Edward Lifson
A fresh and careful ear at work in Chicago
Edward Lifson is now an NPR correspondent in Europe. This profile was originally published in Current, Dec. 12, 1994
By Steve Behrens
"I went through a period when I was doing a lot of photography," says Edward Lifson. "I remember the very first time I put the paper in the developer and saw the image come up. I used to stay in the darkroom all night long. I never found anything I loved so much until this."
This is his reporting job in NPR's Chicago Bureau.
"When I hand [bureau engineer Flawn Williams] a script and go into the studio and hear the piece for the first time, and he hits the actuality, it gives me the same thrill as seeing the image come up in the tray of developer. I feel like an artist. I feel satisified."
In the five years since Lifson sold his first freelance piece to NPR, and especially in the last year or two, his reputation has "kind of soared," says Pamela Fessler, his editor on NPR's National Desk.
Fessler remembers when Lifson came to Washington some months ago to meet colleagues face-to-face and see NPR's new headquarters. Walking around the office took about two hours "because people kept coming up and saying, 'I really liked your piece the other day.' "
Lifson made Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) a continuing character on All Things Considered this fall, tracking his ultimately unsuccessful reelection campaign. Larry Abramson, head of the National Desk, said Lifson did the only broadcast series he'd heard of that stuck with a single campaign to the end.
The reports gave a closeup view of the ordeals of a freshman congressman and his opponent, showing how they were forced into saying things they didn't want to say, how events backfired on them, and "the amount of good intention on both sides," Abramson says.
Lifson's reporting stands out, Abramson says, because he works exceptionally hard, "harder than he ought to, on a lot of pieces," and because he's "an unusual man, a very sensitive person, a very patient person, who views radio as a craft the way people view fine woodworking."
"Good journalists usually think they have to sound jaded and cynical. Ed has found a way to look at the world afresh," says Abramson.
"I love dealing with this stuff!"
Lifson, who turns 38 this week, came to broadcasting later than many colleagues and through an unusual route--from the technical side of the studio.
He had studied architecture, chauffered and tended shops in Europe and hung out in New Orleans at WWOZ-FM before he began earning a living in radio.
"My first on-air job was at 5 a.m. as a Puerto Rican disk jockey. Mostly all I had to say was, 'Baile! Baile! Baile!' [Dance! Dance! Dance!] in the middle of a song." This was in Chicago, where he had been the all-night engineer for a Puerto Rican station, and often got a chance to go on-air when the disk jockey didn't show up. "They did ask me to do some ads for Luna Plastic Covers. They loved the American accent."
Lifson remembers fixing on the idea of working for NPR soon after returning to the country from Europe. He noticed that his younger brother didn't own a TV set. Where did he get his news? Brother turned him on to public radio.
He began asking NPR Chicago Bureau engineer Flawn Williams for a job. "I called repeatedly. He could tell I really wanted the job." While he worked and trained with Williams (who is, according to Lifson, the bureau's standard-bearer "for the days when things were done right"), Lifson watched and learned from bureau colleagues Cheryl Devall and Ira Glass, studied transcripts of pieces by Scott Simon and others, and began producing freelance pieces on spec. In 1989, he sold Performance Today a segment about blues singing. Lifson has since become a full-time contract reporter--a not-quite-staff arrangement that doesn't pay health benefits.
Crossing the line from technician to reporter, Lifson was no longer allowed to dub his own tapes or perform other tasks reserved for technicians. "One of the engineers said that nobody has ever crossed that line before," he says.
Now Lifson carries on an active e-mail correspondence with other reporters wanting to know what cables to use and mikes to buy.
"The other day I was with some NPR folks and we were talking about microphones. One person said, 'I resent having to deal with this stuff.' I said, 'No, I love dealing with this stuff!"
"The fact that he did work as an engineer is one of the greatest assets he has," says Fessler, his editor. "It has made him know what can and what can't be done."
Lifson agrees that coming from the technical side helped his work in some ways. "I think it makes me pay more attention to the sound and how to tell the story through sound." He collects a lot of tape to do a story, even by NPR standards.
Even when he's off duty, his ears are at work. Once, Fessler remembers, Lifson spontaneously taped a children's theater performance because he loved what he was hearing and happened to have his equipment sitting on the next chair.
"When I'm talking with friends," says Lifson, "I'm always thinking they're saying something that could begin a piece, or end a piece."
The obsessiveness "helps when you're an engineer and sometimes gets in the way when you're a reporter. I could work faster if I were not concentrating on getting the sound."
These little moments
To get closer to the thoughts and murmurings of his subjects, Fessler says, Lifson bought a good wireless microphone with his own money about six months ago. He seems embarrassed to admit how much he spent on it.
Lifson isn't trying to be sneaky when he uses it to record his subjects. "I don't run off behind the bushes. But the fact that I'm not hovering over them allows them to be more themselves."
He hasn't used the wireless mike very much, but he was glad to have it clipped to the tie of Rep. Strickland during his campaign reports starting in September.
One of his mikes, wireless or otherwise, captured Strickland discussing obstinate political problems in Washington with his supporters on a college faculty back home:
Rep. Strickland: "What's the solution?" the congressman asked earnestly.
Professor (with chuckles): "That's why we sent you there, Ted."
While strategy and logistics dominated Lifson's first report on the congressman this fall, he leavened it with comic sequences. For example:
Lifson: "The candidate's older brother acts like [pause] the candidate's older brother."
Strickland's county coordinator: "I admire [Strickland for his energy].
Older brother: "I think he's got a mental deficit, anybody want to suffer through that."
County coordinator [burbles fondly]: "But that's our congressman!"
"One glistening silver tear"
In contrast, there was no light humor and not much hope in Lifson's July feature on an Illinois state social worker's bottomless caseload of fruitless labors. Lifson must have rolled miles of tape, but he fashioned the powerful story around one incident: the caseworker's attempt to reunify a baby boy with his natural family. Reunification long has been a major objective of foster care policy, he reported. "But reunification means one thing in a public policy mission statement and another thing on a baby's face."
Lifson takes the listener along for the ride with caseworker Corey Baker, who separates the child from a foster mother he loved in order to reunify him with his birth mother. "Baker won't know for years if he's doing the right thing," the reporter observes at one point.
To make it easier on little William, the caseworker brings along the boy's older brother, Melvin. "Having the brother along for the ride pays off," Lifson reports. "Melvin rubs his little finger along his little brother's lip." William sniffles into the wireless mike, and mumbles in the tiniest possible voice, "I want to go home." Lifson continues: "William falls asleep. His head drops onto his left shoulder. The windshield wipers play back and forth. And one glistening silver tear won't leave the well of William's eye."
For many listeners, that quiet scene aired in Weekend Edition Saturday's long segment, was the emotional climax of a despairing report, setting up the listener for Lifson's final sentences, reporting that the baby's natural mother was living on the street and did not come to meet him when he was yanked out of foster care. The boy ended up with an aunt.
For producers in a listening session at the recent AIR Public Radio Producers Conference in Falls Church, Va., the line about the "silver tear" was the subject of a half-hour critique at 3 a.m. in the morning, Lifson remembers.
Should he have included that line about the silver teardrop? Some producers thought no, it was too sappy; others thought yes, go for it. Chicago Bureau compatriot Ira Glass, who was there, later e-mailed a boxscore to Lifson: "The big radio stars all would have included the teardrop." Even so, Lifson has been wondering ever since if he could have found better words.
"I was there and I saw this, and it affected me, and I'm glad I wasn't hardened at that point. Maybe I didn't put it exactly right, but I'm glad I took the risk."
How he relates to his subjects has been an issue for Lifson. "You don't harden yourself," he says, "so you take in all the emotions, but when you write the story, you represent the facts. Good luck doing that. It is hard. I wish that, election night, I had been a little harder with Strickland and his campaign manager. This guy who really wants to be a congressman had just lost. I tried to keep my objectivity."
"I've never heard a piece that I've done that I've been satisfied with it."
Writing on location
When he first began work at the bureau, Lifson was surprised how far NPR people went to keep their sound authentic. "If you're doing a story on the Chicago Bulls, and you have sneakers on a hardwood court in the background, that had better be the sound you got of the Chicago Bulls."
Lately he's been thinking about staying even closer to the subject by doing more writing on the scene rather than driving back to his office, where "it's easier to lapse into journalese and formulas." This month, for instance, he's reporting a story at a print shop 50 blocks away in Chicago. "I just bring a pad and find a quiet place, and I write. You put the pen down, and you're hearing the presses in the background."
He's on stakeout at the print shop for one of the stories for a special series, The Subject Is Sex, about the shifting relationships between women and men. After a long search, he chose the print shop as the setting for the report on workplace interaction. The shop has great potential, what with male owners, a female president and salespeople, and lots of men with inky hands.
The series airs on most of NPR's news programs the week of Jan. 16, 1995.
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