Audio HNC

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Adding Audio to Your Stories

UPDATED 5/11/2011: Summer Staff—If you’re interested in learning how to create digital audio and add it to your stories, or in converting your HNC stories into audio stories for Aggie Radio and Utah Public Radio, let me know and we’ll set up a training session with Kerry Bringhurst. The rest of this info (from February) more or less applies....

Kerry Bringhurst from Utah Public Radio will join us to talk about collecting audio to accompany your stories. The goal is to create audio clips/segments (actualities) to embed in your stories on HNC. This will give readers the opportunity to hear the actual event. So, for example, if you’re covering a speech, you could record the entire speech and offer that as an option for your readers—they can both read your story and listen to the full speech.

Go to the National Public Radio website and go to, for example, Morning Edition to see sample stories, which include both text and a link to audio. These originate as radio stories, so they may have more sophisticated audio than we will. But you get the idea.

Here’s another, a story with a 1+ minute audio clip. For stories that interns at Utah Public Radio do that are republished on HNC, we can embed the full radio report in the text. Like this by Jesse Dredge on Utah’s “state gun.” Alternatively, if you develop your own audio skills, you could do the reporting on your stories for HNC, and then redo the story for radio. How cool would that be? I’d like all of you to do this. Experiment!

Another multimedia element, of course, is video. Think about taking short (<2 minutes) video clips of people or things in your stories, posting them to YouTube, and then linking them to your HNC stories. As you can see from Jess Allen’s nice story on Cathy Bullock’s bell choir, the addition of photos and video creates a much fuller and satisfying story.

For all your stories, try to think visually—both still photos and video—and think about what your story sounds like when you’re doing the reporting. If you’re covering a concert, some audio of the music and some comments from fans would add to the total package. How cool would it be to have some audio (natural sounds) of the Logan River and screaming kids for a story on rafting? How about selected audio or video clips of an interesting speaker or interview? Think about the possibilities.

We’ve also talked about finding local people with ties to national/global events or stories. Including audio/video of someone from Egypt or Syria or Japan talking about their concern for their family members in the midst of upheavals or disasters adds a “you are there” element to reporting that makes it more real and effective.

Think about it. JCOM has digital audio and video recorders (or you can use your iPhone) that we could train you on, so you could get better play on your stories. Let Ted know if you’re interested in trying it.