Week 4: Telling The Story

A story is an issue that is expressed in human events.
- from Sound In The Story, Poynter

Agenda:

• Guest Speaker – Peg Achterman – Interviewing Tips (handout)
• Discussion, featured podcasts, posts
• Discussion, featured blogs
• Discussion, class podroll/blogroll
• Discussion, determine due date for draft group project proposal (1-9 May)
• Lab – share preliminary audio
• Group time

More Tips For Audio Stories (PPT)

• Don’t tell. Show!
  • Concrete language
  • Evocative language
  • Effective use sound (don’t say it’s noisy, provide background sound)
  • Active tense
  • Edit, edit, edit!
• Listen!
  • That’s why I’ve asked you to subscribe to podcasts this quarter!
  • Close your eyes right now — what do you hear?
• Be Authentic.
  • If you don’t care, why should we?
  • No “gotchas” (don’t edit to change meaning)
  • Use sounds from the site, not from somewhere else — that is, don’t put train whistle in the background if there was no train

Featured podcasts

• Corey – Successful Podcasting (podcast)
• Josh – This American Life (podcast episode)
• A volunteer?

Featured posts

• Jonathan – Editing From The User’s Perspective
• Katie – Advertising Standards for Podcasts
• Maury – I Don’t Like The Sound of My Voice (great word pictures!)
• Nate – Podcasting Grows, But Awareness Levels Off
• Sarah – Local News Sites Get Twitterpated
• Terry – To Love, Honor and Display
• XiaoYe – Podcasting Project Management

Grade Sheet
records of weekly posts — everyone should have had **four** posts by Saturday, two reflection, two external. everyone should also have had a post with blogs/podcasts you’re following this quarter

Featured Blogs
(remember, we’re marketing oriented this quarter)

• Josh – Personalized design; left-hand navigation contains genre elements (archives, blogroll, categories). Consider adding “meta” widget as the last item, to make it easy for people to sub to post or comment RSS feeds. Any other suggestions?
• Xiao Ye – Personalized design; left-hand navigation contains some genre elements (pages, categories). Consider adding archives, blogroll and “meta” widget (as the last item, to make it easy for people to sub to post or comment RSS feeds). Any other suggestions?

Podroll/Blogroll

Assignment made Week 2 (08 April), due Week 3 (14 Apr). Several students did not complete this assignment.

Notice that some folks followed my suggestion and started practicing writing a summary/annotation. Why might I be asking you to practice this skill?

Assignment for next week (due 28 Apr): write a succinct but savvy summary (hah!) of two podcasts and two blogs that you are following. Don’t use the canned copy from the site! Post (one entry) to your blog. We’ll be giving one another feedback on these next week in class.

Also, if you did not provide a link to your blog or podcast (not RSS feeds or iTunes links — links to an HTML pages), create another blog entry and replicate the entry with links.

Due Dates

• Personal Podcast – Proof of Concept (tonight); Finished Podcast (do you want a feedback step?)
• Group Project – Draft Plan (1-9 May – when??) that is developed with Google Docs or WetPaint (to facilitate collaboration and feedback).

Tips & Tricks

• Maury – Association of Downloadable Media
• Vaun – Documentary Interview Techniques
• Vaun – Podcast 2 Microphone Madness
• Yi-Jen – External Source For Writing For The Ear

Resources

• Zuckerburg Interviw (Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes)
• Sound In The Story – Poynter (pdf)
• Record live audio from applications, audio devices: AudioHijack (Mac) – Replay Music (PC)
• Podcasting With Skype
• NewsU – Poynter online journalism training
• Bob Dotson @ MSNBC (one story and the one Peg showed us)