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Ira Glass
Ira's first job in radio was in the summer after high school, writing twenty jokes a day for a Baltimore proto-shock jock named Johnny Walker. When he was 19, in 1978, Glass became an intern in the promotions department at National Public Radio's network headquarters in Washington DC. The network was just a few years old and it was still possible to walk in the door and talk your way into an internship, even if you'd never heard any of their programs.
After that, Ira worked on nearly every NPR news program and did virtually every production job at NPR's Washington headquarters. He's been a tape cutter, newscast writer, desk assistant, editor, associate producer and producer. He's filled in as host of Talk of the Nation and Weekend All Things Considered. From 1989 until 1995, Ira was a freelance reporter working out of NPR's Chicago Bureau. For two of those years, he covered Chicago school reform for NPR's All Things Considered, with two unusual series of reports: each followed one school, for a full year.
This American Life premiered on Chicago's public radio station, WBEZ, in November 1995 and went national in the year following after the staff personally called individual stations and convinced them to air it. The show combines documentary journalism with other kinds of storytelling: radio monologues, found tapes, short fiction and interviews. Sidestepping sensationalism, Ira Glass and his staff serve up narrative epics that pinpoint, in the tradition of Studs Terkel, the unusual and poetic in the everyday. The Show has been distributed by PRI since 1996.
This American Life has won the highest honors for broadcasting and journalistic excellence: the Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards. The American Journalism Review has declared that the show is "at the vanguard of a journalistic revolution." In 2001, Time magazine named Glass "Best Radio Host in America."
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Ira Glass Links
PRI's This American Life:
www.thislife.org
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