CLASS - Thursday, October 3, 10 and 17 from 3-5pm PT / 6-8pm ET
Turning Dense Information into Great Stories
Serious work does not have to be boring. Learn how to turn complicated topics in history, economics, environmental issues, and dense daily news into juicy stories. This workshop-style class will help producers, writers, and editors make the hard facts in your stories more palatable.
Key Takeaways
- You will walk away with new techniques for spicing up difficult subject matter such as history, economics, the environment, daily or weekly news, and health care
- You will learn how to gather the best possible tape, interviews, and/or research material even when dealing with potentially dry topics
- You will gather tools for pushing your own creative limits in both narrative structure and writing
About this class
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Thursday, October 3, 10 and 17th, 2024.
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3 - 5pm PT / 6 - 8pm ET
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Virtual
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4 x 90 minute classes
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$335 AIR members
$385 non-members -
Payment plans available at checkout.
Are you making stories about important issues, but struggling to stay creative with form and content? Are you trying to make a historical character or environmental or economic issue come alive? This three week class offers tips, techniques, and workshop space for turning tough or obscure content into exciting, listenable audio storytelling. Whether the topic is economics, history, the environment, health care, or daily or weekly news, this intensive class will help you accelerate your storytelling and turn the boring statistics of the story into driving stories.
This class is good for editors, producers, and writers who are working with complex or potentially boring topics in nonfiction and want to accelerate their storytelling. It is open to beginner and intermediate level storytellers, and will work with each participant on a specific idea or problem looking at how to make the story pop through getting the best tape and research, finding a delightful story structure, and making your writing spicy and fun.
Who is this class for?
Storytellers in any nonfiction genre, particularly those working in podcast, radio, and daily or weekly news
Meet the instructor
Lewis Wallace
Lewis Raven Wallace (they/ze/he) is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina. He’s the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast, distributed by Critical Frequency. He currently holds a position as the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization. In 2018, he cofounded Press On, a southern movement journalism collective where he also served as the Director of Education until 2022. He is a frequent teacher and public speaker about journalistic ethics, radio and audio storytelling, and justice and abolition.
Lewis's stories about economic, environmental, health care, and equity issues have aired on WBEZ, WYSO, Marketplace, NPR, WKAR, Scene on Radio with John Biewen, and Michigan Radio, and appeared in Scalawag Magazine, Environmental Health News, The Outline, Nieman Reports, and many others. Lewis is a 2021 Ford Global Fellow, a 2020 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a 2015 AIR New Voices Fellow.