Current (https://current.org/tag/this-american-life/page/3/)
The mass shootings last year in Colorado, Wisconsin and Connecticut reawakened Americans to recurring tragedies of gun violence and rekindled a national debate about gun control — one that public radio and television have chronicled and analyzed through ongoing programs and the package of special broadcasts that aired on PBS last month.
Judges in the 72nd annual Peabody competition selected winners as “the best in electronic media for the year 2012,” including PBS programs presented on Independent Lens, NPR’s coverage of the Syrian conflict and a ProPublica investigation produced with This American Life.
As one of the most popular podcasts of all time, Public Radio International’s This American Life has had to deal with its fair share of imitators and parodies over the years, and many other podcasts have appropriated the “This American…” moniker to draw attention to their own audio. On Feb. 5, SF Weekly spotlighted one such effort that was reportedly getting heat from Glass and his attorneys over trademark violation: This American Whore, a podcast covering sex workers’ issues, created in November 2012 by Siouxsie Q, a San Francisco sex worker. Siouxsie Q first tweeted on Feb.
Among the new radio programs inspired by “This American Life” are two productions for non–English-speaking listeners.
This American Life host and public radio superstar Ira Glass continues his foray into scripted entertainment, as a producer of a new television series in development at the Sundance Channel. The project, billed as T, will follow Terrence, a transgender man who has recently undergone sex reassignment surgery, and the story will be split between his present life as a male and former life as a female college student named Thora. Fellow TAL producer Alissa Shipp will also produce T.
Glass ventured into the world of independent film this summer with Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me, which he co-wrote and produced. The film, which had a budget of $1 million, has grossed more than $2.2 million in theaters to date, making it a financial success. This is also not the first time Glass has dealt with a commercial TV station.
Humorist and essayist David Rakoff, a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life since the program’s inception, died Aug. 9 after a fight with cancer that dated to his 20s. He was 47. Rakoff worked in publishing before becoming a full-time writer. He appeared dozens of times on TAL to recite his essays, which often balanced pessimism with a wry sensibility.
‘Sleepwalk With Me,’ is the program’s latest (and biggest) attempt to break into the movie business.
“There is no objective, journalistic version of the show,” Daisey said. “I will be, always, making constant lies of omission by leaving out tons and tons and reams and reams of details.”
Within a few hours of phoning the translator who refuted key details in a This American Life show about factories that manufacture Apple products in China, Marketplace correspondent Rob Schmitz was on a plane to meet her…
Current’s Feb. 27 story on This American Life’s recent breakthroughs with enterprise reporting describes the inspiration behind “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” the story on Apple factories in China that was later retracted. Glass tells Current that after seeing Daisey’s monologue last October, he was already “editing the radio version in my head” as he left the theater. “I thought [Daisey] was doing something remarkable,” said Glass, “which is taking a fact that we all already know — that these devices we love are made in China in conditions that are probably not so wonderful, and he makes us feel something about it.”
Glass invited Daisey to lunch, and he recalls feeling nervous when they met Nov. 16.
Update: On March 16, This American Life retracted “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” its Jan. 6 broadcast that adapted monologist Mike Daisey’s story about working conditions in Chinese gadget factories. Read more. Crunching a two-hour stage monologue into a 39-minute radio piece was a huge challenge for Ira Glass, e.p. and host of This American Life. Glass decided to adapt The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs after seeing monologist Mike Daisey perform the show that skewers Apple and Jobs for the harsh working conditions in factories where adored Apple products are assembled.
Update: On March 16, This American Life retracted “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” its Jan. 6 broadcast that adapted monologist Mike Daisey’s story about working conditions in Chinese gadget factories. Read more. For 16 years, public radio host Ira Glass has charmed listeners with offbeat, quirky stories that captivated minds and won awards. Lately, he’s also been kicking butt, taking names and making a difference. It’s not quite that aggressive.
Ira Glass didn’t know what he was in for when he walked into the post office in the seaside burg of Brunswick, Ga., and asked the first person he met to name the most interesting character in town. Glass and his This American Life production team had given themselves a special assignment: to collect the best stories they could stumble upon far off the beaten path of their day-to-day reporting routines. They followed the standard operating procedure of the Atlanta Journal’s “Georgia Rambler” columnist Charles Salter, who researched more than 500 columns in the late 1970s by roving around small towns of the Peach State in a company car. Nine of the radio show’s producers and reporters adopted Salter’s technique for an episode that aired last summer. They drew the names of their assigned Georgia locales from a baseball cap, went in-country with mikes and recording equipment and, on fast turnaround, collected a trove of human-interest material.
It’s not the best way to collect big annual gifts from station members, pubcasting fundraisers agree. But This American Life’s producers confirmed that giving-by-texting among their many devoted listeners holds considerable potential. Beginning last November, appeals for $5 donations included in four of the show’s weekly podcasts brought in $142,880 from 28,576 listeners, as of April 15, according to Seth Lind, production manager. To donate, a podcast listener simply texts “LIFE” to 25383 and TAL receives a $5 donation, minus fees, paid through the giver’s wireless phone bill. The vast majority of the text gifts to TAL were sent during the campaign’s first month, but fans continue to respond.
In this Q&A, Karen Everhart talks with This American Life producer Alex Blumberg and NPR reporter Adam Davidson.
This American Life is hot. The weekly radio program produced by WBEZ, Chicago, and distributed nationally since June 1996, airs on 325 public radio stations. Ira Glass, TAL’s creator and producer, has become something of a celebrity. The subject of lengthy feature stories in national magazines, he now turns up in TV and radio interviews to publicize a Rhino Records CD, “Lies, Sissies and Fiascos: The Best of This American Life.” His own life, frequently described by himself and others, emerges as one of frenetic activity, a contemporary Scheherazade, obsessively devoted to creating stories that he hopes “will give voice to those outside the mainstream.”
Believe it or not, there’s a stone tablet full of radio principles guiding This American Life. Ira Glass laid them out in a talk …
This American Life is unlike anything on public radio. But what would you expect from a man who once devoted an hour of Talk of the Nation to an imaginary presidential inaugural ball? The iconoclastic weekly program, on the air nationally since June 1996, already is a success by several objective measures — most notably, a Peabody Award in its first year. (“Holy cow, I’ve never seen that before!,” says an impressed producer.) Within 10 months, 111 stations picked up This American Life, including the big stations in nine of the top 10 markets (D.C. is the holdout). Recently, CPB’s Radio Program Fund gave the show a three-year $350,000 award — about twice what the show was seeking.