SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
There's a reason people talk about having NPR driveway moments - you know, when you finally get home but keep sitting in your car or pause whatever else you're doing because you have to listen to the rest of a story. Some radio is that good, that memorable. We call this radio gold, and we're constantly on the hunt for it.
But some of us at NPR wrote for newspapers before getting here. I'm one of those people. I worked at the Boston Globe for about 17 years, writing countless stories of all kinds during that time. And when I switched to radio, I thought the writing would be the same, but instead of my story appearing in print, I'd just read it out loud. I immediately learned that a great newspaper story does not automatically make a great on-air radio story. NPR investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan used to work for the Baltimore Sun, and she quickly had the same realization.
LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: When you read a newspaper story, I mean, it's a nightmare on the radio. It's just this - it's leaden. It's long. It's really involved.
PFEIFFER: It's one skill to write for print. It's a very different skill to write for the ear. Radio writing needs to be shorter, simpler. NPR's roving national correspondent Frank Langfitt also used to work at the Baltimore Sun, and he now prefers radio writing over newspaper style.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: We had a certain kind of orthodoxy of writing imposed upon us that is not the way anyone ever speaks.
SULLIVAN: I kind of agree.
LANGFITT: And I was - I felt that I was completely liberated to write as I would speak. And I'm always thinking, if I'm having a pint in a pub with somebody, what's the first thing I'm going to tell them? What's the story?
PFEIFFER: For this week's Reporter's Notebook, Laura, Frank and I talk about some of the ways radio reporting differs from our previous newspaper lives and how a powerful radio story can basically bring characters on and off the stage.
LANGFITT: It's a lot like theater, in a way, or film in that it's a great way to convey to people in sort of what will feel organic to them. And sometimes if I'm building a story, I might say, if I've got enough time, I want three separate scenes with different characters. But I'm going to give you an example a little bit about, you know, what it sounds like when you write it - 'cause I wrote this - and then what it sounds like when you hear it.
So, OK, very briefly, I'm tracking elephants in South Sudan. We're in helicopters. We're flying around. We track an elephant, hit him with a dart. Down he goes. So here's what I wrote.
Within 5 minutes, the elephant's lying on its side, unconscious in a bed of parched grass. The men leap out of the helicopter, go to work. The veterinarian opens the elephant's nostrils with a stick and tapes a monitor to its eyelid to check vital signs.
That's not the greatest writing. It's - you can get a sense of it, but let me play for you what that actually sounded like.
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LANGFITT: The elephant - she's at least 30 years old - is snoring.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELEPHANT SNORING)
PAUL ELKAN: Nice. Uh-oh, she wants to wake up. You know what we do if she wakes up? You run.
LANGFITT: I mean, that's just, like, one of the best pieces of tape I've ever got, and it tells you how different it is to be out in the savanna of South Sudan. At first, I didn't realize it was a snoring elephant. I thought it was a herd of elephant who were growling...
SULLIVAN: (Laughter).
LANGFITT: ...In the bush. I don't know much about elephants, clearly. And so I'm doing, like, a 360 - oh, what? And then he goes, no, no, he's snoring. I was like, oh, good. We're fine. We're not going to get trampled.
SULLIVAN: (Laughter).
PFEIFFER: You're reminding me that when I worked for WBUR in Boston, I did a story about a young woman who had lost her leg in the Boston Marathon bombing and later had to have her other leg removed because it was so injured. She ended up getting a service dog that not only helped her with practical things but made her happier and less depressed because this dog was so fun and joyful.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JESSICA KENSKY: Rescue, speak.
PFEIFFER: And this woman had such a beautiful, trilling laugh.
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KENSKY: Good boy (laughter).
PFEIFFER: That's Rescue, an 80-pound black lab specially trained as an assistance dog. He belongs to Jessica Kensky.
KENSKY: Yep. You're going to show them your toy (laughter)?
PFEIFFER: And I listened to that laugh so many times when I would listen to my tape. And I remember thinking, if I was still writing for a newspaper, I couldn't convey the joy and delight of that laugh. So there's something about radio where you can bring something that you're a little limited with in print.
SULLIVAN: That's true. That's true. I mean, you know, radio, you get to bring the whole scene into it, and all the characters become what's happening - all this - the voices, the sound, what's happening in the room, where you are. It brings the whole thing to life.
PFEIFFER: There also is a different interviewing style required for radio. You know, when I worked for the Globe and I interviewed people, I would often laugh. I would react. And it - with radio, if your voice ends up in the tape, sometimes that works, but that can often be problematic.
SULLIVAN: Absolutely. You got to stop stepping on people when they're talking. You know, you got to let them finish their thought, and you can't go uh-huh, uh-huh, through somebody's talking, which you often do. So you have to learn how to do it with your eyes, to be like, I'm really into what you're saying, keep talking, without saying it out loud because otherwise, you end up ruining your own tape.
LANGFITT: As a radio reporter, you're best if you're like Marcel Marceau, a mime, and you're just kind of, you know, encouraging them but not saying much. I do remember being with radio reporters when I was a print reporter, and I would do exactly what Laura was saying, which is, uh-huh, uh-huh. And the radio reporter was stamping on my feet getting me to - cause I was ruining the poor guy's tape. I would say, though, that I really love the back and forth. Like, on certain kinds of exchanges, if you can do very short questions, you have a sense of dialogue, like you'd have in a film or in theater.
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LANGFITT: Anna Coughlan (ph) was sitting on a blanket, having a picnic with her mother and three young children.
How do you feel about the Queen?
ANNA COUGHLAN: She's a treasure, isn't she?
LANGFITT: I'm curious, how do you feel about Prince Charles?
COUGHLAN: He's all right. Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Can be a bit weird.
COUGHLAN: He's not as charismatic as she is, you know, 'cause she led the country through so many huge things.
LANGFITT: And so that people can hear in the story a real conversation between real people.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. And any type of reporting requires close listening, but radio, I think, requires a level of listening that might be different than print.
SULLIVAN: I mean, there's really only two questions in radio that we use ad nauseum, which is, and then what happened? - and how did you feel about that? I would say everything in an interview that I do is somehow some version of those two questions. And what you're trying to do is get them to tell a story because then they can bring you to the place where the thing is happening.
PFEIFFER: Radio also requires a different type of interviewing style than for newspapers. And Frank, I think you mentioned you have a good example of this.
LANGFITT: So I was in Somalia, and I - we were traveling around covering the fighting there in the civil war. And I was working with an AP reporter. And this - she's a great reporter. But her interview was, like, a million questions. It was just staccato. She was basically extracting as much information as possible as efficiently as she could from this, you know, major.
And then I was talking to him. And so the first thing I said to him is, well, tell me about your family. And, of course, his whole demeanor completely changed. He started talking about the people he had left behind, how difficult it was to be fighting in Mogadishu.
And then I began to ask them, well, like, how were you trained? And they said, we were taught to jungle fight, so we have no idea how to do house to house in this sort of urban warfare. And so it just ended up being much more interesting. And I got all the information. I mean, I piggybacked on the AP reporter, and so I had all the facts. But I was able to get just a much more sense of who these people were, the challenges that they faced.
PFEIFFER: What about when there's very limited sound to work with? How do you deal with that situation?
SULLIVAN: I had this situation happen last year. We were doing a story about historical markers, you know, these signs that don't make any noise and are incredibly leadenly written. I mean, they're just really - a lot of them are really very boring. So you can't...
PFEIFFER: This historical person did this historical thing.
SULLIVAN: Exactly, and then they died. And so I was trying to figure out - in print, you can do this very easily 'cause you can just link to all the signs, and you can write giant paragraphs explaining the randomness of all these historical markers. But how do you, like, turn that into the radio? And so then I kind of thought, you know, actually, maybe that can kind of work for us. What if we just read these giant paragraphs, listing all of these signs and sort of implying that - how - you know, the actual randomness of these signs by just overwhelming the listener with them.
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SULLIVAN: Anesthesia - Kentucky and Missouri both claim to be the home of Daniel Boone's bones. Michigan and Alabama both claim to be the home of the first Western railroad, while Maryland and New Jersey both claim to have sent the first telegram. The country also has at least 14 markers to ghosts, two witches, one vampire, a wizard, and a...
PFEIFFER: I remember this graph for your story.
SULLIVAN: (Laughter).
PFEIFFER: It was this blizzard of random historical markers that you read, and it was a huge block of text, but...
SULLIVAN: It was huge.
PFEIFFER: ...It worked really well on the radio.
SULLIVAN: Exactly. And it goes against everything we were trained in radio, where it was like, you're not supposed to read these giant blocks of text. But in that one particular instance, I think it helped people understand what we were talking about.
PFEIFFER: That's NPR reporters Laura Sullivan and Frank Langfitt. Thank you.
SULLIVAN: Thanks so much.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, Sacha.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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