The Transom Review
Volume 5/Issue 2
Alex Blumberg |
Alex Blumberg & His Class
(Edited by Sydney Lewis)
A Conversation w/ Alex Blumberg & His Class
Bente Hamel - April 18, 2005 - #3
While reading your remarks on storytelling, Alex, I'm thinking about the time when I was making lots and lots of short features for a local Amsterdam radio station. I would go out without hardly any preparation (no time for that-2 shows a day!) and just follow my nose to see if I would bump into something: a festival, an interesting person, whatever. Most of the time the items weren't very interesting (that's no surprise ..) but every once in a while I would stumble upon this little pearl; this really nice story!
Now that I make longer and more prepared programs, I don't get surprised that often any more, simply because I'm not out on the street, randomly interviewing people. When I go out to interview I know what I want to hear. I feel it's harder now to stay open for the surprise-element.
I listened to Theresa's story, very funny! Don't people always call in the wrong moment. Mara's story I tried to play but I can't hear the book salesman .. his voice seems to distort.
Alex Blumberg - April 25, 2005 - #6
I agree, I miss the feeling of being out in the world, randomly talking to people. And I feel that when you do narrative for a living, like I do now, you don't have as much time to go down unknown streets in the hope that they'll lead you somewhere interesting. I did that a lot when I was freelancing, and it led me to some really good stories. Which is part of the reason that i teach my class. My students, when they graduate, will be out there, poking around, uncovering interesting corners of the world, following their curiosity in a way that i don't have as much time to do anymore. If they find something good, then I hope they'll call me, and we can put it on the radio.
But I wouldn't want to say that a story whose outlines you know can't still surprise you. In fact, I'm often surprised and delighted reporting stories the beats of which i already know. Sometimes a new fact emerges. Sometimes a person draws an original lesson or undergoes a surprising transformation. Often, two people who've had the same experience can have surprisingly different accounts of it. In fact, I think that might be one definition of a good story idea: it has the capacity to surprise you even if you know the facts of it.
One recent example comes to mind, a show we did recently called Mind Games. The first story, about a young New Yorker who runs a group called Improv Everywhere that does these surreal performances around New York with the goal of making the world seem strange and slightly enchanted. One of his events (he calls them missions) was to give an unknown band its greatest gig ever. He found a new band, playing in New York for the first time in a horrible Sunday-night time slot, and he recruited a bunch of people to come to the show and pretend to be fans. They learned all the bands songs, and showed up at the show and acted like they were the Beatles. The band got really into it, as did the members of Improv Everywhere.
The band found out a couple days later though, and then they went through a complicated couple of days trying to sort it out. So going into our interviews with the band and with Improv Everywhere, we knew the facts of the show, we knew what happened, but there was still plenty of room for surprise in how the various parties interpreted what happened to them. And in fact, the guitarist for the band, Chris Partyka, had a response to the Improv Everywhere mission that surprised me quite a bit when he first talked about it, and in the end, formed the emotional core to the whole story.
Melissa Robbins — April 19, 2005 - #4
...Loved the three profiles- some really nice writing all around. I was particularly moved by the line in Nazanin's story, when she writes:
"Sometimes, Evelyn says, she feels like she's going to breakdown, but she's learned that for her, there's no there to pick up the pieces."
Nazanin portrayed Evelyn in such a straightforward way that she held my sympathy from the beginning. But that line...I felt almost suffocated right along with her.
I was also drawn into Theresa's story, and I think the focus on phone calls from home was a nice turn. If anything, though, I might have wanted to hear a little more about specifically how and why: "war gives him a kind of peace, while real stress comes from home"
I think she's really onto something there, and I would have loved to go one level deeper with that.
Sydney Lewis - April 21, 2005 - #5
I just listened to all three and like Melissa am happy to find some good writing throughout.
First reactions: Mara's piece was hard to make out. The book dealer's voice wasn't clear in my ear. I'm pathologically averse to shoving a microphone right up in a person's face, but you gotta do it. That may have been one problem. Some limiter or compression tweaking might have helped. I'm not sophisticated enough to know. I just know it frustrated. As for content, I loved the moments when he veered off the business and onto his size, rummaging around to impress the young woman with a "thin" photo. Also when he sang "April Showers." These human-rich moments perked me up.
Theresa's piece had good surprises, and I liked the sense I got of him as a person. It would have been interesting to hear him elaborate a little on his home avoidance feelings, but I'm guessing maybe he just wouldn't go there. I like that what we did hear subtly illuminated aspects of the guy's persona enough for me to imagine what causes his home stress. I took the piece and went off on my own with it, which is satisfying in its own way.
Nazanin's piece is strong. She found an interesting person with a strong audio voice who is reflective and has a compelling narrative, and Nazanin chose good tape and paced it well. We pay attention. We have to.
Alex Blumberg - April 25, 2005 - #7
As Sydney and Bente noted, the audio on Mara's piece is a little messed up. Her actualities are hard to hear. I think they were just loaded into the computer low. We're trying to get that straightened out. But it's a good lesson in how production problems can ruin great tape. The less you can hear the nuance in a person's voice, the less likely that voice is to connect with you.
Jackson Braider - April 26, 2005 - #8
I am going to beg to differ about "production problems can ruin great tape." We live in the digital age. We have tools at our disposal that can make good better. My point: Great tape simply is great tape, regardless of the acoustics of any given moment: Congrats to Mara for finding such an incredible guy and getting him to talk into a recorder of any kind. Part of our task in post production is simply to reveal the tape's greatness by any means necessary. Levels would help with Bruce, certainly, and we could (and should) fiddle with EQ when needs arise.
And in that sense, I would disagree with Sydney as well. Of course we can always do better getting quality sound, but I kind of like the unmitigated sound of Bruce's voice. In a pristine world, this audio, warts and all, sounds refreshingly natural...
Jackson Braider - April 26, 2005 - #9
Having done more than my share of tape syncs -- think of those as location shoots -- I have started to feel that we in radio often want to lose the sense of a particular environment when we get people to talk on tape. In the current scheme, a teacher in a classroom can sound like a bus driver on his bus can sound like the call center serf in the call center cell. Sure, we'll get a brake squeal here or a chalk scratch there, but somewhere between the shotgun mic and the noise gate, the voice itself that we collect sounds nowhere in particular.
In the ideal radio world -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- it seems as if we're trying to capture voices in virtual recording environments, without real regard as to where people live, work, eat or sleep.
We try to fix all this in the mix with ambient tape, but really, do we need to be so clean, so *antiseptic*?
Sydney Lewis - April 27, 2005 - #10
I don't mind rough sound, I don't mind audio contributions from the environment. I do appreciate being able to hear the words. There were times during Mara's piece when my nothing-special computer speakers, turned way up, could not compensate for what was on the tape. I loved the book guy and wanted to hear what he said. That seemed to be the point. Unless it was an artistic decision to have him in moments be difficult to hear.
Jackson Braider - April 27, 2005 - #11
Sydney -- It's not that I disagree with you (hey, Alex, you can jump into this any time), but the tape we get is the tape of the fact. Intelligible tape is a wonderful goal to aspire to, but there are also strategies for dealing with almost unintelligible tape as well -- not that Bruce ever really approaches pure garble.
I'm thinking, for example, of a moment in a piece by Sean Cole (found on PRX, part of the Inside Out series), where he voices everything people are saying under him. He probably did get everything cleanly, but it's a strategy for an audio/sonic challenge like Mara's (think translation).
That, of course, leads to an entirely different set of questions and issues: Is the narrative voice omni-anything? Omnipresent? Omniscient? Or is it just one of the characters in the piece? I think Sean's voice over in his piece is actually the voice of moderator (in the grandest sense of the term) standing between us listeners and the families of the Massachusetts reservoir.
Which leads me to ask a question to Mara: When you were interviewing Bruce, did you worry that thrusting a mic in his face would influence the mood?
Alex Blumberg - April 28, 2005 - #14
I'm of the impression that actualities should be audible. I agree that good tape is good tape, and a good phoner will work, if an ISDN or tape sync is not available. But I'd say that if the phoner is good, the tape sync would have been better. I don't think anything is ever ADDED by lowering the sound quality. If what you're trying to capture is a person's disheveled, doddering quality, then the better you can hear that person's muttering and fidgeting, the better that quality will come through on the radio. And so yes, I do believe that production values matter. And lots of hiss, or over-modulated levels, or weird phase problems can affect the listening experience, and cause people to miss the thing that you want them to hear.
I will say, though, that occasionally people fetishize sound quality, to the point where it becomes more important than content quality. So if there's a killer interview on the phone, and a so-so interview, recorded with perfect fidelity on the latest Sennheiser fancypants, I'd got with the phoner every time.
All that having been said, I think I figured out what the problem was with Mara's actualities. Her first story was perhaps not perfectly mastered, and so her voice tracks where several dB louder than the actualities, over the long process of rolling off and bouncing and converting that led to her piece being up on the internet, that level discrepancy grew larger and larger. This is my theory at least. So his actualities sounded even muddier and softer than they did when we first listened to her piece in class, where they just sounded quieter than Mara's narration, but certainly audible.
davy rothbart - April 28, 2005 - #12
it was a treat to hear all 3 pieces - i thought they were so vividly drawn. the narration all seemed really natural - it was clear on a 2nd listen how much thought had gone into it, yet when you're listening, it never felt overly scripted.
... here's one trick i've learned when i feel shy about thrusting my mic all up in someone's face -- before an interview, i explain how the mic works and where i'm going to keep it placed, that i'll keep it a couple inches below their mouth so the blast of air from their speech won't blast the mic. and i ask them to look at me and talk to me like normal, otherwise folks try to crane their neck down to try and talk into the mic at their chin. somehow, just talking about mic placement with them for a minute makes them more comfortable with having it in their face the whole time... even for the most mic-shy.
thought alex's "and what's interesting..." test is pretty, well... interesting. and no doubt effective. right now i'm working on logging tape from sri lanka for a story about the tsunami, and what i'm struggling with is that so much of it feels interesting to me. i'm trying to identify the most powerful moments of tape, but when you've spent intense time with someone, you get really attached to them as people and just about anything they're talking about seems funny or poignant. it's hard to get distance from your subject and get a sense of what would be interesting to an outside listener. do other people struggle with this? i wonder if alex's students are dealing with any of these things as they work on their longer final pieces.
Alex Blumberg - April 28, 2005 - #16
I totally know that feeling of being overwhelmed by good tape. What I do is just play it for people. Or tell it to them. Or when I'm out for a drink with someone, tell them some of the stories I've been logging and watch to see if their eyes are glazing over. But the important thing is, if you feel too close to the tape, find someone who won't, and get them to listen. Remember, a key element of the "what's interesting" test is saying it out loud to another person.
And it's important not to feel stupid because you can't separate yourself from the tape. That's what your editors are for (even if they sometimes don't e-mail you back so promptly. Sorry.) Every story I've ever done, I've come to a point where I have a bunch of things that I think are interesting, and then I need to bring another person in and talk it through with him or her. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got early in my career was to use my editor. If you're stuck, it's okay to just call someone up and say, "can i play this for you and you tell me if it's interesting?" Often, just the act of playing it aloud for someone else will answer the question for you. It's much better to do that than to sit and wrestle with it over and over by yourself.
David Kestenbaum - April 28, 2005 - #13
...wanted to ask if you'd given any thought to how this kind of storytelling fits in with how we usually cover news stories. usually we try to put the main point in the intro - which is kind of narrative suicide in a way because you'd like the story to build to some surprising or dramatic peak. i mean if nina totenberg were reporting on a supreme court finding she could theoretically not give away how the case came out in the intro and build toward it, i'm sure people would stay with it to find out what happened. but our listeners would come and burn down the npr building here. why should they wait to get their news? i feel like even in sports reporting on TV they usually let you know who won.. then just go into how they won, though now upon reflection i think maybe that's not so.
anyway i'm always torn - trying to find some way to leave something surprising for the story itself while not making the introduction an annoying tease. i try to maybe give the conclusion but leave you wondering how the hell it happened. but it's hard.
feel like on This American Life sometimes you give away the punchline in the intro, sometimes not. do you have any instructive examples of stories where you struggled with how to handle this and how you resolved things?
Alex Blumberg - April 28, 2005 - #15
Geez Dave, can't you think up any easier questions? I guess I feel like in some ways, news stories are just structured differently. The burden isn't so much on the narrative, since news (at least ideally) is by definition new, and therefore should be surprising. When you're doing stories, like the ones we do a lot, about normal(ish) people in relatively normal situations, then you have to do much more work to give people a reason to listen, and that's why we rely so heavily on narrative pull.
That having been said, I think a lot of news stories don't feel new. They follow very familiar scripts. Politician a says new initiative x will help, and politician b says, no, politician a is insane, and new initiative x will lead only to ruin and disaster, except for politician a's well-connected cronies... That's the way it feels to me a lot, anyway. When I feel disengaged from a news story, it's because it feels like it's following a form I've heard before. Two people arguing about social security reform, for example. that's a story I've heard. In fact, that's the story I mathematically diagrammed above. But social security reform is undeniably new. so the stories i like about social security reform are the ones that actually tell me what's the actual new thing that's going on here. what will actually change, who will actually be affected. Etc.
I don't know. I'm not sure if that's helpful. the fact is, it's hard to find surprising things all the time. Especially on a daily basis. and as for giving away the punchline, what do you mean by that exactly?
David Kestenbaum - May 3, 2005 - #19
... By 'giving away the punchline' I mean revealing what happens in the first sentence or two. It's the beauty and the tragedy of the inverted pyramid. Sometimes I notice you guys do it just to get people hooked...I was just wondering if you had come up with any insights as to how much you give away at the start, though I suppose your answer will be that it depends and sometimes you have to do it to push things along.
Anyway I looked over the front page of the new york times last week. And you're right. The engine that drives most news stories is that the news poses questions which then get answered in the piece. (Example: "North Korea tested a two stage missile for the first time yesterday, U.S. officials said." Now you keep reading because you want to know CAN THEY REACH US? And WHAT IS BUSH GOING TO DO? Etc. etc.) But here is a counter-example.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/arts/design/29scis.html?
It's a story about Christie;s and Sotheby's playing rock-paper-scissors for the right to auction $20 million of art. And they don't give away who wins until the end. The lede is "It may have been the most expensive game of rock, paper, scissors ever played. " and not "Christies wins $20M auction rites by picking scissors over paper." Or whatever. Here are some examples of news stories on NPR that manage to leave the surprising bit for later in the story.
"Yesterday's congressional hearing on steroids and baseball reminded
some people of an extra inning game. Lawmakers questioned players and
officials for more than 11 hours. The hearing didn't add much to
what's already known about steroid use, but there was plenty of drama
in what the players said and in what one of them declined to say.
Here's NPR's Tom Goldman."
"Imagine you are being chased by a tyrannosaurs rex. Six tons of
muscle.. and teeth.... All propelled on just two legs. Could you...
outrun it? A pair of scientists have used computers to come up with
AN answer. Their work is reported in the current issue of the Journal Nature. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports."
The problem is you can't do this all the time. But when a story begins "The Federal reserve raised interest rates today." I'm not likely to keep listening. I've just heard all I needed to know.
I just thought of a funny exercise, which would be to take all the this American life stories and murder them by writing them as AP style news stories.
kimberly kinchen - May 4, 2005 - #20
...I think the marketplace morning report is brilliant not so much as posing particular questions, but at making the listener ask the same question after the intro - "What?" And it's the kind of "what" that makes you want to get an answer. I'm pretty much assured that at 6:50 any given morning, whatever Kai Ryssdal says to intro the show is going to make me ask that. And that show does it in a different way, in that those quick intros never really tell you what the lead story is about, it really just befuddles you enough to make you keep listening. Last week it was: "The $251 gorilla gets a face lift," about the rising stock of google and its revamping the way it does ads; yesterday it was "A big personal problem for Time Warner," about TW loosing a bunch of its employees social security numbers, and other private info. They're news stories and they are very short, so that's different than what we're trying to do here, in a way, but they tend not to give away punchlines...I guess I'm just trying to say, I don't think there always has to be an explicit question up front, but something has to make people ask that "what"?
jane feltes - May 4, 2005 - #21
i sorta had to do this 2 weeks ago for a story about this girl Dawna who got a part-time job at a sub shop and, in a matter of weeks, ended up running the place (kinda into the ground) after the bosses abandoned it. (that was pretty much ira's intro). i think the reveal was necessary in that story because it gave the audience a reason to listen to what otherwise could be a boring first few minutes: a girl talking about making subs part-time. also, even though we know what events will take place, we're still curious to know how she handled them, how they changed her life, just how she felt about it...
Anaheed Alani - May 5, 2005 - #22
...I think in the example you're talking about the interesting question isn't "So did she stay at the store?" but rather HOW and WHY did she stay at the store? You know? So you're still not answering the big question in the lede.
Jackson Braider - May 6, 2005 - #23
Jane's piece is a classic example. There are possibly four or five stories there -- the Marketplace take, the what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up take, the TAL sticking-to-it-in-spite-of-everything take, the what-do-we-have-here take, the macro take, the micro take...
Steve Zelaznik - May 6, 2005 - #25
I'm based in Madison, WI where I cover local news for our community station, WORT. I have found that my stories become the most interesting when I cover the behind the scenes actions around any given legislation.
When Madison decided to raise the minimum wage, I obviously gave away the ending to the story.
"Well Madison has become the fourth city in the country with a local minimum wage. The common council voted 12-8 last night to raise the minimum wage from $5.15/hr to $7.75 by the year 2008. As Steve Zelaznik reports the council's decision was the result of a year long grassroots effort."
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/skzelaznik/web/audio/minimum_wage_wrap2.mp3
Then I went back and documented the actions to get to the city council vote, and still provided diverse opinions on whether this new law was a good idea.
More recently the Wisconsin State Assembly fast tracked two bills to relax environmental regulation for business. Much of the public was unaware of the bills until they made it out of committee.
The bills were complicated enough to understand, but I provided an audio snapshot, of how quickly these bills were railroaded through, to the dismay of Democrats and many individual citizens.
But it still seems my failures surpass my success stories. Perhaps the This American Life show on Washington Irving Elementary is the best recent example of how to make a riveting story out of a complex local issue.
Rene Gutel - May 11, 2005 - #27
Rather than rewriting TAL stories into AP style, I'd like to see AP stories rewritten by TAL, given the caveat that they must be told in under three minutes. Cause that's what we're working with, the time constraints...
The trouble I often have is trying to find and tell compelling stories that are _about people_. I have a knack for unearthing the cool tales about buildings, about historic oddities, about strange new books and their theories, but it's the human element, the character development that I want to improve on. The three stories Alex posted above were interesting because they were little human snapshots. How to incorporate that approach into more typical daily storytelling?
Alex Blumberg - May 15, 2005 - #29
... I'd like to see AP stories rewritten by TAL, given the caveat that they must be told in under three minutes. Cause that's what we're working with, the time constraints.
I agree. It's much easier when you have the time, both on the radio, and during the week to research, to come up with strong narrative driven stories. and even then it's hard. We have a fleet of 7 producers working long days and we can barely come up with an hour of material a week. And the truth is, I don't want to have every AP story written like a TAL story. If the facts are news, then just the facts are usually enough to keep us interested for 3 minutes.
That having been said, I think Steve Zelaznik was right to try and dig for the story behind the news...But I agree, if you can get the story of how the news came to be made, that's a good story.
Jay Allison - May 15, 2005 - #30
Alex, I'm not sure if this is a question or not... when I began in radio, it was a little like your Community Gardens era, except even less narrative-driven because, as an independent producer (whatever that was), you didn't have to pitch someone on the idea you had a good story in mind, but you just went out with your tape recorder to see what happened. (In public radio in the 70s and 80s there was more airtime than good programming so you could get away with a lot of "experiments." Like the Internet now.)
In fact, the whole appeal for me was just going out with my tape recorder to see what happened. I had no story theory. An interest in the basic subject was enough. The whole idea was to find the story, to follow the tape, to be open and curious.
If I'd had to answer a lot of the story questions in advance, I'd not have gone out on 90% of the pieces I did.
Sometimes, the pieces ended up not being stories at all, but became found poems or montages or illustrated essays or little art pieces.
Sometimes the tape would sit on the shelf for months or years until it finally proclaimed what it was about.
Sometimes characters from one piece would start talking to characters from another piece and I'd bring them together.
There was never any way to know, or even guess, in advance. It was all a surprise.
The bad part was that a lot of time was wasted and a lot of stories were tepid. I wish I'd had the benefit of the kind of story analysis that's in this very topic. I'd have gotten better material in the field.
The good part was that there were discoveries of things I had no idea even to look for. In fact, that's what I'd like to hear more of on public radio: the real wild card, the story no one could ever have thought of in advance.
I know, as you said, it comes down to time. Who has the time now for this kind of gamble? Younger people might. Artists might. And Transom would like to be a home for the result....
Anaheed Alani - May 18, 2005 - #31
...I think it can work to go into a situation with no idea of what the "story" is, so long as you have a basic level of curiosity--something you're dying to find out about, some question you need answered.
Jay Allison - May 18, 2005 - #32
You're right of course.
Traveling around as a budding producer talking to everyone, I think the question I wanted answered was, "Hey, what's your life like?"
The advantage of youth is that you really don't know.
And the illusion of age is that you think you do.
David Kestenbaum - May 26, 2005 - #36
I was talking with jay kernis here who thinks a lot about these things and he said he felt sometimes our introductions were too mysterious. (or trying too hard to be mysterious?) he said he felt the general format should be that you give people the headline, and they keep listening because they want to know how the heck that happened.
maybe the thing i'm feeling with a lot of news stories is that after the introduction i'm not really left with any questions. sometimes i hear it and think - oh good, i don't have to pay attention to this one, i can brush my teeth. and that's our fault for not picking the stories better, or finding a better angle.
richard harris here did an interesting story the other day about a blind biologist where you don't figure out that the guy is blind until about 2 minutes in which is a nice idea. though i have to wonder if we would have done the piece if there were not that added element in which case i wonder if the top is interesting enough without mentioning it.
here's a link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4665906
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