I teach a broadcast journalism class on Monday and Wednesday mornings at Emerson College. In yesterday’s class, we talked about the basics of interviewing – how to record good quality sound with a digital audio recorder, and how to get people to say useful and meaningful things on tape.
After class I spoke with someone who works for TalkingScience [www.talkingscience.org], a website created by the Science Friday initiative [www.scifri.org] to “demonstrate why science is transformative, necessary, and—above all—cool.” TalkingScience has agreed to let me post a different story of mine every other week on their website. I plan on using this platform primarily to disseminate two of the podcasts I work on: Ocean Gazing (a series about ocean science and technology: www.oceangazing.org) and One Species at a Time (a series where each episode pays homage to a different species on our planet: www.eol.org/podcast).
In the afternoon I worked on wrapping up a few projects: finishing the audio mix for an episode of One Species at a Time about Cinchona pubescens – a tree whose bark produces the anti-malarial drug called quinine; and making some small revisions to an audio slideshow about a typographer who’s taken a 16th century Hebrew font and updated it for digital end use in ebooks (this was an especially fun project and I hope to have a link to share with you by the end of the week).
Today (Tuesday) I will be appearing live on New Hampshire Public Radio’s program called Word of Mouth to discuss a couple of science stories that I’ve worked on – one on surf clams, and another on corals. To do so, I have to be in a studio in Boston that can feed a high quality audio signal in real time to the station in New Hampshire. I tracked down the right person at WBUR (one of the two NPR stations in Boston) to reserve a half hour of studio time today. If you want to tune in live, visit Word of Mouth’s website (
http://www.nhpr.org/wordofmouth
) at noon (EST), and click the Listen button.
