0
Votes

Q&A with Ira Glass

By Elliot Kort

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Ira Glass is the host of National Public Radio’s This American Life, an award-winning weekly documentary show he began in Chicago in 1995.

Glass will give a multimedia presentation about storytelling and the process of creating This American Life at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Lied Center. Tickets are $16-$19 for students and $32-$38 for non-students.

photo

Contributed photo

Ira Glass, host of "This American Life," will give a presentation on Saturday, Feb. 20 at 7:30 p.m.

Audio clip

Ira Glass interview

Jayplay: In the era of podcasting and changing media, how do you feel the process of American storytelling is changing?

Ira Glass: I don’t think it’s changing. I don’t think that there is a real thing like American storytelling. I feel like people tell each other stories all day long. It’s part of normal conversation. That’s always been true; it’ll always be true. The thing that has happened in the last 20 years is the rise of memoirs in publishing and journalism like we do where people are applying the tools of journalism to very, very personal stories, but at this point, that’s kind of old news. A show like The Moth where people are standing on stage and telling funny or emotional stories are just an extension of that movement. There’s a rising tide of all that that’s on the scene in the same way that independent film is around. It’s this thing that’s happening, and it’s not the biggest thing, but for people who enjoy it, it’s there.

JP: Are there any shows you’re watching with great interest?

IG: Radiolab, out of WNYC. It’s stories that are science-related, but somehow, you just hear the whole world in it. It’s out for fun.

JP: If Radiolab is out for fun, what would you say This American Life is out for?

IG: Oh, we’re definitely out for fun. The whole point of the show is to make an hour of radio that’s so compelling you can’t turn it off.

From the beginning, I feel one of the things that was new about our show at the point we went on the air was that we were going to be a public radio show that was going to take as its mission to be entertaining and not just informative.

JP: You’ve received a lot of recognition for your work and gained a lot of notoriety. Does that affect you? Does that affect how you produce your show?

IG: It doesn’t affect me. It’s still hard to find a good story; it’s still hard to make a good story. The actual nuts and bolts of my job are as hard as they ever were. What’s easier is I don’t have to sweat about how we’re going to be funded next year in the way that I did in the first five years of the radio show. That was a constant struggle.

JP: After two seasons, you’ve stopped production on the television version of This American Life. What happened?

IG: It was just hard to do a radio show and a TV show at the same time, of the style we do. It’s just hard doing two projects at once, especially when those projects are as labor-intensive as both our radio show and TV show were. After two years — and a really good experience — we said that we had to kill either the TV show or the radio show. And as good as the TV show was, we picked the radio show.

JP: Had you considered expanding your staff so that you could accommodate both?

IG: We did. The fact is we’re not that big of a staff. There’s only six or seven of us. The reason why the radio show feels the way it does is because we produce stories in a certain way with a certain set of ideas in our head. So we can’t hire six or seven people and expect them to have the same sensibility. We’d have to hire and indoctrinate them for a year or two, and then they’d be ready to do it. It didn’t seem practical.

Comments

Q&A with Ira Glass

Elliot, Public Radio International distributes This American Life and not NPR. A little fact checking before publishing, Please!

Q&A with Ira Glass

That's funny, This American Life is listed under NPR's synicated programs.

Advertisement