshop students. The first, by Georgia Walker at our workshop at WPLN in Nashville. And the second, by Maribeth Romslo at our workshop in Seattle at KUOW. Both about music. Both impressive for first-time radio producers.

The first time Rob listened to "A Cow a Day" he thought "What the??!" But then he listened again and was hooked. Rob talks to Pejk Malinovsky, the producer of the doc, about his two wildly different interpretations.

"Ums." You're supposed to cut them out, right? But what if the "um" means something? Talia Augustidis noticed her boyfriend "ummed" when he was lying and she thought "radio story." Talia takes a deep dive into the importance of not cutting out all the "ums" as well as the backstory to her piece for the BBC's Short Cuts called "What's In An Um?"

Got your ears on? You'll want them as Rob threads his way through a wide variety of clips  that caught his attention over the last few months. A man injects Fentenyl into his neck... Toni Morrison speaks about beauty... Jad Abamrad waxes about the power of radio... and more.

Shereen Marisol Meraji of Code Switch told me she's sick of her voice -- the authoritative narrator. In response, Shereen recently experimented getting out of the way and letting the tape do the talking for a shocking documentary about a lynching in the 1930s. "A Strange and Bitter Crop" was her first non-narrated story in fifteen years and she can't wait to make more.

Let's face it: Use of the pronoun "I" has gotten out of hand. There's much too much navel gazing and self-indulgence in so many podcasts. And yet, sometimes using the first person as a reporter is the best approach for a story. Leila Day of The Stoop podcast relates how she and her co-host Hana Baba navigate those waters. 

Two treats for your ears. Stories produced by graduates of the Transom Story Workshop -- Ruby Schwartz and Cariad Harmon. They're well worth a listen if for no other reason than their stories are about octopuses and homing pigeons.

The backstory to WGBH's Gabrielle Emanuel's reporting on a hidden past is fascinating. How she found people connected to the Reverse Freedom Riders… How she communicated with them by hand-written note… the discussion in the newsroom about connecting the story of the Reverse Freedom Rider’s to President Donald Trump’s plan to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities… all that on this episode of HowSound.

When you're yelled at. Called a prostitute. Told you're a liar and shameless and malicious... How do you stay the course and keep interviewing? Brazilian journalist Leticia Duarte explains her approach on this episode of HowSound.

Emily Kwong had never been to Mongolia. She doesn't speak the language. She didn't know her way around. It was winter and very cold. She was in-country alone -- no fellow producer. The only way she was able to successfully report on climate change and migration was to hire incredible fixers.

Rob talks specifically about how to bring music in and out of a story. And, then, he takes a stab at the impossible: explaining one aspect of how to select music to use for scoring. 

How do you score a story with music is one of the most frequent questions, HowSound's Rob Rosenthal is asked. Up now, the first of two episodes on the fundamentals of using music in stories.

HowSound listeners always seem to want tips on interviewing. Liz Mak of Snap Judgement delivers on this episode with her approach to interviewing for emotions.

One of the top three questions Rob often hears when he's teaching is, "Should I record in stereo?" Rob says mono is usually the way to go. But on this archive episode of Sound School, former NPR engineer Flawn Williams evangelizes about the value of stereo recordings, and he brought along several sound-rich examples.

Get your ears on for this episode. Rob presents clips from podcasts that made his jaw drop including Love + Radio, The Ballad of Billy Balls, and Have You Heard George's Podcast.

Reporting in the field can be chaos. Anything can happen. NPR host Noel King says that's the best part of being a journalist -- chasing a story that's ever-shifting.

In 2017, producer Sam Greenspan took a leap. He left his producing job at 99% Invisible for... well, he wasn't exactly sure at the time. Now, two years later, Sam's launched Bellwether, a podcast employing speculative journalism to tell stories about the future. The show is a unique mix of reporting, science fiction, and radio drama.

In an effort to try something new, Rob offers another podcast review. This time, "Song Exploder" from Radiotopia.

Despite hours of great material, there are a couple things about Spotify's "Stay Free: The Story of the Clash" that really make Rob cranky.

Who are all those people at the end of an episode of Reply All, given credit for putting it together? One of them is Jessica Yung. She's an Associate Producer. On this episode of HowSound we shine a light on Jessica's hidden work as an AP. 

When you have guests as famous and interesting at Tan France, Ramy Youseff, Wazina Zondon, Ryan Harris, and Alia Shawkat, why does the host  of Tell Them I Am start each episode talking about herself? Misha Euceph has the answer.  

NPR reporter Uri Berliner breaks from his usual approach to storytelling and finds interviewing his dad about growing up in Berlin in the 1930s to be incredibly difficult and rewarding.

Sewage pipes, a radio crime, and sound designing inner thoughts.... Must be another episode of Rob's fav sounds but this time with a twist -- a sound that annoyed Rob to no end. Clips from BBC 3 and Nathanial Mann, Bodies by KCRW, and No Feeling Is Final from ABC Radio.

Every once in a while, I think HowSound should focus solely on interviewing. To heck with sound design, writing, ethics, tracking, and the like. Just focus on “the backstory to great radio interviewing.”

Why? Because interviewing is how radio producers mine. It’s how we collect the raw material for our work. The better the interviewing, the better the tape. The better the tape, the better the story.

I mean, sure sloppy writing can kill stellar interview tape.

Same with bad production.  Conversely a

bad interview can be saved by rock solid writing. But really, if you nail your

interview, the rest will come easy. Okay. Not easy, but easier. And the story

the tape is based on will likely be more satisfying.

Put another way, interviewing is the keystone of audio

storytelling.

That’s why it’s important to examine the work of the best practitioners and Cathy FitzGerald is just that — one of the best. She possesses an uncanny ability to capture “humans being” in her interviews. And she approaches it in unusual ways with her penchant for recording interviews in scene; her use of participant observation, which is a fancy way of saying she doesn’t just ask questions, she gets involved; and her use of props to prompt conversation. On this episode of HowSound, Cathy chats about those approaches and we hear extended examples of her work.

As a bonus, during our chat, Cathy turned the tables and

asked me questions about

interviewing. And that led us to talk about our weaknesses and what we both

would like to improve and to this positively lovely analogy for interviewing —

weeping with one eye.

In the tsunami of serialized documentary making over the last decade, what happened to the short story? Where are the one-off curious and creative sound portraits or essays or found sound or audio postcards or.... ? Last year Transom commissioned a dozen short stories as part of "Small, Random, and Meaningful." Rob features his three favorites.

On this episode, the convention-busting production choices of "10 Things That Scare Me."

Sometimes, there's just too much good work to feature on HowSound. To solve the problem, from time to time I feature a slew of ear-catching clips on one episode. On this episode, work from Believed, 99% Invisible, This American Life, and Threshold.

At a school where I taught radio, in the mic booth, there was a photo of Studs Terkel hanging on the wall. Under it, someone wrote “Talk to Studs.”

The picture was there to help with tracking. Narration will

sound more conversational if you pretend you’re talking to Studs, the thinking

went. After all, that’s the goal, right? To track like you’re just talking to

someone.

Hanging up a picture and talking to it may be a good (and slightly weird) first step toward tracking naturally, Sruthi Pinnemaneniof Reply Alltakes things a whole lot further because she’s driven to avoid sounding like she’s reading something written. She very much wants listeners to fall into a story because her voice sounds unaffected and genuine. 

“(At Reply All) we try to track in a way that is closer to ‘I’m telling a story to somebody,'” she says. “When we’re tracking, we almost always have a producer or someone in the room where we’re trying to recreate that feeling of ‘I’m here and I’m feeling the excitement and joy that I know exists in this story.'”

She says it’s not just a matter of talking to that person in

the room. They help, too. They offer feedback, of course. But, they also play

tape. Sruthi listens to a quote in her story then, right as it finishes, she

narrates.

“The tape always carries a certain kind of emotion,” she explained to me. “Either you’re surprised by what the person is saying or what the person is saying makes you laugh. And so you want the tracking, the line that you’re saying out of it, to carry that emotion.”

What else does she do? Sruthi lays it out in this episode of

HowSound.