Imaginary Worlds - Finding My Voice

Episode Date: August 10, 2016

This week, I pull the curtain back on my process and look at two public radio stories I reported back in 2008 when I began to find my voice as a reporter -- and started to realize that I might want to have my own show where I could geek out freely. Along for ride is my former editor at Studio 360 and mentor: David Krasnow. We talk about what goes into making an audio feature, why I needed more "sign posting," and how hard it is to not sound like Ira Glass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now.

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Molenski. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Molenski.

So back in 2004, I started working in public radio as an intern at Studio 360, a show about arts and culture hosted by Kurt Anderson from PRI and WNYC in New York. And I stayed with Studio 360 for over a decade, taking on many different roles there. And during most of my time, my mentor and my editor was David Krasnow. What that means is I would pitch an idea for a story, I would go record the interviews, then edit down my soundbites, write narration around it, and then shoot him an email saying, all right, I'm ready for an edit. And then over the phone, I would read my narration to him, and then hold the phone up to my computer speaker and play those sound bites.

So from his end, it should sound like a stripped-down, raw version of the radio story. And then he'd give me notes. Sometimes they were light. Often they were not. So today I want to play for you two stories that we worked on together, where I felt like I finally found my voice as a reporter and talk with David about how that happened. So what were some of like the rookie mistakes do you remember long, long time ago when I first started with you? I mean, that was a long time ago. We're talking, are we being transparent?

Oh, hell yeah. Are we being transparent here about how long ago this was? We're talking more than a decade. Yeah, neither. We did not have gray hair either back then. And I, and I don't think I would have known what the rookie mistakes were because I was also sort of a rookie in a way. Like when you started making stories, I had probably only been an editor there for a year or something. Oh, really? Yeah. So I didn't know you seem, I mean, everybody there, if someone had been there six months before me, I would have thought they were like a veteran. Right. A super old timer. No, I started in 2003. And although I had already been working as an editor in print, like I think I managed to convey that like illusion that editors do of like, I know

what I'm talking about and you should listen to me. They come up with like a set of catchphrases that they hope work in terms of giving guidance and direction, which I feel like is probably what you and I developed over the years. Like here are the catchphrases that work for Eric. Oh, really? What were they? More signposting. You came up with that for me? I thought you said that for everybody. Well, I also said it for other people, maybe 99% of other people. No, not everybody needs, well, almost everybody does need more signposting. Um, because it's something that you only do in a radio story.

You don't need to do it in a written story. Um, but you do do it naturally when you tell someone a story, like in, in that mythical moment, we always talk in radio about, oh, you know, tell the story as though you were telling your friends in a bar. And if you're in the bar with your friends, you actually signpost really heavily. go no no no no wait look no this is the important part this is amazing listen oh then also i remember um the other thing you had to get out of me was sounding like ira glass because i was such a fan of this american life well we both suffered from that did you too oh you didn't know that no because you would always be like you know you're doing ira again stop it oh well i hope i was because you would always be like, you know, you're doing Ira again. Stop it. Oh, well, I hope I was.

I hope I was sympathetic. I mean, you know, we both we both, I think, became really like attracted to this as a medium in the wake of this American life. Yeah. You know, whatever, late 90s, early 2000s. And there was no other show that sounded like it for so long. Right. The first piece I did, I was doing some tracking and the person who was engineering the session was Steve Nelson, who was then one of the producers or technical directors. And after my first tracking, which I thought sounded really pretty great, he said, that was not bad. Why don't you try that again, Ira? Wow.

It was very, it was humiliating, but I didn't really have a voice. humiliating, but I didn't really have a voice. All right. So let's listen to Cal Earth. The connection to sci-fi fantasy is a little tangential. This is the first time I learned how to gather tape on the ground and recognize that the people I was interviewing were characters. And that was the other thing too, is that in public radio, I was so surprised how many people refer to the people in their story as characters. It was so strange to me because I came from LA where your screenwriters obviously talk about characters. And I was like, but they're real people. They're not characters.

Well, but we used to talk about casting a story in the same way that you would cast a play. Yeah. And I mean, this is a big difference between features and news. If you're reporting the news, you have to go to the person who has the information closest to the news source,

either the news source, him or herself, or whoever you can get who is the closest. And if that person sounds terrible on tape, and if they speak really badly, you're stuck with them. And you just talk around it. You try to talk around it. But in a feature where you have this ability to, you know, if an artist is not very well spoken, but she has an assistant who talks a mile a minute and is fun and engaging, then the assistant becomes the main character in the story. And so the casting of it, you know, who is really going to sell this to your listeners?

I mean, almost the definition of a feature is, you know, I don't really have to listen to it. So make me want to. I want to back up one sec because you said that the story is only tangentially related to what you cover in Imaginary Worlds because it has because it has well people will hear why on a surface it's a real place on a surface aesthetic level it it is related but actually what this guy was doing i would say was in fact a was a utopian vision of the future like it was he his vision was a kind of science fiction that he wanted to make happen in reality but it was it was the kind of broad stroke

utopian change in society that science fiction is like totally made of. Especially from the 70s, which was big. Yeah, no, he was like Ursula Le Guin with buildings instead of novels. Ah, that would have been a good line. I should have used that. That is really trashy. That was so trashy. Let's keep it. Let's keep it. trashy. That was so trashy. Let's keep it. Let's keep it. Rudy Burden and Nora Murphy live a pretty sweet life. They're artists who work on cartoon shows like The Simpsons. They live in a charming neighborhood of bungalows just off Hollywood Boulevard. But they secretly dream of living in a giant igloo made of dirt. And here's Cal Earth, you can see on your right. Oh my God. Yeah, it's totally, totally different.

We drove an hour east of L.A. to the town of Hesperia. As I entered Cal Earth, I felt like I was walking onto the set of Luke Skywalker's home. It's like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings put together. The connection to outer space is not a coincidence. The idea for these houses came from a lunar colony. It started out as a NASA project, designed by the Iranian architect Nadir Khalili, who just passed away in March.

When I spoke with him last fall, he believed that his designs would catch on, here on Earth, if only people would start asking the right questions. After the disasters, the question is wrong when we ask, when is FEMA coming? What type of insurance do you have? What is the problem in the rest of the world? They ask always, when is UN coming? The right question is, why are buildings burned? Why are they falling apart in a hurricane?

Why are they this? That is the question that will be the basis of a great solution. I took a walk through the domes with my friends, Rudy and Nora. The early ones are very simple. They're almost like mosques. Eventually, we made our way to a super adobe ranch house. It's meant to be in the same league as the suburban homes that surround Keller. I don't know about you, but they didn't have to put in any hallways or anything. They just stacked the arches like a pyramid. And so you just weave in and out of the rooms, which is really nice.

We're underground right now. Yeah, pretty much. Kallur is probably the only place in Asperia that doesn't need air conditioning. The cool air from the night gets trapped in the domes. But it also gives you this amazing view. This has got to be the strangest view out of a kitchen window I've ever seen.

Yeah. Yeah. And then there's this beautiful little earth dome house right across the street. My neighbor's got it too. Showing up at Cal Earth is almost like showing up at a casting call for Southern California characters.

There's an Indian chief, Charles Wood, of the Chimewabian tribe. For me, to build a house, that cement truck has to come 80 miles. And here I see a possible answer for my people. Jim Guerra represents Mexican migrant farm workers. They work with flowers and strawberries. And like most farm workers today, they live on the ground. There's no housing, no toilets, no showers. Savannah Sierra Glazer came here from Santa Monica with her fiancé.

They're shopping for houses. I'm not sure what that dome over there is called, the big, big, big one. We'd like that to be the center and have like four, no, six of the little eco-domes around it, connected to it. So something like that where it would develop community for the people that we invite over. Because we like to entertain a lot of people. River Oliveira, just as a thing for domes. Well, yeah, that's what domes do. They give that kind of energy.

The electromagnetic field, it functions in that method. So when you're in it, you're part of it. That's very beautiful. Thanks. Life's beautiful. Yeah. Breathing's beautiful. But the super adobes are more than funky. They're sturdy.

Phil Vittori is a structural engineer. Now, I started when I was 20. I think I was 24 years old, and I'm 70 now. So that's a lot of years in the dome business. He collaborated with Kalili for 10 years, and they shared an appreciation for the simple physics of a curve. If you take a stick and put it between two points and you put a weight in the center, you'll see the stick deflects downward. If you take that same stick and you curve it into an arch, when you put weight on it, it does not bend downward.

Now, if you take an arch and you rotate the arch through 360 degrees, you end up with a dome. Khalili got the seal of approval from the UN and FEMA. But local building and planning departments have been the biggest hurdle. Their codes only cover traditional housing. I had to bring in the text of analyzing a dome for the building department and then run the numbers for them,

and then teach them how to read the text. Otherwise, they had no idea how to evaluate the design. A lot of people told me they were frustrated with the pace of progress, but Khalili was always patient. He knew he had inspired a movement. As my son was suggesting, he says, one of the ways that we can get it into American market is to do some sitcoms in these structures. And he may be right, you know.

The sitcom, everybody feels comfortable and funny and experience all of these. And then they'll want it. Something that was really powerful here, Ashley, is that you chose to start with your friends. Your friends are actually kind of the, they are sort of a MacGuffin. Like they don't really matter.

We don't come back to them in the end, but they're there with you. But the fact that you went somewhere with friends is something that really pulls us into the story. And I think the next piece we're going to listen to also has a friend in it, but that's a really important device, I think, because it makes me, you're not a disembodied, like voice of God journalist here. You're, you're a guy who went out and had a little adventure with some people that you knew. And I can totally relate to that. Well, one of the things

that I thought was interesting when I was working with you over the years, well, still working with you, but I mean, working with you at studio 360 was um how much you encouraged me to put myself in the pieces and i was shocked i was just like that's not what a journalist is supposed to do for me having you in the story actually is more a matter of journalistic honesty like for me there's something really honest about that i i always want to know well how did you hear about this story? Like journalists are not gods who receive information or who have like, you know, who are tapped into the all knowing, like some like NSA software that tells them everything in the planet that's going on. Like, you know, there are two ways you hear about things. You read it online or a friend told you. For me, that moment

of here's how I came to the story is an important thing in kind of bringing your listeners, like inviting your listeners to take this little journey of discovery with you that I think every good piece of feature reporting, like you should discover something, you should go on a journey of some kind. Coming up, the first time I planted the seeds of imaginary worlds. That's just after the break. All right. So let's listen to viral marketing. This is an incredible time capsule. I didn't know that 2008 could feel like another era, but this truly feels like when I first, when I listened back to this the other day, I was like, oh my God. There's a reference to viral videos. Someone explains what a viral video is.

Oh, the whole piece is that, but it gets even, it gets even more 2008-ish than that. But here we go. I was surfing the web last summer. I don't remember how I got on this website, but it was a political ad for Harvey Dent, district attorney. Unless you're a fairly devoted Batman fan, you don't know that Harvey Dent is Two-. Unless you're a fairly devoted Batman fan, you don't know that Harvey Dent is Two-Face. Now, of course, I knew that Harvey Dent was Two-Face, and I knew that Harvey Dent was going to be a villain in the new Batman movie. But what was really cool was that somebody had defaced the picture of Harvey Dent with green hair and red lipstick. And I followed a series of clues,

which led me to another website. And that showed the first picture of Heath Ledger as the Joker. Let's put a smile on that face. It's an absolutely brilliant move to go for those core fans. Those are the ones you want to energize first. Presumably, they start energizing the people around them. By the way, this is Stevan Tornquist. He's the editor of Marketing Sherpa, which is a website read by industry insiders. He says this kind of viral marketing works like a dog whistle. Only Batman fans are able to hear the pitch, but once the whistle is blown, we start barking. I thought the ad was so cool, I emailed the link to a bunch of friends. In marketing in general, the thing you want more than anything else

is word of mouth. Ave, do you remember last summer me sending you links to the new Batman movie, like Heath Ledger stuff? Yeah, well, I specifically do remember that because I think that you are my kind of my nerd link. And you keep me up to date on all the nerdy things that you know that I like, and that I'm too lazy to actually find out myself. What did you do after you saw the link?

I came home. I'm like, Batman looks really cool. I think we have a nerd. I guess it takes a nerd to know a nerd. The authority on viral marketing, who's a bit of a nerd himself, is Douglas Rushkoff. He wrote a book in the 90s called Media Virus. And he was trying to describe the way certain scandals will saturate our entire culture, you know, like O.J. Simpson. And he was really surprised that a lot of the fan mail he was getting was from advertisers. Some of them are from the advertising agency that did the Calvin Klein underwear ads. Said, oh, you know, we came up with these ads showing kids in their underwear, knowing that people would be upset by them and they'd force us to take them off the air because they would think of it as child porn, but that we'd get more secondary media because of the viral component.

What kind of jeans are those? Calvin Klein. Do you like them? Yeah, they're comfortable. They're like, I don't know, they're comfortable. And it's true, you know, and it was a huge story for a few weeks. Viral marketing also works in politics. Yeah, well, everyone's watching this online.

It's called, I Got a Crush on Obama. In the old business of campaign ads, this unauthorized video is creating a lot of new buzz. What are they called? Videos, right? They're called what? Viral videos. And what means a viral video? What does it mean? Last summer, an ad exec named Ben Rellis made a music video to promote his website,

BarelyPolitical.com. I've Got a Crush on Obama featured a scantily clad babe swooning over the presidential contender. Rellis posted the video on YouTube. A couple days later, everyone wanted to talk to him. And in those interviews, they were really interested in a much bigger story than the video. They were really interested in who's behind this and will this hurt his campaign

and who are we voting for? Obama Girl went viral for one big reason. It addressed a forbidden topic. Douglas Rushkoff explained this to me. A media virus can only spread if it can find some kind of confusion in our cultural DNA. In other words, Barack Obama has major sex appeal, and we're not really supposed to talk about that. But Obama girl can. People don't like seeing an attractive white person singing about an attractive African-American. Viral marketing must have that special ingredient. Otherwise, it's just an advertising gimmick. Like with this Batman movie, the first picture I saw of Heath Ledger is the Joker,

the picture that inspired me to email my friends. It did not look like a publicity shot of an actor. It looked like the kind of picture you'd see on MySpace, someone just extending their arm and taking a digital picture of themselves. It was like a self-portrait of a serial killer. So much of MySpace now is about predators. The fact that there's this sick, psychopathic adult, the Joker, out there on MySpace now is about predators. The fact that there's this sick, psychopathic adult, the Joker, out there on MySpace with your kids, potentially infecting them with all the bad that Joker does,

is really the perfect migration of the Batman mythology into yet another medium. Joe DiNuzio runs the agency behind the Batman campaign. It's called 42 Entertainment. He unleashed this virus onto the world, but he's squeamish about the term viral marketing. He prefers alternative reality game. If you're engaged and you share your creativity and passion with someone else, that's a much more powerful message than anything that we could ever do.

So really what we've done is we've activated you know, we've activated you, engaged you, we've given you the framework, but the communities that we see building around what we do really are activated, controlled, owned, and driven by the audience themselves. And here I am talking about this movie on public radio, giving them free advertising. I should be quarantined, at least until the Dark Knight comes out in theaters on July 18th, in case you're wondering. I'm Batman. So, David, my big question is, do you still worry about predators on MySpace? Yeah. My daughter, who has never heard of MySpace. No, I mean, we can make fun of MySpace,

but sure. I mean, do I worry about my child on other social media that now exists now? Like, yeah, sure. And there's a moment in the piece where you refer to one of those pictures where you just extend your arm and take the picture of yourself because the word selfie was not in common use. That was amazing. That caught me off guard because that's actually you. That's you not having the word. We're making fun of the news people for talking about viral videos, but actually that word just hadn't entered our lexicon yet. And there's no Twitter or Facebook, so I'm emailing links to everything.

Right. You're emailing links when that was a thing. Yes. And then you bring your friend in and then you make fun of her for being a nerd. Okay. That you suggest... So this is what is interesting to me, is that that, I remember in early draft as well, I made no distinction between whether the audience would be as interested in this as I would.

And this is something that I remember we had a conversation about, is kind of like playing to your audience, you know, and sort of the idea of there's some 60-year- old businessman driving home from work. He turns on public radio, Mike at Marketplace. Instead, I'm geeking out over Batman. How do you talk to that guy? are part of that community. And so you don't have that sort of self-consciousness now about whether what you are talking about in any given moment is nerdy or not. Right. So I don't know. Did I force the nerdy angle on you too hard? Do you think that was a mistake? No. I mean, I think for a general piece, because we did an hour on Superman for American Icons hour, and we did not do a like, okay, folks, we're going to geek out.

We just did it as straight as we covered The Great Gatsby or The Lincoln Memorial. And we got a bunch of really angry listener emails. And people were just like, I don't listen to NPR to hear about a stupid comic book character.

I didn't remember that. Oh, yeah. I was shocked. There were just, a lot of people were just appalled that they were like, I can't believe my good public radio money is going to this dumb comic book character. damn it i mean and i'm not even

like i'm not even a comic book fan but but that piece which everyone should go and listen to yeah um that hour is an incredible hour that hour will that hour will make you cry like that that hour really goes places that you know not like krypton you know know, like real places, emotional places. But definitely with my podcast, I was glad that I don't have to, I don't have to do that anymore to some extent. I sort of, I expect that you're with me. And the only thing that I expect people don't know is not everyone is a fan of everything, but I do constantly think about somebody who's listening right now who knows everything about this subject. And there's somebody listening who knows nothing. And, you know, how do I, how do I write in the middle? You still are writing that even though, even though your, your podcast is a narrower community of people who are interested in this area,

you still think about that. Well, who knows what? Yeah. I mean, I feel like there's always going to be somebody out there who, who thinks of themselves as a total nerd or geek, but they really don't like the particular subject I'm about to go into. And so that person too, I need to be like, no, but they really don't like the particular subject I'm about to go into. And so that person too, I need to be like, no, no, come on. It's going to be interesting. See, I brought a friend. All right.

So should we get out of this, my sweaty office where I've had to close the windows and doors so that we have some good sound? It has actually been a total pleasure doing this because these stories were really important for me, like in kind of learning this craft and learning how to articulate things and in developing something of a style for Studio 360 and how we wanted to tell stories on that show that were different from other, you know, programs covering the arts or, you know, different than what we would hear on the arts desk at NPR. And figuring some of these things out, I mean, we really did that together. David Krasnow is now the executive producer of the New Yorker Radio Hour, where he is still assigning me stories. Although in this case, I'm helping New Yorker staff writers turn their prose into audio.

And I still work occasionally with Studio 360, but my main focus is this podcast. I have hired an editor on a few occasions, Carrie Hillman. But most of the time, I play a rough mix of each episode for my wife, Serena. She's a former TV news producer and gives me great notes. I often say she is my secret weapon. Imaginary World is part of the Panoply Network. You can also help support the show by going to Patreon to sign up for regular donations. Huge, huge thanks to everybody who has already signed up. It really helps. Thank you.