Guest Lecture 13 - Sept 28 (17-19) - Nancy Updike

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Time and place: Wednesday September 28, 17-19 in lecture hall B3

Title: "Radio is better than other media and I can prove it"

Guest: Nancy Updike, Producer and reporter at the radio show "This American Life"

Talk: Radio in the US is doing shockingly well, while other media are struggling. Why? Nancy Updike, who has worked in television, print and radio, goes into detail about how to tell stories well on the radio, what makes a radio story good enough that people will remember it years later, and why radio beats TV and print.

About: Nancy Updike is one of the founding producers of This American Life. Besides radio, she has worked in television and in print, doing stories for The New York Times Magazine, The LA Weekly and others. Her television work won her an Emmy Award, and her hour-long radio documentary about U.S. private contractors working in Iraq won the Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award and the Murrow Award. She has reported from Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, as well as the US.

Literature: Daniel suggests you listen to an episode of Nancy's radio show This American Life:

- You being media technology students, I would suggest the recent (July 22) show, "When patents attack!" about "patent trolls" who hinder technological innovations by suing companies that violate their tenuous broad-and-very-fuzzy intellectual property rights.

- Something else that might be of interest is the last episode (18 minutes) of the even more recent (Aug 26) show on "Gossip". It gives you an insider's perspective on how reality television shows create drama out of thin air and how the events we see on the television screen bears only a tenuous relationship to reality. ...Or maybe not, since this episode in itself is a work of fiction...

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