PHILADELPHIA — The 60 minutes I spend every week listening to the podcast This American Life are among the most contemplative and almost meditative 60 minutes of my entire week.
This American Life is a public radio show that focuses on a theme each week, with different stories that revolve around it.
Sounds simple and almost mundane, but while they do cover everyday topics like a new boss at work, scenes from a mall, or matchmaking, host Ira Glass manages to find a way to weave together highly captivating stories that keep me and over two million other people coming back for more.
A few weeks ago Ira Glass spoke to an intimate audience in Philadelphia about his brand of storytelling, and why he continues to love the work he does. The talk began with the lights out in the concert hall, explaining that the intimacy of darkness and the power of the naked voice is what makes radio such an emotionally charged, effective medium.
Glass, who has been named the “Best Radio Host in America” by Time magazine, began behind-the-scenes as a producer for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
During his time at All Things, he stumbled upon a format that he found worked particularly well on the radio. By putting his stories in the outline of “Action, action, action...thought,” he found that people became immersed in a story because it felt like something was going to happen, and they stuck around.
“There has to be stakes,” he shared, “something big and dark at the center of it, something that can never be resolved.”
This American Life has gone through a number of changes since they started in Chicago in 1995, and today they’ve settled into a comfortable format of three stories about life in the United States following a theme of their choice.
To keep things fresh and unique, they seek out stories that would never be heard anywhere else, stories that are so small and personal that no other media outlet would have covered it. They cover “serious news” like President Obama’s inauguration, but also discuss things like the prom, Valentine’s Day and break-ups.
Glass admits that the “show pretends to be a show about everyday life, but we’re really looking for something surprising, incredible, and people that are really amazing.”
They were given the opportunity to push the envelope with a TV program on Showtime, where they came up with something that “felt like real life really, and not real life narrated.”
He ended the evening with a Q&A. On the state of journalism today he commented that “audiences are bombarded by narrative every day, by a fake over- brightness.” And the reason he suspects his show strikes such a chord with millions of listeners around the world is that, “radio is peculiarly capable of making people come across as human-sized, and when we come across like that it makes us feel more sane.”
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Visit http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ to download his show.
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