Rob Rosenthal: Crafting compelling audio stories

Rob Rosenthal isn’t quite sure where his love for audio comes from. It’s not something that was passed down from his parents, nor can he point to any epiphany where he saw the light, or maybe heard the sound, that put him on the path to becoming one of the most respected audio storytellers and editors around.

He remembers already being a huge fan of audio as a self-described “nerdy kid” who listened to shortwave broadcasts from Deutsche Welle, the BBC and Radio Moscow, which few of his peers did. Later, he started spinning punk rock records at a radio station on Cape Cod, the peninsula jutting out from the US state of Massachusetts, where he was raised and now lives today.

After his DJing days, Rob managed college-based community radio stations in several parts of the county. In 2000 he was hired by the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine to start the radio program there, even though he didn’t have much experience in doing documentary radio. But he knew how to record, how to interview and how to edit and it appears, he’d found his calling.

Eleven years later, he started the Transom Story Workshop, a radio storytelling residential program in Massachusetts that ran until 2019. These days Rob, now 62, hosts the podcast Sound School (formerly known as HowSound), a show about the craft of audio storytelling. He’s also a sought-after story editor and trainer in the US and internationally, teaching new and experienced producers in places like Stanford University in California, Radio Slovenia and DW how to craft compelling audio narratives. 

DW Akademie:As someone who started off in radio, what did you think of this new phenomenon of podcasting when it first came along?

Rob Rosenthal: I had my doubts, sir, I had my doubts. I was part of the school of thought that since we have radio stations why do we need to put stories into a file on the internet? It didn't make any sense to me. Once at a conference where I was receiving an award for a student, I got up and I swear to you, I said the following thing: “Hi, I'm Rob. I'm from Maine, and in Maine, we're into CODcasting. It's where you strap a note to a fish and toss it into the water and hope that someone gets it.” That's exactly how podcasting seemed to me. Since that time, I've changed my mind (laughs).

You’ve pretty much devoted your career to audio storytelling and helping others do it. What makes the form so compelling to you?

I think we're storytelling creatures. An academic once referred to humans as Homo narrans, that is, we're built to tell stories. How long have we been telling stories through sound to one another? Long before the internet or podcasting, television and radio, before the printed word, even before cave drawings, I presume. It feels ancient and modern at the same time. So when I make an audio story, I feel like I'm tapping into that, and that's why it’s so satisfying to me. It feels like it’s an essential core element of our being.

In my own experience as a trainer, I’ve found that many people are very interested in creating audio narratives, but a lot of them find it a very daunting prospect. Do you have a strategy for people just starting out?

Ira Glass of This American Life once said that when you're beginning, your taste exceeds your skills. The idea is that you have to put in the effort for your skills to catch up with your taste. In my mind, the way to do that is to start incrementally, which may be less satisfying, because who doesn't want to just pick up a guitar and play a screaming solo right out of the gate? But instead, you have to learn a few chords first. With audio storytelling, the same thing holds true. It makes sense for someone coming to this fresh to create achievable goals even though what you create may not sound like the story of your dreams. Consider starting small. Make a simple trailer with narration and music. That involves writing, tracking, finding the right song and figuring out how to score. Then complicate it. Make another trailer, only this time, interview somebody and use quotes from the interview so that you're writing some narration with a quote or however you want to design it. Then make a vox-pop and figure out how to approach strangers with a microphone, how to mic them properly and set the levels, how to ask a good question that prompts an answer. Bring that tape back and assemble it with intro and outro, and so on. If you try to write some master oeuvre right out of the gate, the probability is good that you’ll fail and won't want to do it anymore. That would be sad.

Let’s say you have an idea for an audio story, how do you begin?

There are two schools of thought. One is just to start interviewing and see what happens. I am in favor of that because you don't know what you don't know, and you're not supposed to write your story in advance and then go find the answers to it. But the problem with that model is that I think it works better for someone who actually knows what a story is. If a new person is starting out and they just go out and collect tape almost all the time, they get lost. They have a mountain of tape, but they don't know what to do with it because they haven't quite figured out what a story is yet and what a story needs. So my preferred answer is that I do think it's important to make an outline of your planned story even if you're an experienced producer.

How does someone begin to understand what a story is?

Right, it feels like it’s this magical unicorn that people talk about all the time, but no one ever helps you define what exactly that means. I’ve sometimes heard people say, a story has a beginning, middle and end. Yeah, but so does the alphabet. That’s not a story. So there are a few things I would suggest. If I'm in the planning stages, one thing I do is try to write out a focus sentence. I try and boil my story down to a single sentence, maybe two. And the structure of the sentence is: Someone does something because of something but something. The does is the action, the because of is their motivation, and the but is the conflict, the tension. So I'm on the hunt for a main character who is involved with the issue I’m reporting on, and I’m going to see if I can write out a sentence based on what I know, pre-interviewing them, online research, anything, and see if I can pencil out a focus sentence. I say in pencil because it'll probably change, but at least it gives you a compass heading.

The second thing I will do is create an outline. I have a list of the people I need to interview to fully report this story. Who’s got a dog in this fight? Then I think about scenes. Where can I report the story? Where can I take my microphone and capture life unfolding, events unfolding, so that I can take a listener and show them the story, in addition to telling them about the story. Then lastly, I'm going to think about what the big themes are. What are the big ideas in my story that I want to make sure to that people you know come away with understanding? And I'll actually coalesce all of those elements into an actual penciled-out outline.

For my stories, I also create a timeline because that’s what a story is, a sequence of events where a character encounters a problem and tries to overcome it. And so to get that sequence of events, it’s helpful to have a timeline. When does the story begin? What happened next? What happened next?

We've talked about outlining. When do you start the scripting process?

I need to know that I have the majority of my material collected. Maybe 80%, that feels right. Then what ends up happening sometimes is I’ll start writing and find holes, and I'll be like, Oh God, I need to talk to somebody about that and gather to get a little more tape. But the writing won't start until I have a decent outline that feels like it might work, and I've got maybe 80% of my tape.

Let’s talk about getting tape. If you're interviewing for a longer-form narrative, how do try to get a coherent narrative from your interviewee?

More often than not, I’ll organize interviews in a chronology. I’m interviewing for a story, not for information. So I’m going to organize my interview, usually, as a sequence of events, and seek information along the way so that I have the tape. The tape will come organized as a story, as a sequence of events.

I think so much about good audio storytelling is about the voice and hearing the emotion and feelings the voice carries. You have to get people to open up to you by creating a sense of trust. Do you have ways of doing that?

It starts with the initial email or phone call. Every time I'm communicating with them, they’re getting a sense of who I am, and so it's important then for me to make sure that I am doing everything my mom told me I should do when I meet people for the first time. I joke, but I feel like so much is what you learned as a kid about being polite and curious and demonstrating that with your tone of voice as well as your nonverbals. I do think friendliness and curiosity are probably the two most important elements.

I would also say to this, and we're not talking about people in power who we’re supposed to hold accountable, I'm just talking about folks. They don't have to talk to me. So I recognize that, and I always believe it’s a kind of gift that they're giving me. If I approach them as I'm looking for them to give me a gift. How best can I do that?

Let's talk about natural sound a bit. At what point in the process do you start thinking about what kind of sound you can get?

I'm definitely thinking about that in advance. If a photographer has a shot list, why wouldn't a radio reporter have a sound list? If I'm doing a story on a shopkeeper, I'm going to think to myself, what are the sounds of a shop? There's the door, maybe there's a bell on the door, people coming in and out. There's the cash register, there's the owner of the shop, working, talking to clients, and so on. I'm going to have all that in mind so that I make sure to get all those things. But what I don't want in the end is a list of sound effects, bell, door, cash register, hand digging in for change to give change. I don't want a collection of sound effects. I want to collect sound in a sort of cinematic way that brings people in so that there’s movement. We're walking into the shop, hearing the door open and close and the bell ring, then someone saying hello. I want all of that in a fluid way. That's so that it’s like the listener walking into the shop or experiencing the shop, not as a collection of noises that I recorded, but as people moving through space and time so that the listener feels like they're there too.

What about the use of music? What role do you think it should play?

This is the hardest question ever. OK, are you ready for this one? Music is emotional fascism. It commands a feeling from the listener. You have no say in the matter, hence the fascism. You have to be so careful with it because when you're putting it into a story, it’s radioactive. You have to put on a hazmat suit when you're working with music because you don't want to manufacture emotions that aren't there and aren't natural to the story. A friend of mine who makes music for podcasts calls it neutral propulsion. It's emotionally neutral-ish, which is hard to do because it’s music. It’s there to underscore the emotion and provide propulsion because there’s movement in music, there's a rhythm that you can use to help propel the story forward. But don't say to yourself, this part is sad, so I'm going to put in sad music. The sadness needs to come from the structure and the writing and the quotes and the tone and people's voices, and then you use music.

So in a way, the music should reflect rather than guide what's going on in the story.

Yeah, I agree with that 100%. It's not the driver.

In our TikTok era, how do you maintain people's attention for these longer stories?

It's got to be the story and the way it's told; it's not about your production. I mean, a production counts, don't get me wrong, but I want people to avoid thinking, you know, this isn't interesting enough. Let me throw some music in here or put a sound effect there. Don't use sound design as a band-aid. I think what’s key is structure, writing and character development, helping a listener latch onto the characters in the story.

Finally, how do you feel about the future of audio narrative and long-form storytelling in this age of chatcasts and funding woes?

I do feel like it's cyclical. If you look at NPR, there was a time in the 70s when they experimented. Then they hit a financial crisis in the early 80s, tightened their belt and created the sound they’re known for today. But even then it swung back, and they aired creative work. Then podcasting came along and they tried new things. So I feel like we could probably draw cycles. My hope is that this is true and that in time, if we just stay the course and be patient, the cycle will come back around, and long-form work will be ascendant again.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.