Comments on: Telling the story: When you don’t have it easy

By:

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 20 May 2007 03:58:34 +0000

Well, it’s been out of print for several years. And while you can usually locate a few used copies on Amazon, sometimes the prices are very high. I got it for $20 OR $25.

A few radio people have told me it’s STILL the best textbook for learning to gather audio. That’s why I decided to buy it.

By:

joseph hollak — Fri, 18 May 2007 17:50:05 +0000

“I finally got my hands on a copy of “Telling the Story: The National Public Radio Guide to Radio Journalism,” published in 1983.”

Is this book incredibly hard to find, or you just now got around to picking one up?

By:

Mindy McAdams — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:54:24 +0000

Ha, great contribution, Jose Luis! Thanks!

The link — and a quote:

“And I also don’t remember why I possibly thought This American Life would want to devote any part of its hour on the air to a ’story’ without characters, ideas or conflict. But I do remember what I thought they should call the gardening-themed show that I thought my community garden story should go into. I thought they should call the show ‘Flowers from the Dead Earth.’ I thought this was a line from the Wasteland, a poem by T.S. Eliot which I’d never actually read, and which it turns out, I’d misquoted. Badly, actually.”

By:

Jose Luis — Thu, 17 May 2007 11:04:09 +0000

Hi Mindy: hard work to catch the point in any story. Alex Blumberg, producer at This American Life, “developed a mathematical test to tell whether you’re on the right track”.
You can find his manifesto in Transom.org:
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200509.review.blumberg.html