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@nprstorytelling
We love this Tumblr but...
...we haven’t updated it in a while. We feel bad about that. It’s because we’ve been focusing on building oodles of storytelling resources over at NPR’s Editorial Training website.
So this Tumblr is on vacation. But there’s still lots of great stuff here. Scroll down. Check it out. And we’re still here. Still listening, reading, looking for the best examples of great storytelling. You can always find us on Twitter or at [email protected].
Does anything HAPPEN in your story?
In public radio, we cover a lot of policy issues affecting LOTS of people. These are hard stories to tell. We gather hours of tape with policymakers and people affected by policies -- but it’s challenging to turn that into a compelling narrative.
Renata Sago of WMFE (edited by Brett Neely, NPR) solved that problem by narrating one thing happening to one person over the course of her story (you can listen above). She was reporting on Florida ex-felons trying to get their voting rights back. They must appeal to a powerful clemency board.
Renata went to the clemency hearing and identified a person who could serve as a main character. Here’s how that one person is introduced:
SAGO: Justin drove seven hours for a five-minute chance to make his case. He waits in the back of the room, clutching an Expando file full of court papers. They date back to one mistake.
JUSTIN: In 1994, Miami, I was snatching a gold chain, and I did 31 months.
SAGO: He was 16.
JUSTIN: I never thought that snatching a gold chain would lead to this, that I'm in State Capitol at 38 years old trying to ask them for my rights back.
As the story proceeds, we hear the big picture -- Florida’s difficult clemency process and its history -- but we stick around to discover what happens to Justin. And in the end, we find out.
This is a simple story structure including the narrative arc of one person’s experience -- surrounded by context. It’s simple, but vastly more listenable than a story that offers no protagonist and no reason to keep listening until the end.
-- Alison
PS - From NPR’s Editorial Training website, here are more strategies for structuring your stories, in order to give them narrative arcs.
Gut check: How to capture the emotion of a moment
What do you do after finishing a bunch of interviews in the field?
You double check your recorder... Was I actually rolling? Phew!... You record a bunch more ambience... The producers will always ask me for more... What else?
NPR’s Sam Sanders does what he calls “an emotional gut check” (see photo above for Sam’s demonstration). He pauses to ask himself, “How do I feel? How do the folks I talked to feel? How does the entire moment feel?”
Sam explains why:
“I do it because so often in our reporting, we’re focused on the facts – how big was the crowd, who said what, what might happen next, etc. But a lot of times, the color and the FLAVOR of the piece will come from the mood of the scene, something that isn’t always found in your audio when you’re playing it back later. I’ve found that, at least for me, I have to actually stop myself, to ask what the mood is.”
For Sam, these gut checks frequently result in down-to-earth, relatable pieces of writing. Like this, from a story about mega-Ben Carson fans:
ADDY EARHART: I was shaken.
SANDERS: You were shaken.
EARHART: Yeah.
SANDERS: Why were you shaken?
EARHART: I was just so nervous.
SANDERS: She was like a teenage fan meeting a Taylor Swift or a One Direction. At every event, there are attempts at weird quick hugs, selfies taken before handlers quickly push fans away and tears...
Sam explains that he wouldn’t have come up with the comparison to Taylor Swift and One Direction if he hadn’t paused to ask himself, “What does this scene feel like?”
And another thing: Sam always runs these sentiments by his editor -- because every gut check needs a gut check.
-- Alison
“The soufflé collapses” and other writing that surprises
The man in this photo is Ilya Marritz. He is NOT a football player. He’s the host of WNYC’s podcast “The Season,” which ends its season this week. Ilya has been narrating, in serialized form, the story of the underdog Columbia football team.*
Also, Ilya is a great writer. What he does so well is describe things in surprising and specific ways. Here are just a few examples:
When Columbia almost wins its first game in 2 years and then blows it, “the soufflé collapses.”
When Ilya describes a post-game locker room, it smells of “Lycra marinated in sweat.”
When the team misses a field goal during a game in Ithaca, NY, “the ball flies off in the direction of Syracuse.”
In these examples, the descriptions aren’t predictable and, because of that, they’re especially evocative. “Lycra” (specific) and “marinated” (surprising) is much better than “uniforms” and “soaked.”
Ilya’s writing is also restrained. If every sentence were peppered with this kind of description, it would be too heavy on the ears. So he’s sparing; every once in a while, Ilya drops in a gem.
You can do that, too. In any story – long or short – you can offer what some people call “a grace note,” or “spark,” or a moment of “flair.” Just a word or phrase. In this post from the NPR Editorial Training website, it’s described as dropping “gold coins along the path... every 60 seconds or so.”
-- Alison
*(Disclaimer: Ilya is a friend of mine.)
Photo credits: Matt Collette (above, Ilya in the uniform); WNYC (below, podcast logo)
Introducing training.npr.org
Today we’re very excited to unveil a new site -- training.npr.org.
We created it for the many journalists working in public media. Sometimes it can feel impossible to find the time and space to hone your storytelling techniques, learn something new or experiment with new tools. We hope the site will help jumpstart all of that for you. It features guides and best practices in four categories: audio, digital, social media and visual.
Check it out and let us know what you think. We’re just getting started!
—Serri
Do you even Snapchat, bro?
NPR’s social media intern Vesta Partovi has taken our Snapchat/Periscope game to a new level with this custom iPhone rig (dubbed “Wombat”). She put it together with the help of two NPR engineers and photographer John Poole.
She writes:
The idea for a Snapchat rig came about after a conversation John and I had last week. We were talking about Snapchat and it’s emergence as a platform for short-form filmmaking. When new technology for storytelling kicks off, creators get excited. We already have the skills, we just need the right tools to optimize them! As NPR folk, we knew that having bad audio was out of the question. As filmmakers, we knew that using steady camera-microphone rigs was a way of life. Being John, he had already invented something similar with Ben for use on a Periscope experiment. Right then and there, Wombat was born.
The rig itself is a shotgun microphone with pistol grip, this $6 cellphone tripod mount, a XLR-to-iPhone adapter (like this), a few screws and a clamp. Now she’ll be able to capture much smoother video and better sound at the same time. You can see the results in action on Snapchat — follow “nprnews”
The lesson: A lo-fi platform like Snapchat doesn’t have to mean low-tech. A few small adjustments can really make your work shine.
—Serri
Audio people! Don’t forget to tell stories about sound
Sometimes, it’s helpful to offer reminders of the obvious: Radio/audio is a really good medium for stories about sound.
This segment from All Things Considered last week, especially its intro*, is a perfect example. It’s a mini-audio history of the typing sound you hear in action movies and TV shows... you know, when the letters robotically appear across the screen, as if the hand of God was typing:
Washington, DC. 08:00. Somewhere near the Lincoln Memorial.
Take a listen (audio above). In the same way that a Daily Show montage of newscasters saying the same dumb thing reveals a political pattern, this intro -- because of the proximity of so many related sounds -- reveals a pop-cultural pattern. (And it’s delightfully written.)
Here are some other ideas for stories about sound:
Accents and pronunciation (e.g. What the right way to say “Abu Ghraib”?)
Machinery/computers and the noises they make (e.g. How to combat intrusive construction sound that is driving you nuts)
Animals. Yes, they make noise. It usually means something. (e.g. How to decode elephant “conversation”)
On a far more serious note, the sounds of war and conflict: Weaponry, for example, can produce tell-tale sounds.
KALW has just started a podcast, The World According to Sound, with mini-episodes (<2 minutes!) about sound. Check it out wherever you download podcasts.
One final pro-tip: Get the people you interview to make sounds that illustrate your story. (e.g. The sounds of the Port of Seattle, humorously evoked by Chana Joffe-Walt)
--Alison
*Huge credit to ATC producer Connor Donevan, who wrote the intro to the ATC segment and produced it.
Why so many people clicked play on this story’s audio from a congressional hearing
When people visit NPR.org stories that include audio, few typically click “play” – only about 13 percent.
But this piece by NPR’s Eyder Peralta? It got hundreds of thousands of views and about 62 percent of them resulted in a “play.”
Why? Because the audio was thoughtfully cut and packaged for a digital audience. Take a look for yourself:
Let’s break this down:
The headline: It’s clear and easy to understand. And the content delivers exactly what the headline promises – a story told through sound snippets.
Some text, but not too much: Eyder begins the piece with a few paragraphs for context without burying the audio, which, again, is the experience people are promised.
The packaging: Eyder doesn’t overthink it. He lists each clip with a brief description so you know what you are getting before you click play. That makes it easy to scan from clip to clip (and our analytics show that’s exactly what people are doing).
This is not the first NPR story to take this form. It’s often used by the Two-Way blog for congressional hearings and complicated issues, such as this one.
The chart at the top of this post is from our internal analytics dashboard. It shows the surge of people who visited the Planned Parenthood story, which became the most popular item on NPR.org.
–Eric
How to make scenes that breathe and move and WORK
Thanks to an invitation from Storybench.org to write about NPR stories that “breathe life into a neighborhood scene,” I’ve been thinking about what distinguishes audio scenes that are, well ... meh ... from those that really sing.
I came up with six examples of scenes you can learn something from (though there are many, many more). Check it out HERE.
Here are some “CliffsNotes” of ways to create immersive scenes:
1. Awesome writing (like at the beginning of this piece by Robert Siegel from Cuba).
2. Stereo sound recorded and mixed by a pro (fast forward to about 9:45 in Part 1 here)
3. A clearly plotted pathway through the scene (I love how KCUR’s Frank Morris walked through the 7 mile-long line of tornado destruction in Joplin, MO)
4. A surprise that challenges listeners’ expectations (In this story from Turkey, Ari Shapiro highlights unexpected things about the place and people)
5. Movement! (Steve Inskeep takes you along a Louisiana street)
6. Audio of people interacting (Kelly McEvers brings LA’s Skid Row to life by letting us hear the regulars talk)
-- Alison
Photo credit: NPR/John Poole
Public radio people told a story exclusively on Snapchat ... and lived to tell the tale!
A couple of weeks ago, Alison MacAdam and I spent a day showing a new employee how a story comes together at NPR, from start to finish. It’s an extensive process that not many people — even those who work at NPR — get to see in its entirety, so we wanted to find a way to share the experience with our audience (who love getting glimpses at faces-for-radio).
Enter Snapchat.
The app felt like a natural fit for the story we wanted to tell because it has a peek-behind-the-scenes feel. (You can watch the final product above.)
I wrote about how we did it in the NPR Social Media Desk Tumblr, but let me add something here about using Snapchat for storytelling.
Our experiment worked for a couple of reasons:
1. It presents everything in chronological order. Classic story structure.
2. It’s easy to add more context with captions and drawings.
3. It’s not that intrusive to the people you’re photographing or recording (videos have a maximum length of 10 seconds).
4. It’s okay if it doesn’t look totally polished – that’s part of the charm.
8,800 people ended up watching the story in the 24 hours it was available. Dozens of them sent positive feedback right back to us via Snapchat. It was a reminder that you shouldn’t be afraid to make a story explicitly for a social platform. If it only lives in one place and doesn’t directly connect back to your site, that’s okay!
—Serri
PS — Before you start, consider which platforms make the most sense for what you’re trying to accomplish. I don’t think this would have worked as well on Twitter or Facebook, for example, because you don’t naturally check back in with the same story throughout the day.
When should you reveal the big magical number?
When you have a story that’s centered around a huge and surprising number, when do you reveal it?
This piece by NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce illustrates how the answer could be different for audio and digital. It’s about researchers who discovered how many trees there are on the planet (the answer is 3 trillion).
In the radio version, Nell took listeners on the researchers’ quest to find the answer and didn’t drop the big figure until the story called for it – at the 1:30 mark of a three and a half-minute piece.
CROWTHER: We all gathered in a room. It was a very exciting time. We'd been working towards it for two years.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And...
CROWTHER: The total number of trees is close to about 3.04 trillion.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Three trillion - that's, like, eight times more than the previous estimate. If you were to plant a tree every second...
CROWTHER: It would take you somewhere in the order of 96,000 years to plant that 3 trillion trees. So it's a huge astronomical number that I don't think I could comprehend before this study.
If Nell revealed the number at the beginning, it would have spoiled the story.
But Internet readers of a text piece don’t want to wait. They want the answer immediately. And Nell’s write-up delivered it 27 words into the story.
–Eric
Building a neighborhood scene
On Friday, August 28, two stories on Morning Edition achieved the same thing: They painted effective scenes of single, emblematic streets.
The first street is in LA - in this diminutive piece by NPR’s Nathan Rott about Californians limiting their water use. With a small amount of ambient sound, audio of people talking about their lawns, and a few directional details (”on the corner,” “a couple houses down,” “across the street”), Nate began his piece with a 360-degree view of the street.
It could have been... fine... to hear just one resident, but with three Nate sketched a more comprehensive visual image of the street. He also served his story better since he was elucidating statewide statistics, not just individual experiences.
The second example is longer and more immersive. The entire frame of Steve Inskeep’s post-Katrina feature from Arabi, Louisiana, is a street scene: Schnell Drive, which was inundated after the hurricane (see photos above). Listen to the ways Steve (with producer Rachel Ward) sketched a human streetscape -- not with predictable, static sounds (lawn mowers, cars passing) -- but by capturing their interactions with residents - knocking on doors, introducing themselves, entering homes, engaging people spontaneously on the street.
There are a million ways to build a scene with sound. These are just two - unintentionally related! -- ways to do it. The lesson here: If you want to bring a street or neighborhood to life, don’t describe its parts in isolation. Demonstrate how they are connected.
-- Alison
Credit: Photos of Schnell Drive and its residents by Edmund D. Fountain (Check out some of his other photos from the Gulf states here.)
How doodling can improve your audio story
Here’s a handy trick from NPR’s Don Gonyea, who has endured more campaign airplanes, Iowa State Fairs, and overstuffed spin rooms than almost anyone. Don is nearly always on a tight deadline, and it turns out he sketches pictures like the doodle below - to help him tell vivid stories quickly.
Don explained the doodle above – of an event at the Iowa State Fair - as a way of remembering the layout. It’s an act of reinforcement: The protesters stood where you see “Boo!” and “Hiss!” The supporters? Look for “Yay!” and “Go Go!” The stage was quite small (top left corner). There were hay bales (those rectangles by the stage). And so on…
He even uses graph paper -- in part because it helps keep things to scale.
Why not just take a photo?
Don says, “You can draw from any perspective.” For example, the aerial view. No photo will get you that, unless you catch a ride on Trump helicopter.
And why not rattle off these visual details into your microphone?
It would get lost on the tape. Don doesn’t have the luxury of rolling back through all of his audio to find those moments. He’s sprinting too fast for this afternoon’s All Things Considered or tomorrow’s Morning Edition.
Ultimately, Don uses his doodles to recall those one or two telling visual details he can write into his story. And those details make the difference between mediocre exposition and a story that takes the listener somewhere.
– Alison
When you can’t get a story out of your head, write an explainer
You’ve probably seen the photos: shockingly orange water cascading through Colorado’s Animas River, the contamination the result of an accident by the Environmental Protection Agency at a nearby mine.
KUNC reporter Stephanie Paige Ogburn has been covering the story on air, but I was particularly struck by one of her web posts about it (which she published before most national media started paying attention). It’s a great case study in the efficient explainer.
The headline sets the right tone from the start: Why Was The Environmental Protection Agency Messing With A Mine Above Silverton? In the post, she deftly describes the history of mining in Colorado, how and why the EPA was involved in this particular site and the basic mechanics of how mining creates the bad orange water:
That water, when it runs through the rocks in a mine, hits a mineral called pyrite, or iron sulfide. It reacts with air and pyrite to form sulfuric acid and dissolved iron. That acid then continues through the mine, dissolving other heavy metals, like copper and lead. Eventually, you end up with water that’s got high levels of a lot of undesirable materials in it.
Ogburn says she wrote the post from home (bed, actually), the night after the accident.
“My husband was like, what are you doing, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that story and kept digging around when I got home,” she says.
Her post was just what I wanted in the early days of the story. It works because it feels clearly distilled; it provides a remarkable amount of context on a complicated topic, without getting caught up in too many of the details.
Photo credit: EPA
—Serri
How to tell a powerful story... in real time
August 14 is Melissa Block’s last day as host of All Things Considered. After 12 years “in the chair,” she leaves behind thousands of memorable moments. But none are more powerful than her stories from Sichuan Province, China, in the days after the 2008 earthquake hit.
In honor of Melissa, I thought I’d share the audio excerpt above -- because of the presence she brings to this story. In the midst of the tragedy and chaos you can hear above, Melissa just talked into the microphone, describing everything she saw.
Here’s what’s happening: Melissa is watching a couple desperately search the rubble for their toddler son and parents, with the help of a huge, rumbling excavator. She is witnessing one family’s tragedy, nobody speaks English, and it’s not the time or place to stand around doing traditional interviews with an interpreter. So Melissa narrated the whole thing in real time. It’s raw. Heartbreaking.
If you want to hear a master class in how to tell a disaster story -- and to be reminded that journalists are human, and that’s OK! -- there is no better lesson than this story.
And here’s one more reason Melissa is a class act. She took every chance she got to thank the people who helped her tell this story -- interpreter Philip He (above) and producer extraordinaire, Andrea Hsu.
-- Alison
Photos by Andrea Hsu/NPR
Listen to the work of your colleagues
From Sara Sarasohn, longtime NPR editor and producer, now editorial leader of NPR One:
“When I stopped being a producer, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured that I had mixed more than a thousand reporter pieces. That is what taught me to be an editor. I actively engaged with such a volume of the work of my colleagues - good and bad - that I developed a lot of ideas about what worked and what didn’t.
When I became an editor, I realized that I was mostly just engaging with my own work. I had lost the valuable teaching I got from engaging in - not just listening casually to - others’ work. So I developed a practice of sitting down once a day with my hands folded in my lap and just listening, very carefully, to a piece I had nothing to do with. It gave me new insight into techniques and pitfalls I would never have if I just did my work as an editor. It only took five minutes a day. You don’t have to do that exactly, but you should develop some mechanism for learning from the work of others.”
Illustration by Alison MacAdam
Tell a small story in order to tell a large one*
Compliments to Rachel Martin, Jordana Hochman and Connor Donevan at Weekend Edition for this great story last Sunday. They produced an 11-minute piece about two sisters who were stranded in the New Orleans Superdome with thousands of other people after Hurricane Katrina.
Weekend Edition could have tried to tell the story of the Superdome by talking to LOTS of people. Some might consider that a more “accurate” reflection of what happened in 2005.
But by focusing tightly on just two sisters, Rachel and team immersed listeners in Talitha and Regina Halley’s memories. And that “small” story told the BIG story of the Superdome more effectively, I think. There is an emotional truth to it -- the horror, the trauma, the transformation of lives -- that is hard to depict without this kind of deep dive.
Here’s Regina Halley, now 33 years old:
I still don't feel like I'm OK. Like, for us, tomorrow never came. We were supposed to go back to our house. My sister was able to push through. I don't even know how she was able to cope with it as a child. Or maybe her coping was to move forward and not let it stop her. But in me and my mom's case, it's totally different. Still to this day, if it's raining, my mom, she still packs a suitcase.
-- Alison
*Lots of people have conveyed this “tell a small story to tell a big one” tip, but I’ll add a shout-out to NPR’s Ari Shapiro, who said it to me.
