Ira Glass: what makes an interesting story
Listening to This American Life host Ira Glass talking about, what makes an interesting story makes me regret, we didn’t talk much more about this in journalism school:
Making stories that are constantly saying: look how different this is, than you would think, look how interesting this is, look how much more interesting, this is than you would think it, constantly searching for stories where there would be little surprises all the way through, all along, what that’s doing is reasserting that the world, it is reasserting the world to its proper size, you know, reasserting that the world is a place where surprise and pleasure and joy and humour exists, it makes things hopeful, you know. This is my problem with most radio and television news, it is that they make the world seem less interesting than they are.
If you for some weird reason haven’t listened to every single episode of This American Life and Radiolab – I sincerely envy you and promise you, you’re in for a treat!
