Podcasting Hacks

Build a Great Story Show

Find out how to interview to get a great audible story for your podcast.

Since January 2004, WGBH-FM has broadcast a weekly series of short radio pieces called Morning Stories, which are narratives from ordinary people about some significant moment in their lives.

Our storytellers come from widely different backgrounds (they include a housecleaner from Brazil who is in the U.S. illegally, a postal worker, a tenured university professor, a retired high school teacher, a Cambodian immigrant, a blue-blooded Bostonian, a Jewish grandmother, victims of domestic violence, and seers of past lives). But their stories share a common goal: to give listeners a feeling for what it is like “to be the other guy.”

In public radio, stories that make a strong personal connection with a listener are said to have driveway potential—i.e., they keep the listener glued to the radio, even after he has parked his car. At their best, these stories also make us want to retell them, in our own words, to someone else. Whatever their style or subject, stories this vivid and infectious tend to have some common elements:

• A dramatic story line that whets our appetite for what happens next

• Specific incidents, behaviors, and details that are easy to visualize (not, for example, “Full of self-reproach, I took it out on others,” but “I came home and kicked the dog”)

• A narrator with a genuine tone of voice, able to express or suggest the emotions the story inspires

Most of us are not professional ...