Alex Blumberg

• Intro / Manifesto pt. 1
• Conversation pt. 1
• Manifesto pt. 2
• Conversation pt. 2
• Download this document in PDF
• Alex Blumberg in TALK
• About Alex Blumberg

Manifesto Part 2: The Addendum

At this late date, now that Manifesto, part 1 is finished and I’m considering what to write in part 2, I finally figured out what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about two very important, but often overlooked elements of radio journalism. The subject of manifesto part one was how to choose a good radio story. The subject of today’s little manifesto, (in Italian, manifestissimo,) is how to conduct a good radio interview.

I feel the need to point out that there a billion more things to say about putting together a good radio story. There’s writing, structuring, pacing. But those are the aspects of radio production that everyone talks about. What they don’t talk about are the two things that come first.

To do a good radio interview, it’s helpful to know what you’re going for. I’d argue there are two main kinds of tape you’re trying to get. The first is emotionally honest tape. In tape like this, what the person is saying is secondary to the emotional tone they say it with. Here’s a prime example:

Spelling Bee
(NPR’s Morning Edition – 05/30/1997)

Let’s just say, we’re not listening to this story because we’re curious how the word is spelled.

Emotionally honest tape doesn’t need to be overwrought though. It can simply be honest. Honesty is very audible on the radio. You can hear when someone is saying something they really feel, and you can hear when someone’s giving you a canned response. The most vivid tape is tape where you hear people saying something they really, really mean. Here’s another example of tape like this, from an interview Columbia graduate Anya Bourg did, for a show on This American Life called “DIY.” The story involved a wrongfully convicted man, Collin Warner, who was finally released from prison after 21 years, thanks to the tireless efforts of two men: his loyal friend from childhood, and a small-time lawyer in Brooklyn. In the interview we ask the lawyer if this type of wrongful conviction could happen again. His answer … well, it’s not the most groundbreaking information in the world, but the way he says it, it just stands out:

Listen to Anya Bourg’s Story – 1:00 MP3: Streaming(80 kbps) | Download (596 kb)

The second type of tape that you’re going for is tape that takes the form of an anecdote. The anecdote is the fundamental building block of good radio journalism. An anecdote is at it’s most basic, a sequence of actions that arrives at some point or conclusion or surprising revelation. We tell anecdotes to each other all the time, every day. “This morning as I was leaving my house on my way to work I heard these strange sounds. They were high-pitched, and chirpy, like a baby animal or something. When I went outside the sound got louder, it sounded like it was coming from under the porch. I bent down and saw a litter of kittens. An alley cat had given birth there during the night.”

There are two kinds of people in the world. People who talk in anecdotes and people who don’t. The people who don’t wouldn’t tell that story that way. They wouldn’t tell that story at all, in fact. They’d simply convey the information contained in that story, “Some alley cat gave birth to a litter of kittens under my porch last night. I heard them on my way to work this morning.” Now don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends don’t tell anecdotes, but on the radio you want an anecdote-teller every time. The reason is, we’re hardwired to listen to stories. And if you can get the information delivered in an anecdote, people will pay more attention.

Consider the following example. You need to know two things before listening:

1) the guy telling the story is from a working-class town in upstate New York, and was the first one in his family to go to college, and not just any college, an Ivy League school, Cornell University.
2) He and his entire family loved to eat meat.

The story takes place early in his freshman year, he’d just arrived, was nervous, didn’t know anyone, and wasn’t sure he belonged:

Listen to the Freshman Year Story – 1:57 MP3: Streaming(80 kbps) | Download (2.2 mb)

Once you get past a certain point in the story, you’re not turning off the radio until it’s over. That’s the power of the anecdote. It conveys lots of information – about the dislocation of freshman year, about the absurd lengths people go to fit in – but in a way that makes you want to listen. Imagine if the tape had simply been this: “yeah, in my freshman year of college, I was so nervous about fitting in that I told people I was a vegetarian.” It’s the same information, but not told in a radio friendly way.

The thing people don’t realize is that this radio friendly tape doesn’t just happen. Well, sometimes it does, actually. Some people are born story-tellers, and speak in anecdotes as a matter of course. And other people are irrepressibly heartfelt and emotional talkers who open up to people with microphones the same way they do with their friends and family. But most people, the vast majority of us, need help. And you as a radio reporter need to realize that one of your biggest jobs is to help the people you’re interviewing become good tape, which means 1) helping them talk honestly and emotionally, ie. like real people, and 2) helping them tell good anecdotes.

I. Helping people talk like real people

Let me begin with an anecdote. When I first started doing radio, I thought that in order to build rapport with my subjects, I should spend 5 or 10 minutes chitchatting with them, off the topic of what I was there to interview them about. But every time it seemed that at the end of the chitchat my subjects were more nervous, not less. I finally figured out why. It was because I wasn’t putting them at ease with my chitchat. Quite the opposite, I was confusing them. From my perspective I was just being, you know, casual, but from their perspective a stranger called them me up out of the blue, scheduled an appointment to talk with them, dragged his tape recorder all the way up to their office, just to ask them where’s the best place to get lunch in the area?

In other words, you’re fooling no one. You’re there to do a job, and the sooner you acknowledge it, the better it will go. Don’t pussyfoot. Take control. If they’re sitting across a desk, make them sit next to you. If their phone is ringing see if they can turn it off. Never ever, ever, ever, ever let them hold the microphone. It does NOT make them feel more comfortable. And it just insures that you’ll get mic noise. The more certain you are in your behavior, the more comfortable and relaxed they’ll be in the interview. The weird thing is, once you’ve bossed them around enough in the beginning – made them switch seats, turn off their cell phones, scootch closer so you don’t have to hold the mic way out; in short, all the things you’d wouldn’t do if you were just talking – the more it will sound like a natural conversation in the end. People do forget about the microphone, almost immediately, but only if you acknowledge it in the beginning.

The other very important thing to remember: if they don’t say something the right way the first time, you can go back. People will be stiff. They’ll stumble around. They’ll talk all formal, like they think you want them to talk. They’ll say “this individual” instead of “this guy.” They’ll say, “I was concerned, definitely” instead of “I was freaked out, yo.” You don’t have to let them. Get them to tell it again. Rephrase the question. Stop them and say, “I want you to answer that question again, but this time use the word sad instead of lachrymose.”

How much can you do this? A lot. Witness this tape from an interview NPR reporter John Nielsen did for a story about Avian flu in zoos. During an outbreak, people were afraid to go to zoos because they thought, wrongly, there was a higher risk of catching the disease in a zoo. Nielsen’s interviewing a zoo director, and he just needs the guy to set the record straight, say that zoos actually aren’t any more dangerous than anywhere else. But the guy’s a scientist type and isn’t talking like a real person. We’ll pick up the tape after John’s asked the question a second time, why is it safe to go to the zoo?

Listen to John Nielson’s Story – 1:36 MP3: Streaming(80 kbps) | Download (1 mb)

Notice, he’s never mean or rude or off-putting. And that’s very important. By bossing people around, I don’t want to give the impression that you should march into people’s offices after they’ve generously agreed to give you time out of their busy day and start making petty demands. But simply to realize what they already understand, you’re there to do a job, and to do it right, you need them to follow your lead. You can hear John’s final piece here:

Zoos Tracking West Nile Virus
(NPR’s Morning Edition – 10/02/2002)

The zoo guy comes in at the very end.

II. Getting people to talk in stories

I did a story a while back about a mailman in Chicago. I spent a day on his route with him. It was in a working class neighborhood in Chicago, relatively high crime, and there were a lot of drug dealers around. The mailman, Henry, had a very complicated relationship with them. On the one hand, he was afraid of them, because they were federal felons with guns and he was a federal employee with nothing but mace. He was afraid to even call them drug dealers on tape, he called them boys in the hood, or businessmen instead. On the other hand, he saw the same guys hanging around the same corner every day, and since they were both working the same neighborhood, they’d developed a somewhat collegial respect for one another. I wanted to get across in my story this peculiar and complicated relationship. So I put in this anecdote:

Listen to Henry’s Story – 1:57 MP3: Streaming(80 kbps) | Download (2.2 mb)

Henry was a wonderful man, and I loved spending the day with him, but he was not an anecdote teller. And the story you just heard did not happen the way you heard it. To prove it, I’m going to play you the raw tape of the way he first told me about this episode. There are two things to pay attention to here. First, the climax of the story, that the boys in the hood came to Henry’s aid, is the very first beat Henry gets to in his uncut telling of the story. This is a classic move with non anecdote tellers. They tell you the point, and then fill in the details later. For a good story, you want the details first, and then the point at the end. So a lot of what I do in the raw tape is get him to back up and fill in the details of the scene. One of the most helpful things my boss, Ira, ever told me was this: you know you’re getting good tape when people are quoting dialog to you. You can hear me prompting Henry, “then he said what? Then what did you say back?”

The second thing to listen for in the raw tape is how the story Henry wants to tell me is totally different from the story I WANT Henry to tell me. I want him to tell the story about what happened that day with his angry customer. He wants to tell me a story about proper procedure for submitting a change of address card. Henry was a very, very good mailman, and this part of the story was interesting to him. But it’s not interesting to me, and since I’m the professional journalist in the equation, part of my job is being a proxy for the rest of the people listening, and that means, if I’m good at my job, what’s interesting to me is what’s interesting to my listeners. Anyway, here’s the tape the way it actually happened:

Listen to Henry’s Story Uncut – 1:57 MP3: Streaming(80 kbps) | Download (2.2 mb)

This story, which ended up being sort of pivotal in the final piece, wouldn’t have happened at all if I hadn’t been on the look-out for something to turn into an anecdote. And I think that’s one of the most important things of all to remember. A lot of what you’re doing during a radio interview is simply picking the moments you want to make into stories. So always be on the lookout for moments that seem somehow meaningful, or poignant, or pivotal. And when they come up, make sure you get the details.

Okay, now it’s my students’ turn. The semester has ended, most of the students have graduated and, we hope, entered the work force. Their final projects are all up on the web.

Columbia Student’s Final Projects

There’s hours of material here, but I’d point people, for the purposes of discussion, to a couple of the pieces in particular:

Jennifer Weiss does a fantastic job exploring the world of platza, a spa treatment in New York City’s Russian bathhouses:

Listen to Jennifer Weiss’ Story – 10:25 REAL AUDIO: SureStream (28.8 – 44 kbps)

Kristen Gillespie tackles a very difficult subject, consumer debt, and does an admirable job with it. Note that even though it’s a newsy topic, she still uses emotional tape and anecdotes in reporting it:

Listen to Kristen Gillespie’s Story – 7:11 REAL AUDIO: SureStream (28.8 – 44 kbps)

One of the weirdest stories in the final batch was by Michael Rice. It’s a profile of a New York city beekeeper, sort of, but it goes a lot of other places as well:

Listen to Michael Rice’s Story – 8:38 REAL AUDIO: SureStream (28.8 – 44 kbps)

Now that the class is over, I’m especially curious to hear from the students. I’m curious about a couple things specifically, and maybe you guys could post a little about this. First, what if anything did you guys learn from the documentary class. Second, what are you all doing now that you all have graduated? And finally, are you able to apply anything you learned in class to your jobs/lives post Columbia?

The Alex Blumberg & Class Review
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