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BreAna Loranger interviews Kiera Feldman at the
National Youth in Radio Training Conference
Intro from Jay Allison
Producer Erin Mishkin has begun to create a with-youth, for-youth series of audio guides to the art of radio. Transom and PRX are featuring three pilot pieces. Erin wants your thoughts about these modules. Are they instructional, inspirational? What others would you want to hear? Let us know what you need, and we’ll work with Erin and PRX to create more.
From Erin Mishkin
I have always been a fan of youth radio. I love the freshness of it, its often frank and open nature, its ability to break down our expectations for what we think a radio piece should sound like. I love that when I listen to youth radio, I come away with a new perspective on any number of universal issues. During my time in graduate school, I began more seriously exploring the idea of teaching audio documentary to youth as a means for self-expression, community involvement, and self-exploration. Audio School, a series of guides informed by youth radio producers on the art of making radio, is the result of this exploration.
The goal behind Audio School was to create an audio documentary guide that was informed by youth who have been producing audio documentaries. What would they have wanted to know when they were first starting out? What advice did they appreciate at the time? Because there are several written guides and resources for audio documentary producers available, but fewer audio guides, I wanted to “show” rather than “tell” youth how to create audio documentaries by using the very medium they are learning and, most importantly, using their own words to describe the process. How can sound be used to teach about the art of sound?
It was also important to me to highlight the valuable contributions being made by youth to the public radio landscape and to share their insight and wisdom about producing audio documentaries. I wanted to help youth learn from other youth and see the value in the work of their peers—expanding their role models, perhaps, from adults to youth their age.
In the course of producing these, I found that, more often than not, youth weren’t afraid to admit that they are still learning, that even though they may have been producing radio for a while, they are by no means experts. As a newbie radio producer myself, there is something appealing about hearing these admissions and being reminded that everyone was a beginner at some point.
Format and Production
Think of it as a DVD special feature, only there’s no DVD. These guides provide a combination of commentary by the youth producers woven in between snippets of their own work. They reflect on the choices they made, what they’ve learned since production, what they wished they had done differently, and what they thought worked well. Along the way, they offer tidbits of advice, pep talks, and insight into the art of radio.
To figure out which topics to tackle first, I asked youth producers to tell me what they wished they had had more guidance on when beginning to experiment with documentary arts. I made an extensive effort to hear from youth all over the nation (and who were doing all kinds of radio) through an online survey, endless phone conversations, and email exchanges. I also talked to adult youth radio advisors, public radio gurus who were fans of youth radio, and anyone I could convince to talk to me about youth radio. I found that those in the public radio community—especially youth—were excited about the idea and were willing to help.
After getting much feedback, for this first round of pieces I decided to focus on three topics: general advice, interviewing, and use of music in pieces. For the general advice vox pop, KBOO youth radio producer BreAna Loranger conducted several short interviews with her peers at the National Youth in Radio Training Conference. For the guide on interviewing, I talked to Emily Raymond at KRCB regarding her piece, “The Night I Met Billy Corgan,” an interview with the Smashing Pumpkins star. For the music guide, I interviewed Kiera Feldman, a member of the KBOO Youth Collective and a student at Brown University, regarding her piece, “In a Cornfield in Iowa.” Both producers were funny, insightful, and articulate about their pieces and the choices they made. In order to avoid having the sound of a phone conversation (Emily was in Portland and Kiera was in Providence), I asked both producers to record themselves and then send me the audio. (This technical complication was an obstacle to having other youth producers participate—many don’t own their own sound equipment and were unable to borrow it from their youth radio group.)
Audio School
General Advice
BreAna Loranger
KBOO Youth Collective guru BreAna Loranger talks to her peers at the National Youth in Radio Training Project in April 2006 about what advice they’d give newbie radio producers.
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Listen to “Intro to doing radio – Vox Pop Style” – 3:51 MP3: Streaming (64 kbps) | Download (1.8 MB) |
Interviewing
Emily Raymond
Emily Raymond of KRCB’s youth radio contingent describes what it was like for her to interview her musical idol, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame. From deciding what to ask (and why) to getting reticent talkers to gab, Emily shares her insights into the art of interviewing.
- Listen to “The Night I Met Billy Corgan”
- Visit Emily’s profile page on PRX
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Listen to “Interviewing Guide – The Art of Interviewing” – 5:08 MP3: Streaming (64 kbps) | Download (2.4 MB) |
Using Music
Kiera Feldman
Youth radio producer Kiera Feldman reflects on her use of music in the piece, “In a Cornfield in Iowa.” What was her reasoning behind her music selection and the timing of the music? How did a piece about trying to find oneself make use of a song by the 1980s band, Journey? Kiera takes the listener behind the scenes, giving us insight into all of these things—including how her thinking about audio documentaries has evolved from her initial thought that it was “print journalism with really cool music.”
- Listen to “In a Cornfield in Iowa”
- Visit Kiera’s profile page on PRX
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Listen to “Music Guide – How to Avoid Breaking Out the Musical Sledge Hammer: Or How to Use Music Most Effectively” – 5:38 MP3: Streaming (64 kbps) | Download (2.6 MB) |
To Learn More
Audio School is made in collaboration with the good folks at Generation PRX. Generation PRX, a project of the Public Radio Exchange, promotes youth voices and youth-produced radio to help listeners discover the next generation of sound. To learn more about Generation PRX, and to see lesson plans connected to the Audio School modules go to the Generation PRX page.
Feedback
I would love to hear from radio producers—veteran or newbie, youth or adult—about what topics to tackle next. Future guides could include: editing tips, how to record in the field, how to use ambient sound, ethics, writing for radio, or how to find the story. What do you want to hear? If you’re a veteran, think back to when you were just starting out and let me know what advice you wished you had been given. If you’re just beginning to get your radio feet wet, I want to hear from you, too.
About Erin Mishkin
Erin Mishkin
Before getting a degree in Arts in Education, I worked for four years at National Public Radio, where I did everything from operate a conference popcorn maker to edit my division’s employee newsletter. This past summer I traveled the Midwest in a van-full of teenagers, camping and doing documentary work along the way. I love office supplies, buying cheap shirts at Target, and meeting characters in my neighborhood.
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Discuss this Feature |
Producer Erin Mishkin has begun to create a with-youth, for-youth series of audio guides to the art of radio. Transom and PRX are featuring three pilot pieces. Erin wants your thoughts about these modules. Are they instructional, inspirational? What others would you want to hear? Let us know what you need, and we’ll work with Erin and PRX to create more.
Hi Erin,
It’s great to read about what you’re doing.
You ask for suggestions…
My feeling is that there is already a lot of good information out there – for youth and non-youth – about interviewing and collecting tape. What I think is missing is a good guide for what to do after you have all this tape. I think a hands-on for-youth/by-youth guide to editing, mixing and producing would be very valuable. Maybe it would be possible to work with Jeff and the Transom Tools folks to adapt some of the information that’s already on this site.
Best of luck.
Joe
Thanks for the feedback! The topic of "how to edit" ranked really high among youth who answered my survey, so you’re right — this is definitely a topic worth exploring. Great idea to work with Jeff and the Transom folks.
Thanks again!
erin
This is a great project, Erin. I’m impressed with how comfortable the producers are talking about their process.
I’d like to put in another plug for editing . You’ve done the interview and decided on the music, then what? In Emily ‘s piece she says not to worry about stammering or asking stupid questions because it’s all going to be edited out. How does that magic happen? How do a few/many clicks of the mouse turn a stammering fan into an insightful interviewer? It’d be a challenge to explain how to edit orally but it would be a fun experiment.
I’m looking forward to hearing whatever you decide to do next.
Hi Erin, it’s so great to see the finished project! Or pilot, rather. And before I say anything else, I’d like to thank you for properly spelling "school" in your title. I seriously want to know how anyone ever got the horribly mistaken idea that kids just love it when people spell it as "skool" (and god help anyone who makes that a backwards "k").
That said, it was a pleasure to take part in Audio School. I hope other youth producers will find my comments useful. If anyone has any advice on music use, I’d love to hear it. Has anyone worked with musicians to score radio stories?
As for future installments of Audio School, editing would be great, but I really think you’d have to have a visual component. So much of editing is visual (in my mind, at least). But yes, I recently learned how to properly use the compressor and that 10 minute lesson has made a world of difference. I can only imagine that there are a ton of other functions like that.
In the Interview module, Emily talked about how the actual interview is totally different than how it sounds in a finished piece. That got me thinking…have I ever heard any raw tape other than my own? Even though a segment might sound like a simple conversation, everything on the radio is heavily edited (except, of course, live shows). I’ve been told to count to 10 after an interviewee stops talking before you ask your next question, but what does that actually sound like? I’ve heard that I shouldn’t be afraid to sound stupid when asking questions, but what does sounding stupid sound like?
In her session at Third Coast, Nancy Updike said, “Comfort is the enemy of good reporting” (or something along those lines). I’ve thought about that advice a lot since then. I’m wondering if there could be a module of Audio School that is like annotated raw tape (eg “this is me feeling really awkward and nervous, this is me buying time while I think of a new question, this is me pausing because I thought they had more to say but it turned out they didn’t, this is me asking a question that went nowhere and then I had to backtrack…”).
I’m with Joe and Kiera – these ideas are terrific. Editing can be an evasive topic, but actually seeing the transformation (as Kiera suggests) from raw tape to broadcast might help let us in to how the process works.
There might be a way to make this more visual by providing some accompanying worksheet (like the ol’ "Divide your story up into scenes" exercise).
Maybe a youth producer would be willing to show the steps of editing and talk through decisions about what to keep and what to toss?
Thanks so much for this awesome work,
Jones (who promises never to write "skool")
I’m developing a youth radio project in Vermont, and I’m grateful to find this project online. Can’t wait for more. One thing I’d love to hear people talk about is the log slog. It’s hard to really understand how holy the log is until you’ve finished your first piece. So it requires a lot of faith to keep GOING on that first project. I’m finding a lot of resistance to this stage of the process. It’s slow, kids are not clear why they are logging, and they seem to see no light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of energy is lost in this stage.
In light of this, I’d be real interested in hearing about effective ways of teaching in this strange and mysterious stage of production…and would love to hear what people think are good parameters for FIRST projects (after a quick dip with a vox pop). What have you all found is the best format/length to set kids up for success on their first project? Any advice for a newbie teacher like me?
Thanks a lot.
Erica Heilman
Thanks for putting this together, Erin (sorry I’m joining this conversation a little late…I just found your piece on Transom.) I’m the new Education Director at public station WYEP in Pittsburgh, PA, and we’re starting a radio journalism program this summer with high school students. Since we’re kind of in uncharted waters (for us, that is), any suggestions about starting something like this are greatly appreciated.
Some of the other posters have mentioned this, and I would also enjoy hearing your suggestions about introductory exercises for kids who are totally new to audio storytelling. A lot of these kids come from urban neighborhoods that don’t traditionally have any associations with public radio listening. What’s a good way to introduce these concepts and spark their interest?
I know not every student wants to be the next Ira Glass, but I think there’s a lot of potential there for the students to tell stories that are meaningful to them. What are some short-and-sweet beginner exercises you’d recommend that are fun but also teach the basics and leave them wanting to do more?
Thanks! -Stephan Bontrager
I feel like I must be dense for not seeing it – but what is logging?
Logging is: taking notes on and/or transcribing your tape.