From my real job

Here's an example of what I do every day at the office.

As a producer, my voice isn't on the radio very often, but I'm working behind the scenes to mold interviews into conversations that are easy for busy listeners to hear and remember.  Most of these are about today's news stories and we record them over the phone.  But I always love getting the chance to take our microphones out of the studio to let the listeners hear stories about a particular place.

This week it was White Bear Lake, Minnesota.  If you're from here, you know that the Walleye Fishing Opener is the unofficial start of summer in Minnesota.  The Opener was on WBL this year.  But I don't care much about fish and neither does our afternoon host, Tom Crann.  So we went to the shores of White Bear to hear about its history from the head of the town's historical society .  Turns out the lake used to be a major destination for St. Paul residents to spend a summer or a raucous weekend.

That was 100 years ago.  It has since turned into the quiet bedroom community most of our listeners think of today.  So in this interview , I wanted to give the listeners a chance to imagine the grand hotels, the noisy trains and the squeals from the amusement park that made this city much more fun back then than any fishing party could make it now.

This is place-based journalism, edited for a broad audience.  But it would have been easy to edit this 32 minute interview in a different way, so it would apply specifically to someone standing on the shore line.  "See that clump of trees straight across the water?  That's where the roller coaster used to be.  Turn around and look at the white house with the porch.  In 1890, that's where the Williams House stood.  Its glamorous summer visitors were the talk of the whole town. Meanwhile, the ground beneath your feet was the croquet yard."

There are historic photos from this time period at our show's Web site.  In a podcast, though, the photos could be part of the presentation.  You could compare what you're seeing now to the image from 100 years earlier.  I've seen some walking tours use this "slide show"technique even as the audio is playing, though I don't currently know how to pull it off.