Transom→ Revisiting: Magical Realism in Radio
2024-07-16 I think this happens to reporters a lot. They see someone who looks interesting. They chat with them, and they think, “Hunh, maybe there’s a story here.” It happened to David Weinberg. Back in 2016 or so, David was producing a series on South Los …›
Transom→ All Hear, July 2024
2024-07-11 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. I recently read a thread in UKAN — a listserv for U.K. audio producers — about people considering leaving the audio industry. It was heartbreaking to read about so many …›
Transom→ An Audio Field Trip
2024-07-02 One of my favorite past times is sending music to friends, usually a link to a song sent by text. Punk, dub, and experimental music to my friends Sven and Matthias. Avant-garde classical and electronic music to Carla… For my daughter, Gwen, I usually …›
NYT Open - Medium→ Enhancing The New York Times Web Performance with React 18
2024-06-26 How upgrading to React 18 energized The New York Times website — and how we tackled some of the challenges we faced along the way.Illustration by Ben HickeyBy Ilya GurevichAs software engineers at The New York Times, we place a high value on p …›
Transom→ Structure Interviews Like a Good Story
2024-06-17 I picked up on something Ira Glass said in the last episode of Sound School that I want to highlight here. Rather than structuring a story as a collection of arguments and ideas, structure it as a narrative, a sequence of events. This happened, then th …›
Transom→ All Hear, June 2024
2024-06-06 Hello! Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. This month there’s a few brilliant opportunities for makers who are underrepresented in different ways — those in the Global Majority, those working in a lan …›
Transom→ Tips to Elevate Your Reporting and Storytelling from Ira Glass
2024-06-04 I started counting the number of valuable tips Ira Glass of This American Life offers on this episode of Sound School and I gave up. There were too many. Tips on writing, reporting, structure, scoring… In fact, I think this rare recording I’m featu …›
Transom→ Safety First: Recording with Actors for an LGBTQ Story in Uganda
2024-05-21 I remember thinking: Uh, oh. We hired the wrong translator. I was in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro to be exact, reporting a story on pretrial detention — a netherworld between arrest and arraignment. In Rio and many places around the world, once someone …›
Transom→ Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative…and Ethical?
2024-05-07 (I recommend you listen to this episode before reading this post or listening to the audio excerpt below. All of it will make much more sense.) Back in the aughts, one of my students was producing a profile of a singer songwriter. During editorial meet …›
Transom→ All Hear, May 2024
2024-05-02 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. In some personal news, I’m headed to New York for the first two weeks of June to host an In The Dark event at the Tribeca festival — I would love to meet some audio mak …›
Transom→ Introducing Sound Judgment
2024-04-23 Right this minute, I’m riding an Amtrak train, heading home after visiting my daughter at college. It’s supposed to be a day off. No work. I thought I’d read a book (In case you’re wondering, I packed two: Mama’s Last Hug and How the Garcia G …›
Transom→ Yohancified: Making You Didn’t See Nothin
2024-04-16 Note from Sarah Geis: This manifesto is made up of excerpts of interviews I did with fellow members of the core production team: Yohance Lacour, Bill Healy, Erisa Apantaku and Dana Brozost-Kelleher. But the podcast could not have been made without the …›
Transom→ Thanks, NPR. That Was Satisfying.
2024-04-09 During the first couple of minutes of this episode, I take NPR to task for the preponderance of two-ways on the network’s news programs. In particular, my distaste for host interviews with reporters where everything sounds so unsurprising. This is es …›
Transom→ All Hear, April 2024
2024-04-04 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. You might know me as an organiser of resources, but I’m an audio maker too! Last month I wrote an article for Transom, The Many Lives of “Dead Ends”, about a piece I …›
Transom→ Building A New Media Ecosystem
2024-04-02 Looking for a Signal We’ve spent the last five years using our perspective as scientists and funders not only to figure out why exceptional independent creators make the things they make, but to create an ecosystem that amplifies their signal. …›
NYT Open - Medium→ Milestones on our Journey to Standardize Experimentation at The New York Times
2024-03-26 Illustration by Henri CampeãBy Kathy YangExperimentation is an important part of product development at The New York Times — it helps us measure the impact of our changes, ship features safely, and gain insight into user behavior. Experiments …›
Transom→ The Um, A Deep Dive
2024-03-26 Dale Lumsden taught me how to cut tape — as in reel-to-reel tape. I call his teaching approach “The Lumsden Method.” The way Dale did it was this: He straightened himself up at the mic. Got his copy ready. Cleared his throat. Hit record. And …›
Transom→ The Many Lives of “Dead Ends”
2024-03-19 Searching for Story A big “thing” happened early on in my life: my Mum died. When I was three years old she fell off of a cliff while on a work trip in Spain. Her death was ruled an accident, and I grew up knowing that to be true, but as a teenager …›
Transom→ Revisiting: Should I or Shouldn’t I – Recording in Stereo
2024-03-12 We’re revisiting a valuable episode recorded in 2016 for this installment of The Sound School Podcast. Despite my severe hesitation around recording in stereo (I practically break out in hives just thinking about it), I put together the following FAQ …›
NYT Open - Medium→ Rethinking How We Evaluate The New York Times Subscription Performance
2024-03-08 An exploration into The New York Times Growth Data team’s process of designing and building a new subscription reporting model.Illustration by Giulio BonaseraBy Amir MalekThe New York Times digital subscription offering is a complex service that ha …›
Transom→ All Hear, March 2024
2024-03-07 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. It’s International Women’s Day tomorrow and this month there’s some suitably great opportunities for women in audio. Within events there’s the International Women …›
Transom→ Small, Random, and Meaningful
2024-02-27 A journalist friend of mine once joked, “This is how journalists count: One. Two. Trend.” Just in case it doesn’t make sense, I’ll explain. Reporters often seek to report stories on trends. If a bunch of houses go up for sale in a neighborhood, …›
Transom→ All Hear, February 2024
2024-02-15 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. This is my first All Hear as a freelancer… I haven’t been fully freelance since I left university (when it was just a thinly veiled disguise for “unemployed …›
Transom→ For the Love of Radio, Get Out of the Studio
2024-02-13 I remember talking to Matej Praprotnik, the Assistant Director of Radio at Radio Slovenia, and practically demanding that he “Get Maja out of the studio!” In another meeting, this time with Mirko Stular, the Director of Radio, I made the same state …›
Transom→ A Triple Whammy
2024-01-30 One of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in a radio studio — maybe the strangest thing I’ve seen — happened during a class on DJing I was teaching at KUNV, a community radio station in Las Vegas. A student sat down in front of the mix …›
Transom→ All Hear, January 2024
2024-01-18 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. I hope everyone had a lovely and restful holiday. There are loads of great opportunities this month, some stand out ones including the Storyhive Video Podcast Program for e …›
Transom→ Tracking Partners
2024-01-16 When you listen to Martine Powers narrating The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop from The Washington Post, here’s what you don’t see and hear: This effort — several hours of tracking for just one episode — is in service of recording the be …›
Transom→ Revisiting: Goldstein on Writing, Fonts, and The Goldstein
2024-01-02 It’s hard to imagine an experienced storyteller like Jonathan Goldstein feeling anxious about writing and putting a story together. But he says the anxiety is always there. Ever since he was a kid and he had a story from school to tell his parents, …›
Transom→ But I’m a Virgo
2023-12-28 CONTENT NOTE: This piece contains brief mention of suicidal ideation and ableism. CONCEPT AND PROCESS The process of being diagnosed as autistic is tough. It involves reflecting on all the ways in which your life experience aligns with the …›
Transom→ Community Visions: Outside My Door
2023-12-26 Remember the Lockdown Times? The Stay-at-Home, it’s Safer to Not Breathe Each Others’ Air times? The Overemoting from the Waist Up, while Slumping in PJ’s at 4pm from the Waist Down, Hoping your Screen would Share, your Wifi Wouldn’t Glitch, yo …›
Transom→ Running After Lulu
2023-12-21 My wife called me a psycho after she first heard this story. I admit, it hits a little harder coming from her. Not because she’s my wife, but because she works as a clinical psychologist. Running After Lulu was recorded over two hours one eveni …›
Transom→ Which Is the Better Open?
2023-12-19 The opening to the previous episode of Sound School was boring. Dull. Uninteresting. As Ira Glass has put it, “Story equals bait plus narrative.” Well, there was nothing “bait-y” about the first two minutes of that episode, the one feat …›
Transom→ What Nice People Do
2023-12-14 In the early 2000s, I dreamed of quitting my day job to produce radio stories full time. I managed to get a few pieces on All Things Considered, and in 2006, I got one on This American Life. During the final edit, Ira Glass bet me five dollars on how m …›
Transom→ Gear Guide 2023
2023-12-12 As we come to the end of the year, we always try to compile a list of interesting gear for people making radio, or podcasts, or anyone doing audio recording and editing. These might make a good last-minute gift for an audio recordist you know, or …›
Transom→ All Hear, December 2023
2023-12-07 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, The Everything List for Audio Opportunities. This is the longest edition of All Hear ever — 90+ opportunities! The very first edition came out in January of this year with 30 opportunities, and I’m very pleas …›
Transom→ Santa Ana Winds
2023-12-07 This piece was born out of a strange sense of homesickness I was feeling in the fall of 2022. It was the first time in the 10 years since I’d left the Central Coast of California that I felt a pull to move back. I didn’t. Instead I made a …›
Transom→ Reporting Out at the Edge
2023-12-05 Theo Greenly remembers there used to be hovercraft transport to Akutan Island but not anymore. To get there to report a story for the public radio station he works for, Theo had to take a white knuckle express, a little six-seater twin prop plane calle …›
Transom→ Mothers Never Die
2023-11-30 During a visit in Paris at the end of 2022 I mentioned to Laurence that I would like to create an audio piece about the Unspeakable or Unutterable. The idea was to tell a story where we have difficulties finding the right words — it’s eithe …›
Transom→ A Tribute to Mary Gaffney
2023-11-28 September 25, 1950 – September 4, 2023 From Syd Lewis (Transom Editor) Losing Mary Hearing of sound engineer Mary Gaffney’s death staggered me. I’d spoken with her a couple of months earlier and knew she was having health struggles, but …›