Looking at the Ira Glass and other guy who’s name I can’t pronounce videos, there was a good amount to talk about and consider.  First with the Ira Glass, obviously there is the series of anecdotes that lead into one another.  The most important piece is the flow of the story.  Everything needs to go hand in hand to have a nice continuous flow like a lazy river at the water park–minus the pee.  Of course there is also the other side of that, where the storyteller needs to raise questions continuously in the anecdotes, following a question, answer, question, answer format (although all questions don’t need to be answered).  There is also the importance of the moment of reflection, which relates to Radiolab‘s video, in that there needs to be a piece of of opinion and reflection that connects the speaker to the listener, much like an “oh yeah” moment.

People also need to keep track of the relations or interest level of each story.  I don’t think I’m going to be very good at this process in the beginning–I tell bad stories…  And then I found five dollars…

Also the idea of “acting real” or being “the real me” on the radio–not sure how much people want to listen to me and my monotone voice.  Could be a problem.  But I will try.

Onto Radiolab, I strongly disagree with the idea of radio being an intimate interaction, where there is just the speaker and the listener interacting.  First off, you don’t really interact with the speaker aside from listening.  The only interaction comes with yourelf and what you create in your mind from a story.  On top of that, radio shows are often large talk shows where the conversation is coming from multiple people in the broadcast room.  You can’t have intimacy where no interaction occurs between the the speaker, who is on one side of the radio talking to no one, and the listener, who interacts with himself.

I think the most interesting tidbit came from the Radiolab piece when he came to talking about the story.  He talked about how radio is just reading a story, but it really isn’t.  Thinking about it, it is just like reading a story, except with a story , you have the opportunity to go back a reread over interesting pieces and reevaluating what you just read.  With radio, you have only a single opportunity to hear, evaluate, and contemplate all the information, leaving larger gaps to fill in with your mind.  This is an interesting opportunity for the storyteller, allowing much larger interpretations for the story.