bob sacha » storytelling

Good Ethics vs. Good Storytelling & What We Crave

bob sacha — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 18:55:02 +0000

There’s a nice article in the New York Times magazine about my favorite radio show, RadioLab. And there is a fantastic interactive that the New York Times Magazine created isolating some of their storytelling sounds.

RadioLab is a brilliant show about science, told in an extremely clever non-traditional way. I’m always struggling with the line between good ethics and bad storytelling in new media. Many of the sounds on the show are created and the editing is extensive. But rather than being bad journalism, its brilliant storytelling and it just won a Peabody Award for…..
Immersive and boundlessly imaginative, the series uses pithy prose and state-of-the-art sound to illuminate complicated scientific and philosophical subjects.

Here’s a great quote from the NYTimes story written by Rob Walker:

“I asked Abumrad what a traditional radio producer would make of his meticulously constructed bruup bruup fhewm fhewm. “They would say it’s insane,” he said. Early on, he had to deal with “radio people” who thought he was wasting time on “artsy-fartsy namby-pampy” technical distractions. “But do you want to know why ‘Radiolab’ has worked beyond public radio?” he asked. “Because it sounds like life. You watch TV, and someone has labored over the feel. Look at ‘Mad Men’ or ‘The Sopranos’: the mood, the pacing, the richness of it, comes from those fine, quote-unquote technical choices.”

and even better, another quote on why it’s important to make things that last, not just things that are fast.

This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what’s the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.

But the other interesting thing about media these days is that it can stand perfectly still. In fact it loiters: shows don’t simply spill over the airwaves and evaporate; they linger on DVRs, DVDs, various online services. Newspaper articles pile up in Web “archives.” And clearly we still accept, still crave, some deeper media experience too. In experimenting with a show that produces (at most) 10 episodes a year, WNYC was specifically thinking of HBO’s success in building powerful cultural franchises that ignore the mores of traditional broadcasting.

The Soldier

bob sacha — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:36:39 +0000

UPDATE: MSNBC has purchased “the soldier” and is running it on their front page in time for the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war. See it here.

The Eddie Adams Barnstorm Workshop, now in its 20th year, is one of the best in America for photojournalism. Every year 100 students come to the farm of the late Pulitzer Prize winning photographer in upstate New York to shoot a photo story and listen to the greats of photojournalism talk and show their work.

This year I was lucky enough to be asked by Brian Storm (Mediastorm) and Tom Kennedy (WashingtonPost.com) to be a member of their multimedia team. I was then assigned to the Blue Team with photographer Chris Hondros and picture editor Pancho Bernasconi, both of Getty Images News and producer Leah Latella. Chris chose Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man as the theme for our team of 10 photographers. I tagged along with talented team member Brian Sokol who shot the images. I recorded and edited the audio and his images to produce this piece.

Our multimedia team was amazing in its breath and talent. Check out the rest of the multimedia presentations.

Soul of Athens

Mon, 28 May 2007 23:53:32 +0000

When I decided to come to Ohio University as the Knight Fellow last year, I generally received one of two reactions: envy or head scratching.

Why did I do it? Well, to create work like The Soul Of Athens which launched today. I produced the content for the creativity section.

I shot and edited The Art of Coal Country about how Nelsonville, Ohio was saved by art. It’s my vision of how a typical newspaper feature story can look on the web.

Soul of Athens is our attempt to look at where “merlot meets moonshine,” an multimedia examination of Athens County and our small University town in the foot hills of Appalachia.

This is a class project, totally created by students but the brainchild of the amazing Zach Wise , the 29-year-old visiting professional who has guided it, kept us on track and constantly tweaked and prodded us into the best we could do in 8 weeks.

Zach pretty much allowed us to generate and create and build every bit, from concept to design to code to content to text to viral marketing. Another web guru, Brian Storm flew in from NYC to be our second guiding light.

What was most interesting for me was to be involved as a producer and generate pieces that I did not shoot myself (though I did edit them all.)

For Harmony in Two Parts , a story on the creative process between 2 musicians, I generated the idea and worked with M.K.Smith, who photographed and recorded the piece. I made the edit

For PassionWorks a story about an eye-opening art studio for developmentally disadvantaged adults, and The Carver of Coolville Ridge, a story about David Hostetler, an internationally recognized sculptor who lives nearby, I found work already in progress and matched it to ideas I generated. So I have now also learned the fine art of begging and pleading for rights and cooperation. I re-edited the pieces for the web.

And it’s pretty much what I came here to learn. I couldn’t be happier. Love to hear what you think.