Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production - Softcover

Kern, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226431789 ISBN 13: 9780226431789

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Perhaps you’ve always wondered how public radio gets that smooth, well-crafted sound. Maybe you’re thinking about starting a podcast, and want some tips from the pros. Or maybe storytelling has always been a passion of yours, and you want to learn to do it more effectively. Whatever the case—whether you’re an avid NPR listener or you aspire to create your own audio, or both—Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production will give you a rare tour of the world of a professional broadcaster.
Jonathan Kern, who has trained NPR’s on-air staff for years, is a gifted guide, able to narrate a day in the life of a host and lay out the nuts and bolts of production with equal wit and warmth. Along the way, he explains the importance of writing the way you speak, reveals how NPR books guests ranging from world leaders to neighborhood newsmakers, and gives sage advice on everything from proposing stories to editors to maintaining balance and objectivity. Best of all—because NPR wouldn’t be NPR without its array of distinctive voices—lively examples from popular shows and colorful anecdotes from favorite personalities animate each chapter.
As public radio’s audience of millions can attest, NPR’s unique guiding principles and technical expertise combine to connect with listeners like no other medium can. With today’s technologies allowing more people to turn their home computers into broadcast studios, Sound Reporting couldn’t have arrived at a better moment to reveal the secrets behind the story of NPR’s success.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Kern is the executive producer for training at NPR. He has worked in almost every position in radio news, including executive producer of All Things Considered.

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Sound Reporting

The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production

By Jonathan Kern

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2008 National Public Radio, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-43178-9

Contents

FOREWORD, 
PREFACE, 
1. SOUND AND STORIES, 
2. FAIRNESS, 
3. WRITING FOR BROADCAST, 
4. REPORTING, 
5. FIELD PRODUCING, 
6. STORY EDITING, 
7. THE REPORTER-HOST TWO-WAY, 
8. READING ON THE AIR, 
9. HOSTING, 
10. NEWSCASTING, 
11. BOOKING, 
12. PRODUCING, 
13. PRODUCTION ETHICS, 
14. PROGRAM PRODUCING, 
15. PROGRAM EDITING, 
16. COMMENTARIES, 
17. STUDIO DIRECTING, 
18. BEYOND RADIO, 
APPENDIX I. GLOSSARY, 
APPENDIX II. PRONOUNCERS, 
NOTES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Sound and Stories

Radio has proven to be quite a survivor as a news medium. After all, radio listening was a big fad of the 1920s (as was the Charleston), and historians of broadcasting will tell you that radio's "Golden Age" ended more than fifty years ago. Television could have put radio out of business in the 1950s and '60s, but it didn't, and the proliferation of cable news channels in the 1980s and '90s could have made radio news irrelevant—but that didn't happen either. In the last decade or so, the Internet has emerged as a popular source of news, especially for younger people, accelerating the decline in newspaper subscriptions. But even as newspapers lost readers to the Internet, public radio's audience actually grew—from 14.6 million weekly listeners in 2000 to 23 million in 2006. These days, "radio" has less to do with a specific kind of receiver or a means of sending signals from a transmitter than with a way of communicating news and information through words and sound. A "radio show" may be broadcast, or streamed on a Web site, or downloaded in a podcast; soon it could be delivered to a mobile phone, or to another sort of handheld device that gets its data from a nearby wireless access point. But even as the technology is changing, the process of reporting and producing audio news and information today is much the same as it was when NPR began in the early 1970s; and "radio" continues to be a convenient way to describe all forms of mass communication relying primarily on the spoken word. So it's worth considering what it is about this aging medium that continues to be so attractive to people, especially when there are so many alternative ways to find out what is happening.

RADIO IS PORTABLE. People have been listening to the radio in their cars since the 1930s, and pocket-sized transistor radios have been around for half a century. Today you can buy headphones with built-in radios and MP3 players that also contain FM tuners. Water-resistant sets work in the shower, and satellite receivers make it possible to hear the same strong radio signal as you travel from one state to another. People can and do listen to the radio while they jog, cook, drive, work, or bathe—something that can't be claimed by either print or TV.

RADIO IS INTIMATE. No matter how big the audience, a good radio host thinks of himself as talking to a single person—the one who's tuning in—rather than to listeners as a group. (For that reason, if you're on the air and asking people, say, to call in to your program with their recollections of Martin Luther King, it's always better to ask, "What do you remember about Martin Luther King?"—as opposed to "We'd like to invite listeners to tell us what they remember ...") Program directors and other executives sometimes underestimate how tight the bond is between the person who talks on the radio and the ones who are listening. The departure of a longtime host of a news magazine can prompt thousands of angry letters, phone calls, and even petitions. People feel that they've lost a friend.

RADIO IS NIMBLE. Most of the time, a radio reporter can carry all of his equipment—a recorder, microphone, and a computer—in one bag. You don't need a camera crew or a satellite truck, as TV reporters do; and it certainly doesn't matter what you're wearing or whether you've had time to comb your hair. As a radio reporter, if you can get to the scene of a news event, you can report on it, even if your gear consists of little more than a cell phone. (In fact, on many breaking stories, TV becomes radio—networks just display a still photo of their correspondent or a map of the area where the event is taking place, and have their reporter phone in the story.)

FEW THINGS AFFECT US MORE THAN THE HUMAN VOICE. Certainly there are photographs that touch us, and TV often can tell a story with vividness and immediacy, and newspaper stories often have great quotes. But people convey what they feel both through their words and through the sound of their voices. During a radio interview, we often can hear for ourselves that a politician is dismissive, or that a protester is angry, or that a Nobel Prize winner is thrilled and exhausted; we don't need a reporter to characterize them for us. And public radio especially allows people to speak at some length; an interview in a news magazine might run as long as eight minutes. We don't force ourselves to reduce a person's insights and emotions to a single ten-second sound bite. Even in transcription, this exchange exposes the tremendous sadness and loss of a farmer in Wales as she describes how the Ministry of Agriculture shot all of her 228 dairy cows after some of them contracted foot-and-mouth disease:

HOST: Did you watch?

JONES: Oh, my God, no! Oh, no! I heard it. That was enough. I heard it.

Watched? No, no. I said goodbye to them all. But they just shot them where they stood. Oh, no.

Watched? No way. I watched them burn afterwards. Of course, I needed to be there for them. I had to watch that, and now I'm living with the horror of it all. I think it's the most harrowing experience I could ever, ever, ever imagine going through.

I say, my ten-year-old daughter knew every one of those cows by name. She didn't have to look at their numbers. She knew who they were by their faces. I could have gone in blindfolded and touched everybody's udder and I could have told you exactly which cow it was.

SOUND TELLS A STORY. The art of public radio journalism entails most of the skills practiced by television or newspaper reporters—finding sources, conducting interviews, digging through documents, getting to the scene of the action, observing carefully—plus one that is unique to our medium: listening, or "reporting with your ears." The right sound—the whine of an air raid siren in wartime, the echoes in a building abandoned because of a chemical spill, the roar of a trading pit in Chicago—can substitute for dozens or hundreds of words, and can be as descriptive and evocative as a photograph.

Today, NPR distributes news reports in many different ways—through its member stations, via satellite, over the Internet, in podcasts, even to cell phones—and it often provides written versions of them on the Web. But radio's greatest strengths remain the power of sound to tell a story, the expressiveness of the human voice, and the intimacy of the medium.

There are also some big challenges to reporting news on the radio.

Just as newspapers and Web sites are laid out graphically—in space—radio programs are laid out in time; radio producers argue over when a story will be heard, not which...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226431789
• ISBN 13: 9780226431789
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 398
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland