Milano | CNYCA: Feet in Two Worlds: How to Tell a Story on Radio?

How to Tell a Story on Radio?

by Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, reporter, Polish Daily News

How to tell a story on radio? It’s really not easy for the reporter used to print journalism. First of all, radio appeals to different senses. The ear in our culture is much less sensitive than the eye and therefore the spoken story requires more details than print to create a full world.

Place: In an article the journalist can easily switch places he describes. He can go from the mayor’s office to the Greenpoint waterfront to Harlem projects, as long as there is some logical link that connects all of those places. On the radio, the process of communication is different. Here the story has to be set up very carefully. The narrator has to take the listener to the place where the action takes place. In between the lines the listener should be able to find the answer to following questions: why he is taken to that particular place, how the narrator arrived there, what he sees around him and – most important – what he is able to hear around him. The same questions have to be answered when the narrator leaves one place and moves to a different one.

Characters: On the radio when a new character is being introduced, he has to be described very accurately. In order to touch people and be remembered, the story has to appeal to emotions. The characters as well as places have to be realistic and listeners should be able to connect to them emotionally. The emotional connection is not necessary if a character serves as an expert.

Quotations: A great quotation one uses in a print story might be useless on the radio if the speaker does not have appropriate intonation or expression. On the other hand, sometimes quotations that barely touch the subject are used on the radio even though they do not move the story forward, but are said in a nice and pleasant voice.

Reporter as a character: In print it is very rare for the reporter to reveal himself as a character. Unless he is an activist personally involved in a story, the reporter should serve as a cold observer who contemplates all sides of the story. On the radio one has to be more personable and should describe more fully his feelings and emotions.

Different audience: Taking part in a public radio project for ethnic journalists means switching audiences: in my case from Polish to American, from a limited audience to a large one. In my ethnic paper I don’t have to create a sense of ethnicity for my readers, and the purpose of my writing is primarily to give a practical advice on how to solve particular problems or where to go for help. But in the radio project I tried to show the world of Polish immigrants to an American audience. I wanted to show what it’s like to be an immigrant and the kinds of problems Polish immigrants are dealing with. How is their average day different from the average day of an American?

My own experiences: My biggest difficulty was to find people willing to talk to me. I approached many pharmacists and doctors but when they found out that the program was to be taped for an American audience nobody wanted to speak up. The pharmacists were afraid that some of their activities which are not always legal might be revealed. The doctors were afraid of getting into a conflict with pharmacists – in ethnic neighborhoods the two professions compete with each other. Another problem was that in Greenpoint everybody knows each other and no one wants to get the others into trouble. The pharmacists and doctors usually said, “If this was for Polish paper, maybe I would talk to you, but this is for American radio. You never know who can be listening.” When I finally found the pharmacy that agreed to participate in the project I had a hard time interviewing the customers, since they were afraid to talk too, especially those who are undocumented.

Speaking into the microphone was very stressful for both my interlocutors and myself. But after practicing the interviews with my friends I somehow got used to it, even though I used to hate my voice. I thought it was not very feminine and too hoarse. Time and training let me overcome these obstacles.

The most surprising thing in the radio project was the amount of time it took to record my piece – six months for an eight-minute piece. Let’s see what I had to do – get people to talk, log the interviews, transfer fragments of the interviews on the fibreshare (a system that connects audio work stations), write the script, do the tracking, and numerous editing that required retracking. This was a lot of intense work but it was worth it – a new experience and all the fun I had!