Iffy.news→ Mainstream media funds fake news
2021-03-01 When debunkers link to fake-news stories, they do more harm than good. There's a right way and wrong way to cite unreliable sources. Most publishers use the latter. …›
Transom→ Occupational Hazard
2021-02-23 What to Pack I used to think I carried a lot of radio gear. Going out to any interview I’d bring a backpack filled with headphones, a recorder, couple of mics, spare batteries. The usual. These days I’d do anything for that light load. Starting las …›
Transom→ Gas Mask? Check. Bullet Proof Vest? Check…What To Wear When The Reporting Gets Dangerous
2021-02-16 Over the last year, Casey Martin has reported from the front lines in Seattle. What he’s seen is crazy, he says. First the pandemic. Then the occupation of several blocks of the city in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. And now, the far-right prot …›
Transom→ Hexagon Heart
2021-02-09 THE (WAY) BACK STORY I’ve been working with audio for close to 50 years, so it feels like almost my entire life. I began at my college radio station, then later, in NYC, I fell in with a little crowd that included Jay Allison, Karen Frillman, Lou Gia …›
Transom→ Eavesdropping On The Insurrection
2021-02-02 The obvious, stand-out aspect of this story is the tape. It’s absolutely stunning. Micah Loewinger produced this story for On the Media (OTM) about the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th of this year. Micah logged into a public …›
Transom→ Going Narrative
2021-01-26 Eight Axioms of Semi-Efficient Narrative Production Believe me. I get it. Narrative can be intimidating. And expensive. We listen to our favorite podcasts and we hear reporters talking about the years they spent chasing down a story. We listen in as th …›
Transom→ Perk Up Your Ears
2021-01-15 One of my favorite things about podcasting is that it reminds me of community radio. These are stations where the door is wide open; everyone is welcome to enroll in training and get on the air. I think of community stations as a kind of “electronic …›
Transom→ FRAN
2021-01-12 Backstory In its original form, FRAN was actually a television pilot. When I wrote the pilot, I was living in LA and working at a television production company. However, at the time, I was pretty much exclusively focused on one thing: comedy. Almost ev …›
The ProPublica Nerd Blog - ProPublica→ She Photographed Police Abuse at a 2014 BLM March Then Watched the Image Go Viral During Capitol Riot
2021-01-11 by Lisa Larson-Walker In the midst of Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol, Twitter user @thejuliacarter gave voice to the outrage many felt at the stark difference be …›
Transom→ Bow Glacier Asserting Its Existence
2021-01-05 Some years ago, I was walking through Government Center in Boston. I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going when I heard music — timed with my footsteps. I looked down and discovered I’d walked into a sound art installation. Some …›
Transom→ How Do You Know a Story is Worthy of a Podcast Series?
2020-12-22 If only there was some magical equation for figuring out if the story idea you have equals a podcast series. Something like: Characters + Tension + Surprise + Date Peg + Narrative + Social Issue = 7-part series Wouldn’t that be handy? Unfortunately i …›
Transom→ Shure MV7
2020-12-15 A Worthy Successor to the SM7B When recording from home became much more common, even necessary, during the pandemic, the Shure SM7B became a very in-demand microphone. It had already become a favorite of many serious podcasters, largely for the same r …›
Transom→ Show, Don’t Tell
2020-12-08 Sometimes I’ll slap myself on the forehead and say, “Oh right! Don’t forget to do that when I write!” It’s for that very reason we’re dusting off this old episode of HowSound from 2012 with Brian Reed about the writing maxim “Show, don’ …›
Transom→ Gear Guide for a Lockdown
2020-12-01 2020’s holiday season, like the rest of the year, is certainly unlike any other in memory. Economic hardships, and changes in work processes due to safety concerns will make many people’s year-end purchasing plans dramatically different. …›
Iffy.news→ Congress’ COVID-Positive Party
2020-11-30 Do partisan beliefs and behaviors affect COVID-19 infection rates? Maybe, at least among members of the U.S. Congress. …›
Transom→ Everybody’s Home
2020-11-26 David Greenberger The process for working on Everybody’s Home was similar to what Tyson and I had been doing over the course of about a hundred pieces that we co-wrote for three CDs with the ensemble Prime Lens (My Thoughts Approximately (2017), It H …›
Transom→ Nancy Was Here
2020-11-24 I went to high school in the 1970s at a time when the queer community was marginalized — to say the least. In fact, I won’t say the least. It was dangerous for gays and lesbians and trans people then. I grew up on Cape Cod a culturally con …›
Transom→ Story Mentorship Fall 2020: Pieces
2020-11-17 The Fall 2020 Transom Story Mentorship students on Zoom with Rob Rosenthal and special guest Shereen Marisol Meraji. About Rob Rosenthal, Lead Instructor Rob Rosenthal is an independent producer and a teacher. He’s the host for the HowSound podcast o …›
Transom→ Things I Like
2020-11-10 If you were to ask me, “Do you have a copy of Thoreau’s book Cape Cod?” I’d say yes, and immediately find it among my pile of books in the Cape Cod section of my collection. Or, if you were to ask, “Can we listen to that Rahsaan Kirk record y …›
Transom→ Portraying Character
2020-10-27 The longer I do this, the more I think the best audio storytelling is about the writing. Yes, of course, there has to be a story there in the first place. Yes, you have to interview well. Yes, you have to record well. Yes, a lot relies on the character …›
Transom→ Story Mentorship Winter 2021: Apply
2020-10-22 Story Mentorship Applications This online training will take place from January 24 – March 6, 2021. Instructor Rob Rosenthal will run the 6-week program. We have intentionally capped the class size at six so that participants are guaranteed indiv …›
Transom→ Move It Forward
2020-10-20 The Weight of a Story Untold From the moment I entered the criminal legal system as a 15-year-old boy, I was told, “Don’t tell anyone anything about your case.” I translated that to mean: Don’t tell my story. It then was reinforced by the first …›
Transom→ Why So Chatty, Alex Blumberg?
2020-10-13 There’s not a lot that’s funny in the recently published compendium of writing on climate change by the New Yorker called The Fragile Earth. It’s not a funny topic. In his book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Out?, about the same subject …›
Transom→ It’s Alright
2020-10-06 Discovering Transom I had bought the graphic novel Out on the Wire, by Jessica Abel, and felt so privileged to be reading it and to be behind the scenes with such amazing radio makers. I would so recommend this book for any radio lovers. It offers such …›
The ProPublica Nerd Blog - ProPublica→ Meet the Baconator
2020-10-02 by Frank Sharpe As a member of the team responsible for keeping ProPublica’s website online, there were times when I wished our site were static. Static sites have a simp …›
Transom→ A Night of Ear Candy – Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff
2020-09-29 For decades, one of the downsides to radio was that it ephemeral. Something is broadcast and then it’s gone — lost to the ether. The internet changed that, of course. Now, a great program or live public event can be archived after it’s ai …›
Transom→ Stephanie Foo, 2020
2020-09-22 Guess I Gotta Write This Goddamn Diversity Article Again I’m writing this article for the third goddamn time. The first time was ten years ago, when I first entered an overwhelmingly old and white field. So I wrote an article for the Associatio …›
Transom→ The Intersection of Folklore, Radio Journalism, and a Pear
2020-09-15 Rebecca Nolan arrived at the Transom Story Workshop in the spring of 2019 as a folklorist. “A quasi-folklorist,” she demurs. Regardless, Rebecca earned a degree in folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada in 2017, but she …›
Transom→ Lewis Raven Wallace
2020-09-04 Confronting Privilege and Power in Storytelling I host a podcast about the history of “objectivity” in U.S. journalism, which begins with the story of my experience being fired from public radio for purportedly violating standards of “impartialit …›
Transom→ The Squirm Test
2020-08-31 Some years ago, while I was working on an audio tour about rural Maine, I interviewed a beaver trapper who lived alone in the western part of the state. Inside his house there were dead beavers on the floor, dead beavers hanging on the wall heading dow …›
Transom→ Effective Sound Effects
2020-08-18 Ben Naddaff-Hafrey and I were nerding out about all things radio and podcasting when I interviewed him recently. As we talked, he bowled me over with a lovely quote he remembered about the power of audio written in the 1930’s: “The ear is half poet …›
Transom→ RØDECaster Pro
2020-08-11 It’s a little hard to put your finger on exactly what the RØDECaster is: It’s an audio mixer, allowing you to combine four microphones and a few other sources in real time. It’s a stand-alone recorder that can save audio to an internal S …›
Transom→ Pandemic Diary
2020-08-03 Look up Lauren Chooljian’s work for New Hampshire Public Radio; you’ll see stories like: • Sununu Tasks Panel With Offering Ideas On Police Accountability, Transparency • N.H. Supreme Court Rules Public Has Right to More Government Records …›
Transom→ Sound Art Meets Poetry Meets Cicadas
2020-07-20 The other day, I dropped off some computer speakers at a friend’s house. She came to the door and I thought to myself right there, in the moment, “I’m a little nervous but I’ll do it.” The “it” was to share the seed of an idea. So, I told …›
Transom→ Principios básicos del podcasting, parte 4: alojamiento y distribución
2020-07-07 La estructura de un podcast Acabas de grabar y mezclar tu primer episodio de podcast (quizás con la ayuda de nuestros artículos anteriores) y ahora necesitas compartirlo con el mundo. Este es el aspecto realmente revolucionario del podcasting: desde …›
Transom→ Walking In The Margins Of Journalism Ethics
2020-07-07 There’s a presentation at the Third Coast Festival from back in 2005 that has stayed with me for years. It shocked me. I thought “Wait, what??! Reporters can’t help people?” Anne Hull, a reporter for the Washington Post, was talking about how t …›
Transom→ Recording Cellular Phone Calls
2020-07-02 Our Reluctance Here at Transom, we’ve been reluctant to focus too much on recording phone conversations because we generally prefer the results of an in-person interview. The warmer, more vivid sound of someone speaking into a good microphone paints …›
Transom→ Leave In The Question
2020-06-23 There are a handful of things about recording interviews that I always get asked by students in a Transom Workshop. “Do I have to mic my questions?” is a classic. The answer is “yes.” But the reasoning may not be obvious at first since a …›
Transom→ Principios básicos del podcasting, parte 3: niveles de audio y procesamiento
2020-06-16 Empieza con una base sólida Has grabado una gran conversación o quizás estás mezclando tu voz con música o efectos de sonido, pero lo que escuchas no termina de convencerte. No es algo inusual. Obtener la mezcla correcta involucra muchas cosas: es …›
Transom→ A Feast For Your Ears
2020-06-09 One of my favorite episodes of Code Switch is about the explanatory comma. In short, the hosts explore this question: When should cultural context be given when talking about race and culture. (As they put it in the episode, how long is NPR going to sa …›