Urban Unrest

27 April 2006 | Business, Community, Programming | Ernesto Aguilar

The Story Focus for Radio Workshop at NFCB was one of the best I attended. I wanted to share my notes from this session with our volunteers; I think everyone, whether you’re doing news or public affairs, can learn from these techniques. I will post the great music breaks session notes tomorrow. Writing for the Ear: taking scripts and writing them for speech as opposed to reading them.

Advocates may not understand what a story is, how to tell not just the facts but what a story is.

Think about what story stays with you? Stories about people are most memorable; people talking to people.

Start any story with the audience. What they are interested is the relationship of a story to themselves as human beings. Passion, feeling, what it means to a source.

There is a big difference between stories and facts. Use facts to tell a story, but people to illustrate it.

Mind map: Draw a circle and draw spokes from it. When your brain synapses connect, they map outward. The problem is that once one think a given thought pattern, it’s more likely we will think that way. Use the circle for brainstorming.

Put happiness in the middle of your circle. Now go around the circle, without thinking, and place associations with each spoke. Now look at what you have in terms of happiness. How many of you have written down one, two, three words others will share? Go through and see what words get at least half. Note that everyone is an individual, and the chances of finding half the room with consensus on a word are slim. Now, do spokes on each word/spoke. This will give you a new way of thinking of something.

How do we decide how to do a story? First, think of who is in the story. If it is in your mind, put it down. Every spoke could be a trail to a story.

Now, once mind map is done:

Why do I care? Why am I doing this story and not some other story? If you can’t find a solid reason why you care, find something else. If you’re forced to care (job), identify a means of caring.

Why will my audience care? Once you understand this, you have your angle.

Developing the idea. What do I know about this story? What do I need to know? What don’t you know? Who is in the story that I could talk to? Think about who has the authority to tell a story because they’re living an experience. Just about everyone has a perspective.

Research: putting names to story development. When you find someone who is engaged in some way, as opposed to just talking about it, write it down and maintain this contact, as it is a story.

Once you find that person it is a “focus statement” for a story. Focus on what they’re doing and why (i.e. what they tell you about why they’re doing it). When listeners make a conclusion, they make that story their own. You want to leave enough work for the audience to do, so they remember the story.

We have to be careful not to underestimate the intelligence of our audience.

We all have different stories in our heads; the easiest story to cue is about personal responsibility. When you go to the individual, people turn to personal responsibility. @Focus on the systems in your stories, if our focus is to make social change.

As you have developed the story, you are to the General Focus Idea: given all this information, do I care about this story? If you can’t connect it to a larger audience, move on. It’s not about your agenda, but your listeners.

Radio is more competitive than it has ever been, that if we do not make it compelling, they will go somewhere else.

You hear print stories on the radio all the time, but no one remembers them. The mistake that people make is that listeners care about what they care about, and we need to be aware of what their listeners care about, not what we care about. They have their own interests, and we can keep them by telling stories that they care about.

All of us have stopped and listened to the radio. Our listeners do too. When done right, radio connects with people and make a real difference.

Question about influences/biases: desire to not be biased, and an editor (just someone to review) help in fairness.

Question on clarity: biggest block is scriptreading and writing. We tend to write for the eye, but not the ear. We do not talk like we write; ear does not hear words, it hears ideas. We can read for hours, but not listen for hours. Ear fatigues quicker than the eye. Example of Ira Glass; e mimics human speech rather than script. The sentence is to speech as the paragraph is to writing.

One can convey optimism, energy, passion in breath and cadence. Performance is important; listeners do not have facial expressions. If you need to go over the top, so that voice conveys more, good. We are not trying to deceive, but to be honest. Emotion sets a tone.

As a young producer, you may create a montage, but as a veteran, you can give context.

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