Ben Calhoun has been in love with radio since he was twelve years previous. After faculty he started working at WBEZ, Chicago’s Nationwide Public Radio affiliate, ultimately working his technique to This American Life the place, amongst different tasks, he was a reporter on the story “Harper High School,” about gun violence in Chicago, and an editor on “The Out Crowd,” which received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. Calhoun has additionally contributed to dozens of reveals and podcasts, together with Morning Version, All Issues Thought-about, Serial, and Radiolab, and labored on tales about all the things from college board fights to “artificial calamari.” He’s at the moment the chief producer of The Each day, a podcast from The New York Occasions, the place he oversees an editorial workforce of greater than fifty folks. As somebody who is aware of nothing about making radio, I used to be grateful to Ben for instructing me about shut listening, collaborative modifying, and learn how to navigate the various evolving types of audio journalism.
Merve Emre: Give us a quick capsule biography of your journey from faculty to the place you might be at the moment.
Ben Calhoun: I’d say there are two main plot factors. The primary was after I was twelve. I used to be listening to public radio within the backseat of a automobile, sitting exterior of a grocery retailer ready for my mother to come back out. Terry Gross was interviewing a musician named Ted Hawkins, who was speaking about his life and his music. I fell in love with broadcasting. I fell in love with the concept a dialog might convey everybody listening into another person’s world; that you can inhabit it and really feel issues and see issues that you just didn’t have entry to in any other case. It was like magic to me.
I listened to the radio relentlessly after that, from jazz DJs to public radio. There’s a photograph of me standing subsequent to a speaker in a Nirvana shirt and ripped denims, however what I’m listening to is Prairie Dwelling Companion. When you drilled into the molten core of public radio in 1980, Prairie Dwelling Companion would move out of it.
The second second was in faculty. I had a job delivering pizzas for Papa John’s, and sooner or later my brakes went out. I had been listening to an episode of This American Life about enterprise conventions. In that episode, Nancy Updike tells a narrative about two individuals who meet at a conference and fall in love, however considered one of them dies on the aircraft journey house. On the time, I didn’t have a mobile phone, I needed to ship 5 orders, and I used to be in the course of nowhere within the suburbs of southern Milwaukee. It was an actual drawback. However I noticed, I need to hear what occurs subsequent within the story. It registered for me: I don’t know the way they make this factor that they make, however I swear I’m going to seek out out, and I’m going to do it.
What occurred to the pizza?
I made it again. I simply ran the automobile into the curb after I wanted to cease.
I graduated from faculty, throughout which I ran a bunch of radio reveals, with the intention of simply getting my foot within the door. I ended up at WBEZ in Chicago, and I did something that the information division wanted: xeroxing, binding audio-editing manuals, writing newscasts for Morning Version at 4 o’clock within the morning. It took ten years, however ultimately This American Life employed me. I spent half a decade at that present, over two stints, and at Serial, our sister manufacturing.
Speak to me about transferring from This American Life to The Each day, which is a unique style of audio.
I spent the primary 9 years in information. I turned a creature of newsrooms, with a sure belligerence in opposition to authority and a love of scrutiny and obsessive accuracy. Afflict the comfy and luxury the troubled. These have been concepts that actually appealed to me. The thought of giving folks entry to a platform to speak about their experiences was all the time compelling to me. I instructed many alternative journalistic, nonfiction-type tales at This American Life, however three years in the past The Each day knocked on my door and was like, We’d like any person along with your bizarre mixture of experience—one half information and one half longform. That’s the double helix of what that present is: a longform, structured audio story propelled by the information second. The Each day was start-up dimension after I acquired there. For 5 years, they made the present with about twelve folks, working till 5:30 within the morning and getting up at 9 AM. They introduced me in to transition to a extra sustainable, long-term mannequin for the workforce.
Lots of the editors I’ve interviewed have began out at magazines modifying criticism or journalism, and that’s all they’ve edited. Or they began out commissioning and modifying book-length nonfiction, and that’s all they do. However you will have labored within the newsroom, you’ve labored for longform podcasts, and also you’ve labored for The Each day, which you describe fantastically as twinning longform and information. How do you suppose schematically in regards to the totally different genres which can be jostling in opposition to each other in audio at the moment?
For my very own sake, I’ve all the time damaged it down, first, into information, just like the NPR selection—usually brief type, although generally with longer arcs that go to, like, seven minutes. You then’ve acquired polished nonfiction, like Radiolab, This American Life, and Serial, with that scripted aesthetic. Then there’s “chat,” the Invoice Simmonses and the Name Her Daddys, these sorts of reveals with a whole lot of riffing and modified monologuing. There are additionally the miscellanies, and I really like these reveals too. There’s an important previous present known as Joe Frank, by a man named Joe Frank, who would make these arty, indescribably stunning episodes—you possibly can hear a whole lot of the precursors to This American Life in there—the place he’s scoring for emotional atmosphere with script or spoken-word efficiency. There was additionally a present known as Phrase Jazz by Ken Nordine in Chicago. Principally, that’s how I map it out.
On this podcast final 12 months, we talked with critics about their follow of shut studying: of studying a textual content attentively to schematize and interpret it. Is there a follow of shut listening that helps you concentrate on the way you go about modifying, setting up, and decoding a narrative?
Once I acquired to This American Life, I used to be used to public radio edits with a one-to-one mannequin, which means that, as a reporter, I’d write a narrative after which I had a beautiful editor, Cate Cahan, who would clear it up. Once I went to This American Life, I discovered learn how to do group modifying.
Let me clarify with a visible:
It seems like a extremely dangerous poem. Issues are indented and justified left. The place you see “track, track, track,” that’s the place you place key phrases from what the author, the audio narrator, is saying—as you’re listening, you’re registering issues that you may dangle on to. Then, if the narrator goes to a clip of tape, like a sound chunk from an interview with somebody, that’s the place it says “Speaker A.” There, you’d choose up a key phrase that was in that clip from the tape. You then return to the narrator, who’s now performing one other observe, and choose up a key phrase. So, you go down and alter the indentation when it adjustments audio system.
Right here you possibly can see it in follow.
These are hand logs made by my colleagues. You possibly can see they’re simply chicken-scratching out key phrases from totally different parts of the story. What this does is, it makes a miniature construction. You possibly can map a one-hour audio documentary, basically, on 4 pages. This provides you handles for what your expertise was. I’d make a circle the place I acquired bored and the place I began to float, or put a query mark and circle it the place I used to be confused. Or I would make a line with two little arrows to indicate the place I believed one thing was taking too lengthy and we’d need to condense it.
I need to share this as a result of I’ve come to really feel that a lot of modifying is about clocking your personal expertise as a client of the factor and being hyper-alert to the sentiments that you just’re having, then having the ability to talk these emotions as notes to the one that made it—feedback like “shorten this” or “make sure that this point lands cleaner.” Then they will implement their adjustments. Everybody at This American Life would hearken to a draft and create a shared map that we might then use to debate it. At instances, we might have 4, 5, or six folks on an edit. Afterward we might go round and everyone would give their notes utilizing maps that look similar to this.
It sounds such as you’re listening for a couple of various things. First, for theme: What’s the individual speaking about from one second to the subsequent? How are we transferring between theme one and two and three? Second, for voices: The place do Speaker A and Speaker B come into the observe? Third, for tempo: How lengthy do I spend on some extent earlier than I transfer on? What is going to folks’s tolerance be? And fourth, for a story arc: The place do we start and finish? What factors are presupposed to land? Does that sound correct?
That sounds completely proper. If I have been to spotlight two issues to search for when modifying audio, they’d be confusion and tedium. They’re quite common when making one-hour documentaries. I herald drafts of reveals that have been presupposed to be an hour and ended up an hour and forty-five minutes—you’re vulnerable to have some boredom and confusion in there.
With audio modifying, you’re coping with the uncooked materials or a draft of a narrative. Audio is insanely illiberal of repetition, much more so than print. If there’s a lightweight repeat in how something is conveyed, your mind units off this obnoxious alarm: “Oh, I feel like I’ve seen that tree before. Are we going in a circle?” Additionally, audio is all the time structured in reverse. You’re beginning with an concept, a sense, or a plot level that’s essential, and dealing backward. I used to make a diagram for those that confirmed how they pay attention via time. You’re going together with the story, and it’s escalating, and while you hit, say, the music publish—you already know, when the music in This American Life is available in—it all the time arrives with a sense, an concept, a realization, a mirrored image. We all the time construction audio so {that a} part is driving at these issues. The purpose is the payoff. It’s acquired a really experiential particularity.
There’s an analog right here with sure types of print. My editor at The New Yorker typically says that the distinction between tutorial and journal writing is that teachers start with the payoff after which inform the story, however journal writing tells the story to provide the payoff on the finish.
To land it with a punch.
How does hand-logging assist you to reverse engineer the construction of a narrative? Does studying learn how to pay attention train you learn how to produce?
That’s a extremely good query. There’s a separate instrument that I gained via a whole lot of ache, which I shouldn’t have needed to undergo. I’m going to share a giant story about this.
At some point, I needed to get one thing from Ira Glass at This American Life, so I’m going to his workplace, and I say, “Can I just get ten minutes?” He stated, “Yes, if you talk to these two Israeli guys who want to make our show in Hebrew.” And I stated, “That is not what I was expecting, but we can do that. We can quid pro quo this situation.” These two guys ask us learn how to construction a narrative for audio. Ira stated to me, “Well, you go first.” And I stated, “I would prefer that you go first, but all right: What I do is I take hours of logs and I flag all of the things that I feel like are the most meaningful. I flag key plot points. I flag beautiful exchanges. I flag what feel like meaningful or emotional moments, and I just mark all of the things that I’m kind of in love with.”
That is whereas listening to uncooked audio?
Sure. For any story, you may need anyplace from two to, like, thirty or forty hours of uncooked tape. I’d undergo all of it, I’d quantity all of these issues, after which I’d make a desk of contents. It might be numbered one via fifty, and I’d star, circle, or notice the issues that felt essentially the most important. Then I’d use that as my little key, and sequence the numbers into an overview: We’re doing 4, then we’re doing seven, after which we’re leaping again to 1. I’d make my define by letting or not it’s pushed by the ability of the fabric I used to be working with. As a result of, for audio, you simply all the time need the tape driving the development of the factor.
So I end explaining this, and Ira says, “Oh, well, I do the same thing. Except I use letters.” I spent twelve years arising with this method, and letters are higher! I stated, “I wish I could go back to 2001, and you could just sit down with me for thirty minutes. You would have saved me years of agony.”
Here’s a third instance:
It’s basically an overview in my quasi-legible handwriting, some issues are blue and a few are crimson. That is the construction for a narrative known as “Just South of the Unicorns.” What you’ll see within the define are moments I knew we wanted. These are in crimson—the fabric I couldn’t think about this story with out. Then there are bracketed issues, that are the items of tape which can be expendable. I’m making a map of what completely has to exist within the completed model and making selections about what I can lose. Whether or not it’s on the modifying or on the making aspect, it’s about arising with a instrument so to put handles in your concepts.
“Just South of the Unicorns” begins with an opportunity encounter that motivates a deep dive into the historical past of a beloved author. Different tales you’re employed on are extra investigative. How do you concentrate on structuring the second form of story?
I’ve acquired two children. They’re eleven and 13, and the eleven-year-old listens obsessively to books on tape. She lately began speaking in regards to the starting of any story as “the scrape.” I stated, “What do you mean ‘the scrape’?” And she or he stated, “You know, where they’re telling you what it’s going to be about, and they give you enough information so that you can follow it.” And I stated, “Oh, you’re talking about exposition.” I really like that by listening to audiobooks, she determined to name exposition “the scrape.” I used to be lately speaking to folks at The Each day about how I really feel like there’s actually just one construction. You’re locked right into a chronology, on the whole, with moments of reflection and which means. However entering into the story, you possibly can have a ton of invention.
You possibly can scrape in several methods.
You possibly can scrape in so many alternative methods. Right here’s an instance of the story the place the scrape didn’t pan out. Sarah Koenig had gotten a tip a couple of man who labored in a pork-processing plant and had seen a bunch of packing containers labeled “artificial calamari.” “What’s artificial calamari?” he requested. One other individual stated, “It’s hog bung. Hog rectum.” Since Sarah’s acquired higher-class issues to research, she requested if anyone needed to look into this. Oh, my gosh, I did. I’d body the entire thing as an investigation: Is that this true?
To be completely clear for everyone who hasn’t heard this episode, the query is whether or not or not hog rectum is handed off as calamari in eating places.
You simply need the reply, proper? I noticed at a sure level in reporting it out that I used to be not going to have the ability to get the reply. I bear in mind one morning, after I was within the bathe, I believed, “The way I’ve built the stakes of this entire thing is not going to work.” However I would like it to be true. I would like this story to exist on the planet. Can I, midstory, change the stakes for the listener?
The final individual I talked to was this man Eddie Lin. He had a web site known as “Deep End Dining,” and he’d eaten a whole lot of hog bung. That is an excerpt from episode 484 of This American Life, the place you’ll hear the place we change out the stakes:
He thought it wouldn’t be simple. However he thought it may very well be completed. And there was just one technique to inform if he was proper—to cook dinner up some bung and eat it. And if the style was overwhelming and the feel was all fallacious, effectively, then I’d have my reply.
And at this level, I’ll be frank. I began to root for the bung. I noticed that this isn’t a narrative about fraud. It’s not a bait-and-switch story.
It’s a narrative about risk. It’s traditional rags to riches. It’s about whether or not a reduce of meat—maybe the lowliest, most malignable reduce of meat in America—may someway, in not less than one place on the planet, be dipped within the redemptive oils of the good culinary equalizer that’s the deep fryer.
And it would emerge remodeled, not an outcast, however as an alternative hair combed, clear shaven, in a go well with and tie. It’d stroll reborn onto a desk. By sheer pressure of resemblance, it is perhaps cherished. Its historical past, years of drudgery and hardship, doing the physique’s least glamorous job, all washed away.
No, this isn’t the story of a con man like Bernie Madoff. It’s Fairly Lady. That is whether or not Good Will Searching finds his manner out of Southie. It’s whether or not Charlie, on that final chocolate bar, actually can get a golden ticket.
I really feel like I’m listening to a locker room speech. The workforce is down, and also you’re the coach telling the gamers they’re going to show it throughout. The music begins to swell. We get a rags-to-riches, losers-to-winners story. After all, it’s fully hilarious too, and ridiculous. How did you write that? How did you rating it?
If we couldn’t get to the reality about calamari, we might get to the reality about feeling like an underdog. That’s what the story was about for me, as a story and as a risk on the planet. Everyone knows the underdog story. It’s such a deep effectively. It’s so common. I believed, if I can wrap my arms round how that feels, perhaps I can pull off this switcheroo. Truthfully, I didn’t know if it was going to work. I wrote that story with out an preliminary edit. I bear in mind I introduced it into Ira’s workplace, and he stated, “How long is it?” I stated, “Twenty-six minutes.” He stated, “How long should it be?” And I stated, “Well, it depends on your appetite for butt jokes.” It ended up being twenty-four minutes lengthy.
In reporting the episode, you known as the Nationwide Restaurant Affiliation and the Nationwide Pork Board, and also you spoke to an anthropologist who instructed you your questions have been racist. How do you embed a resistant supply or a hostile supply right into a story?
One of many issues I really like about audio is how the interplay of conversations could be alive within the expertise. I really feel like my present employer can be troubled by me speaking about this within the context of The Each day. However The Each day is so typically a reporter’s journey. How did the reporter get on this topic? You pose the query going ahead, and then you definately observe via the gathering of data, which may take so many careening turns.
Once I went again to work at WBEZ in Chicago, there was an schooling reporter beginning on the beat. She had talked to the Chicago Public Faculty District for a spot in regards to the price range. She stated, “The tape is so hard, the spokesperson is mansplaining to me the whole time.” I stated, “Do you have a good clip of that?” She performed me a clip the place she says one thing that’s clearly proper, and he doesn’t need to hear what she’s saying. He simply goes, “Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky!” I used to be like, “We are putting that on the radio!” It was unorthodox for a Morning Version information spot. However after I listened to it, I used to be excited for her. You have been out of a newscast for a second, and also you have been in an change between two human beings, considered one of whom was being belligerent. She discovered a manner for that interplay to exist in an act of storytelling.
Every part that you just’ve described for us—hand-logging, thematically arranging (and rearranging) a narrative, speaking to a number of sources, discovering methods to make use of a hostile supply—makes full sense within the context of a longform podcast, a extremely polished form of type. How did the wants of The Each day change your follow of modifying?
The Each day is sort of a speed-chess model of the identical factor. I take advantage of all the identical instruments. The method of The Each day is very structured, regardless that the format is a dialog between colleagues. We’ve got a query, and we go to a reporter who we expect has completed the reporting and may give us the reply. Or we see an article and we expect it may maintain an episode. Then there’s what everybody calls a “pre-interview,” however inside The Each day is known as a “pre-chat.” I don’t know why. However we name the reporter and ask a bunch of questions in regards to the reporting, and what we’re doing is simply mining for concepts. In the event that they’ve acquired materials, we’re speaking in regards to the materials, after which structuring a dialog round concepts.
I consider these conversations just like the tango. There are specific issues that occur at sure instances, and also you’re anticipating them to occur. The reporters sense it from the conversations earlier than the present. The producers and the hosts all have a map of how issues are anticipated to go. We might veer off, however we all know the thought or the sensation we’re going to drive at earlier than the ad break in the course of the present. We all know what we’re going to do and when, however the choreography unfolds in a manner that propels you from beat to beat. The genius of the workforce that created the present was determining learn how to reverse engineer a dialog in order that it retains a specific amount of life and oxygen.
The present’s energy—one story instructed every single day, plucked from the information—can also be its vulnerability. There’s stress on the editorial resolution of what story warrants that stage of focus. In our noisy information cycle, there’s a lot energy in that focus. I hear on a regular basis from listeners who say, “I won’t pay attention to that story, I’ll just wait for a The Daily episode to be made. They can come in and I can make sense of it. They’ve got the decoder ring.”
