NPR’s On the Media dissects the NPR editing process
NPR’s On the Media has a fascinating behind the scenes look at how much editing goes into an NPR story. We learn that NPR correspondents record ambient audio which is then mixed in with their regular reports, which in turn are edited to remove ums, ahs, and the like.
My favorite quote (from Alex Chadwick, one of the hosts on Day to Day):
I think there’s no question that most people listening to NPR programs are unaware of the artiface that’s there.
[...]
Well, why do they try to make it sound that way if it’s not that way, if it’s not real? Because the world of presentation and the media isn’t really real, in that sense. It is real, but it’s kind of a heightened reality, it’s a better reality, it’s a cleaner and more articulate reality.
I always wondered why NPR radio shows sounded so much better (in a technical sense) than most of the radio shows I’ve heard on talk radio. Well, now I know… the NPR guys aren’t even doing their shows live! In hindsight that’s obvious; I just took it for granted that the NPR news segments were done live.
You can listen to the show (real audio), or you can read the transcript. I highly recommend listening to the show, because then you can hear the before and after editing clips.
[via Brand Autopsy via waxy.org]
January 11th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Every once in a while, NPR does live coverage of some news event—inaugurals, SotUA, conventions, 9/11—and you can tell that it’s live. I guess that it never occurred to me that the news recaps are canned, but thinking on it, they are.
That’s also a lot of editing. I’ve edited out stuff in my own speech before when I did radio, and the time was always 1.5x or more of the actual clip length.