and STILL impressed

Listening to these stories, once in class, and then again on my own, I feel that I’m starting to understand ‘writing for the ear’ more and more. All the stories, I think, are great. Even though we talked about how the neuticles story could have added some different interviews, or how the baseball story could have pushed the limits on sounds, they were all more creative than I had anticipated. When we were told we would be listening to stories, I imagined watching the news with my eyes closed, but mostly, that wasn’t the case. I never expected to be entertained as I listened. While it has not been diagnosed, I’m a firm believer in having my own personal form of ADD, but when listening to these stories, I didn’t get bored once.

Kind of off topic, but then as I was editing my own audio sample, though not a NPR style story, I saw all the work that goes into these stories. When you listen to them, it seems so easy, like everything just fell into place. But as I attempted to edit my 10-minute interview down to under a minute, I saw that these pieces are all well thought out and time consuming. It’s much harder than I thought.

I feel like with each blog I always say that I am starting to understand convergence more, and starting to realize that I like it more than any one news medium, and even though it’s repetitive, I must say, I have the same feeling this week. In this class, I am seeing news as I never saw it. For me, it was always newspaper, magazine, or broadcast. True, I still got most of my news online, but I always thought it was just a copy of what was in the paper. I am beginning to appreciate what the different forms can do for a story.