The award-winning producer of This American Life will speak at Ohio University about his experience with radio reporting.
Striving to find the stories that emotionally connect with listeners, Ira Glass produced an episode of This American Life called “Home Movies” that detailed the lives captured in home videos. It’s a topic that resonated with Macy DiRienzo, a senior studying photojournalism, who used to make home videos with her family.
Ira Glass, the host and executive producer of This American Life, a weekly public radio show on National Public Radio, will speak to Ohio University during “Reinventing Radio: an Evening with Ira Glass” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.
During the show, Glass will play different clips from the 20 years the show has been in production, choosing moments that particularly stood out to him. He tailors the show based on what he finds interesting at the time, instead of giving the same speech to every audience.
Glass, who began working at NPR at the age of 19, is known for his compelling storytelling abilities, his distinctive voice and his conversational tone in reporting.
DiRienzo, a former Post photographer, said she enjoys the personal stories and anecdotes contained in the episodes and listens to the podcast on her way to class.
“I feel so funny because I’m always walking down the street with my Beats on, and people probably think I’m listening to some rap music but really I’m listening to him calmly talk to me,” she said. “It’s one of those things that makes it feel like someone’s just really there telling a story.”
Andrew Holzaepfel, the senior associate director of the Campus Involvement Center, said the decision to bring Glass to OU partly stemmed from a conference that he attended at which Glass was a keynote speaker.
Holzaepfel said the “Reinventing Radio” event can be accessible even to those with no interest in journalism or radio.
“Ira’s a journalist but he’s also a storyteller,” he said. “This American Life, those programs from beginning to end are really weaving a tale together in a really interesting way.”
Thomas Hodson, the director and general manager of WOUB at Ohio University, conducted a phone interview with Glass in February for his Conversations with Studio B podcast. In the interview, they discussed some of the behind the scenes work of This American Life, the rise in popularity of podcasts and how Glass found his niche in radio reporting.
“I think he’s a master of selecting the stories,” Hodson said. “One of the more interesting things in my conversation with him was his absolutely relentless pursuit of excellence in the stories, so much that he values killing stories as much as he does going forward with stories.”
In the interview, Glass said the program throws out up to 50 percent of the stories they produce. His conversational approach to reporting is an aspect that particularly stuck out to Hodson.
In discussing the popularity of podcasts, Glass and Hodson both felt it correlated with the rise in mobile phone usage — people can listen to podcasts while driving, exercising or doing any activity that would otherwise inhibit reading.
At Brown University, Glass studied semiotics, the study of transmitting meaning through communication.
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Hodson, who said he has listened to This American Life for the entirety of its 20-year lifetime, was surprised to receive a compliment from Glass on how he conducted the interview and formulated his questions.
“I actually had my audio engineer cut that out and send it to me so I can keep it,” he said.
@seanthomaswolfe
