For
Ira Glass, it means surprises, empathy, fun — in 45-second stanzas
Believe it or not, there's a stone tablet full of radio principles (links below) guiding This American Life. The public radio program's host and executive producer, Ira Glass, laid them out Feb. 11 [1998] in one of Minnesota Public Radio's broadcast journalists' lecture series, at Macalester College in St. Paul. Glass says the principles add up to "more, better radio."
The production team at WBEZ in Chicago put the weekly show on the air nationally in June 1996; it was airing on 130 stations within a year, when Public Radio International became the distributor, and it's now heard on 252 stations. By last fall, the show's weekly cumulative audience had grown to 565,000, according to PRI.
This is a complete edited transcript from Glass's talk. A large excerpt was published in Current, May 25, 1998. Thanks to Minnesota Public Radio for the photos by Dan Monick and the tape.
I want to talk a little bit about making radio stories and how we do it on the show that's different from what is perhaps traditionally done on public radio.
Web page originally posted May 25, 1998
Current: the newspaper about public TV and radio
in the United States
Current Publishing Committee, Takoma Park, Md.
No.1: Seeking pleasure
A couple of years ago, I went to Alaska to cover the Exxon Valdez oil spill with Danny Zwerdling. And we were the lead story in every newscast. I bring this story up to say that all the storytelling techniques we use now on our radio show Danny and I were trying back then, and other NPR reporters were doing. It was like the third day in this sort of saturation Monica Lewinsky-O.J. trial kind of coverage. We were trying to get a sense of the environmental impact on animals. And so Danny and I visited this animal rescue center they had put together in a local community college.
Interviewer on tape: Alice Berkner, director of the center, said earlier today she expects rescue teams to start flying in dozens of animals, mostly birds, sometime today. They'll feed them through stomach tubes, clean their nostrils, and in some cases bathe them.
Berkner on tape: It's a series of baths in hot water. It's a solution of Dawn dishwashing liquid.
Interviewer on tape: Dawn dishwashing liquid?
Berkner: That's correct.
Interviewer: You're going to get letters from Ivory and the other companies.
Berkner: You know, I hate to sound like an advertisement, but Dawn is the best soap for the job. I've tested just about everything out there, and Dawn seems to remove the most commonly encountered polluting oil. [Jaunty music begins in background.] It rinses out of the feathers very well, which is extremely important, because if you leave any detergent residue in the feathers, the bird won't waterproof up. So we have been sticking with Dawn. I'm open to suggestions in a lot of areas about bird care, but I won't allow any substitutes for Dawn. [Music swells.]
Glass: Danny and I left this in basically because it amused us. It just gave us pleasure. We thought our listeners would be amused. John Rabe [of Minnesota Public Radio] and I played this on his radio show this morning--and since then, three people have come up to me to say that they remember this moment from a tape from 10 years ago.
We thought that our job was more than just to explain the big issues and hear the people from Exxon and the state of Alaska and the environmentalists. We felt like it was our job to amuse ourselves and our listeners and to document what was really happening, what we were seeing in front of us, like the Dawn.
The show I produce now--This American Life--you know, it's this very emotional, idiosyncratic show, and sometimes I try to tell people that I do not feel that my job has changed from the days when I was an NPR reporter and covering breaking news. I always have a hard time getting that across.
But this is what I'm talking about: I still feel like my job is like it was then--to document these real moments that surprise me and that amuse me, and that just gesture at some bigger truth.
Okay. Typical story on public radio. Let's say that it is about welfare reform. The story will be about four or five minutes, and the reporter will interview people on all sides. I was trained this way. You've all heard a million of these stories: The reporter will basically write three or four sentences and then you'll go to a cut of tape from the people who are for welfare reform, say. And then another two or three sentences explaining the other side, and then we hear a quote from somebody who's against welfare reform.
If the reporter had more than a day to work on the story, maybe you'll hear somebody who's affected by the welfare reform as a quote at the beginning or the end. And then, because it's public radio, the story will begin with, you know, a little vague, sort of murmury street sound, and it'll say, you know, "Here on the south side of Chicago, it looks like any other day, but in fact changes are brewing in Washington, D.C."
Public radio has arrived at a kind of mature plateau, where all over the country we have reporters who do a very good job at analysis. Preparing for this, I went through a rundown of All Things Considered from Monday. And there were only two stories that did not follow this format. And the strength of the stories were that they analyzed what was going on really well. They give a lot of background. It was clear what they meant.
The thing that got left out is that the reporter never had any of these Dawn dishwashing liquid moments, in two hours. And all the quotes that were in the stories were only quotes from people who appeared kind of like talking heads, illustrating ideas.
And there was something dull about the rhythm, to me as a radio producer, where every story was set up so there was a little bit of script and then you'd hear a quote, and some script and then some quote. And radio, you know, functions a lot like music, even though it's speech. It had this very predictable rhythm.
And we never get to know any of the characters, enough to feel anything or empathize in any way or to be amused or to feel angry or to be surprised. It was a two-hour radio show. The only person we got to know--and this is kind of typical in the electronic media--was somebody who died. They did an obit of one of the Beach Boys.
No.3: How we structure a story
Glass: So Brett was on the subway platform in New York City. Afternoon rush hour, the platform's packed. And he sees off in the distance this guy who's going from person to person to person. [Funky background music begins.] And he's watching this guy. And this guy walks up to one person at a time. And the guy walks up and is quietly saying something to each person. And Brett can't tell what he's saying. The guy's standing very close. The guy is dressed okay, not a bum. Nobody's giving him any money; there's nothing like that. And the guy just moves on, to the next person.
And the guy's getting closer and closer and closer. Brett is trying to hear what he's saying. Finally the guy gets close enough that Brett can hear what he's saying is, "You, you can stay. You, out. You, you can stay. You, gotta go."
Brett on tape: And I'm starting to feel a little nervous and aware of the fact . . .
Glass on tape: Will I make the cut?
Brett: It sounds so silly. We all like to think that we're evolved enough or mature enough, but when push comes to shove and a guy's going down the line rating, I found that you can't help but kind of hope he gives you the thumbs up when your turn comes.
Glass on tape: But, Brett, he's not choosing you for anything.
Brett: No, he's not. And he didn't even look like anyone I particularly wanted to hang with, you know. I mean, as much as one can tell from someone's appearance . . .
Glass: You didn't really feel any need to impress this guy?
Brett: No, no.
Glass: And to me, it's like I think you're right because this is the purest case I've ever heard of. Literally, he's picking you for nothing.
Brett: Right.
Glass: And yet you want to be chosen.
Brett: Exactly.
Glass: So the guy walks up to Brett, stands actually a little too close to him, looks in his eyes and says, "You can stay." And Brett feels this euphoria. There's no other word for it, really. I mean, in his mind, he knew that there was no reason to be this excited. But in his heart, it made him really, really happy.
Brett: It was like, all right!
Glass: You wrote in your account of this, "I find myself, against my own better judgment, now looking with some disdain and perhaps a tinge of pity upon those who didn't make the cut.
Brett: Sure. I mean, if you can't make this guy's cut, come on!
Glass: "How terrible," you write, "to be excluded, to be found unworthy. But no one has ever claimed life to be fair."
Brett: No, they haven't.
Glass on tape: There is just something about the judgment of strangers. When the cashier in the record store examines your choice of CDs and gives you a look like, "You are so lame." When the cute host or hostess in the restaurant seems to be rendering some judgment on you in some way as they walk you to your table. It's as if by their status as strangers, they have some special insight into who we are. Their vision is somehow not clouded by all the things that we would want them to know about us.
Glass:This is the structure of the stories on our show: There's an anecdote--a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that's powerful, I think, is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can't see anything, especially in radio. That you just want to know what happens next. It's irresistible. You just cannot help but want to know what happens next.
Then, there's the part of the story where I make some really big statement like there's something about the kindness of strangers. Because you can't just have an anecdote. It's got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they're trying to draw from it, it's not a real sermon. And radio, in particular, is a very didactic medium.
The way that we're taught to listen to it is, I think, largely from news shows, where they're constantly telling you: here's what happens, here's what it means. And so we're used to that. And if I didn't say, "There's something about the kindness of strangers," this story just would not be as satisfying.
So the way that my staff and I talk about stories is we talk about, okay, what's the anecdote and then where's the moment of reflection. And we structure the stories like that, over and over and over.
Sometimes the story that we end up getting is not the story we set out for. Like, for example, we sent out a woman who had this idea--we were getting ready for a Valentine's Day show--and she said that her great aunt and uncle, who are in their 50s, had one of these relationships where in the early stage her great aunt was pursuing him and he didn't want to get involved. And she pursued him for, like, a year, and then something turned him around. And then he just fell. And they got married, very quickly, and they've been married for 22 years.
And so we send this person out; she's never done a radio story. We show her how to use the equipment. So she talks to them for, like, an hour. And that story turns out to be completely untrue.
But she stumbles upon a different story, and the aunt and uncle talk about how they'd been married for 11 years at the time of this story. And they were in a yogurt store--which for me is a really good moment in any story--and she sees this guy whom she had gone out with, before her husband, and she sees him and it's just like "Boom!" She remembers everything about everything, and they start to talk and then they're calling each other every now and then, and they're getting together for lunch. And pretty soon he is the main thing in her life that she looks forward to. She's thinking about him all the time, you know. And who among us has not been there?
And she feels like she has to tell her husband. So she sits him down and she says, "Look. There's this guy and I can't stop thinking about him. I just can't stop thinking about him." And her husband doesn't get mad, and he doesn't cry. He puts his arms around her, and he says, "I'm just so sorry I can't do that for you any more. I'm so sorry I can't do that for you." And he holds her for a little while, and she gets up, goes to the phone, calls the guy, and tells him that she will never speak with him again. This is a good place for a music swell. [Music swells.]
When the woman told one of my producers, Nancy, and I this story, Nancy like looked at me and she's like, "I don't know what it is about that story, but I know I'm supposed to remember that story. And there will come a time in my life where I will be called on to use that story in my own life. That is an instructive story." And I felt the same way. That's what we want every story to be on the show. And love is such a big part of it.
We try a million things, we try so many stories, we kill so many stories. We kill three times more stories than we use.
When I was putting together this speech, I spent an absurd amount of time thinking about what to say to you and pulling tape cuts. And some of my staff members told me, "You're crazy to spend so much time thinking about this. Anybody who's coming to see you, all they really want to know is 'dish' about their favorite public radio personalities. Don't bother with the tape and the music and the mixing board. Just get up there and what you should do is say things like, 'Carl Kasell . . . boozer. Robert Siegel . . . has two wives. Garrison Keillor . . . has his own intern.'"