Monday October 24, 2005

So the 2005 Third Coast International Audio Festival is officially over which means I finally got the long night of sleep I’ve been craving and I’m ready and thrilled to get back to making radio.

Looking through my notebook from the conference here’s what stands out, other than the very bad drawing of a chandelier I attempted.

NPR reporter David Kestenbaum’s simple and obvious once it’s been pointed out to you advice about making boring interviewees speak like humans again – particularly the idea that you make a scene happen if there isn’t one. To illustrate this, Kestenbaum told the story of meeting a subject (the guy who had mapped the first weed genome) at his hotel room so they could actually go out and look for weeds on Washington D.C. streets instead of simply reporting the event from the press conference.

Ben Walker’s meta-presentation style during his and Tod Maffin’s session on podcasting that involved typing out snarky comments in an open Word file as the session happened. Sometimes he even did this while he was speaking.

Jad Abumrad from WNYC’s Radio Lab sharing his secrets about scoring in radio pieces. Listen to Jad’s show and you’ll recognize that he’s a master at it – I often don’t even notice there’s music in his stuff while I’m listening because it’s simply doing what music should do in a story. Moving the story forward by framing tiny moments. As Jad put it – acting as punctuation to those moments when a character’s words glance inward and expose what they are feeling.

Washington Post reporter Anne Hull telling all of us that she gets scared to talk to strangers and make phone calls too, but that you just have to pretend that you’re a reporter and you’ll get through it. She said enough insightful things about understanding the people, communities, and issues you’re reporting on that I heard pens moving and notebook pages flipping all over the room (i.e. go to the Wal-mart and talk to people until they kick you out. And when that happens, talk to people in the parking lot). In five minutes she also delivered the best real-world discussion on journalistic ethics I’ve ever heard.

I was also reminded that I work in an industry with some of the sweetest, most supportive people around. And just for the record – it wasn’t me up on a bench Saturday night dancing with David Kestenbaum and David Wilcox while Ben Adair unbuttoned my shirt. That must’ve been someone else. Photos, mostly of the partying, here.