Sarah Hutchins | Feb. 23, 2010
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| Photo by James Brosher |
| WFIU news director Stan Jastrzebski talked to students last week about audio storytelling. He recently covered the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. |
Jastrzebski told students he traveled to Poland after he received a call from organizers at the Candles Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute, who were looking for media coverage of their trip. His response: Take me along and I’ll pitch the story to National Public Radio.
When Jastrzebski approached an editor at NPR, however, the response was not what he had hoped. An earthquake had just devastated Haiti and the national air time would be devoted to covering the disaster and other pressing issues, producers told him. But NPR was interested in the story – if Jastrzebski could get it another way.
Thanks to a grant from the Russian and East European Institute at IU, Jastrzebski found the funding to tag along with the teachers, students and even the mayor of Terre Haute. Also along were media students from Batchelor Middle School in Bloomington, who had covered the story before with Candles founder Eva Kor and who have won many awards for their documentaries about the holocaust.
So Jastrzebski did have his story. Once in Poland, he said he spend days collecting interviews and natural sound for his stories. NPR also required that he take at least one photo to go with every audio piece.
"You’ve all heard about convergence," he said of the need to produce more than simple audio. "It’s really happening."
Jastrzebski edited and produced the audio features from Poland. He said he wanted the stories to air in conjunction with the anniversary, not months later. As a result, he had about 24 hours to produce each story.
"You want to meet the deadlines the news department would normally have," he said. "Don’t make the audience conform to you. You conform to them."
International time changes turned helped extend Jastrzebski’s deadline. His small hotel room, however, did not provide the best environment for sound recording. So Jastrzbeski improvised and found a way to record his voice overs.
"I leaned out the window with my microphone to avoid the echo," he said.
In addition to technical troubleshooting, Jastrzebski had to deal with the emotional challenges of touring the death camps. In one audio segment, group members light matches and read memorials to the dead.
"That was the part where it really started to get to you," Jastrzebski said. "You understood what the week meant to everyone else."
Most of Jastrzebski’s work featured natural sound and interviews. The Terre Haute group toured the camp with Holocaust survivor and Candles founder Eva Kor, whom Jastrzebski talked to while walking around the grounds.
"Don’t be afraid to be intrusive with a microphone," he said, describing how he tried to get a microphone close to Kor whenever she talked.
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| Photo by James Brosher |
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Jastrzebski’s overall advice was simple: Be nice and be patient. Still, "don’t be afraid to be intrusive with a microphone" he said, in order to get good audio. |
"The language of audio production is universal," he said.
In addition to discussing his trip to Poland, Jastrzebski gave students tips for audio storytelling projects.
Sophomore Tessa Wilhelm said this was the second time Jastrzebski visited the class. She said that he has helped her with audio news ideas.
"When he came to our class the first time, he gave us handouts that he wrote with his own personal advice about how to create radio stories, how to pitch, what to do and what not to do," Wilhelm said. "It was almost all the advice we’ll ever need compiled into a few pages."
Neal-Estes said he news director has acted as a sounding board all semester, with students pitching their ideas to him and using his feedback to refine their story ideas.
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