A second edition of Sound Reporting has arrived, updating NPR’s guide to audio journalism for a new era. The first edition, authored by Jonathan Kern, was published in 2008. The newly updated Sound Reporting, Second Edition: The NPR Guide to Broadcast, Podcast and Digital Journalism (University of Chicago Press) incorporates insights from 80 interviews with NPR hosts, journalists and staff, including many who have joined the network since the previous edition. In this excerpt, Jerome Socolovsky, NPR’s audio journalism trainer, shares strategies for achieving a natural delivery that reflects your voice and personality.
NPR vowed at its founding to “speak with many voices and dialects,” and in many ways it did. NPR had a cast of women anchors and reporters, including “founding mothers” Linda Wertheimer, Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts, at a time when the major TV network’s evening news anchors were mostly men. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, the griot who hailed from the Gullah community of North Carolina, was a frequent commentator, as was Romanian American writer Andrei Codrescu, who delivered trenchant reflections in thickly accented English, and the late Wade Goodwyn, whose Texas-inflected drawl was once compared to “warm butter melting over barbecued sweet corn.”
In the days of AM radio’s dominance, a resonant baritone may have compensated for a weak signal. But that’s no longer the case with the superior quality that podcasts and FM radio deliver. And there’s been a turnabout in thinking across American public radio, in no small part thanks to people like podcast host and professor Chenjerai Kumanika. In a 2015 article for Transom, he pointed out the pressure faced by journalists “of various ethnicities, genders and other identity categories” to imitate what he described as “culturally dominant ‘white’ styles of speech and narration.” A distinctive “NPR voice” did develop over the years that seemed free of regional and other dialects, making it easy when you turned the FM dial to tell when you’d landed on an NPR station. But in recent years, the network has made a concerted effort to bring the full range of speech and dialects that reflect who our journalists really are, and live up to that original mission statement in the fullest sense.
So listen to NPR and learn from our journalists’ on-air delivery, but cultivate your own voice. “Don’t try to change the way that you sound,” says Weekend Edition Sunday host Ayesha Rascoe, whose unmistakably warm and vivacious personality comes through on air, which she says has a lot to do with her coming from Durham, North Carolina. “If you grew up in Boston, you’re not going to sound like me. If you grew up in Oakland, you’re not going to sound like I do.”
But, she adds, there’s a difference between changing your voice “and trying to figure out, ‘How can I get these words out without stumbling?’ ” she says. No matter what your voice is like, sounding natural, and not like you’re reading, “is the hardest thing in the world.”
In this chapter, I’ll help you tackle that “hardest thing in the world” by sharing what has worked for me and for my NPR colleagues. We’ll also get some tips from voice coaches who’ve worked with NPR folks.
“Everybody has a voice for radio,” says Rachel Martin, who hosted Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Sunday and was former national security and international correspondent. “You just have to own your own voice and talk like you actually talk in real life.” And while a certain amount of theater is involved, it’s something anyone can learn. “It takes a bit of work to sound like yourself,” says Life Kit managing producer Meghan Keane. “But when you get there, it feels awesome.”
Perform the Story
Let’s start with a couple of don’ts. Don’t just read your script aloud. It will sound like you’re bored, and your audience will hear it. Don’t exaggerate as though you’re reading a children’s story: You will sound patronizing. And while you should sound natural, “sounding like yourself means not that you’re at a bar talking to your buddy over a beer,” says Jessica Hansen, who was NPR’s voice coach for eight years. “You have to perform the story.” The performance trips up many journalists who come to audio after a career of letting their words speak for themselves. “I am not comfortable with the performance part of our job,” says Eyder Peralta, a former newspaper reporter. “But it is a big part of our job.”
Why? Because the listener can’t see you. They can’t follow your lips moving, your hands gesturing. They are getting none of the visual cues that animate speech. So you have to make up for it by emphasizing important words, varying your cadence and timbre. It’s the same as with the people you interview: How a voice sounds sends signals that help the listener absorb the information they’re getting.
That’s something people do naturally in conversation. “When somebody tells you something surprising,” says Eyder, “you don’t think, ‘I need to act surprised.’ No, you act surprised. Or you smile when something’s funny. People can hear you talking through a smile. If you’re in the moment, you’ll do that naturally.”
“Live the script,” adds Eyder, and the performance will happen by itself. Whether you’re tracking in your hotel room, in your bedroom closet, or in the studio, imagine you’re still on the scene, surrounded by all the sights and sounds and personalities. “That’s a huge part of the performance. It’s being in the moment, being in that world when you’re actually reading.”
Let’s say you were talking to firefighters battling a wildfire, and you’ve written evocatively about their faces being covered with soot and the trees behind them charred to a crisp. Take yourself back there as you track. If you’re talking about someone whose home burned down, remember what they looked like, and how you felt, as they told you about it. Don’t do it just for emotional stories. If you’re reporting on a new kind of battery technology, think about what the inventor looked like when they described it to you.
Admittedly, it’s harder to do that if you didn’t report from the scene, or if you’re reading a script someone else wrote. But it can be done. Just listen to how NPR hosts read intros, putting their whole selves into every word. What they’re doing is thinking about the meaning of the words coming out of their mouth. Which is what you should do too. If you’re voicing a spot about a plane crash that killed 73 people, don’t just read “73 people died.” Think about what that loss means to the bereaved families. Don’t rush. Don’t be boring. Give it the inflection that it deserves.
Listen to the Clips
And match the mood of your piece. If it’s a fun story, smile as you speak. What Eyder said is true: people can hear you smiling! If it’s a sad story, your voice should reflect it.
Sometimes reporters just want to get the delivery over with. So they read the tracks, and ignore the sound and the actualities. That’s a mistake. Your tone should do justice to the emotional quality of clips. If someone tells a joke in an actuality, come out of it with a little chuckle. If they just spoke through tears, you should talk like it moved you. So listen to the actualities as you track. If you’re tracking in a studio, ask a producer to play them for you when they appear in the script.
Rachel Martin and David Greene did that with a humorous tape and copy about a congressional session in which lawmakers quoted songs by the singer Meat Loaf. You can hear the hosts laughing as they tell it. “If I hadn’t played the tape for them as they were reading it,” says Morning Edition producer Phil Harrell, “and if I hadn’t played the music, it would have sounded completely different. But the way it came together, it was a sparkling moment.”
If you’re not in a studio, you can still play the acts back to yourself on your computer as you read. If even that’s not possible, listen to the tape so many times that you can play them in your head as you track. No matter how well your piece is written, and how good your tape is, it’s a waste if you sound like you’re telling a completely different story.
Be Emphatic
When she began hosting Weekend Edition Sunday, Ayesha would lower the energy in her voice when delivering sad news. She thought it would be an appropriate tone, but she was told that her voice actually sounded flat. The lesson: The delivery must be robust, no matter the tone. “Whatever I’m reading, even if it’s sad, you still have to bring energy to it. It’s not a happy energy,” she says, but it is a forcefulness that matches the impact of what you’re saying. A script might read, “ ‘17 people died in Ukraine today,’ and I think in my head, ‘This is important, this is urgent.’ ”
“The exclamation point is in your voice,” says longtime correspondent John Burnett. “You have to get emphatic about things. And you can sound outraged. It’s not editorializing as long as you’re not giving your opinion. But the voice says that ‘this is fucking important.’ And listeners want that because that’s the boldface, that’s the lede, that’s telling people what the takeaway is.”
A trick that Meghan picked up from Jessica’s training was to take her script and read it with different emotions: proud, loving, angry, bored, jealous and so on. “It’s really interesting to see which emotions actually make you sound the best. And doing that over and over again, you have a shortcut word if you’re slipping into sounding like you’re stale or you’re rushing.”
You can use emotion in your voice to signpost stages in the story. “Whether it’s a seven-minute feature or a newscast spot, there’s a beginning and a middle and an end,” says Jessica. “What’s the journey? What’s the good news? What’s the bad news? What’s the high point? Where are you comforting? Where are you welcoming? Where are you breaking it gently?”