This week we were instructed to watch some YouTube videos in which two radio experts, Ira Glass and Jad Abrumrad talk about storytelling on the radio and how it is different from other forms of media. As a print journalist, I really connected with what the men were saying, as there are a lot of similarities between spoken and print journalism.

In his first video, Ira Glass talked about what radio stories are made of. They have two parts, the antidote, which consists of the facts of the story and the bait or the hook that makes people keep listening. In print journalism, we have the lead, that is the opening line of the story that serves as the hook. The main difference I noticed between the bait and the lead is that the lead only occurs once, at the beginning of the story and is used to get readers to read while the bait has multiple parts which are interspersed throughout the story to get people to continue to listen. I supposed that this is because with print journalism, people almost always start reading at the beginning of the story while with radio, people tune in and start listening at various parts the story, so bait is needed throughout to get people to not change the station and continue listening to the story being told.

In part two of the video series, Glass talks about finding stories. He mentions that it can be hard to find good stories. I have experienced this on occasion when writing journalism stories, especially when working on stories for my Senior Project.

The thing that resonated most with me in this piece was not about finding stories, instead it was about cutting the “crap,” that is, abandoning stories that you have started that just are not good. I have experienced this when writing myself, but unlike Glass, who has enough time and resources to simply kill a story, I have had to figure out a way to make the story usable. I have written nearly complete reviews for print in the past before realizing that they just weren’t that good and had to restart my writing process, starting over and changing the way I’m looking at whatever I’m reviewing and completely rewriting the story. It can be hard but it happens.

Jad Abumrad’s piece on “How Radio Creates Empathy” did not draw me in as much as Glass’s show, but I could still relate to it. When he mentioned that the lack of visuals in radio stories could be seen as odd at first, I connected to him since I felt odd earlier this week when I co-hosted the sound only DS106 show.

I did not really get his points about radio never dying. I do not know many people in my generation who listen to traditional talk radio. Those who listen to audio media other than music tend to listen to podcasts, not traditional forms of radio or even things like Satellite Radio. This may be because it is so easy for our generation to get information and news through other forms of media, both visual and written.