Trying to branch out a little, I spent part of Friday morning at “NPR’s The Audio Cut.” One of the questions/problems I’ve seen come up in print, when other forms of media enter the conversation, is: How do you put together a video or audio piece in addition to a print story, making sure that it in some way augments the print story? Going into the workshop this morning with very little knowledge about how an audio project is put together, I think the thing that made the biggest impression on me was how much more effective audio can be at conveying emotion.

Obviously, in print, if somebody is starting to choke up during an interview, the only way to share that is to write that they were starting to choke up, which can read awkwardly. And even then, it’s hard to capture the exact feel of the person’s emotional response, or mark the exact moment when it happens. The two NPR panelists this morning played a couple pieces in which the emotion of their subjects came across both in cracking voices and in charged silences. It works to describe a person in print through appearance, personality traits or mannerisms. But I sometimes think actually allowing a reader to hear a subject’s voice, maybe through an audio clip attached to the story or to an accompanying audio slideshow, gives a better sense of that person. Hearing the emotion enter his or her voice, just as it happens, can be really poignant.

Among the basic tips on ensuring good audio for which I was really grateful: Hold the microphone out of your line of eye contact with the subject (for the sake of interaction) and a little away from the subject’s mouth for clean sound. Some of the best sound comes from interviewing in a small, enclosed space. If the interview’s happening in a loud, public place, panelist Hansi Lo Wang said, record a minute of just ambient noise so that transitions between voiceovers and interview aren’t jarring. Keep an eye on sound levels during the interview. And vary the length of “selected cuts” according to the length of the story - 20 seconds at most for a 1-minute news spot and 30 seconds at most for a 4-minute story, according to the NPR handout from the workshop.

From talking to a couple recruiters at the career fair, I got the sense that although it might not be crucial to master audio and video production in addition to reporting and writing stories, it’s important to at least know how to capture quality raw footage or sound. The recruiters described thinking about it simply as another extension of reporting. Get sent out with a recorder or camera, and it’s best to be able to bring something back. I’ll try to take that to heart.

A couple links provided in the NPR handout:

http://airmedia.org/PageInfo.php?PageID=194 (The Association of Independent Radio, Jay Allison, “Interviewing Tips”)

http://www.transom.org (handout says the “Tools” page is a particularly good resource)

http://shop.npr.org/books/sound-reporting/ (NPR’s page on “Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production,” by Jonathan Kern. An excerpt is included at the bottom of the page.)

— Matt Kawahara