When “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man” came out in the fall of 2025, I knew I would need to dedicate real time to listen. Produced by Western Sound and Talkhouse for Audible and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, the series — which just won a Peabody Award — is a musical biography of the prolific inventor of Afrobeat, the Nigerian Fela Kuti, who died in 1997. It’s also a history of the tumultuous, often violent post-colonial powers he challenged, and what it takes for art to change minds.

The series was reported and hosted by Jad Abumrad, the creator of WNYC’s Radiolab who’s now an independent producer. Long ago, I got to report and help produce a piece with him and his team, so I know that Abumrad’s approach to narrative audio is like no one else’s. He doesn’t work from written scripts, but rather builds stories from interview tape and sound, working the connective tissue of narration around the more musical logic of characters, emotions, and ideas.

So when I finally started listening to this new series, I expected something good. What I didn’t expect was something you rarely hear much anymore in narrative podcasts: something daring and groundbreaking.

The sequence that lit up my brain occupies much of the third episode, “Enter the Shrine.” By this point in the series, we’ve learned a lot about Fela Kuti’s impact on Nigeria, and particularly on the musicians who played with him for years. We’ve learned some about his childhood in Abeokuta, in a Yoruba-speaking region north of Lagos. We’ve learned that he studied piano in London at Trinity College, before coming to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and getting exposed to the writing of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. And we’ve learned how he returned to Nigeria in 1970 determined to bring these ideas home, setting up a housing compound and club called the Shrine that he declared to be an independent state within Lagos.

The episode “Enter the Shrine” broadens out — and slows down the plot. For more than 10 minutes in the middle of the episode, all narration falls away and we hear only a blend of voices, music and sound design that tries to replicate the “trance” that people say came over them listening to Fela Kuti’s live performances in his club. All this happens against an extended mix of his song “Army Arrangement,” a 1985 critique of Nigeria’s military junta. 

We do not hear the names of most of the people whose voices we hear swirling around us — rather they appear as a chorus, sometimes only repeating one word, at other times entire phrases. The longer this goes on, the more it infringes on a very old taboo in radio: that speakers must be identified whenever possible.

Yes, on radio we do hear the occasional “man on the street” interviews, and there are artistic “non-narrated” documentaries that flirt with unidentified speakers. Trailers and promotional clips might contain a flurry of voices to show off what a series has to offer. But generally in nonfiction audio, it’s considered rude not to identify who is speaking. That’s both for reasons of ethics, but also to avoid disorienting the listener. 

There’s one more thing to add about montages: they are labor intensive. You have to comb through a ton of tape to find the clips that “pop.” Then you have to juxtapose them against one another, trimming and rearranging clips until everything sounds right. You may add music, you may subtract it. You probably should play each version of the sequence for others to make sure you’re not deluded about whether it works. All told, building an effective montage — especially a long montage — requires a lot alchemy, and acceptance that many of your attempts will fail.

I had to know how the montage sequence in "Enter the Shrine" came about — and more importantly, all the editorial arguments that surely went into its construction. So I called up Jad Abumrad and his editor, Ben Adair. (Full disclosure: in addition to reporting an episode of “Radiolab,” I once worked with Ben Adair at American Public Media and later gave notes on a series he produced with Pushkin Industries, “Lost Hills.” I’m also one of the editors on a forthcoming narrative series with Pushkin, Audible, and Higher Ground Productions).

Right away, Abumrad and Adair told me something I’d suspected — that the elaborate, sound-rich montage sequence that’s now in their third episode was originally intended as the start of the series.

“One of the big questions of the series was like, what is the first episode? Even as I say that question out loud, my stomach gets a certain layer of acid to it,” Abumrad said. “Because we lived with that question for so long.”

He built the montage set in the Shrine, but then the notes came back: this material was too confusing without context. Who was everybody? Why were they there? And where was Fela Kuti?

Abumrad and Adair took that feedback and moved the sequence further into the series. 

Even within the episode itself, we get about ten minutes of preparation: we hear a sonic tour of Lagos, we hear where Fela’s Shrine was situated and how it’s spoken of today, and we hear about Fela’s elaborate preparations to go on stage each night — followed by a procession to the club, sometimes on a donkey.

What follows is a transcript of the montage sequence from “Enter the Shrine,” annotated with parts of our conversation. I’d advise listening to the episode (and ideally the two that come before it), and/or reading along as you listen. This transcript starts after the first ad break in the episode, approximately at the 11:25 mark.

***

Script Annotation: Episode 3, ‘Enter the Shrine’

[~11:25] Jad Abumrad: This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

Before we go back into the Shrine — well first, let me give you a picture. 

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: I do remember we had an edit. We were sitting at my kitchen table downstairs and we had the script, and I think we had, at that point, decided this was the third episode. And Ben was like, ‘You need to talk about where (the Shrine) is in Lagos and the importance of the location.’ Ben always had a really good ability to think on the level of the series. And (about) what people need to experience at any given point of the series, so that they can go where you want them to go. This particular episode finally made sense (when) we put in context that people needed."]

It is an open-air club, fits about 500 people. There’s this tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor.

And to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish “cages” where dancers dance. 

[annotation a="Ben Adair: We went to Nigeria for three weeks and interviewed so many people there. We interviewed three of (Fela’s) — as far as we know — four remaining wives. Two of them had never spoken to the press before."]

Also to one side there is an altar, where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana.

But I’ll be honest, what’s most interesting to me is not so much the Shrine itself — I mean, it was a club — but rather what happened to people when they went inside of it.

[annotation a="Jad Abumrad: This episode was born from recognizing a pattern. Which was that people talk about being at the Shrine, and the experience of falling into a kind of hail of music. We just kept hearing that, and so it felt important. That (insight) came after we had really finished reporting."]

Because — do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? Right, like we all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms and it changed their life and they can't stop talking about it. And there is a way to explain those experiences — you can say, neurochemistry, right? There’s something about these drugs, they rewire your brain. Fine.

We ran into so many people who described listening to Fela's music, at the Shrine, in the same way! That it had the same effect on them. Which is a little harder to explain. Though, I will try in a moment.

But first, let's reenter the Shrine from their perspective. 

(crowd noises)

[annotation q="Julia Barton: How many hours of tape did you have for this series?" a="Jad Abumrad: At least 200… We used (the audio and video editing app) Descript to make very, very low-res builds, just string-outs of tape. Just to hear how the voices talk to each other, and if they like the order that you've put them in. Then there was a lot of ‘Ctrl+Fing’ as we zeroed in on certain keywords that people would use. It was really easy to figure out who in our many, many interviews had said what."] 

[annotation a="Once (you are mixing) in ProTools, then you close that part of your brain and you just try to respond to the music and align the tape, so it feels like it's also music."]

[annotation a="Ben Adair: Jad is also a composer. And so there's a lot happening with the music in terms of looping and tuning the voices, tuning other sorts of sound around the sound beds that are in it."]

And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice: What are you paying attention to? How does that change over time?

[annotation q="Julia Barton: Was this line about noticing part of the framing?" a="Jad Abumrad: That (came from) my therapist! Because we had a whole conversation where he was like, ‘I think what you're doing is a guided fantasy. And if you're going to give people a guided fantasy, you need to instruct them about how and what to notice as they're going through it.’"]

At one AM, Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians and he begins a riff … that will last most of the night.

Woman 1 (Marilyn Nance):

My experience in being in the Shrine was like, like the music was like inside of me. It was all around, it was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you are all inside the music.

Woman 2 (Nina Darnton):

A kind of hypnotic dancing.

Man 1 (Duro Ikujenyo):

React to music, dancing and listening. (repeats under)

Woman 3 (Lorraine Animashaun):

I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me and they were in a mist. So you're in a different world.

(Keyboard, chorus sings)

[annotation q="Julia: You go hard on the whole chorus, man-on-the-street approach." a="Ben: (At one point) everyone was going to be introduced during this dance party — (sarcastically) ‘Let's interrupt the party to make sure that everybody's introduced to everybody else.’"]

[annotation q="Julia: So did you do anything before the sequence to help alleviate that anxiety?" a="Ben: Yeah (we added) two episodes before it."]

Woman 4 (Rosa Cuoto):

This idea of the spiral (spiral, spiral). And circles (circles, circles). It's another way to deal with time.

Man 2 (Dele Sosimi):

I would describe it as in a swirl. You know, when, when you have a cyclone, it starts off as this little thing that builds up and it builds up. The more you allow it to circulate, it just starts to get bigger.

(Vocal montage mix begins, repeating elements from voices above)

[annotation a="Ben: We had permission to use some (of Fela Kuti's) music very liberally. We could use it to remix. Or we could remix it, and we could edit it however we wanted. A lot of artists would never allow that."]

VOICES:

(Spiral, spiral, spiral)

(Get bigger. Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(Circle)

(Get, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger)

(music fades under)

[annotation a="Jad: It was really just trying to get into the internal mindscape of the people who would be lost in the trance. Like the way in which the building could start to breathe, you know, and everything could start to spiral and spin around your head. You lose track of where you end and someone else begins, which was an idea everyone kept talking about."]

Man 3 (Bode Omojola):

Fela starts his music to enchant. This repetitive pattern, the power of the musical ostinato. It's part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured.

(Enter horn section, vocal montage interspersed)

Man 4 (Brian Eno):

I thought this is really an amazing new form of music. It was, it was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time. And you explore it. You kind of enter it, and live in it. This is a place, this isn't a song.

[annotation a="Ben: In the case of this episode, I do think that the audience missed a few people (in the montage) who were really important. There's a great quote from Brian Eno that comes right in the middle of it. Knowing that's Brian Eno, I think it has a little more weight to it. In the bonus episode (Episode 13), he expands on that, and it's super interesting to hear the huge effect that Fela's music had on him as a musician and as a producer."]

Man 5 (John Darnton):

And meanwhile the rhythm section’s keeping going (going, going, going).

(horn section reenters)

Man 4:

This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you are entering into that place.

Woman 1:

Hypnotized. Like the music was like inside of me, it was all around. And it was just like being hypnotized.

(Montage of multiple voices)

Man 6 (Michael Veal):

And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is so nasty, you have to dance. But that's just the ground level. 'Cause why would you play a song for 30 minutes or 40 minutes unless you really have something to say?

(horn section mixed with full vocal montage)

[annotation a="Jad: One of the members of our team, Ruby Walsh, had made a draft where she had ‘Army Arrangement’ and a couple of people (speaking) on top of it. The moment that we both heard it, we were like, is this the first episode? It had a sparkle to it, an energy that felt inviting in a way. She really fought for us to make it the first episode and that spark was us recognizing that she was right."]

Man 5:

And then suddenly —

(vocal montage repeats, begins to fade under)

Man 5:

After half an hour, 40 minutes…he starts singing.

[annotation a="Jad: The danger in this kind of thing would be to simply talk about the music, right? But the music itself is so pregnant with all of the ideas. You have to put people in it. So we had this idea of: the series was like a river, and each of the episodes was a little eddy in the river. The river was the music, right?"]

[annotation a="Ben: The producer in me was like, what? How? How is this gonna work? But we kept coming back to it, because it is exactly right: the music has to be the guiding force. Jad talks in a bunch of different moments in the podcast about this torrent of music that Fela was creating, that was just streaming out of him and around Lagos and around the world. So why not have that be the guiding principle?"]

(vocal section of “Army Arrangement” featuring Fela Kuti begins)

Whether you like or you don’t like
After you hear this true talk
Whether you like or you don't like
After you hear this true talk
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you like it good (Ge ge)
If you no like it you hang (Ge ge)
If you hang you go die (Ge ge)
You go die for nothing (Ge ge)
We go carry your body, go police station
You die wrongfully

(song pauses)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

(Fela sings):

All of them Kirikiri
Ten to fifteen years in jail
After one year inside jail
Civilian government take over

(music continues under, partly blurred)

Man 7 (Saul Williams):

Hold up, hold up. What is this?

Man 5 (John Darnton):

He sings in a gravelly, low pitched voice — and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist.

Woman 5 (Stephanie Shonekan):

He talks about the United Nations, he talks about Thatcher, he talks about Reagan. It’s really, everything is like a history lesson.

Man 5 (John Darnton):

You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage, like thought balloons, and then sinking into somebody's skull.

(Music transition to celeste-like notes)

Woman 5:

I just felt, Where has my mind been all, you know, all, all my life? Complete surprise. Like —

Man 8 (Moses Ochonu):

I, I was immediately captivated.

Woman 5:

— why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff?

Man 9 (Lemi Ghariokwu):

When Fela sang into a microphone, I saw the — the light.

Woman 5:

I was just like, you know, like —

Man 8:

It sucks you in. And then it has that lightbulb effect on you. You come into yourself, and you know, it's a moment of, uh, introspection too, because you, you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have.

Woman 5:

All the stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through Fela, that I had not learned in school.

(music, celeste-like to an ad break)

[annotation q="Julia: Can you talk about how little tape there is of Fela in the series?" a="Jad: He’s not one of those guys that you get to know by listening to him talk."]

[annotation a="Ben: Even when he's recorded, he's usually giving a lecture or giving an interview. He is reciting political points. Even the tape that exists is not really, like Jad’s saying, tape where he reveals himself."]

[annotation a="Jad: It was a real frustration through the process. I felt like we were circling, and we couldn't get close enough. We couldn't get in his head. (After building the first episode) I realized I should stop thinking of Fela as a psyche that I need to get inside of. He's an energy source that is flowing through people. And this series is about watching the energy."]

[ad break]

This is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Before we go on, the voices you just heard before the break, in addition to Michael Veal and John Darnton, were Stephanie Shonekan and Bode Omojola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Sosimi, and Duro Ikujenyo. Activist, filmmaker, musician Saul Williams. Musician and producer, Brian Eno. Artist Lemi Ghariokwu. Photographer Marilyn Nance. Designer Lorraine Animashaun, and our advisor, Moses Ochonu, who's a professor of history and my colleague at Vanderbilt University. 

[annotation a="Ben: There's that whole section, I don't know how long — a minute and a half? — of just saying the names of all the people that you heard. And that irked some people. And (at one point) they wanted us to bring that up (into the montage)."]

He was one of the last voices you heard, and I asked him –

Jad [in tape]: You said that the music made you feel like you needed to tune into things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what?

Moses Ochonu: Uh, you know, when I was growing up in Nigeria, you know, we would hear about corruption, about thousands of naira being embezzled by some politician or government officials. And we would open our mouths in shock because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with thousands of naira. How would the person carry this money? What, what would they put it in? In some boxes and in some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it.

And then over time we started hearing about millions, not thousands anymore, then billions. And now, as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions.

That over time has had a numbing effect, a dulling effect. The shock value, the kind of shock that I felt as a child growing up in Nigeria, the moral outrage that I felt, that's gone, that's long gone.

Jad: And that is what would come back when you heard his songs.

Moses: Right. Exactly.

Moses said that Fela's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed into believing was normal. And I think there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. 

Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here, you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. 

[annotation a="Jad: I was talking to my therapist and I was trying to tell him the story of this episode — and he was like, ‘So why? What did they all experience?’ We ended up getting into a whole thing about that, and I was like, ‘Oh, I need to put this in.’ … This sort of music lecture, about the ostinato, that sort of unpacks what you've just experienced."]

For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops, ostinatos going round and round.

Bode Omojola (Man 3): The power of the musical ostinato.

“Ostinato”in Italian by the way, means basically “stubborn.” The loops stubbornly repeat, and at first it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then, the natural response is then to want some change. Like, “can we go to the next section now? Please. Please? No?”

This is what the Buddhists call our monkey mind. Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change. It only builds. 

Layers get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, 

(repeating music resumes)

You arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two. Now that part of you that wants novelty starts to notice things like, “Whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove.”

[annotation a="Ben: One of the first very first conversations that we had about making this show, Jad had this desire he expressed about wanting to do something that sounded just so different. And the way he put that, even in the early meetings, was: Making a documentary that you could dance to. I think that becomes the most palpable in this episode, Episode 3."]

Dele Sosimi (Man 2): Whoa, the ostinatos — they're like machine gears. They don't grind. The gears are timed in between each other, so they just subtly lift fit into the little gaps and holes like Tetris.

The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response, the way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears in a higher-level clock. My God, this groove is a whole world.

(musical transition, celeste re-enters)

This is the trance state. Usually when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses, but actually it's the opposite. It's the state of hyper focus.

You are noticing things. You're hearing things you've never heard before, because your neurons are rewired. You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.

Saul Williams (Man 7): I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

In comes his voice booming like the voice of God. This is phase three. And because you are open, you really hear what he is saying.

John Darnton (Man 5): You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull.

And in that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be —

Lemi Ghariokwu (Man 9): I saw the light.

That you can now dance to.

[annotation a="Ben: I remember like at one of our last meetings, you know, just laughing out of nowhere. And Jad's like, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I'm like, ‘Dude, you did it. You made a documentary that we could dance to.’"]

(“Army Arrangement”/vocal montage up for several beats, then running under low)

Fela Kuti: My music, my main… my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it.

This is a clip from an interview Fela gave in 1988 where he describes his musical form, almost as this vehicle designed to move people, step by step by step, so that they can hear what he has to say.

Interviewer: Is your music kind of a tool?

Fela: It’s a weapon. It’s a weapon to say, so I can talk when I have the chance to. consider music to be effective like a weapon, to inform people. My music is like an attraction to inform people. It is the information side of the music that is important.

[annotation a="Jad: That was one of the best moments, where you really feel like he was philosophically addressing the thing that we had just built with music. Where he's extremely insightful is when he talks about the ‘musical contraption,’ as he called it — the thing built with his music. He knew what he was doing, you know?"] 

(Music out, replaced by a swirling sound)

In that same interview, he suggested there’s something else going on here too. That has to do with time itself.

(voice: Circle, circle, circle…)

Fela: If anyone tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell them no. Time is meaningless unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything.

***

Julia Barton is a longtime audio story editor and author of a newsletter about broadcast history, Continuous Wave. She's worked with nonfiction authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Jill Lepore, and Michael Spector to create original podcasts and audiobooks. Barton completed a Nieman Fellowship in 2024. Her work can be found at RadioWright.com.

The post How Jad Abumrad transports listeners to a legendary club in Lagos for the acclaimed podcast, ‘Fela Kuti: Fear No Man’ appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022” is a newly released audiobook compendium of English-language nonfiction. The collection’s curator, Julia Barton of Pushkin Industries, spoke with creators of work in the collection about their storytelling choices and challenges. This is the final of four posts that revive “Audio Danger,” Barton’s Storyboard series on podcasting published a decade ago. Her recent pieces update the status of podcasting as a journalistic form, analyzes a podcast that takes us inside the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and features an investigation of abuses at indigenous schools that won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award.

Every type of documentary storytelling has a built-in tension between the need to plan — to prepare questions for interviews, plan shot lists, script narration — and the need for the kind of spontaneity and openness that results in great moments on tape. Now imagine a documentary podcast produced mostly inside a prison, requiring coordination with the warden’s communications officer. You’d think that would result in a show that’s even more tightly planned — and sounds like it. But the secret brilliance of “Ear Hustle,” the award-winning production of PRX’s Radiotopia, is that it always finds ways to sound fresh and surprising, despite its origins in the media lab at San Quentin State Prison (soon to be revamped as San Quentin Rehabilitation Center) north of San Francisco.

I reached out to the producers of “Ear Hustle” to talk about their recent episode “Last Memory: Ryan and Earlonne.” Both that episode and the one that precedes it, “Last Memory: Michael,” are poetic explorations of the memories that incarcerated people carry with them: memories of their last days on the “outside.”

“For me the idea of these stories was thinking about how memory works and how photography works,” says co-host Nigel Poor, who’s also a visual artist. “Telling stories through pictures or through the spoken word is about trying to capture something that’s quite elusive.”

Both episodes in the “Last Memory” series start with the producers trying to track down an exact location, but getting a little lost. “The idea was to go to an ordinary place where something extraordinary happened,” Poor says. “Something traumatic or life-transforming happened there.”

A story subject as trusted co-host

In 2018, California’s then-governor Jerry Brown commuted the sentence of “Ear Hustle’s” co-host, Earlonne Woods. But he hadn’t been back to the intersection in Lawndale, in greater Los Angeles, where he was arrested on December 27, 1997. Woods, his co-host, and “Ear Hustle’s” executive producer Bruce Wallace drive to the fateful location as Woods tells the story of that day. He and his friends were, he says, “up to some nefarious activities.” They wound up on a high-speed chase from cops, a chase that ended in a car crash. The police opened fire, wounding Woods and killing his best friend, Furman Little.

Woods relates all to his co-host as they sit in the car near the intersection decades later. Poor asks him to recall the last thing he saw of his friend. “His hand,” Woods says. Then the conversation veers in a surprising direction: a dream Woods once had in prison about his dead friend:

“He was in heaven, and he told me he was writing R&B songs and shit. I couldn’t compute that, but it was just good to just see him and talk to him, you know what I’m saying? And even though it was a dream, it was just something that I held onto for years.”

It’s in moments like these that you hear how “Ear Hustle” is built on trust between the co-hosts. Even though this memory is clearly painful, Woods is able to laugh about his dream. Poor and Woods say they don’t script out their interactions in the field or in the studio. They may have outline in mind, but they’d rather sacrifice the efficiency of scripted narration than to give up the spontaneous flow of conversation.

The atmospheric scoring fades out after Earlonne Woods relates the story of his dream, followed by a few seconds of silence. Then we are introduced to someone entirely new: the second character of the episode, Ryan Pagan. Nigel Poor interviews him inside San Quentin, where he talks about his last memory, having one last dinner with his family at Applebee’s before he began his 72-years-to-life sentence for first-degree murder.

The unnarrated transition from Woods’ story to Pagan’s could be jarring, but this is an episode that signaled from the start that it was going to be a bit “untethered,” as Nigel Poor puts it.

Trusting listeners to follow the threads

“‘Ear Hustle’ is a show where a lot of times we have two pieces of tape from two unrelated people, but just the proximity of them illustrates a thread that is hopefully clear enough that you don’t actually have to (explain) it,” says the show’s editor, Amy Standen. “The listener just intuits it.”

That thread becomes clear as the episode continues: These last memories, preserved in amber after incarceration, are filled with pain and regret. They mark the place in time where mistakes and bad ideas became irrevocable, and where the life of these men diverged permanently from the lives of their families and loved ones.

“Ear Hustle’s” co-hosts go to visit Pagan’s father and sister, who reminisce about him before his life took a terrible turn. The two still live in the house where he grew up. Then Nigel Poor returns us to San Quentin, where she asks Pagan if he wants to know what she (and also we) have heard about his mother, who recently passed away. He agrees, and so Poor relates the story that his mother would cry herself to sleep, years after his incarceration. Pagan reacts by saying. “I felt it.” The interview goes on:

Ryan Pagan: “When I would think about her, I knew that she was thinking about me. I never really fully processed her passing and I think it’s because I’m so far removed from out there, it hasn’t really hit me. And I still think that she’s there. There’s a lot of happiness, and there’s a lot of pain in that house. Part of me doesn’t want to go back. And then, part of me does.”

Nigel Poor: “Does it almost just seem like another world in a completely different orbit?”

Ryan Pagan: “Yeah, it seems a whole different — you’re right, a different planet. I hate that version of me. I associate that version with the house, with that area.”

It’s here that you feel the full force of the rupture that crime and incarceration bring. But the episode isn’t done with us yet. Soon we are back in Lawndale, the site of co-host Earlonne Woods’ last memory. He’s been shot in the back, and yet he’s still running, determined to get rid of the handgun in his waistband. He throws it through a window in a nearby house.

In the podcast’s final scene, Woods and his team go looking for that house. And after some persistence, they find it and its owner, the same man who decades earlier ducked for cover when gunshots erupted outside. Then, he recounts in a slight Spanish accent, a handgun broke through his window, its laser-finder pointed right at him.

“Good thing it didn’t go off,” he chuckles.

Woods tells the man that he was the one who threw the gun. He relates how his sentence was eventually commuted, and how he started a podcast about life inside and outside of prison. Then he pays the man back for the damaged window. We listen as the remarkable scene unfolds — as a new story starts to overwrite at least a part of the difficult memory set here.

Then Nigel Poor asks the man, “Why were you so nice? Why did you talk with us?”

He says, simply, “It’s my nature.”

His generosity and simple kindness comes as an emotional gut-punch after the fraught stories we’ve heard from both Ryan Pagan and Earlonne Woods. But there’s no way the team could have planned this moment. They simply went to the scene with open minds, then trusted that listeners would hear this episode, and its interwoven stories, with open minds as well.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop “Revisionist History” and “Against the Rules,” among other chart-topping shows.

The post ‘Poetic explorations’ in a podcast from inside and outside prison walls appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022” is a newly released audiobook compendium of English-language nonfiction. The collection’s curator, Julia Barton of Pushkin Industries, spoke with creators of work in the collection about their storytelling choices and challenges. This is the third  of four posts that revive “Audio Danger,” Barton’s Storyboard series on podcasting published a decade ago. The first installment,  posted last week, updates the status of podcasting as a journalistic form. The second analyzes a podcast about the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Open the Apple Podcasts U.S. “top shows” list on any given day, and you will encounter the strangest magazine stand. The most popular shows, in terms of new subscribers, are usually a mix of news, religion or self-help, comedy, and — by far the biggest genre — true crime. There are series about murder, of course, but also deceit, sexual assault, terrorism, corruption. As long as someone’s doing something bad, it seems, the listeners of America can’t get enough of it.

Just as established as true crime’s huge popularity has been the backlash against it, especially in audio, which until a decade ago, had no tabloid-style genre. Documentaries, parodies, think-pieces all point to an ethical queasiness about shows that seem to repackage human suffering into addictive (not to mention commercially lucrative) entertainment. And sometimes that ethical queasiness has real-world repercussions.

“This is not a podcast for me,” Young Lee told a Maryland appeals court on March 28. Lee’s sister, Hae Min Lee, had been murdered in Baltimore in 1999. The eventual murder conviction of her boyfriend Adnan Syed did not make national news until the podcast “Serial” dug up and questioned the case in 2014. Eventually, Syed’s murder conviction was dismissed — but in a move that’s now roiling the criminal justice world, Syed’s charge has been reinstated after Young Lee’s objections.

And “Serial’s” popularity could well have been a factor in the decision. According to The New York Times, Lee’s voice wavered as he talked about the case: “This is not a podcast for me. This is real life. A never-ending nightmare for 20-plus years.”

It’s worth noting that in a post right here on Nieman Storyboard, soon after “Serial” launched in 2014, the creators of the show expressed their own concerns. They said were caught off guard by the podcast’s runaway success, and even more by its rabid fanbase of amateur online sleuths trying to “solve” the murder.

“(Our sources) are real people with families and lives, who have trusted me with their information or with their anonymity, and so it makes it nervous. It makes me really nervous,” said “Serial” host Sarah Koenig.

Making ethical issues part of the story

It’s one thing to say that podcasters should confront the ethics of what they do. It’s another thing to hear them being confronted on tape and changing trajectory as a result. For me these days, the best true crime podcasts are the ones that confront their ethical issues head on and use the energy of that confrontation to make their stories better. That’s a big reason why I admire the Gimlet/Spotify series “Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels,” and in particular its third episode, “Don’t Play with This.”

The host and lead reporter of “Stolen” is Connie Walker, a longtime veteran of CBC television and radio. Walker’s past reporting includes the series “Missing and Murdered,” about crimes against indigenous Canadians. But this time, she turned to her own family’s history — in particular, the long shadow of Canada’s religious residential school system for indigenous children, a system that the country’s government has now admitted was a form of “cultural genocide.”

Walker herself did not attend residential school growing up in Okenase First Nation in Sasketchewan. But her late father, Howard Cameron, attended a large institution called St. Michael’s, a school in Duck Lake run by Catholic priests. He never talked about his experiences there with his daughter. But Walker says that after the discovery in 2021 of a mass grave at one of the Canada’s largest residential schools, she began seeing an outpouring of stories from older family and tribal members about the abuse they had endured at St. Michael’s. So she returned home to interview those relatives, and to understand more about her father, from whom she’d been largely been estranged growing up.

Letting listeners in on the reporting process

The second season of “Stolen” follows Walker’s quest to understand her father’s past and her own. At the start of the third episode, we hear a remarkable archival film, a documentary set at St. Michael’s in 1967. (The school has since closed). In the film, former students confront one of the priests, Father Anthony Duhaime.

“Father, we heard people stand up here and say they were beaten if they spoke their native tongue,” a man’s voice says.

“Yeah, but that’s one fact against the other,” the priest retorts. “What does it prove? Nothing.”

Walker’s father is not in the film, but by now she suspects one of the priests abused him. She’s on a quest to find out the man’s name and whether he’s still alive. She heads to the local library and finds that one of the possible suspects, the man in the film, has already died. But she finds a strange profile piece about another of the priests, someone her uncle had accused of sexually abusing him as a child.

In the article, the priest talks blithely about visiting a local penitentiary and confessing: “Maybe I should be in here also, but I never got caught.”

“The article gives almost no context for the quote,” Walker narrates, “But I’m shocked to read it. I don’t know what he meant, but it’s the kind of thing I can’t just ignore.”

Although this series is more personal than Walker’s other investigative podcasts, up until this point she’s been employing what I call “Nancy Drew mode:” the storyteller following a trail of clues. Nancy Drew mode works really well in the linear form of audio, as our minds naturally want to connect what we just heard with the next piece of information. It’s a big reason why true crime audio stories can be compelling and addictive. And Walker’s clear, simple narration style — honed from years of news reporting — makes the story easy to follow. One new discovery leads to the next without digression or confusion.

Walker also employs a trope that “Serial” made popular: the reporter-team field debrief. We hear as she calls her producers from her car to tell them what she’s found in the library. One suspect might still be alive, she tells them, but before approaching him, she wants to talk with one of St. Michael’s more outspoken survivors. A man named Eugene Arcand.

And it’s here that the episode takes a turn. Arcand, an advisor to Canada’s National Truth and Reconciliation Centre, is a busy guy with only a little time for an interview. But sitting on the patio of a local Starbucks, he tells Walker frankly about the abuse he’d endured, and how he’d once confronted the very priest she’d been researching, calling him a “sick pig” and threatening to throw him off a balcony.

Then Arcand tries warns her off her quest.

“I see people thinking they’re doing good when they’re not doing good. We don’t want to just be interviewed, and then somebody takes off with it and becomes an expert on the backs of our misery,” he says.

Looking back on this moment later, Walker tells me she was stunned. “I had been so motivated by wanting to seek some kind of accountability and to try to find out as much as I could. To hear him say that was really jarring.”

In the episode, Arcand goes to recount words of an elder who spoke to him in Cree, warning him that the stories of residential school survivors belong to the community:

“This is what we have learned,” Arcand quotes the man as saying. “We don’t profiteer from it. We take care of it, where we have to pass it down. But use this in a good way. Don’t play with this, you know?”

Letting the reporting shift the narrative

The episode lets us hear almost all of Walker’s intense encounter with Eugene Arcand. And it gives us the rare chance to hear a subject reshape the trajectory of a true crime narrative. Walker says after she spoke with Arcand, she asked her immediate family if she should even pursue the story further. Ultimately, her younger brothers convinced her that they, too, needed to understand what had happened to their father. It was their story as well, because it had shaped their lives.

In the following episode, Walker and her fellow producers change course. They interview 28 survivors of St. Michael’s — many of whom had never told their stories publicly before. It is painful to hear how they were abused, their childhoods stolen and culture repressed. It takes a brave, persistent and thoughtful journalist and production team to seek out these voices and handle them with care. When true crime is based more on truth than crime, the results can be powerful.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop “Revisionist History” and “Against the Rules,” among other chart-topping shows.

The post A true crime podcast that is more about truth than crime appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This month, Pushkin Industries published  "The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022," an audiobook compendium of English-language nonfiction. The collection’s curator, Pushkin’s Julia Barton spoke with creators of work in the collection about their storytelling choices and challenges. This is the second of four posts that revive "Audio Danger," Barton's Storyboard series on podcasting published a decade ago. The first installment,  posted last week, updates the status of podcasting as a journalistic form.

By Julia Barton

[dc]T[/dc]he 2022 podcast “Will Be Wild” (from Pineapple Street Studios/Wondery/Amazon Music) is a powerful, deeply reported eight-part series about the people who saw the U.S. Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, coming — both those who tried to stop it, and those who took part. The series’ narrators, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, are veteran public radio reporters who previously co-hosted a series at WNYC Studios, “Trump, Inc.”

I admire the drive and scope of “Will Be Wild,” reported mostly in the year following Jan. 6 riots, for its remarkable sourcing even as suspects were apprehended and Congress began its investigations. Bernstein and Marritz each carve out beats of their own, alternating episodes as they help listeners navigate the disturbing cacophony of disinformation and violent rhetoric that came to a crescendo that day — and remains a ever-present threat.

As a story editor myself, I found the fifth episode, “The Tunnel,” particularly fascinating. It’s a great candidate for Pushkin’s best-of collection as a distilled and structurally remarkable example of what this series does so well throughout.

Framing a story through a tunnel

The episode starts with Bernstein and ex-District of Columbia police officer Michael Fanone watching footage from his body-cam on Jan. 6. Fanone, normally an undercover vice-squad officer, had responded to distress calls on his radio and volunteered to back up officers under attack at the Capitol. He wound up in the short tunnel that leads to a landing overlooking the National Mall — the same tunnel presidents walk through before taking the oath of office at inauguration.

“We were calling this episode ‘The Tunnel’ very early on” in production of the series, Bernstein says.

[caption id="attachment_175093" align="alignright" width="450"] Andrea Bernstein[/caption]

The reporting method Bernstein uses at the top of the episode, that of watching or looking through records of an event with the subject, is one that works especially well in audio. It allows people to re-enter their memories of an event and narrate them in present tense. In this case, Fanone’s memory is horrific and painful: Rioters pull him from the line of officers, rip off his badge and radio, and threaten to kill him. Then someone Tases him in the back of the neck. We can hear him scream. After the crowd finally releases him, we hear Fanone back safely in the company of his fellow officers. But he has suffered a traumatic brain injury and, as he finds out soon in the hospital, a heart attack from being Tased.

“Both Hannis Brown (the series’ sound designer) and I felt that putting together this episode was one of the most intense things we’ve ever done,” Bernstein says. “Listening (to the body cam video) over and over and over and over again… Mike Fanone is narrating to me everything that happens, but of course, he’s being attacked. So I have to ingest his version, but also look at the whole scene.” Which meant re-examining the attack as recorded by multiple other videos that surfaced of the same incident.

Days of reporting for 10 minutes of story

These hours and days of intense reporting are in service of the first 10 minutes of the episode. The story then turns to the man who held the Taser that gave Fanone a heart attack: Danny Rodriguez, who had traveled with right-wing insurrectionists to D.C. from California and who believed, he tells FBI interrogators, that President Trump needed them to “save democracy.”

[caption id="attachment_175057" align="alignleft" width="450"] Former Washington Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone (left) with fellow officer Daniel Hodges and U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry
Dunn at a hearing of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault of the U.S. CapitolJune 21, 2022.[/caption]

Bernstein says she had been pursuing an interview with another of Fanone’s attackers. But then a judge allowed journalists access to raw video of Rodriguez’s four-hour interrogation. After watching that, Bernstein had a realization, one that went far beyond the violence of the man’s encounter with Officer Mike Fanone.

“In the course of my last six to seven years of reporting, I have interviewed probably hundreds of people who have had an encounter with Donald Trump,” she says. “And each of them comes to kind of the same conclusion as Danny Rodriguez: ‘I was caught up in what (Trump) was saying, and I thought I would be the one to carry it out.’ And then all of them find themselves cast aside.”

That insight leads to a second, powerful layer to this episode: As narrator, Bernstein wants us to pay attention not only to what happened but to how disinformation and the former president’s charismatic hold on his followers led to violence. After introducing the interrogation tape, Bernstein turns to the audience and explains that listeners will not be hearing all of it, but directs them to the show notes to find links to the whole thing. Bernstein makes journalistic transparency and context a part of her story, as she narrates in the podcast:

Because part of the story of January 6th and the lead up to it and the aftermath, is about fake news and media manipulation, we want you to know we’ve kept the meaning of what people said intact.

I found that a deft move, simple and direct, but also a reminder that part of our job as listeners is to think about how a story is being constructed. Bernstein then lets us listen in on Rodriguez’s alternately self-loathing and self-aggrandizing version of events. By the time he’s done confessing to the FBI, we’ve spent 10 minutes with him, the same amount of time that we spent with Mike Fanone. The symmetry is subtle, but powerful.

The rest of the episode unpacks the biographies of both men, raising many ironic connections along the way. Both are close in age, around 40. Fanone voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Rodriguez was fond of attending “Back the Blue” rallies. But he also has a history of encounters with the law. He might have been, in another version of his life, the kind of petty criminal Mike Fanone arrested or, just as likely, used as an informant in one of his undercover vice-squad investigations. (Earlier this year, Rodriguez pleaded guilty to several federal counts and still awaits sentencing.)

A deadline ending

Every piece in Pushkin’s “Best of” collection has storytelling moments that I might send a young producer or editor to listen to for inspiration, like a small master-class. “The Tunnel” is full of such moments, but the one that stays with me comes at the end of the episode. Bernstein is just about to wrap up the story of Mike Fanone, who’s reflecting on the “gift” of Jan. 6, which he says opened his eyes to how angry he’d been and the cost of that anger on the body politic. This is his comment from the podcast:

“We really need as a country to re-embrace compassion and empathy in our interactions with one another."

And that could have been a triumphant ending. After all, Fanone had testified before Congress and been on the cover of TIME.

But close to the episode’s production deadline, Bernstein had the instinct that she needed to talk with Mike Fanone one last time. By then, he’d resigned from the D.C. police force and become an on-air contributor to CNN. He’d received several death threats and seemed to be struggling to figure out how to negotiate his new notoriety. There were rumors he was writing a memoir (which was indeed published in October 2022, long after “Will Be Wild” came out).

In March 2022, Bernstein met with Fanone again and played him tape from their previous interview, the one where he’d spoken about the need for compassion and empathy. He told her he’s still proud of his conduct and that of the other officers in the tunnel on Jan. 6. But of his earlier self on tape, he says in a grim tone:

“I was still optimistic that we could change as a country. Unfortunately, I think things have just gotten worse.”

Just a few seconds of vivid sound design separate Mike Fanone’s voice in the first interview from his voice in the second. The effect is bold but not confusing. The episode collapses the passage of time in its last moment, giving us just a taste of how it feels to be either Mike Fanone or his assailant, Danny Rodriguez. For both, one split-second encounter changed their lives forever. After that, the past — no matter how well recorded — feels like a land forever out of reach.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop "Revisionist History" and "Against the Rules," among other chart-topping shows.

The post A podcaster follows a then-cop into the breach of the U.S. Capitol appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A revival of the Storyboard series “Audio Danger” updates the craft of narrative podcasts and introduces a new best-of collection. This introductory post will be followed by four posts that analyze outstanding podcasts and interview the journalists who made them.

More than a decade ago, Nieman Storyboard started publishing an occasional column called “Audio Danger.” Here’s how it began:

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

When I wrote that, I was a freelancer, struggling to find full-time work after getting laid off as a public radio editor in the recession of 2008-09. The type of audio stories I wanted to tell Storyboard readers about were the type that almost no one was paying for: documentaries, narrative audio essays, weird one-offs. There was some wavering hope on the horizon: Back in 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose “podcast” as its word of the year. By 2012, Edison Research’s Infinite Dial survey of digital media users found that “nearly half of Americans are familiar with the term ‘podcasting.’”

But podcasting, when I started the Audio Danger series, was mostly an unpaid hobby. You could take creative risks with it, free from the constraints of broadcasting, but that wasn’t going to get you a job. When I wrote “good audio should be dangerous,” I honestly didn’t know if I was writing a love letter to the future of my profession, or its obituary.

Podcasting comes of age

It turned out to be the former. These days, I’m the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, where I’ve helped create narrative shows with the likes of nonfiction writers such as Malcolm Gladwell (“Revisionist History”), Michael Lewis (“Against the Rules”) and Jill Lepore (“The Last Archive”). I’ve also had the privilege of editing some of our audiobook originals, which have no print version and which unspool like long-form documentaries with interview or archival tape, scoring and sound design.

This is all to say, the decade-old Audio Danger series now feels like something of a time capsule from right before the podcast bubble started to inflate. Audio producers, at least in the U.S., have been able to pivot from complaints about not having enough outlets for their work, to complaints about not making insane truckloads of money. More importantly, listenership of spoken word audio continues to grow, expanding into formerly dormant forms of audio fiction, plot-driven genres such as true crime, comedy and opinion podcasts, and most astronomically, audiobooks, now one of the most profitable sectors of the publishing industry. The same Infinite Dial research that, 11 years ago, got us all excited about Americans knowing the word “podcast” now shows that 42 percent of American adults and teens have listened to a podcast in the past month, a new record.

But audio producers still face the same challenge: how to earn and keep a listener’s attention. Whether we’re trying to fit a feature into a three-minute hole in the broadcast clock or storyboarding a longform series, we ultimately come up against the same issue: how to unspool a story in a way that listeners can follow, often while their eyes are distracted by other things.

To meet that one central challenge, we have to put in the listening hours. We listen to raw tape, to the written narration that is supposed to tie it all together, to the notes from our colleagues, to the work of our mix engineers and so much more. Then every time we hear something that’s not working, we need to fix it and listen again. It’s time-consuming and expensive, as many of the new owners of podcast productions are finding out to their surprise.

That surprise — followed in due course by dismaying show cancellations and layoffs — is part of why I want to revive this column. Because unfortunately, a single wrong perception has only gotten worse with the mass-commercialization of audio: the perception that it’s “just talking.”

Creating the illusion of natural speech

The term “podcast” itself is part of the problem, since it can encompass everything from an uploaded voice-memo to unedited chat shows to a narrative series that takes years of reporting and producing. But the truth is, we all have a hard time categorizing that which we can’t see. And most of us do think of speech as effortless; it’s the ocean we swim in all day. Hence the dual fallacy that all forms of spoken-word audio are basically made the same way, and that they’re just not that hard to produce.

The opposite is true, especially when it comes to narrative, story-driven audio reportage. It takes a team, including producers, editors and engineers, to craft the illusion of natural speech’s flow from interviews, archival tape and written narration. We’re not swimming in the ocean of speech; we’re desalinating it, purifying it, bottling the results and putting fancy artwork on the bottles. Because listeners notice right away if they hear the artifice in our stories and errors in our audio mixes. The very thing that’s supposed to make our work “easy” — human speech — is what makes it very hard to do well.

That all sounds like a bummer. But it’s overshadowed by the amount of great audio storytelling being made and listened to now. In the spirit of Audio Danger, we at Pushkin want to highlight audio stories that takes creative risks, that demonstrate solid craft, and that revel in the delight that only audio can deliver. So we’re publishing an audiobook anthology called “The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022.” I curated nominations from Pushkin staff and others of outstanding (non-Pushkin) podcast episodes, broadcast reportage, experimental pieces and more from the last year. In the spirit of other print-based “best of” collections, we want to use the audiobook form to break down some boundaries and show the wide range of English-language narrative audio our industry has produced in a single year. Before each entry in the collection, I narrate a short guide for listeners.

The audiobook collection rightly keeps its focus on the works themselves. Nieman Storyboard is the best place for a deep-dive into storytelling craft. And so I’m bringing back “Audio Danger” to feature some of the incredible stories in this collection. You’ll get a preview of some of the entries, and I’ll ask the creators about challenges they faced and the story-making risks they decided to take.

The seeds of this collection were really planted here at Storyboard more than a decade ago. I’m grateful for the chance to bring this column back. Our series starts just as “The Best Audio Storytelling” is available and continues with installments over the next few weeks. Nothing would make me happier than for new listeners to find the work inside and sense, perhaps, just a hint of danger.

* * *

Julia Barton is the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, following a long career in public radio. She helped develop “Revisionist History” and “Against the Rules,” among other chart-topping shows.

The post A new best-of collection of audio storytelling honors narrative podcasting appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor’s note: In her third and final dispatch from the recent Third Coast audio storytelling conference, radio producer Julia Barton examines a dilemma  journalists in every medium face: how to create good narrative on deadline.  In a session titled "Making News Stories Good Stories," producer Marianne McCune deconstructed her techniques for doing exactly that. Read Barton's earlier reports from the conference: Part 1 and Part 2. Also, Third Coast has just released its first set of audio recordings from the 2014 conference. 

For all the buzz around longform and super-longform podcasts, the fact remains that most audio producers — at least in the United  States — are still doing daily news work. They work fast and short, making stories that fit rigid network schedules like the ones at NPR (which just this week got even tighter, with more frequent newscasts: for some background see here.).

A reporter might despair that there’s no room for creative or human storytelling within this frame. Not necessarily, says longtime producer Marianne McCune. In two packed sessions at the Third Coast conference, McCune showed some of the ways she’s made quick-turnaround news pieces memorable and profound.

[caption id="attachment_117270" align="alignleft" width="150"] Marianne McCune[/caption]

McCune started off playing a WNYC news feature of hers that’s won many awards: a dispatch from the apartment of an 87-year-old woman stranded in her apartment high in a housing project building after Superstorm Sandy inundated lower Manhattan in 2012.

Admittedly, this was a dramatic time in New York, and stories were literally washing up everywhere. But McCune’s work stays with us because of the little things: the smell of ham going bad in the woman’s fridge. A conversation (over McCune’s cell phone) with a friend who urges her to leave and get help. The woman insists she’ll be fine. “Oh, you are so hard-headed!” her friend exclaims.

McCune also has the presence of mind to narrate what she sees, using her microphone as a notebook. All these moments add up to what she calls “the in-betweens”—basically scene tape, moments that happen in field recording as opposed to scripted narration later recorded in the studio. Scene tape usually bobs up and then recedes quickly in news pieces, if it exists at all.  But with forethought, the scene tape can actually serve as the structure of the story and carry much more of its expository weight. All of this results in a piece that avoids “boilerplate,” McCune said.

Most importantly, McCune said, good audio reporters just “linger” -- hanging around, tape rolling, as long as possible after they’ve “gotten” the story they came for. Deadlines are real, yes, but within that time constraint McCune thinks every reporter “should figure out maximum linger time you can do. Know yourself well enough.” Although she knew she had to rush over to WNYC and start filing her story, McCune still hung around as long as she could in the housing project building, recording as people struggled down the dark stairwells and then tried to figure out where to get provisions.

People stopped being “interviewed” and had conversations with one another. You get a glimpse into their real situation, rather than a performance for a microphone. “While you’re lingering, things happen, and more happens than the thing you came for,” McCune said.

When McCune gets back to the station from a reporting trip, she outlines the story quickly—where she’ll use tape, and where she’ll need exposition.

“It’s so rare you come back from a story not remembering the best moments you have,” she says. She does not transcribe her tape but plucks out the best parts based on the outline. This sounds minor, but it’s crucial: our memories and instincts really are the best filter for prioritizing quick-turnaround material, and getting into the weeds of a full interview can be deadly to the composition process.

Finally, McCune says, before finishing the story script, she follows up with sources if possible, even if only half a day has passed. Her Sandy story ends with the news that friends of the “hard-headed” elderly woman came to her apartment and moved her in with a relative in Queens. McCune calls this follow-up “turning one page” in the narrative.

“For some reason, it’s very satisfying,” she says. Satisfying because the update offers a modicum of resolution. That, combined with rich scene tape and evocative details, make stories by reporters like McCune linger in our minds, long after all the neighboring stories on the crowded NPR clock fade from memory.

Julia Barton is a longtime public media editor, working with “Life of the Law,” American Public Media, “99% Invisible,” and individual producers. She’s also been the managing editor of Radiotopia, a podcast collective from PRX. Barton’s reporting has appeared on “Radiolab,” “99% Invisible,” “Studio 360,” PRI’s “The World,” and other programs. She lives in Brooklyn in life, online at juliabarton.com.  

The post Third Coast Conference: Narrative off the news appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Editor's note: In her second dispatch from the recent Third Coast audio storytelling conference, radio producer Julia Barton looks at the approach the producers of StoryCorps, the non-profit oral history project, take to invisibly piece together their compelling stories. Read her first dispatch from the conference, on the tension between journalism and storytelling.

NPR’s “Morning Edition” airs intense conversations every Friday, conversations you are not likely to forget: a woman forgives the man who shot and killed her son. A boy with Asperger’s syndrome asks his mother if she’s happy he was born. The stories are tender and real, and each one is unadorned by anything but a brief host introduction. There are none of the usual tools of audio storytelling: no narrator, no musical scoring, no “natural sound.”

[caption id="attachment_117222" align="alignleft" width="150"] David Isay[/caption]

These StoryCorps segments are only 2.5 minutes each, but they’re culled from 40-minute sessions recorded in the non-profit’s touring “booths” with two microphones and a facilitator who can help make the conversations meaningful.

Now 11 years old, StoryCorps has facilitated 50,000 such recordings. For their session at the Third Coast conference, StoryCorps founder David Isay and producer Michael Garofalo focused on how they get a select few of these recordings into shape for broadcast.

“There’s this illusion that people step into a StoryCorps booth and tell a perfect three-minute story,” Garofalo said. “There’s a lot of editing that goes on.”

No kidding. StoryCorps sessions are transcribed, but Garofalo doesn’t work from the logs. Once his team has selected a recording to break down, they go through it in ProTools, an audio production system, flagging sections by theme, and also flagging transitional words that might come in handy when rearranging bits of conversations. He showed us his list of 23 “buts” for one session.

In the end, the 2.5 minute broadcast version he showed us had 274 separate edits. That’s an average of almost two per second.

But even more goes into the back end of these productions, and that involves the participants themselves. They have to give StoryCorps permission to broadcast, of course, but they also cooperate with fact-checking as producers try to corroborate any incidents or facts that come up in the conversation. And finally, StoryCorps must get their permission for the final edited version before it goes to NPR. No one has ever refused, Garofalo says. In fact, “there’s a lot of crying” when people hear the distillation, he said.

Isay drew the name of his presentation from a Zen proverb he keeps tacked above his desk: “A good craftsman leaves no trace.” That disappearance is very much what StoryCorps is all about: elevating, above all else, those who speak. But so much art and intention goes into leaving no trace, it strikes me as the hardest work of all.

Julia Barton is a longtime public media editor, working with “Life of the Law,” American Public Media, “99% Invisible,” and individual producers. She’s also been the managing editor of Radiotopia, a podcast collective from PRX. Barton’s reporting has appeared on “Radiolab,” “99% Invisible,” “Studio 360,” PRI’s “The World,” and other programs. She lives in Brooklyn in life, online at juliabarton.com.  

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Back in the distant 1990s, This American Life host Ira Glass described a recurring dream of NPR’s Scott Simon: Simon would shoot a basketball over and over, but then it would disappear. The ball never landed. That, Glass said, was a perfect metaphor for broadcast: We tossed words and stories into the ether, but we never knew how or even whether they were received. The disconnect, while frustrating, made broadcast an incredibly forgiving medium. Everything we did, whether triumph or disastrous mistake, was basically forgotten, and we started every day with almost a clean slate.

Until about 10 years ago. That’s when bandwidth reached the point where national programs and larger stations started to archive most of our work, even live broadcasts. Meanwhile, smartphones allowed podcasting to come into its own. We now expect audio stories to be permanent, but we haven’t given a lot of thought to how that affects our work as audio storytellers.

Here’s my take as someone who works with many feature reporters as an editor: The specter of digital permanence is making too many of us uptight. Audio stories depend on the logical flow of information, of course, but the best of them also harness rhythm, sonic juxtapositions, spontaneous reactions, and the full range of the human voice.

Take, for example, the work of NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling: He does complex reporting, but it stays with us because his stories work on a musical as well as intellectual level, each level reinforcing the other. The skills to pull that off well are experiential. As with other performative arts — theater, music — real mastery comes through practice and bodily intuitions that work faster than the conscious mind. Until recently, broadcast was our perpetual rehearsal stage, a place to try something new, fail, get up and try again, safe in the knowledge that everything was low stakes.

But now digital permanence has turned broadcasting into publishing. And that’s a hugely different system, mentally speaking. Publishing emphasizes the creation of work that lasts — the eternal and perfect. Yet the demands of broadcast (or even the broadcast-like schedule of regular podcasting) still require us to steadily churn out work. I’ve seen these contradictory pressures drive people crazy.

Here’s how perfectionism short-circuits the storytelling process: While wrestling with our raw material, we cannot avoid a huge gap between what we think the story should be and what story actually makes sense to listeners encountering all our material for the first time. To locate, measure and close that gap we need to collaborate with someone else who’s fresh to the story. And we need to be willing to let go, quickly, of multiple story versions. This is also true of print, of course, but even with quick-turnaround audio, there’s no way of faking your way around this process, especially for a beginner. As an editor now in a digital world, however, I find more and more reporters unable to think of their early drafts as provisional. They want and expect perfection, and who can blame them? The world now has access to their perpetual Internet audition tape (not that the world really cares, but that’s a different matter).

Of course, we’re not getting the ephemeral days of broadcast back — and of course, that has the enormous side benefit of allowing the world to finally hear our audio stories more than once. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge the lost benefits of ephemerality and try to work some of it back into our process.

Here are some ways of doing that:

Ditch the script

I recently did a piece called “Neither Confirm nor Deny” for WNYC’s Radiolab. The “I” part is a convenient lie, because in truth, Radiolab stories accrete in layers, with different producers coming in and out of the storytelling process with no document to guide them. After a storyboarding meeting, the story is divided into chapters and producers all take a crack at recording a rough spoken version of the story with music and interview tape.

This is not how things typically go in radio production. Usually, after reporting and doing interviews, I transcribe all my tape, pull out the best bits, and write a narrative around them (with stage direction for the use of sound elements). This is called the script. I’ll read the script aloud to an editor, playing the soundbites at the appropriate moments. The editor will give me notes, usually substantial, for a first rewrite; we then go back and forth on several more versions. Once I get my final version refined and approved, I’ll go in front of a microphone to read the script, all the while trying to pretend I’m not reading from a script.

If it sounds awkward and painful, that’s because it is. Radiolab addresses the problem by doing away with scripts, and their painful illusion of finality, altogether.

“I suspect some folks would rather sit in a room and be allowed to toil alone until they get it just right and only then present it to the editor. I respect that,” host Jad Abumrad says of the process he and his team have developed. “But then you invite in a far worse situation, in my opinion: That's when a producer has worked really hard to make something they love, but in the process has driven the piece in a different direction than the editor wanted. Then what happens? The editor says, ‘Start over.’”

Instead, Abumrad likens the Radiolab process more to that of making a movie, which requires much more teamwork than a traditional author-editor publishing model. The resulting stories, as Alexis Madrigal has pointed out, sound “webby” — porous and multi-vocal, with tangents curlicuing away, and odd, spontaneous moments popping up here and there. This is a multimedia aesthetic, and you can’t fake that or voice-act your way into it — you have to strike at the heart of the audio storytelling process to make it happen, and for Radiolab that means shifting from multiple written drafts to multiple rehearsals, with no one taking themselves too seriously along the way.

Set real deadlines

Multiple iterations take time, of course, and preferably money to pay people doing them. For the smaller teams typical of podcasting or public radio, Radiolab’s approach can have a dangerous side: getting stuck in a digital netherworld of constant tweaking and never-being-done. And that’s where I think deadlines are never going to be optional for audio producers. They help us power through doubts and inhibitions and connect with our material in the spontaneous way that it requires, at some point, to sound right. “When I’m on a deadline I will go farther than if I had all the time in the world,” says Kaitlin Prest, who produces “The Life of the Law,” a podcast I edit. “I get into this zone of, ‘Anything is possible, no time to think, just do it.’”

Invite the audience in

“I suppose it would have been nice to not feel the pressure of digital permanence,” one young Brooklyn producer, Nadia Wilson, told me. “But when I went into radio, that was assumed.” As a SoundCloud Fellow, Wilson produced the series “Hear to There,” stories from the New York subway system. The series gained 20,000 followers pretty quickly. Her project is open to anyone who wants to upload a piece, and in that way everyone can be invested and experimenting. It’s a community effort, and it’s fun. Why would Wilson trade that for an ephemeral, if more forgiving, broadcast-only life? “I don't think I'd have it any other way,” she says.

And honestly, our listeners are much more tolerant of failure than we think. Digital natives seem to understand that — and certainly the huge popularity of low-production-value podcasts proves it. The ones who tend to equate permanence with perfection are those of us trained in broadcast. It’s as though, now that we can shoot the ball and watch how it lands, we expect to score every time. Broadcast never worked that way, and neither does the permanent world in which we live now.

Julia Barton edits the podcast The Life of the Law and is managing editor of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX. This and future Audio Danger columns are produced in conjunction with Transom.org, a site for audio producers. For an extended version of this piece, featuring sound clips from different iterations of the Radiolab process, go here.

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One morning this summer, I got on the elevator with a colleague at WNYC, where I’m working as an interim producer for national programs. My elevator pal had just gotten off the subway and was running late for a meeting he’d scheduled. I stared at him, and we burst out laughing – because this was Jad Abumrad, host of Radiolab, and the night before I’d watched him pack the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the rafters. You’d think, after turning a 2100-seat opera house into a live-radio nerd-rave for two nights in a row, Abumrad might take a day to kick back in his limousine. But things don’t change that fast in public radio. The half-life of an afterglow is still very short.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="428"] Radiolab's Abumrad and Krulwich, with dance troupe Pilobus (photo by Lars Topelmann)[/caption]

Yet as Abumrad and his co-host, Robert Krulwich, stepped out onto the stage for "In the Dark," I remember thinking how much shows like these do, in fact, change everything. The show, which has been on tour on and off for a little less than a year, takes Radiolab’s  exploratory storytelling mode and expands it with a troupe of dancers, a rock band, and an audio-laden laptop.

I agree with some reviews that the show could be more – more visual, more daring, better paced to match the itchy needs of an audience stuck in seats as opposed to your average multi-tasking podcast listener. But the content and presentation were almost beside the point. The audience – a surprising number of excited teenagers and their equally excited parents and grandparents –  were seeing the human manifestations of Jad and Robert, previously just voices in their heads. And just as importantly, Jad and Robert were seeing them.

Almost all of broadcasting’s basic vocabulary comes from the stage – we produce “shows” and “programs.” We have “hosts” and “audiences.” But despite many productions that still bear the live-radio torch – A Prairie Home Companion, Whad’ya Know?, or the new series Wits,  for instance – most radio has been severed from its theatrical roots. We producers spend far more time interacting with our recording gear, our editing programs, and each other than our audience. And the truth is that after a while, “audience” can recede into a dark, nebulous cloud somewhere far beyond our glass-walled studios, a cloud that largely tends to emit bursts of irritable calls, comments or emails.

A live event turns that dynamic on its head. Live events tend to attract core listeners: people who can give isolated producers a different kind of feedback. “It’s really important to be able visualize who you’re talking to every week,” says Chris Bannon, WNYC’s vice president for content development and production – one of the managers here who prods shows to do live events.

Like more and more public radio stations, WNYC has built its own performance space. When a locally produced program such as Studio 360, for instance, does a live show there, Bannon says some of the most valuable moments come afterward, during the spontaneous “hanging out” time with audience members. “They begin to tell us about their lives, and many of them are creative. They listen to us while they paint or while they garden or while they repair the car. You start to think, ‘What can I do that will turn what they’re doing into something that would be interesting for the rest of the audience?’ ” The result has been more listener engagement projects on the regular, pre-produced version of Studio 360.

But a producer or reporter doesn’t need an entire stage show in order to benefit from live storytelling. WNYC transportation reporter Jim O’Grady regularly wins storytelling bouts at The Moth. It’s great to see the glint in his eyes as the audience laughs at his descriptions of PSE –  his “Pre-Sexual Era,” or his portrait of a formidable yet cat-fearing nun. In fact, O’Grady says, live storytelling gave him the skills he needed to make the leap from print reporting to radio. Here are the main things he says it taught him:

Story structure: “In (print) journalism, the lede is paramount,” he says. “Not so in storytelling. Of course, a strong beginning is better …  but far more important is the end of a spoken story. The way you end a story is what the audience is left with.”

Voice work: To meet The Moth’s strict five-minute story limit, O’Grady learned basically to memorize his work. But of course, to engage the audience, he had to learn to sound the opposite. “Be prepared, sound spontaneous,” he says. The approach works as well when he goes on the air: “The more relaxed you get, the more you can forget yourself. That takes so much practice.” O’Grady also learned to vary the pitch and speed of his read, to lose the monotone delivery that kills even the best-written story or radio feature.

Failure: “Everyone bombs,” O’Grady says. “If you do this long enough, you will bomb.” One night at The Moth, O’Grady says, his story fell flat, and he immediately knew why: “I overreached. I tried too hard for effect. I went for the maudlin and sentimental instead of something more truthful.” So he rewrote the story – the audience reaction immediately helped him.

This risk of failure is by far the most important benefit of live performance. In our age of digital permanence, a deadly perfectionism becomes almost irresistible. But we can tweak the life out of our stories – which, in the end, not everyone is going to like no matter what. That spontaneous, uncontrolled moment of creation between listener and producer, audience and performer, is what makes audio such a powerful medium. When radio storytellers put out the immense effort and take the risk of going on stage, they remember that. Plus, if they’re lucky, they get something very rare in this business: applause.

Then they head back to their quiet studios, stick on their headphones, get back to work.

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads Storyboard’s “Audio danger” series. She last wrote about Radio Diaries and the Olympic boxer Claressa Shields.

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