The next aspect of the storytelling workshop was the anatomy of a radio story. This included adding drama by revealing a bit to us at a time through surprise and emotion. In addition this was including scenes with action to take the listener through the story. These elements will keep the story moving throughout. This will also give the listeners an idea of being there. What I found most helpful was gathering audio like a movie director gathers shots including going far back and getting an establishing shot (of audio), and also getting close to get discreet actions.

Then it goes down to crafting of the story once the sound is gathered and the story is focused. According to the workshop, we feel emotion, we do not feel facts. This includes when shaping this story, it is necessary to choose the best cuts of audio. What I enjoyed was how the NPR folks said it was okay to mic yourself as the reporter and get every reaction (including your own) to include an element of surprise. Sure it doesn’t work every time for every story, but if you are surprised as a reporter, then it’s probably pretty darn cool.

We also went to Shakespeare’s Pizza to gather audio and then return to turn a feature story on the local pizza joint. It was fun to see how everyone did a different story in the same location. Overall, the experience was so cool, and I was glad that I was able to participate and NPR decided to come to Columbia, Missouri to train.

Take a look at the application video I filmed at Rock Bridge State Park:

NPR Guru Michael Skoler shared some of his sounds from his radio days. Skoler has ten years of experience in public radio in addition to experience in video and the web. He is currently a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I wanted to share some takeaways from his presentation.

Skoler has experience with making complex topics understandable especially during his science beat at NPR. To do this, he broke out of formulas.
Other lessons:
1.    If the tape is boring, you have to sparkle (Skoler took pieces of the interview to finish his sentences and used tape in interesting ways. His voiceovers were engaging and conversational).
2.    Break the formula (Take people out of their element. Find the most important aspect of the story that will be interesting to the audience)
3.    Why radio is better? It’s the pictures. (Using words to create images)
4.    Tell a simple story (Ask dumb questions to get a why it’s complex, keep asking to explain what’s going on, “give me an analogy”)
a.    Before we get to this, let me tell you a story… find out where it connects to their experience, start from there
5.    Make your search the story (Put yourself in it when appropriate)
6.    Take risks and have fun, take challenges

Skoler ended by saying that some of the best stories are just asking a question out loud at some point – tell a good story about a good question.

Fun!

We have been working on getting two focus groups planned to sample the show and offer us their feedback. This will be helpful to be able to get show ideas from them as well as see what they think of the show and if this format is something that they’d use. We have our first one booked and we plan to get our next one booked for the following Monday.

Also, this week we met with Michael Skoler to talk aobut the show and listen to his feedback. He offered us some suggestions on where we should take the show from here which we will present during our final presentation. It’s good to be getting things done, but I will miss working on the show.

I worked on producing a local food show for after Thanksgiving. The challenge with this is a distinct news peg. The farmers market is continuing throughout December. Also, the show will come right after December. And it isn’t very controversial. However, local foods as a concept is not too controversial. I think it could still be a good show despite the lack of controversy.

Lindsey and I have also talked about finding numbers for the show. We want to organize a focus group and will get the names of KBIA listeners soon. This will help give us insight into how people are viewing the show. We would also like to schedule a meeting with Michael Skoler, who has a lot of experience with public radio shows like Intersection. That will greatly help with helping the show for next semester.

This Monday we had our show on Human Trafficking that I helped produce. I was really nervous about this show because it is a really hard topic to discuss, but I knew what points that I wanted to really highlight. One of them was identifying the issue in Missouri and identifying that the issue does exist here. Another was to discuss why the issue exists in general (from a cultural perspective) and what can be done to stop it. I felt that the show was highly successful. We were able to pint out the points that we wanted to in the short timeframe that we had. There is so much surrounding human trafficking, that it helped to know what I wanted out of the discussion. Even then, there are some issues that I wanted to touch on that we didn’t have enough time for. We did have two call ins and several people in the discussion board. Good for us!
The next show that I’m going to start on is local foods. This issue seems fairly straightforward, but I want to see the intersection of the issues. Also,  we want to start having happy hours at Uprise and plan for those to be the first few Mondays in December. That should be another way that we can engage and create an audience.

Our topic on Monday was Columbia’s One Read book, “The Air We Breathe” by Andrea Barrett. In studio guests included Brad Lookingbill of Columbia College, Darwin and Axie Hindman and Lisa Saffran director of MU’s Masters in Public Health Program. It was a great discussion and Reuben said that he had a lot of fun hosting it. You can tell when the host enjoys the topic and it was enjoyable to have Darwin and Axie Hindman as guests. That was pretty cool to have the major and his wife as our guests. I took photos during the taping as well so we have photos to use for the website, which has finally been updated with our staff bios. We really need to get the archived shows on there so we can point to what the show looks like to our future guests.

This Monday’s show is on Human Trafficking. I had a real world view of what producing a show is really like. One of my guests for that show backed down, but he is still able to call in. This will help with the show for sure, but we only have two guests. I had a lead on another guest, who I have been calling and emailing without response. It’s annoying for sure, but even with two guests and several call-ins, it will provide for a good show.

This week I produced a show on cycling in Columbia.  Our guests included Ian Cheny of PedNet, Detective Jeff Westbrook with  the Columbia Police Department and Michelle Windmoeller, who is an avid city cyclist. It was a pretty good show and we had one caller and nine people in the chatroom, which was the most participation that we’ve ever had. Producing a show was pretty cool. I was in the driver’s seat, feeding the questions to Reuben. I could see when he was struggling for a new question, and since I had researched the topic I knew what would be good. 

 The next show I’m working on is Human Trafficking. This should be a pretty powerful show. The trouble I’m running into is deepening the conversation beyond just the awareness aspect. Yes, awareness to the issue is vital, but that’s only half the show. The other half is WHY it’s important. WHY should people care beyond the fact that it’s morally wrong? I’ve completed the show preinterviews and have the guests. Now I need to go back and re-interview a couple of them to get to the real issues. 

Also, we’ve talked a lot about audience development. For this, we will have a couple of happy hours at Uprise Bakery, invite our friends and push the show onto our friends and their friends. The hope is that it will spread by word of mouth. We’ll see.

In class we presented our progress with somewhat disappointing results. No one called in for our first show, which is no fun, but building an audience takes time. This week we did a show job landscape in Missouri. We had a couple of people in the chatroom engaging each other. Even though one woman turned out to be a guest’s mother from Lexington, SC, it was still good that people are using the chat function. Before and after the taping, I took some photos to add to the facebook fan page. We’ll be taking more photos for promotional purposes and eventually do some backstage video as well.

I was working on producing Monday’s show on biking in Columbia. This includes gathering all the pre interviews and research I’ve done for Reuben to have. We put them in a paper folder so that he can reference it if he needs to. It was hard to get more information from a previous pre interview because I wasn’t getting a call back, even though I thought that he had confirmed. Eventually I called him enough that I was able to get through. Hopefully Reuben will feel prepared with the info I gave him. I also booked two guests for a show on human trafficking. So it’s been a paticularly busy week producing, but I’m glad that I’ve done this class for capstone rather than just volunteering my time. I feel like so far, I’ve gotten a lot out of it.