Glass’ celebrity is further influenced by fan engagement and productions such as Adam WarRock’s “Ira Glass” rap. Throughout all of this, we see Ira Glass very much constructed as a figure who has brought pleasure and entertaining aesthetics to broadcast journalism. Though the paratexts mentioned above arguably create as much meaning about Glass’ star text, his celebrity is always constructed in reference to TAL, and the program’s unique exploitation of the radio feature format. For this reason, we can see how TAL shapes our understanding of Glass’ radio pioneer public persona.

TAL‘s aesthetics make it markedly different from other television and radio journalism. TAL invites listeners to revel in a sort of postmodern opposition to mainstream journalism. The program weaves together informal conversation, first-person monologues, actuality field recordings, sound bites, music, and more into a hip, irreverent weekly radio show. Its self-reflexive style is one aspect that differentiates it from traditional hard news. The show’s commentary and reflection in its own production, usually heard via Glass’ conversation with a producer or participant, works in conjunction with its commentary on traditional journalism to sonically construct the show as self-aware. We see this in the first 10 minutes of Episode 455, “Continental Breakup,” which first aired on January 22, 2012.  This episode is about the European debt crisis, and is guest hosted by Alex Blumberg. Here we see TAL taking up a traditional “hard” journalism topic. Yet, the topic is presented in an informal and playful manor. Glass’ nebbish, high, nasally voice begins the program as if in the middle of a private conversation with the listener. He begins quickly by saying, “I think at this point even the most casual news consumer has run across a lot of stories like this….” Next, TAL edits in sound bites from recent news stories and we, the listeners, hear a serious sounding male news reporter saying “The focus of the European debt crisis move today…,” and other successive sound bites related to the economic situation in Europe. This informal, stream of consciousness opening is typical of TAL, as all TAL episodes begin without an introductory frame. This might give listeners the feeling that we enter the show already in the middle of a conversation with Glass and company.

Next in this episode, Glass does introduce the program, and turns it over to Blumberg. A conversation between Blumberg and Glass ensues, and includes several informal moments that convey naturalness and liveness. Before Blumberg takes over as host, Glass announces, “From WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Alex, I’m just going to hand they show over to you.” This is followed by an unpolished moment of confusion:

Alex Blumberg: All right and I say, like, “from WBEZ Chicago,” that thing?
Ira Glass: No, I just said that. So you don’t have to say that.
Blumberg: So I don’t have to say that?
Glass: So you can just proceed. Have you heard this show before?
Blumberg: No, you didn’t say “today’s program.”
Glass: All right, I’ll say – you can say “today’s program.”

Blumberg and Glass speak over each other, laughing in a light, friendly way. This unpolished exchange could have easily been edited out in post-production, especially since the trained ear will notice that besides laughter, all signifiers of the body (breathing, et al) have been smoothed out through dialogue editing. This apparently unscripted moment is, however, kept intact, and accomplishes the task of conveying an artificial spontaneous liveness to listeners.

Overall, Ira Glass is repeatedly constructed in TAL and other media as a charismatic, jovial, informal, self-reflexive, and playful radio journalist. This difference from traditional broadcast journalists who you might find on CNN or even NPR’s All Things Considered has contributed to Glass’ personality as a pioneer of the new age of radio journalism. This is further shaped by TAL’s experimental distribution via events like This American Life LIVE!, where the radio program is performed live onstage with dance numbers, animation, other video, and more. The performance is beamed to movie theatres across the country live. First done in 2009, a new This American Life LIVE! is being broadcast around the country on Thursday, May 10^th, and I know I for one will be attending it at a local theatre here in Madison, Wisconsin.

This blurring between storytelling, journalism, and media formats troubles traditional notions of ethical reporting and conceptions of truth. Glass goes to great lengths to distinguish himself as an untraditional journalist, and despite (or perhaps because of this) he has received countless major broadcasting awards for journalism.  The most recent coverage of the kerfuffle and drama surrounding the veracity of an episode aired earlier this year, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” and TAL’s subsequent retraction of the episode in the March 16^th in the TAL episode “Retraction,” points to mainstream journalism’s inability to reconcile TAL’s postmodern style of journalism. Having heard the original “Mr. Daisey” episode, I question TAL’s retraction, as the program was very clear that it was featuring portions of Mike Daisey’s one-man play “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” and even included a disclaimer at the end noting what Glass and his team were able to fact check and what they could not.

However, this controversy is significant, not because it questions or clarifies the “truth” of This American Life’s episode featuring Daisey, but rather it points to the significance of TAL within the American mediascape. Moreover, at the end of the day, it recuperates Glass’ integrity. In “Retraction,” Glass doesn’t just retract TAL’s previous episode, he interrogates the show’s fact checking process and interviews Daisey again, during which he is self-reflexively critical and idealistic about the boundaries of radio features. Thus, in his humility and self-awareness, Ira Glass is ultimately able to retain his persona as an unconventional, pioneering radio journalist.

On Radio is a new Antenna column dedicated to contemporary radio programming and other issues surrounding the medium in all its forms.

Hands down, Radiolab is the most interesting American radio program of the past decade. Although, that’s not a particularly bold claim, really, as there are plenty of people out there who have heaped similar praise upon the series, not least of all Ira Glass and the MacArthur genius grant folks. Produced by the New York City public radio station WNYC and distributed nationally through National Public Radio (NPR), Radiolab is a math, science, and philosophy show hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. The program deals with “big questions,” as their website puts it – things like life, death, knowledge, the universe – typically through broadly themed episodes on topics such as laughter, the human brain, race, time, deception, and randomness. Radiolab is a radio feature in that it is a (mostly) non-fiction program that mixes fairly traditional elements of journalism and news reporting with more artistic and dramatic elements. If non-music radio programming can be placed on a continuum with straight news talk placed at one extreme and the fictionalized radio drama at the other, then the radio feature (or “radio documentary,” as John Biewen and other radio producers refer to it) is situated somewhere in the middle, a mix of words, sounds, and music that merges the informational content of journalism with the form and emotion of art.

Just as standard NPR news programs like All Things Considered are often called “news magazines,” in that they consist of numerous stories reported more in-depth than standard “headline news” style broadcasts, the term “radio feature” insinuates an even more extended, highly focused examination of a story or topic, similar to a thoroughly researched and contextualized cover story in a print magazine. Often, as is the case with Radiolab and also This American Life, multiple stories may be covered within an hour-long episode, but they nevertheless all tie into an overarching theme or narrative. This is not breaking news, even though it is journalistic in the sense that it is informative, educational, and frequently timely and topical.

Emphasis is placed on characters – people – who the audience is invited to identify with through fleshed out, exceptionally visualized scenes. This is where the artistic and dramatic elements come in: the focus of a radio feature like Radiolab is on storytelling rather than mere reporting of events and facts, and this is often achieved through vertically structured and intimate, slice-of-life narratives. NPR’s news magazines regularly attempt to craft similar segments, but what really sets a radio feature apart is its meticulous attention to form – Biewen, in the introduction to his edited volume Reality Radio (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), calls radio documentarians “journalists/artists” who “use sound to tell true stories artfully.” This emphasis on form can range from simply playing with voice and basic narrative structure to experimenting wildly with actuality sound and music in a way that verges on sound art – it does not always need to be “complex” or affectedly avant-garde. Still, radio features are able to sidestep conventions and engage in a level of experimentation that standard radio news programming rarely, if ever, does.

Radiolab tends more toward the “wild experimentation” end of that spectrum, even though the core of its aesthetic is what host Jad Abumrad, in an essay he penned in Reality Radio, describes as “the pleasant illusion of ‘two guys chatting’.” He’s referring here to the back-and-forth dialogue that occurs between co-hosts Abumrad (pictured left) and Robert Krulwich (pictured right) – a loose, conversational style that is also extended to the discussions between the hosts and their interviewees. And indeed, there is an emphasis placed on voice and narration – the voices of the hosts and interviewees stitched together to recount experience. Still, the show is, at its most basic, “about curiosity and discovery,” to quote Abumrad again, and this inquisitive, innovative spirit is extended from the show’s focus on “big ideas” to the way it explores, through sound, those ideas.

Most notably, the producers quickly and often abruptly butt voices up against one another, as well as layer voices on top of each other and then layer atmospheric sound, sound effects, and music on top of (or underneath) it all. For instance, in the recent Radiolab episode “Patient Zero,” the hosts examine the concept of “patient zero,” meaning the case that can be identified as the starting point of an outbreak. They begin with the story of Typhoid Mary, the woman who has been commonly understood as the source of the first typhoid fever outbreak in the United States, in the early 1900s in the New York City area. But in fact, they begin the episode somewhat confusingly with a pair of producers randomly speaking to one another (“So have I said where we are? Am I on tape yet?”) in what is clearly an outdoor environment, a brisk wind creating loud distortion in the microphone. Abumrad quickly identifies the producers but does not otherwise introduce the story or the episode. Returning to the actuality sound, one of the producers explains from the field that they are on an abandoned island where a woman with an infectious disease was at one time quarantined, but the exact location and identity of the woman are still unnamed. Then, Abumrad and Krulwich begin their host narration, which takes the form of a conversational, improvisational-sounding dialogue. Krulwich asks, “This is a story that begins when?” to which Abumrad responds, “Well, actually, it starts in 1906….” The narration continues in this conversational back-and-forth mode for awhile, Krulwich playing the inquisitor to Abumrad’s more authoritative storyteller, though quickly a third voice joins the conversation, that of UW-Madison medical historian Judith Leavitt. This is clearly a storytelling style compared to news radio’s standard narrative flow of a host intro and hook followed by a reporter opening. Information is revealed quickly and yet incrementally, and much attention is paid to context and creating a visual image for the audience to imagine. Rather than the thesis, characters, and scene all being set immediately, it is two minutes into the episode before it is clearly established that they are talking about a typhoid outbreak, it is more than three-and-a-half minutes before it is announced that this is the story of Typhoid Mary, and it is not until after the four-minute mark that Abumrad and Krulwich announce the theme of the episode.

Radiolab is about exploring ideas – big, difficult, abstract ideas – and more than anything it achieves that through experience. Here, experience is meant in a double-sense: creating a fun, adventurous listening experience for the listener, as well as connecting, through intimacy and description, to universal thoughts and feelings that the audience will be acquainted with personally. For instance, the tone is loose, accessible, even fun, with digressions and moments of humor interjected. The dual narrator device functions to bring the audience into the story, Abumrad and Krulwich expressing amazement and asking each other questions in a way that often reflects what the listening audience is likely to be thinking. The banter also underlines the sense of discovery. For instance, when a startling point is revealed, the narrator’s stop and spontaneously declare, “Really?!” Moreover, the back-and-forth dialogue also functions as a kind of theater, more akin to a radio play than a news story. This intimate, first-person narration builds tension and draws the listener in, like a group of friends telling an amazing story at a bar.

Music is particularly integral to Radiolab’s aesthetic. Referring again to the “Patient Zero” episode, almost as soon as Abumrad and Krulwich’s introduction starts, musical stings begin to creep into the piece. At first, these are curious sounding, modern classical style piano and string arrangements that quietly stay beneath the voices, mostly solitary notes that sound as though they are searching for something. However, as the Typhoid Mary story begins to build with Abumrad, Krulwich, and Leavitt describing the typhoid outbreak of 1906, the music perks up, horn bursts and tense strings serving to underline the impending danger. The voices and music continue this way, emphasizing and building upon one another in a montage fashion. Pauses and silences are interspersed to highlight moments of confusion or revelation.

Indeed, these elements all work together to make Radiolab sound like the process of intellectual discovery – it is the research and problem-solving process manifested audibly.

The answer, I believe, lies partly in the qualities of Corwin’s work, partly in the vagaries of broadcast history.  As with many other innovators in the field of radio production, as well as in radio research, the propagandistic fervor of World War II swept Corwin up into its too-hot embrace (to reference Mr. McLuhan) and led the emerging art of radio feature production into a too-close alliance with god and country and self-righteous patriotism.  Corwin’s two best-remembered works are We Hold These Truths, the nation-wide broadcast carried by all three networks on the brink of war (December 15, 1941), and On a Note of Triumph, his 1945 paen to Allied victory. Both are virtuoso examples of Corwin’s “kaleidosonic” technique (thank you Neil Verma), swooping from omniscent narrator to scenes of battle to church choirs to folksongs to dramatic dialogues to set speeches, underscored with bombastic music and pushing us to ever greater heights of patriotic self-congratulation with a now embarrassing lack of irony or restraint.  Corwin was anything but cool.

Another problem is that Corwin’s reputation, boosted by government-sponsored programs during the war, has eclipsed the larger tradition of US feature production, much better understood and perpetuated in Britain and Europe.  The radio feature represented the most creative aspect of sonic innovation in radio for decades, firmly established in the BBC where a Features Department nurtured the careers of  producers like D. G. Bridson, Marjorie Banks, Nesta Pain, Charles Parker, and Ewan McCall.  Corwin worked with some of these artists during the war, and his series An American in England, produced with the help of Edward R. Murrow and his CBS news team, with original scores by Benjamin Britten, remains among his best work, in my opinion.

Now that we have entered a “second golden age” of the radio feature, with work such as Ira Glass’s This American Life, the sound experiments of Jad Adumrad and Robert Krulwich’s Radiolab, and organizations like the Third Coast International Audio Festival bringing it all together, perhaps Corwin can be remembered again for what he contributed to sound form and style.  A few new books seem to indicate this:  Michael Keith and Mary Ann Watson’s publication of Corwin’s diary from his epic post-war work One World Flight, Matthew Ehrlich’s Radio Utopia on the post-war radio documentary, and Neil Verma’s forthcoming Theater of the Mind.  Norman Corwin lived just long enough to see this period emerging.  I hope it made up for the decades of neglect.