{"id":401,"date":"2006-12-01T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2006\/12\/01\/voice-and-meaning\/"},"modified":"2024-11-19T15:06:35","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T15:06:35","slug":"voice-and-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2006\/12\/01\/voice-and-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Voice and Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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[Editor\u2019s note: This essay first appeared on transom.org, \u201ca showcase and resource for new public radio.\u201d]<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dear Transomistas,<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was daunting to have Jay Allison\u2019s invitation to be a guest on Transom.org, because I\u2019m no insider to radio production. I do work in a cousin genre \u2013 narrative journalism in print \u2013 in books, magazines, weekly and daily papers. There\u2019s substantial overlap, but natural differences. A few public radio people often joined 10 or a dozen print journalists in my writing workshops during my decade as a writer-in-residence at Boston U. and some join my writing workshop at Harvard\u2019s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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My writing seminars work on print pieces, and the radio folks are always among the quickest and most fluent at structure \u2013 at treating a piece not as a topical outline, but an assembly of sequential experience for audience members, arranged so the listeners and readers dip in, as needed, to some ongoing story, to background info, to other relevant-to-glimpse side stories, and coming back, perhaps repeatedly, to the main tale.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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On the other hand, the radio (and film) people, when writing print articles, seem less likely to imply relevant nuances of character. And sometimes they need reminding to include a few just-right sensory details that nail down for the audience the immediacy of a set scene. Perhaps they sometimes do this part of print-piece construction haphazardly because in broadcast production, ambient sound and the attitudes redolent in a subject\u2019s voice and recorded situation often accomplish that work in passing.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And it isn\u2019t always clear in early drafts when the radio people intend some print passages to be taken ironically \u2013 as utterance to be doubted \u2013 a handy device to signal distancing from some character\u2019s statement or to make the audience question a proffered explanation. The radio folks often justly count on a character\u2019s or a moderator\u2019s tone of voice \u2013 not words or specification of detail \u2013 to transmit the same signal quite forcefully.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Over the years, I\u2019ve coproduced a handful of public radio pieces and a public TV documentary. I\u2019ve learned from these few efforts, and from teaching radio people in my writing workshops, and also from daily life as an affectionate listener to our Boston public radio stations: WBUR and WGBH. These experiences lead me to suggest that we devote some time and space to exploring the role of voice in narrative work \u2013 appropriately, a term that implies tone, an audio matter.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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We navigate the world taking in not just the nominal, stated, surface-content of spoken information, but also unstated, subtextual emotional cues, forceful but nearly untranslatably subtle information contained in tone of voice. This information about personality comes to us through phrasing and melody. Without even being acknowledged, it comes to us that this or that character we are listening to in a radio piece is in an emotional state of ferocity, or silliness or fury, despondence, detachment, lightheartedness, confusion, ignorance, authoritative confidence \u2013 these are just a few samples among many delicate, elusive emotional circumstances that determine a listener\u2019s take on the meaning of a piece as surely as any list of concrete facts does.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I\u2019m told that radio people use the term \u201cvoice\u201d another way \u2013 as a verb, as in \u201cI\u2019m going to go voice my words\u2026\u201d meaning sit in the studio and record one\u2019s written text \u2013 one\u2019s introductory material or voice-over ambient sounds, or segues between actualities.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Here, the term \u201cvoice\u201d is related to that informal radio verb, but it\u2019s used, unsurprisingly, as writing teachers use it: Voice is the personality of the teller of the story. Defining it that way sets it up as something determined by audience perception, as well as issued forth by the writer \u2013 <\/em>it\u2019s an audience member\u2019s ongoing, developing sense of the person who\u2019s telling the story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In writing your script, if you can deepen and broaden and complicate the storyteller\u2019s voice, you can deepen and broaden and render more complexly human the content of the work.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Let me offer you a story that we might as well call:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The Night Of The Barking Dog And The Firetrucks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Throaty barks awaken me. I squint at the clock. Hmmm, it\u2019s 2:17 a.m. and I\u2019m now in a fix. I\u2019ve got to teach tomorrow, and I have a writing deadline; I\u2019m annoyed because I teach grumpily and write ploddingly on three hours of sleep.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Asleep and awake, it\u2019s the nature of the human beast to scan for danger constantly, assisted by our delicate five senses, a portion of intellect, and adequate memory. A powerful narrative sensibility, seemingly hardwired in each of us, evaluates what the senses and intellect and memory divine, especially after one of the senses sounds its warning beep-beep that a danger threshold may have been crossed.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Beep-beep \u2013 there\u2019s a slight smoky smell of smoke. Nope, no fire, just a cigarette smoker on the street below. I drift half-awake, jolted again by more of those barks.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I evaluate the threat by trying on a sequence of barking-dog narratives for fit:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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a. Marauding wolves have come down from the steppes \u2013 I must barricade the house and find my axe.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Well \u2013 no steppes near here. I haven\u2019t seen my axe in years; and anyhow, there\u2019s just one barking creature \u2013 no pack.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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b. My sons are up late, they\u2019ve got \u201cLassie\u201d on, and I must go shut off the TV or at least their bedroom door. I shuffle down the hall. Both sons are out cold, the one breathing deeply, the other snoring quietly, neither barking.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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c. Hadn\u2019t I vaguely noted \u2013 perhaps while walking home \u2013 that this neighborhood guy, only know him to nod, was out there this evening, being hauled along by a new, huge, high-strung mutt that was barking and leaning its way down the street? In fact, I convince myself that I recognize the dog-voice. The Narrative Way has reassured me that I\u2019m not about to be devoured.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Now that story has helped me define and estimate the danger, a defensive plan springs to mind: Close window and find ear plugs. I sleep.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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***<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Brain scientists tell us that narrative is part of the scouting-for-trouble toolkit that has evolved right along with the human condition, an ancient cognitive skill that does for each of us what sentinels used to do for the towns they watched over from atop high encircling walls.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Sentinel work is awfully close to what journalists do, in the daily paper or on the morning news. Reporters scan the modern world and report to local listeners and readers. They scout for trouble, and also for that antidote to communal trouble \u2013 sources of social cohesion within a community. They report on terrorists probing our gates, and they congratulate the local ball team, covering in one short newscast, community danger from without, and community bonding from within.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I\u2019m awakened again.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This time, it\u2019s fire trucks squawking outside the window. I squint at the clock. An hour has passed. It\u2019s 3:17. I recall that class I\u2019ve got to teach and that looming article deadline. I feel for my spectacles, sigh, and peer out the window. The fire trucks are awfully loud, and they\u2019re not even right below the window. They\u2019re up the street, setting up a block away by some shops and old houses. That\u2019s far enough off (I check this theory by constructing a few quick narrative scenarios about how flames might spread, or not) so there\u2019s no danger. I pull a pillow over my head again.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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At seven, as usual, I\u2019m up, soon down the street in a line at the neighborhood coffee shop. I\u2019m a dutiful citizen. That\u2019s where I habitually ingest the day\u2019s newspaper along with a morning latte. I also catch the news on the coffee shop radio, which is always set to \u201cMorning Edition.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And here comes that damned neighbor, pulled by the barking dog, which he ties up outside. He joins the line behind me. I want to complain about the dog, but find forgiveness in my soul and instead settle for asking, \u201cDid those fire trucks wake you up, too, last night?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cYou bet they did,\u201d he says, \u201cFirst this new dog of mine wakes me, and then it\u2019s the fire trucks, right in front of my apartment!\u201d He points out at the street. \u201cI couldn\u2019t sleep with all that racket outside my window. I work as a reporter at the local paper, so even though I knew I\u2019d be tired, I slipped on my bathrobe and slippers and walked outside to check things out\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Well, this is downright optimal for me as a news consumer. Here\u2019s a genuine local reporter, and he\u2019s eyewitness to the cataclysmic ferocity, the sudden personal loss times the number of burned out souls, of an apartment-house fire. I ask him the reader\u2019s basic question: \u201cWhat happened?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And looking right at me in general (I am news-audience now), ignoring me in particular (it\u2019s his mission to inform the citizenry, not chat with his neighbor), he says in emotionless radio-reporter voice: \u201cA fire at the corner of Third and Elm Streets destroyed several units in the north wing of Brookville Apartments, 123 Brookville Street. Damage is estimated at $800,000, according to Assistant Fire Chief Charles J. McGillicuddy. There were no reported casualties. The cause of the early-morning blaze is under investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And what do I do? I mean, this is a social situation. Citizenship is one thing, but do I really want to be stuck at breakfast with this wooden character?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I duck. I move away. It\u2019s morning news time, and here\u2019s the walking, talking morning news. One might even argue that I\u2019ve lucked out and a local, reliable, factual, professional source, and like the rolled-up paper that comes flying onto my stoop every morning, here\u2019s an earnest eyewitness delivering his account directly to the listening audience.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Nevertheless, I don\u2019t invite him to sit at my table and tell me even more \u2013 for the same reasons that many people these days are not buying their local papers any more. Newspapers are in a business crisis (paid circulation declined 2.5 percent nationally in the past six months). Radio news has dimmed long ago on many commercial stations.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What happened? In his fire report, the neighbor assumed a formal voice of an official reporter, and in that role, he\u2019d declined \u2013 sorted through and eliminated, didn\u2019t even consider, perhaps \u2013 many crucial narratives that he must have sensed, that flare into being right along with a fire. No sensory report of searing heat and acrid smoke. No haunted residents straggling out, no little girl looking in at her orange bedroom window, no casual, professional firemen, detached from the sorrow and making order of mayhem, lacking the fascinated gleam reflected in the eyes of some of the gathering onlookers, not including one guy in a bathrobe with a noisy dog pulling at him.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This report cautiously mistook enumeration for responsible portrayal, mistook ignoring emotional content for remaining objective, mistook selecting civic, not personal facts for being unbiased. So the account left out most of the story \u2013 systematically strained out the parts of available content most likely to engage the listener as a person, although it indeed included material listeners-as-citizens should hear about.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But there I was, in line at the coffee shop, heedlessly, inseparably, unitarily and indivisibly being all of me, both citizen interested in addresses and damage reports, and whole person, interested in people and human consequences. The reporter\/neighbor\u2019s decision \u2013 which of course I set up in this tale to mimic conventional thinking about what constitutes news \u2013 is clearly no fun. And it\u2019s not great for business, at a time when papers and radio stations are desperately searching for audience, to toss out the engaging parts, as if engagingness is evidence of triviality and ethical irresponsibility.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Fire has social meaning as surely as civic meaning, and the heat of its personal meanings matches the heat of the blaze. No talk of the dispossessed? No wonder about firefighting? There\u2019s so much to say, a fine book to be written by someone willing to dissect the anatomy of a small urban blaze.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Still, the main reason I drank my coffee alone in this story is that the fellow\u2019s lapsing into standard newsvoice left me feeling lonely. The voice signals impersonality. He delivered some goods, sure. He even delivered the illusion of fair-mindedness. But he wasn\u2019t companionable. When I hear or read the news, I often feel officially constrained, kept back behind some cordon established for my own safety and the greater public good. Fine reporting, to the contrary, is a friend\u2019s generous act, leading the audience where it dares not traverse alone.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And fuller exploration of experience simply isn\u2019t possible in official newsvoice. That\u2019s the point of it. It is drained of the personality of the teller, and there\u2019s no one left, then, to sense, evaluate, and make the metaphors that explore what experience is like.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I have a term in my writing workshops for that sort of reporting. I call it sentinel reporting. Consider the names of newspapers: Bugle, Clarion, Patriot-Ledger, Sentinel, Tribune, Guardian. Sentinel reporting selects from the chaos of details about an event those elements that fit into a delimited \u201ccivic fact set\u201d \u2013 facts that affect city governance, the work of the city, the behavior of people as public citizens \u2013 addresses, fire brigade numbers, names of officials, damage amounts, medical conditions, official cause determination. It doesn\u2019t deal with quirky stuff, individual, moody stuff, not with peevishness, snits, depressions, triumphal, gloating moments at work, happy seductions, innocent drunks, unshined shoes, smelly bathrooms, compulsive cleaning of same, doesn\u2019t acknowledge the excitement of a crowd at a fire \u2013 the stuff that fills our real lives, though not architects\u2019 glamorous drawings of it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Insofar as such accounts deal with emotion at all, they confine themselves to the \u201ccivic emotion set\u201d \u2013 emotions shared by all citizens, basically, and given a multi-ethnic, multi-religious\/agnostic, multi-class\/multi-racial population, that emotion-set contains few elements: perhaps the civic emotion most commonly explored in the news is pity for endangered children \u2013 it\u2019s the emotion that most directly and effortlessly crosses tribal lines. So does resentment of criminals. So does admiration of town benefactors. So does sports pride \u2013 and pride in the flag, although that\u2019s where even the few shared emotions start to get complicated.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It is no accident that there\u2019s a stiff way of uttering news, to which we\u2019re all habituated by years as listeners and readers. I\u2019d start with a strong presumption that the reasons this is the voice of news must be multiple and strong, because it\u2019s counterintuitive that the most engaging, human-scale tales arising from public events are specifically not the traditional center of newsrooms\u2019 work. Rather, the mannered and restrictive presentations possible in \u201cnewsvoice\u201d represent the standard of what feels to sincere practitioners like ethical professionalism in news organizations across our nation, and world. Why? Perhaps because the diction of newsvoice tames and balances news by depersonalizing it, builds civic experience and civic unity \u2013 while still allowing open inspection of major social issues.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Still, in the light of the shrinkage of newspaper circulation, and the rise of narrative journalism as a way of retaining readers, it\u2019s worth asking this: If the events of a city\u2019s daily life offer up fascinating, thought-provoking tales, why must weak stories be favored by news media?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Disclosing news is a paradoxical activity. It surely seems useful to draw attention to shared danger and to congratulate unifying public events. But when we do so, we become official conveyors of these tidings, public functionaries. It\u2019s hard to avoid becoming somehow official. And inside that role, it feels like an act of honor to strain out the irrelevant, the individual, the stuff that isn\u2019t, in sum, community experience. This seems like the bias that propels us into the role of guardians, sentinels who watch the city for the public good. Our choosing news voice over quirkier, private voices reflects the (frequently instinctive) choice.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I hope we can explore and refine together here, an important idea for radio producers: that there are other voices available to you, appropriate to the act of sculpting a radio-listening experience for diverse audiences, than the standard sentinel voice. In fact, I\u2019d like to suggest that many sorts of emotions and moods and activities and true pictures of our shared lives simply can\u2019t be portrayed in that standard voice.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And yet, if you flip through the day\u2019s presentations on public radio stations, or even scout the more individualistic ones aggregated so wonderfully on www.prx.org, most seem to have selected a voice, a diction, and thus a storyteller\u2019s stance, that\u2019s more conventional than the material and perspectives covered.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How much should and can you break from this conventional voice and still be part of a useful public conversation? How much is possible, given current expectations of editors and other gatekeepers? Can you offer examples of innovators who\u2019ve explored other ways than this voice of presenting content? Is there a body of radio narrative that points to ways around the limitations of conventional voice? I\u2019m not asking these questions with any pedagogical cunning. I ask as a radio outsider who\u2019s frequently marveled that public radio seems often in the forefront of such exploration.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I\u2019ll stop my presentation here. I hope I\u2019m quitting in the middle of an exploration. It\u2019s the place where I surely need help, as I\u2019m a visitor in this world, here by invitation and your tolerance \u2013 and very interested in the topic, in this time when the newsroom is melting away right along with the polar icecaps, and the nature of public news is up for rigorous exploration and redefinition.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u00a9 Mark Kramer 2006<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Editor\u2019s note: This essay first appeared on transom.org, \u201ca showcase and resource for new public radio.\u201d] Dear Transomistas, It was daunting to have Jay Allison\u2019s invitation to be a guest on Transom.org, because I\u2019m no insider to radio production. I do work in a cousin genre \u2013 narrative journalism in print \u2013 in books, magazines, weekly and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[40],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-mark-kramer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVoice and Meaning - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2006\/12\/01\/voice-and-meaning\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Voice and Meaning - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[Editor\u2019s note: This essay first appeared on transom.org, \u201ca showcase and resource for new public radio.\u201d] Dear Transomistas, It was daunting to have Jay Allison\u2019s invitation to be a guest on Transom.org, because I\u2019m no insider to radio production. 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