Posts tagged ira glass
A great story is like a great melody: it announces its inevitable greatness and you recognize it the first time you hear it. Most stories aren’t that. They do not announce their obvious greatness. 60% are in the limbo region where they might GET great or they might flop, and the only way to figure it out is to start making the story. So you launch in, hoping for that winning combination of great moments, charm, funny, and X factor.
As a result, we go through tons of stories on our way to the few that end up on the air. It’s like harnessing luck as an industrial product. You want to get hit by lightning, so you have to wander around for a long time in the rain.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.
All of this becomes clear in Retraction, which is an extraordinary display of transparency in corrective journalism.
Agreed. Definitely worth a listen.
FJP: Important as can be. Ira Glass and This American Life retraction of its Mike Daisey Apple/Foxconn episode.
Should be listened to but if you want to read the transcript, it’s available here.
Ira Glass on storytelling and harnessing creativity.
Illustrated by David Shiyang Liu.
Ira Glass: ‘Who cares if radio survives? Something else will happen’
It’s a predictable but important question, whenever you get a group of successful radio storytellers in a room. Will the medium survive? Or rather, do talented people still need the traditional institutions of radio to do good work?
Apparently this is the magic question that activates Angry Ira Glass.
At WFMU’s Radiovision Festival last Saturday, Ira Glass (This American Life), Marc Maron (WTF), and Tom Scharpling (The Best Show On WFMU) gathered for a panel discussion about, among other things, the future of the craft. Eventually, moderator Therese Mahler asked the magic question.
Glass replied, agitated: “For some reason radio seems to survive, and I believe it’s because as long as there are cars with radios and people are lazy, people will get into a car and turn on a radio.”
Later, he continued: “It’s disturbingly nostalgic. I mean, who cares if it survives? Who cares if radio survives? Like, something else will happen,” Glass said. When Maron pressed him for what, exactly, that might be, Glass struggled to come up with an answer.
I love that photoshop job. haha. Ira is right, sound is malleable. It’ll be fine.
for the rest of the article and a link the the 5 min conversation, see Niemanlab.
We can get behind it.
wnyc:
Heavy swearing from Ira Glass. Excellent.
(also: co-sign on the effort)
You know him as host of NPR’s “This American Life,” but we here at AFAJP strictly know Ira Glass as devoted supporter of our mission to get The Onion a Pulitzer Prize.
Are you as angry as he is?
As fans of the This American Life we were happy to come across this brief clip of Ira Glass discussing structural techniques of good storytelling.
This is part one of four. Follow the links to watch parts two, three and four.
Hat tip to Mark Berkely-Gerard whose post on multimedia storytelling lead us to the video.
