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. …›

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 …›

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 …›

Transom→ Floating

2023-11-23 Floating… Floating is an excerpt from my staged work CHRCH, A BLACK MUSIC STORY.  CHRCH is a work of autofiction that follows my own lived experience, spiritual journey and love for house music. House music is a transcendent music genre and cult …›

Transom→ Mixing Fiction with Non-fiction

2023-11-21 One of the ways I discover new podcasts is by reading “best of” lists. While there can be a lot of dreck in those lists, I often encounter gems. Weirdly, given what I do for work and how many podcasts I listen to in the course of a year, I don’t …›

Transom→ Pineapple Head

2023-11-16 Sharif Youssef's "Pineapple Head" is a poetic little piece, written like a children's book, but exploring themes of depression and loneliness. The post Pineapple Head appeared first on Transom. …›

Transom→ Starting Out: Issue 25, with Regina Barber

2023-11-14 Introduction  Welcome back to Starting Out from me and Transom! In this issue I spoke with NPR’s scientist in residence and Short Wave co-host Regina Barber, who made the leap from academia to media. She has a PhD in physics and taught physics a …›

Transom→ Uncovered

2023-11-09 Would you mind turning on the light switch? When I moved to the U.S., I lived for a while in Borough Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC, with a large Jewish ultra-orthodox community. One Saturday, during Shabbat with no cars around, a Jewish man wit …›

Transom→ Interview Strangers on the Street, Make a Podcast

2023-11-07 During nearly every workshop I teach, right at the beginning, I send students out to the street to record vox. Talking to strangers with recording gear a student has barely used can be a harrowing experience — especially, the talking to strangers …›

Transom→ All Hear, November 2023

2023-11-02 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. I’m really excited about this month’s edition. It’s filled with so many opportunities open to audio makers — fellowships, grants, scholarships, fully funded uni …›

Transom→ Are You Listening?

2023-10-31 Parachuting In the early aughts I was getting my feet wet professionally as a radio reporter in Chicago and increasingly was interested in parts of the city, the South and West Sides, that were often underreported, or covered one-dimensionally, usually …›

Transom→ Every Library In My Life

2023-10-26 Welcome to my circus This piece embodies a personal journey of resilience. As a young, book-hungry reader in a family without means for books and a town devoid of child-friendly libraries, I manged not only to survive an evil librarian, but I also emer …›