Final Project Statement and Link

 Over the past year and a half, I have driven back and forth between Massachusetts and Pittsburgh almost ten times. It’s eight hours each way, so I’ve logged somewhere around 160 hours in the car. Feeling totally burnt out on music lately (I can’t take learning about another new wispy-voiced Indie-band) I’ve become addicted to This American Life, Radiolab, and The Moth. Especially Radiolab, and I don’t think it’s any wonder that the show’s producer, Jad Abumrad, received a MacArthur Genius Award this year. The show is absolutely brilliant—not only do they share the most peculiar science stories (origins of the AIDS virus, human/animal communication, HeLa cells…) but they relay them in such a way that the stories seem to…evolve. There’s something about an audio show that’s completely nonlinear—the various voices, ambient sounds, music, all the little tech-y editorial decisions like fading, phasing, looping, and amplifying are all a part of the narrative. Much like a soundtrack in a movie creates tension or heartache at just the right moment, all of the details in an audio show are working in similar manner to have an effect on the listener. The experience of listening to so many such stories over the past year and half have begun to make me feel like I haven’t been hearing these stories, rather I’ve been absorbing them. Sometimes I’ll even find myself suddenly remembering a clip of dialog or narration, and I’ll have the hardest time remembering why I know it. Eventually I’ll be able to trace it to another piece of dialog, and then back to the story. It’s something that doesn’t happen after reading a book—I usually remember a text as a whole.

Just as the experience of hearing a story is very different from reading it, adapting a story for audio is completely different than writing. Even more so than I thought before I began this project. The story I’ve produced for this class—my very first ever, so please be generous—ended up being much less of a story than I initially intended it to be. This piece evolved out of interviews with former steelworkers I collected for Peter Trachtenberg’s Structures and Techniques class this semester, and the essay I ended up writing for that class is an altogether different beast. Whereas there I could subtly draw a metaphor between the nonprofit Rivers of Steel’s mission to commemorate Pittsburgh’s industrial past with the idea of folklore vs. fakelore (essentially, the fabrication of folk heroes), there was no such room in this piece for such subtlety, and I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. In this piece you will find no fakelore and folklore. But you will hear more voices than I was able to incorporate into the essay. In the essay, I just couldn’t find a place to include Joe Karpieniak, but in the audio piece he fit in perfectly. Such decisions were actually easy to make—each choice came naturally to each medium.

The steel industry isn’t material that I’m naturally drawn to. But what I noticed about the interviews I had collected was the voices of these guys. There’s so much character in them. I can’t really express in an essay the way Ron Gault would raise his voice to talk over the din of the other restaurant patrons, or how the way he never paused in his speech said something about his character, about his military-man persona. Same with Manny when he speaks wistfully about his former blast-furnace employees. So in the end I’m completely grateful I collected this material.

With all the talk this semester of multimedia storytelling and how it’s not a bad idea, as Tim and Laura said in their presentation, to have one form to specialize in, I can really see audio becoming my medium. It is hard. Very hard. It’s so utterly particular. You have to be extremely patient and listen to little two-second clips over and over again to catch the place where it’s glitchy. But I never got bored doing this project. I realize that I still have a lot of rough transitions, that some of the levels are off, that I probably could have cut out portions of dialog that went on for too long (but it was hard to find a place to cut these guys off!). And then there’s the larger issues of the piece—it was really hard to make it a start to finish narrative. But revision is completely different when dealing with audio. I’m the sort or writer who writes on and on until I get it all out, and then I go back and rework it into something. I revise with fury. But that gets really complicated with audio, and I realize if I do this again (which I plan to) I’ll have to become much better at mapping everything out ahead of time. I did this to a certain extent, but I should have been much more exact with it. I really like to listen as I go, but I hope with practice that I’ll become better at envisioning what certain clips and transitions sound like together.

And then there’s the whole my-own-voice issue. I’ve always cringed hearing my own recorded voice. I’m getting used to it. I realize sometimes I get a little droney, or my voice is choppy, or I sound like a stiff-voiced NPR reporter or worse, like a high-schooler doing a school project and imitating a stiff-voiced NPR reporter. Again, practice. It’s really hard sounding natural, and nothing sounds more unnatural to me than practicing sounding natural. The voice is a funny thing. If only we could all sound as good as Ira Glass (who has shared some of his own awkward early interviews, so this gives me hope).

And finally, the technology. I recorded everything on an Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder. Files were downloaded as MP3’s and dragged into Audacity (it's free!). This was my first time working with Audacity—okay, with any audio editing program—and it was fairly easy to figure out. It’s a little clunky, but the commands are more and less intuitive once the basics are figured out. The worst part is the size of the files. Audacity saves projects as .aup files, and they can be up to several gigs. The program crashed many times while I was working on this—mostly when I imported two-hour long interviews. The next time I interview I’ll be sure start new recording sessions every half hour or so, maybe even more frequently, because dealing with really long pieces (especially if only using five or ten minutes of it) becomes cumbersome, and even risky. I know there are other simple audio-editing software out there, like Fission, which could be helpful in the future for doing some of this preliminary splicing work. Once I had the piece where I wanted it, I exported it as an MP3 file. In this process all the tracks (I had somewhere between twelve and fifteen while working in Audacity) are merged into one. Once it’s re-imported back into Audacity they can’t be separated any more.

As we can’t upload MP3s to our blogs I’ve uploaded the piece to Mediafire. It’s about 35 MB. 

DOWNLOAD FILE HERE

All the Best,

Amanda

Breaking into Print Online: Six Publications and How to Get Your (Virtual) Foot in the Door (An Introduction)

This was supposed to be easy. To start, I was going to figure out Smithsonian magazine, and Sarah was going to tackle Outside. Our question was simple: what’s the relationship between online content and the print magazines? Who should we pitch, and should we tailor pitches for online content differently than for print?

So I headed to Smithsonian’s website, and as I was waiting for the page to load, the website’s description showed up in the gray bar above the page: “History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places: Smithsonian Magazine.” Great, I thought. Even broader than I realized. I recently thought that maybe one day I’d pitch them my idea for a story about the rise of blast furnace tourism in Pittsburgh’s post-industrial age, and if it wasn’t quite right for History, surely it would fit under People. Or Travel. Or Places, even. As the page loaded, essentially the same menu came up as a series of tabs under the website’s header, except this time a little more specific and sounding slightly more like a Jeopardy game: History & Archeology, People & Places, Science & Nature, Arts & Culture, Travel, Photos, Videos, Games & Puzzles, and finally, Blogs.

So I clicked on History & Archeology. More categories: Archaeology, Biography, Today in History, US History, and World History. Under People & Places, we’re given four distinct geographic regions: Africa & The Middleast, Asia Pacific, Europe, and The Americas; under Science and Nature there was Anthropology & Behavior, Dinosaurs, EcoCenter, Environment, Technology & Space, and Wildlife. Arts & Culture, Travel, and Photos each also had four to five subcategories. In Blogs, a more general category list came up: Art, History, Lifestyle, Science, and Travel and to click on any of those headings would show me the various blogs within the Smithsonian website related to that category, anywhere from one to four blogs per category.

And this whole time I was completely ignoring the other menus scattered throughout the pages—ones inviting me to see what was up at the Smithsonian Institute, or to see what was in the Air & Space Magazine (okay, I clicked on that one—let me just say, more tabs, more categories, and titles more alluring then anything I could ever write an article for, such as: “Block That Star! How can we find other Earths if their suns keep blinding us?”).

I was trying to be pragmatic. I wanted to find a section that my story would be appropriate for. I wanted to find the email or contact of the editor in charge of that section—the advice I’d always heard was appeal to editors directly. While I was having this battle, Sarah was having a similar battle with Outside Magazine. We sat at her kitchen table eating Cheezitz trying to figure out how to demystify the print/online relationship for you all, but becoming ever more mystified ourselves.

Where, oh where, to begin? What, exactly, of the content showing up was actually published in Smithsonian and Outside magazines—the ones you can still buy on a shelf and hold in your hand? And what amount of the content was for the web only? Would it be easier for me to appeal to a web content editor as opposed to a magazine editor? Would that be a way to get my foot in the door and to build a relationship with an editor, to eventually print something in the actual magazine? Or maybe the actual magazine wasn’t any better than the online content, and maybe they paid the same, too.

With a little bit of exploring, I eventually learned that the pieces listed under the tabs on the website were a mix: some were features that appear in the print magazine—in which case it would say Smithsonian Magazine under the author’s name. Some linked over to the blogs. Essentially, there were more category headings than articles, each piece being cross listed in several places on the site.

As it turns out, you can’t pitch directly to editors at Smithsonian anyway. Their magazine is 90 percent freelance based, but only two percent of pitches are accepted, and the only way to pitch for either the magazine or online content is via an online proposal form.

And, as it also turns out, Sarah and I found that there is no formula for how to navigate between any magazine and its online presence. Some magazines’ online versions show material only from editors. Some only list what’s in their magazine, selecting a few items to feature on the web. And some publications create online-only material in addition to their print material. Some magazines that come out every month, or every two months, are posting articles online daily

In this presentation Sarah and I will highlight 6 other magazines where you stand a better chance of publishing something in their online version versus their print version, and some instances where publishing on a magazine’s website will help you get your foot in the door with the editors, and can possibly lead to publishing something in print.