Transom→ Notes On Muxture

2021-10-05 I. Pouring foundation One of my most viewed YouTube videos starts with a chattering 808 drum pattern. As the video fades in, the first thing you notice is a recording studio’s wall filled with checkerboarded golds and browns, evoking the basement of …›

Transom→ Interviewing for Story (Rerun)

2021-09-27 Alix Spiegel is a master of narrative storytelling. Listen to any of the episodes of Invisibilia she hosted or any of the stories she produced for This American Life and, I suspect, you’ll agree. Even back when she was a science reporter for NPR cove …›

Transom→ There’s No Such Thing As A Podcast Emergency

2021-09-21 “There’s no such thing as a podcast emergency.” I first read that quote on Twitter a few years ago, thanks to podcast producing icon Kathy Tu. I have worked on about a dozen productions since then and that phrase has helped me breathe through eve …›

Transom→ Take A Closer Listen

2021-09-16 Meandering musings on audio consumption  I. Recently I was listening to the podcast It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, enjoying an episode about monoculture, specifically regarding the Olympics, and (separately) the Jennifer Lopez / Ben Afflec …›

Transom→ The Megan Tan Way

2021-09-14 There’s an illustration I’m sure you’ve seen. Look at it one way and you’ll see an older woman in a veil. Look at the same drawing a while longer and you see a younger woman wearing a hat with a feather plume. Same picture, different image.  …›

Transom→ Starting Out: Issue 2

2021-09-09 Welcome back y’all! Or welcome period, if this is your first issue. To catch you up, Starting Out is a partnership between me (Hi! I’m Alice!) and the folks at Transom. We’re glad you’re here! If you frequent a certain corner o …›

Transom→ Mixing Tune Up

2021-09-06 Audio editing is a really weird job. You spend hours staring at a computer, sliding around pictures of soundwaves — it can be hard on your eyes — and your attention is often consumed by the absurd, like “why doesn’t this person ever say …›

Transom→ Sounds Easy, But…

2021-08-31 This is true: I was so smitten by a story from the Kitchen Sisters airing on NPR’s All Things Considered, I brought my radio into the bathroom so I could shower and listen and get to where I needed to be that afternoon. I got delayed briefly because …›

Transom→ The Audio Producer’s Guide To Loudness

2021-08-24 Loudness Loudness is a helpful technology for any audio storyteller. It can help you balance voices to each other, know that your podcast will sound consistent from one episode to the next, or meet a specification set by a distribution platform. When t …›

Transom→ Goldstein on Writing, Fonts, and “The Goldstein”

2021-08-17 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→ Starting Out: Issue 1

2021-08-12 Hiya!   Welcome to Starting Out, a newsletter for people entering into the audio industry. I’m Alice, a podcast producer/reporter and former intern. I’m thrilled to partner with Transom on this project. They are the gold standard in train …›

Transom→ Stand-Ups (Rerun)

2021-08-02 I thought the whole thing was kinda strange. It was some years ago. I was working with a producer and a reporter on a collaboration between the BBC and Marketplace. We were reporting on the Brazilian economy. And, we were about to interview an expert o …›

Transom→ Fireworks

2021-07-19 I called up the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies out of the blue. I had read that Salt, a school in Portland, Maine, was considering adding a radio track to their longstanding writing and photography tracks. I had no background in documentary rad …›

Transom→ Bittersweet News

2021-07-08 Changes at Transom After so many years helping to steer the ship, Samantha Broun and Rob Rosenthal are leaving Transom to work on exciting new projects.  At Transom, we’re all about providing people with the tools and encouragement to tell t …›

Transom→ Narrative Justice

2021-07-05 What’s the truest form of journalism? “Letting others speak their own truth… Give them their voice. Letting them speak from their heart… It actually conveys a truer sense of what you’re trying to get the audience to hear in a more pure fo …›

Transom→ The Kids Will Have Their Say

2021-06-22 Some years ago, I worked with Blunt Youth Radio in Portland, Maine. It was incredibly rewarding. The young people I spent time with were grateful an adult cared enough to hand them a microphone — especially because they were so curious and had so muc …›

Transom→ How To Build Your Editorial Muscles

2021-06-17 By the time I left The New York Times, I had been there 18 years and had worked as an editor and a reporter. I’d been dissatisfied and yearning for a change for a while. I wanted to get into podcasting, but I wasn’t sure I had the chops to work in …›

Transom→ When Anthropology Meets Audio Storytelling

2021-06-08 The other day, I started listening to Stay Away From Matthew MaGill from Pineapple Street Studios. I’m very intrigued by it. Eric Mennel, the reporter and producer, is a clear and engaging guide to what appears to be a strange story about a huckster …›

Iffy.news→ Vax vs. Vote

2021-06-02 A side-by-side, state-by-state comparison showing vaccination rates closely correlated with Biden-vote percentages. …›

Transom→ Wrangling Stories With A Focus Sentence

2021-05-25 Starting a story when you’re not sure what’s at the heart of it can be tricky. But there are a couple of techniques I’ve used with students over the years that can help focus a story and center on what it’s all about. You can tr …›

Transom→ In Focus: Ways To Home In On The Core Of A Story

2021-05-25 There’s a risk when you write a story — lack of focus. No center. I’m sure you’ve heard stories like this. It’s like someone let a horse out of the paddock and it’s running all over the place. You can’t tell where it’s going or when it …›

Transom→ Remote Recording: Riverside and Talk Sync

2021-05-18 The COVID-19 crisis forced a number of dramatic changes in the ways that interviews are conducted. We explored different approaches earlier in the pandemic, including looking at some specific programs, such as Zencastr, and hardware, like the Rode Rode …›

Iffy.news→ The United States of Conspiracy

2021-05-18 Americans will believe almost anything. Two decades of polling prove that. No matter how insane the claim, at least 10% and up to 40% of people will say it's true. …›

The ProPublica Nerd Blog - ProPublica→ New: View an Organization’s Employees and Officers on Nonprofit Explorer

2021-05-14 by Andrea Suozzo On Friday, we updated our Nonprofit Explorer database in two big ways. First, we’ve added the ability to view key employees and officers right on an orga …›

Transom→ Celebrating 50 Years of NPR (And The Independent Producers Who Helped Shape Its Sound)

2021-05-13 For 50 years now, NPR has steered toward the goal — and remarkable vision — of an all-embracing, choral representation of America. It is a daunting task and requires a diversified team to pull off. In the language of the original enabling legislati …›

Transom→ Tape-Driven Storytelling

2021-05-11 There’s research that indicates people form their musical tastes when they’re young. Songs and bands that you liked as a teen will stay with you and, typically, remain your favorites as you age. That doesn’t mean taste remains static, it just mea …›

Transom→ Treat an Interview Like a Relationship

2021-05-04 Anna Sale’s Manifesto for Interviewing People About Hard Things When we started Death, Sex & Money at WNYC in 2014, the idea was pretty simple: to create a place for conversation about what really made up the details of our lives but what I found …›

First Draft→ An introduction to live audio social media and misinformation

2021-04-29 What does the rise of live, audio-based social media mean for identifying and moderating misinformation? We’ve taken a look at the platforms and their moderation policies, and offer some key takeaways for journalists and misinformation researchers. ( …›

Transom→ Dissecting a Good Story, Well Told

2021-04-27 Sometimes I’ll call another producer and I’ll say, “Hey, I can’t quite figure out what to do in order to… ” And they might respond and say, “Well, did you hear the latest episode of such-and-such podcast where they did this thing wher …›

Transom→ Principios básicos del podcasting, parte 5: volumen para podcasts v. radio

2021-04-20 Este artículo nació en 2016, con un email a la lista de distribución de AIR. Había muchas preguntas sobre niveles de volumen para podcasts y para radio, así que una noche me senté mientras me preparaba para una mudanza de Mineápolis a Washington …›

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 …›