“The atomic element is the story”

A little while ago, I wrote about why I think segmentation matters for on-demand radio. In an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, This American Life production manager Seth Lind agrees:

[U]sers often don’t want the whole show. “Right now people often share an episode, but they’ll say, ‘Act 3!’ Or, ‘Fast-forward to this time!’” Lind told me. For users, he discovered, “the atomic element is the story, rather than the episode.” That might seem kind of obvious to web publishers, but it doesn’t necessarily fit with the narrative philosophy of the show — a handcrafted hour of storytelling, woven together by a common theme. “I think we’re sort of purists, in terms of wanting people to get the entire episode and to encourage them to listen to it as a whole,” Lind said.

Soon, each TAL story will have its own page, with its own URL and a full transcript.

CBC, please, start your photocopiers.

This American Infographic

A very, very cool project: This American Infographic.

My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.

That’s a tall order, given that there are almost 15 years’ worth of episodes. Can’t wait to see more of these.

via @zuschlag, via For Me, For You

Video: Ira Glass at the Gel Conference

It’s about surprise and humour. It’s a bit of Storytelling 101 (event leads to event leads to event leads to universal truth). But it’s mostly about craft, and if you tell stories, it’s totally worth 32 minutes of your time. From 2007, here’s Ira Glass at the Gel Conference:

Present again is Ira’s familiar “taking the tools of journalism and applying them to people whom you wouldn’t normally apply them to” mantra.

Particularly interesting is the explanation for why TAL doesn’t have billboards (or “bills”):

One of the differences between our show and the other shows on the public radio is that the other shows will start their show with a list of what’s coming up on the program, which I feel is a sort of singularly uninteresting way to start something. Actually, on our show we would just start the action going. Like, I feel that if we could draw you into the dream of it, you’ll be inside it before you can even think about why you’re inside it or what it is. And it’s far more irresistible.

You can watch the whole video at the Gel site, or if you’re feeling thieve-y, you can just download the FLV file.

“You are sombody that needs pledge drive justice”

Via the latest This American Life newsletter, some very, very funny pledge drive spots from Ira Glass. Click to listen:

• Megan.mp3
• Paul.mp3
• Kathleen.mp3

Though they’re funny, I don’t think these as effective as Ira’s twice-yearly, straight-up, arithmetic-based podcast promos.

This American Donut?

Dunkin’ Donuts’ America Runs on Dunkin’ campaign graphic seems to include a bit of a nod to This American Life, no?

How to download old This American Life episodes as MP3s

Once upon a time, you could download old episodes of This American Life by grabbing MP3 file locations from the M3U files posted on their website. The MP3 files lived here:

http://audio.wbez.org/tal/SHOWNUMBER.mp3

But that stopped working.

These days, though you can still listen to TAL archives, downloading them has become a bit trickier because the shows are hidden behind a flash player. But, that flash player is still pointing to an actual downloadable MP3, and Christopher Soghoian has figured out where they live:

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/SHOWNUMBER.mp3

Come on… that directory structure is pretty hilarious.

Replace SHOWNUMBER with the episode number (338 for example), and you’re good to go.

If you download and enjoy This American Life, you really should donate.