In some countries and cultures, it’s very hard to find or create quiet places to record interviews. The vibrant street life may be so noisy that it’s audible from inside buildings, or the extreme climate may cause sounds such as pelting rain or creaking roofs expanding in the sun.

Outside, everything from barking dogs to street hawkers and blaring music can mean it’s impossible to find a quiet corner. As a journalist, you’ll need to work around this – after all, it’s not possible to ask hundreds of motorists to stop tooting!

OnMedia’s Lesley Branagan has tips to help you get good clean audio that will edit up nicely, no matter what the situation.

Indoor environments

• When you first make contact with your interviewee, ask them if it’s possible to do the interview in a room of the building that doesn’t face the street.
• If all the rooms get a lot of street noise, seat your interviewee away from the window, and seat yourself so that you have your back to the window. That way your microphone won’t be pointed at the source of all the noise.
• Close any windows and curtains in the room to deaden any sound.
• Use a directional microphone (shotgun or cardioid) or set your usual microphone onto a directional setting, so that you don’t pick up background sound from all directions.
• Ask for the airconditioner or fan to be turned off because it just sounds terrible. If it’s exceptionally hot and the interviewee is still reluctant, I often suggest breaking the interview into two sections, and turn on the AC/fans for a few minutes in the middle to cool down. Most interviewees will agree to this compromise, especially if you frame the uncomfortable heat as something that you will ‘endure together’ to get a good outcome.
• In many countries, doing an interview in someone’s home means the kitchen is very close by and is often in use. Request that no one uses the kitchen during the interview, as you don’t want the sounds of clattering saucepans as an accompaniment to your interview.
• Having a journalist visit can often attract lots of visitors but these can make editing your audio a problem. Don’t be afraid to close windows and front doors. If a colleague or family member insists on sitting in on the interview, advise them: “I will need you to be very quiet during the interview and not to move at all.”
• Make sure you record plenty of background atmosphere, which matches the atmosphere of the room during the interview. For example, if there were lots of cars tooting at a distance outside, try to record the same sounds, but without your interviewee speaking this time.

Outside

If you are recording an interview outdoors, for example, with a shopkeeper in a noisy bazaar or a protester at an election rally, there is no way you can avoid noise. On the plus side, a market or village square’s dense sound atmosphere contributes to the character of your documentary and transports the listener to this vibrant scene. But if it’s too loud, your interviewee just won’t be heard which defeats the point of making the recording.

• Try to find a place where the background noise is at a consistent level behind your interviewee. If there are no jumps in the background levels, it is easier for the listener to tune their ears to focus on the speaker.
• Position yourself with your back towards the source of the noise – that way your microphone is facing away from the noise.
• Moving to the back of a market stall or around a corner can sometimes make a world of difference in dampening the sound.
• Try to do your interview away from groups of people talking or shouting, and away from noises with sudden increases and decreases, such as generators or children.
• If sudden noises happen during your interview and drown out your interviewee’s voice, then that portion of your recording won’t be usable. You will need to request the interviewee to go back and repeat the last sentence. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ll have to get you to repeat that. You were saying?”
• Make sure you record some good atmos of the background sound by itself, and you can use this to patch over any edits and make the background sound appear seamless. Unexpected sounds like sudden shouts may add a lot of character to your piece, but try to record those separately so you can have more control when you are editing.
• Be aware of whether the natural atmos changed over the duration of the interview. For example, did the bazaar go from being very bustling to very quiet when people started their prayers? If so, you need to try to record both types of sounds. Did the background generator sound stop during the interview? If this is the case, you’ll need to record the same generator sound later, and then place it underneath the second part of the interview when you are editing, making sure you keep the levels consistent or fading out the background sound slowly.

For more about recording audio, take a look these onMedia posts:

Top 5 mistakes recording audio

Digital audio recorders for journalists: what to look for

Six tips for selecting powerful voice clips

Written by Lesley Branagan, edited by Kate Hairsine

(photo: flickr/Bent Kure CC: BY-NC-SA)

The death of radio has been predicted many times in the past decades but guess what? Radio still isn’t dead. On the contrary, it’s booming. It’s true people may not own as many radios as they used to but on the other hand, they are carrying this century’s version of a transistor radio – their smartphones – around with them in their pockets. And these magical listening devices give people the chance to hear a huge variety of radio shows and podcasts when and where they want to.

But besides new convenience, it’s also the extraordinary quality of many new radio programs that’s causing people to tune in to radio again. onMedia’s Kyle James takes a look what is being considered a new golden age of radio.

In the United States these days, something’s going on in the world of audio that I’ve never experienced before. People are waiting with baited breath for Thursday to roll around. No, it’s not for the next episode of some hit TV show like “House of Cards” or “Orange is the New Black.” They’re waiting for a radio program to be uploaded. Yes, you read that correctly – a RADIO program. Every Thursday, the latest installment of Serial is released and it’s being gobbled up by the masses. Hard numbers are hard to come by but the program has topped the iTunes podcast charts since it debuted October 3.

Serial is a long-form radio investigative journalism show during which Sarah Koenig, a producer of the acclaimed radio program This American Life, brings listeners along as she investigates a 15-year-old murder. She wants to know if the young man who was convicted, and who is now serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison, is the one who really killed his ex-girlfriend. She explains in this very first part of Episode 1. And since then, radio listeners across the country have tuned in to listen to Koenig go through the case with a fine-tooth comb and talk to people involved. She accesses original police interviews with suspects and witnesses, tries to recreate the sequence of events around the crime, tracks down old schoolmates of the victim and the convicted murderer, and speaks at length with the man convicted of the crime.

But what makes Serial different to other kinds of documentary is largely its tone, which is similar to that used in other innovative radio shows popping up across dials and on podcast feeds; it’s casual, first person and sometimes a little uncertain. Gone is the authoritative, distant, neutral narrator normally associated with radio documentaries. It’s been replaced by a voice that reveals emotion and even insecurity. Listen to Koenig question herself in the following clip. Similarly, in the third episode of the podcast StartUp, which follows a man who knows nothing about business as he starts one up, host Alex Blumberg has kind of a breakdown on mic. “I’m about to quit my job!” he says to his wife. “I’m just one guy with this stupid little plan, and there’s a gazillion people out there with better plans that are going to make more money.” These kinds of characteristics have led some media observers to comment that radio is having its own “New Journalism” moment. New Journalism was a style in the 1960s and 70s that relied on solid reporting mixed with more dramatic literary techniques and a generous dash of subjectivity.

And Serial is not afraid of drama – obviously a murder case can be pretty dramatic but the producers milk it for all it’s worth by teasing out the information, building up suspense and then leaving listeners dangling at the edge of a cliff at the end, waiting for the next installment. Although, truth be told, it’s come in for some criticism for just that from some corners of the journalism community; is it a manipulative drama or is it is investigative journalism? It’s kind of both, actually.

Serial and StartUp are just two of the relative newcomers in this new wave of high-quality radio. Others include Love + Radio, a prize-winning interview-driven show; Strangers, true tales about the good, bad and ugly ways people relate to one another; and the upcoming Invisibilia, which weaves brain science together with personal stories.

As Slate magazine wrote: “Just like New Journalism in its early days, the shows are sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating and self indulgent, but always exciting and fun.” In a sense, these latest programs are piggy-backing on the success of older siblings, namely shows such as This American Life or RadioLab, which laid new radio ground, moving away from the traditional acts-and-tracks story model and taking more chances with topics, presentation and the use of sound.

Easy listening

But also what’s helped these shows get produced in the first place is the new ways of distributing audio, especially podcasting. Although podcasting has been around for more than a decade, and growth in listenership was stagnant for a while, it’s now experiencing a comeback.

According to Apple, subscriptions to podcasts through its iTunes platform reached 1 billion last year and the numbers are still growing. Many believe the future of radio listening is moving firmly from the radio set to the smartphone, especially as the devices have become ubiquitous and people get used to on-demand media consumption. More people are listening as they commute, work out at the gym or do household chores.

(photo: flickr/Doug CC:BY-NC-SA)

In addition, podcasts can be cheap to produce. There are fewer administrative issues to deal with, and they can get by with a smaller staff and a smaller budget. Plus, producers are finding that podcasts create strong bonds with their audience, which makes them attractive to sponsors and advertisers. With its combination of easy distribution, flexible formats, and what seems like a thirst for long-form reporting and good storytelling, radio is back in fashion. And this isn’t just the case in the US – look at what Radio Ambulante is doing across Latin America.

Once again, all those rumors of radio’s impending demise seem to have been greatly exaggerated.

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

The show was inspired by a reporting trip novelist Daniel Alarcón made to his native Peru on assignment for the BBC. While investigating migration there, Alarcón travelled across the country recording personal stories from a wide range of people. But when he later heard the final mix, he was disappointed that the producers had largely highlighted the English speakers he talked to, leaving out much of the compelling material in Spanish. He wondered what the result would be if there was a place where Spanish-language voices could be heard.

In 2012, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Radio Ambulante was born. Programs have featured a transgender Nicaraguan woman living with her wife in San Francisco, a Peruvian stowaway describing his frightening journey to New York, and an Argentine who was jailed during that country’s dictatorship and given the choice to either work or to die. “Ambulante” can mean traveling or itinerant but also refers to “ambulantes”: street vendors who sell all kinds of wares in many Latin American cities.

While Radio Ambulante has a growing list of terrestrial stations that carry it, the show is largely distributed digitally. In early October, Radio Ambulante was awarded the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award in the innovation category. onMedia put a few questions to Radio Ambulante’s co-founder and executive director, Carolina Guerrero, about how the show’s format has been received in Latin America and where the show wants to go to from here.  

Carolina Guerrero (photo: Radio Ambulante)

onMedia: It’s been said that Radio Ambulante’s goal was to produce long-form audio stories, a format that largely didn’t exist on Spanish-language radio. Is it too simplistic to say you wanted stories along the lines of the popular and critically acclaimed US radio program “This American Life”, but in Spanish?

Carolina Guerrero: We are huge fans of This American Life, and that program was certainly one of the inspirations for Radio Ambulante, but we’ve created our own style, and our content is different too. Some people have called us, “This Latin American Life”, which is very flattering, but we hope our listeners now see the complexity of having created a transnational podcast in a different language, and how Radio Ambulante is still a unique podcast.

How has this new form been received in Spanish-speaking countries and communities across the Americas?

We are thrilled with the positive response we have received from our listeners. Our audience keeps growing, as more Spanish-speakers learn about podcasting and audio storytelling. Obviously, it has taken time for us to build an audience, since radio in Latin America has been mostly used to listen to music or news, and Radio Ambulante’s stories are long-narrative pieces that require time and concentration. We have around 100,000 monthly listeners, and 84 percent of those listeners are between 18 and 45 years old – 45 percent of them are in Latin America. Young Spanish-speakers are digitally savvy and interested in podcasting and in these new forms of audio storytelling.

Your audience target area is enormous. How can you be sure that all your listeners can relate to the stories you produce? Are you worried the cultural differences are too large?

Our target area is enormous since the number of Spanish-speaking people in the world is almost 400 million – but of course we don’t need to reach all of them to be successful! We hope to reach as many as we can with quality, well-reported, impeccably produced stories. That’s universal. Everyone loves a good story. And so, yes, there are cultural differences among Spanish speakers, but we believe that our stories are capable of moving audiences anywhere Spanish is spoken.

How have you found your producers over such a large area? How big is your network of contributors now?

At the very beginning we reached out to journalist friends from Latin America to find stories, and a few months later we opened a Call for Pitches that brought us many more stories from independent radio producers in the US as well. It’s the kind of thing that becomes easier as time goes on: now we have a body of work that we can point potential contributors to and people come to us with great ideas all the time. During the last two years, we’ve seen our network of producers and contributors grow and expand all over South, Central and North America, and some other countries in Europe or Asia.

Novelist and Radio Ambulante Co-Founder Daniel Alarcón (photo: flickr/Esther Vargas CC:BY-SA)

The Gabriel García Márquez prize committee praised the collaborative nature of the project, saying its strong journalistic guidelines had given the stories a distinctive voice. Is there a common sound that you’re after?

The common sound we are after is that of great storytelling. Our editors work closely with our producers for long periods of time and we have a very distinctive format where, most of the time, we have a narrator alternate with the characters telling the story. That gives the stories a dynamism that we are always looking for since listening to the same person speak for a long period of time could be boring. We try to find a balance in the way we tell the story. Ambient sound, music and sound effects are also key elements.

The committee also pointed to the economic model of Radio Ambulante. I know you got Kickstarter money at the beginning. How are you financed now? Do listener contributions make up a significant percentage of that?

We still receive support from our listeners, and expect to launch another Kickstarter campaign early next year. But most of our funding comes from different foundations in the United States. We’re also starting to get underwriting and hope to find a few sponsors now that our audience is much bigger.

You have several methods of distribution – broadcast on radio stations, your internet site, SoundCloud, etc. Which is the most popular?

SoundCloud is the platform where we upload our content, and from there it is distributed to other platforms. So every time someone listens to our story on our website, via iTunes or via Stitcher, they actually listen to us in SoundCloud. We receive specific stats and metrics from them. But we also have a partnership with BBC Mundo, and they have their own platform and analytics, but bring half of the listeners to most of our episodes as well. We are also growing in terrestrial radio stations around Latin America. In essence, however, we’re a digital project. From reporting to production to distribution, we rely on the most current digital tools to do our work. Our very nature is transnational. So without them, we could not exist.

You’ve experimented with different formats, including live shows, multimedia and English-language specials. Are there other ways you are looking at to expand your audience and interact with your listeners?

We are always looking for new ways to grow our audience and engage our listeners. Earlier this year we launched an interview series in English with PRI (Public Radio International) called Radio Ambulante: Unscripted, where Executive Producer Daniel Alarcón interviews Latino and Latin American artists, thinkers and innovators. With this series we hope to reach those listeners who are interested in topics related to Latino and Latin American art and innovation, but who might not have the Spanish-language skills to access that information through Spanish-language media.

We also hope to expand our presence on the radio dial by distributing our content to more terrestrial radio stations in the US and Latin America. KALW, the local public radio station from the San Francisco Bay Area, just starting broadcasting our content in Spanish – which is huge! We’d love to see more radio stations around the country follow KALW’s bold move. Live shows are a big part of our mission, too. We have the forth one coming up in San Francisco, and we know it will be a success. It’s all part of our mission to bring diverse, complicated, moving stories from Latin America to the audiences that crave them. With that goal in mind, we’re willing to try every avenue available.

Interview conducted by Kyle James

(photo: Kyle James)

An online multimedia story is a combination of video, text, photos, audio, graphics and interactive elements where each aspect complements the others. It allows a reporter to draw on the strength of each medium to tell a more compelling story.

But making a multimedia story really shine requires forethought and planning. Even before going out to report, journalists need to think about how they’re going to approach the story, when they’re going to use video, text, sound or photos, and then tie everything together to create a cohesive package. onMedia’s Kyle James has tips on doing the prep work to make sure your multimedia story is a success.

Playing to their strengths

Really good multimedia storytelling is more than just posting a video or a graph alongside a text story on a website. It’s about taking advantage of the characteristics of each medium to present the different aspects of your story in the most engaging way.

I find it’s best to sit down at the very beginning and divide the contents of the story among the different media. I ask myself: “Would this aspect work best as a short video, or should I take pictures or maybe write a couple of paragraphs?”

When I’m breaking things down, here’s what I keep in mind:

Video: Best for action and movement, shows what is happening (a protest, a fire, a person cooking, a dance performance). Can capture emotion well and good for strong quotes (eyewitness to a significant event, person recalling a tragedy). Video really draws people in.

Pictures: Good for capturing a specific, important moment, especially if it’s emotional (a reunion of long-lost siblings, soldier returning from war). Photos are good for showing places, environments and things that don’t move (buildings, landscapes). People can study pictures, unlike with video. That old cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” still rings true in many instances.

Audio: Conveys emotions, feelings. The voices of experts can give your story credibility. Background (ambient) sound, especially if combined with pictures, can give a good sense of place. Audio works best when combined with pictures or video.

Graphics: These work well providing complex information in easy-to-understand ways. Stories with lots of numbers and statistics can benefit from graphs, showing trends or relationships (clothing exports over the last decade, wage growth). Diagrams can show how things work or how something came about (where floodwaters reached, how the bridge collapsed). Maps show where the story unfolded and can be layered with interactive elements.

Text: The written word works well for abstract, complicated aspects of a story. It’s the place to provide background and analysis, as well as headlines and photo captions. Many multimedia producers save text for the information that can’t be conveyed with video, audio, pictures or graphics.

If we’ve got video of an event, why would we simply describe it with text? Video’s power is showing action, so we should use it. Pictures of people overtaken by powerful emotions or recordings of their voices talking about their experiences are going to be very compelling. Yet an opinion piece on a policy or development or an analysis what has been learned in the wake of an accident might best be suited for text.

Writing it down

Since I can’t keep all this in my head, I need to write things down.

Click here for a planning list that helps you organize your thoughts around a story and how you want to cover it. It asks for things like a working title, a short story synopsis, conflict/tension involved, the main characters, who you’ll interview, and what works best with video/audio/pictures/etc.

Those who are more visually minded might want to write up a chart instead. The picture below is a quick sketch of possible elements of a multimedia story that I’ll call “The Bridge.” While this isn’t a real multimedia project, the story is true. In 2010, a stampede on a bridge in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh during a big festival killed 350 people and injured 750 others.

In this instance, I’ve made headers of the main media elements and put in aspects of the story that could fall under each. The arrows between some of them point out aspects of the story could have several elements. For example, the hourly timeline would be an interactive graphic that would incorporate text and pictures.

Assembling a storyboard

Now that you’ve got the elements figured out, you will want to create a rough storyboard of your project. A storyboard is a sketch of how the story will be organized and laid out on the screen. It’s a good idea to do a sketch of the opening page of your multimedia story, the first thing users will see, and then subpages or sections as well.

I’ve quickly drawn up mock-ups for the landing page and one inside page.

On the landing page, the first screen people will see on coming to my story, I’ve sketched out (very roughly) the title and the kind of picture I think I’d like.

I’ve put a space for some text to give us the very basics of what happened (remember, text is good for background and context), and then a possible navigation menu with four categories.

I could add a video or more pictures. But right now, I don’t think I want much more on my opening page, so I’m going to keep it simple.

This second page is where users land if they click on the first link in the navigation column, and we go to the background page. I’m using text because it’s good for context, video because we might find some footage of the actual stampede, a map to show users where things happened, a timeline to take us though the day of the tragedy, and eyewitness accounts from people who were there that combine pictures and audio

A storyboard is not only a good organizing tool, it can help point out things you might have missed. It can also help show you if you’ve actually got the resources and time to do all the things you want to do.

Storyboards aren’t written in stone, they’re just guides. You might well start changing things around, or adding and dropping elements, after you begin doing your reporting and seeing what great material you get or what’s not going to come through after all.

Things to keep in mind

• Multimedia stories are multi-dimensional, they use different media elements that complement each other
• They require planning and forethought
• Start thinking in a non-linear way. Instead of “first part” and “second part,” think “this part” and “that part”
• After preliminary research, start thinking about the different media to use – draw on the strengths of each
• Come up with a rough storyboard – you can always change it as you go along

For more onMedia posts on multimedia, see

Visual storytelling and moving beyond ‘multimedia’

A look at what the New York Times is doing with multimedia

The test of the multimedia storytelling app, Stellar

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

How do you make a JamSnap?

After launching the app, tap the camera icon on the top right-hand side. This will engage the camera and gives you access to a few simple controls: tap to focus, flash on/off, and switching between the iPhone’s front or rear camera. Or, you can upload a photo from your iPhone’s photo album.

Like Instagram, JamSnap offers you a square frame for photos, so you’ll have to adjust your image to fill the frame. Once you’re finished adjusting the image, tap “Choose”.

Then comes the interesting part.

A prompt will appear on your screen to “tap & hold anywhere to add sounds”. So, choose a point on your image where you think it’s most appropriate to add a sound, then tap and hold to record. As you’re holding to record you can move your sound tag around the image. The limit for a clip is 10 seconds.

Give some thought as to how you are holding your iPhone before you tap to record. Is it pointing the right way to capture the sound you want?

You can add up to 10 audio clips to each image.

To discard an audio clip, simply tap, hold and swipe the clip away to the edge of your mobile screen.

There are several sound effects that you can add, such as a voice exclaiming “Oh my god!”. Similarly, after you have recorded a clip, you can add audio filters. But these audio sfx or filters are probably not going to be what you’re looking for in a journalism context.

Once you’re finished recording your audio clips, click “Next” and you can add a caption to the image, and choose whether to make the JamSnap public or private. You can also share your JamSnap directly to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and App.net social media networks.

Click “Share” and you’re done. Check out the video below for a demo.

From your user feed on the JamSnap website you can locate the < > icons for the html code to embed your JamSnap into a blog or website. Either manually log on to your feed by typing https://jamsnap.com/user/insertyourusername – or use the share functions in the app to email yourself the image link or share via Twitter which will also generate a link to the image.

JamSnap images and audio also appear and play directly within a Twitter timeline which is very useful for getting people to actually see and hear your stories.

What could journalists produce with JamSnap?

JamSnaps developer Mayank Sanganeria told onMedia that his inspiration for the app was to create a way of easily adding information or context to photographs he wanted to share with his family and friends.

That’s a good starting point for storytelling or documenting an event.

Potentially you could use JamSnap to produce an image with an audio dispatch, or with an interview soundbite or a series of audio clips, and of course a caption. Another story format to explore might be to first create a collage of images in another app, importing this collage into JamSnap, and then adding audio clips plus a caption.

JamSnap also works with an external microphone for recording audio.

Sanganeria said an Android version is a likely to be the next step in development, and perhaps a “Pro” version for mobile journalists. At the moment onMedia is testing a beta version of JamSnap that lets you record longer clips and insert audio from Dropbox and the AudioCopy app. The ability to record and edit audio in another app and insert into the JamSnap image is very useful.

These days it’s quite rare that an application I use only after a few minutes makes its way straight to my page of favorite reporting apps but I think JamSnap is one that may well stay.

What else should journalists know about JamSnap?

Cost: Free.

Languages: The user interface is only in English at the moment.

Audio format: Audio is recorded on your iPhone in the .m4a format and then uploaded to JamSnap’s server and also encoded into .mp3 and .ogg – this allows audio to be shared and played on different browsers and devices.

Author: Guy Degen