Tape

Andrea Silenzi is the creator and host of Why Oh Why?. She's also the Senior Producer of Slate's The Gist.* "I listen to a lot of radio and there's so much of 'This person wrote a book.' 'This person has a project.' 'This person has been working on this for years.' And I just think that I much prefer conversations where people have a personal connection that's at stake. ... Like I always get the pitch of I want to do speed dating and it's like no one I've ever known has actually sincerely ever done speed dating. So If I were to do a show about speed dating it would be the most inauthentic thing possible." (*This episode is guest hosted by Avery Trufelman.)

Hillary Frank is the host and creator of The Longest Shortest Time. "I hate small talk, and it makes me very uncomfortable. I don't know how to do it well. I want to have a real conversation with a person."

Lynn Levy is a producer at Radiolab. "Sometimes if you’re interviewing an author they’ve already worked out the best way to tell the story. They’ve been through all the options in their head, they figured out what to omit and what to get rid of. And often times, even though they’re not reading from the book, they’ll literally be saying the words that they wrote down. Like you’ll hear phrases from the book in what they’re telling you. … And it can be really seductive when you’re interviewing these people because they’re giving it to you. You’re just like, well this is going to be very easy to edit. Thank you. The thing is when you actually do go to edit it it doesn’t have anything. It doesn’t have any tension, it doesn’t have any pathos, it doesn’t have any like… um… It doesn’t have any um! It doesn’t have any moments where you can hear somebody working things through. And I think one of the things that radio producers kind of know is that it’s a better story if something happens. You want to go out in the field and something is going to happen and you are going to record it and that’s going to make a better story. But that’s even true about interviews. You want something to happen in the person who’s talking while you’re talking to them. You want them to figure something out or work something through or confront something, if possible. … They think they know how the story goes and you have to convince them otherwise."

Pejk Malinovski is a poet and a radio producer. "I feel like when I make structure it's not a traditional Hollywood storyline where there's a beginning and a middle and an end and a conflict and resolution I think it's more about tension and release. I think it's more about composing musically basically."

Michael May, a Third Coast Gold Award winner, is a freelance radio and print journalist. He teaches radio documentary at the Salt Institute. "I'm not interested in doing stories where I just label somebody some clinical label — a misogynist, sociopath. It's so easy to dismiss people, it's much more difficult to understand them."

Stephanie Foo, a former producer at Snap Judgment, is a producer at This American Life. "I think everybody has a story that is worth telling, but I think most people don't know what their best story is. At all. They'll think that it's their most life or death moment or that it's the moment that they feel changed them the most, but sometimes it's the most surprising little moments that really touch people. And I don't even know necessarily what those moments are in my life."

Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt are the creators of TLDR. "The internet can feel like the same thing over and over again, and sometimes that's because the internet is the same thing over and over again. But sometimes it's because you've hemmed yourself to a boring internet by just paying attention to people who are much the same as you. So to the extent that we can get out of that, it gives our show more longevity."

Tamara Keith is NPR's White House Correspondent. She also co-founded B-Side Radio. "There's drama in the human experience, and if people are willing to share that, there's a way to make it into a good story... says the person who only does stories about the White House and Congress."

Ann Heppermann, a Peabody Award winner, produces Slate's Culture Gabfest. She teaches radio writing and radio drama at Sarah Lawrence College. "I don't think you want all crappy tape, but there's something about texture of crappy tape and Skype tape. If you think about sound as a palette, I kind of like phone tape and I like how it adds an element of grit to it."

Jeff Emtman is the creator and host of Here Be Monsters. "You can think of your memory as a box full of photographs, like the ones your parents have in your basement. Just like old glossy prints. ... And unfortunately, when you pick up an old photo print, what happens is you always leave a thumbprint on it, and overtime your memories become more and more thumb-printed. So if you pull up a memory enough times, you’ll just be looking at your own unique thumbprint."

Zoe Chace is a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money. "A lot of times people don't pay enough attention to their voicing at all. They don't realize that their story doesn't exist, unless people are grabbed by their voice. The story literally — like practically literally — is not happening. People are just missing it, so I always thought voicing is key, it's central. You have to grab people. And I had a real approach where I was almost trying to scream out of the radio, 'Listen now!' And, 'Listen now!' And, 'Listen now!'"

Ellen Horne is the Executive Producer of Radiolab. “When you’re trying to create something new, that kind of risk-taking has to happen in a low-stakes environment.”

Eric Mennel is a producer for WUNC and Criminal. "People pooh-pooh the idea of logging like it’s the worst thing in the world. Some of the best techniques I’ve learned, in terms of interviewing, was from logging good interviewer's tape. ... Listening to Alex Kotlowitz conduct an interview was like it’s own class on how to make radio."

Sean Cole, a producer at This American Life, has also reported for Radiolab, Marketplace, and 99% Invisible. "Journalism is a translation of madness, and poetry is a transcription of madness."

Stan Alcorn, a freelance multimedia journalist, is a contributor to WNYC and NPR. “I love stories but I’m very interested in how they pertain to some larger truth that you’re not going to know without quantifying it.”