Finding the fresh approach

Thirty years ago, All Things Considered was a fledgling, frankly alternative source of news and information; today, it's one of the nation's dominant news magazines. Somehow All Things Considered has managed to take on this expanded role without losing its unique perspective.

Shortly after becoming the show's senior editor (a job I held for five years), I got a lesson in ATC-style news reporting. In August 1996, Amtrak announced that to save money, it would eliminate rail service in several parts of the country. Typically, a broadcast journalist might report that story by talking to an Amtrak official, or a transportation analyst. ATC wanted to cover the story somehow -- but in our own fashion.

Noah Adams suggested interviewing an employee at one of the train stations that would be eliminated. Then-Editorial Assistant Carol Klinger worked the phones, looking for just the right person -- and in Longview, Texas, she found a fifth-generation railroader who had been in the business for 25 years. Then it was up to Noah to ask him the right questions, the ones another reporter might not.

In the end, the "facts" of the story -- which rail schedules would be canceled, how much Amtrak hoped to save -- were dispatched in the story's introduction. Our story focused instead on people: how closing the station would affect folks in Longview, including our veteran railroad man. He told us the kind of railroad watch he carried, the shape of the ticket punch he used -- and how it would feel to shutter the old station. ATC presented the news; but more, we told the story.
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         -- Jonathan Kern, Executive Producer for Training, NPR News

Among other ATC broadcasts whose fresh approaches made them memorable:

What countless Americans heard in the mid-90s, Robert Siegel dissected. "It's not words or phrases," Siegel said, "but a melody" -- a sentence that veers up in pitch to end with "an implied question, a silent 'you know?'" The speech pattern is called a rising intonation. When Siegel heard it spreading from hip-talking teens to their elders, he turned to linguists for context, analysis -- and amusement.
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When rebel forces overran Monrovia in April 1996, the Liberian capital was a world away from most of NPR's audience. Linda Wertheimer took listeners inside the conflict in an unavoidable, personal way, through a telephone interview with one Catholic Relief Services aid worker pinned down in her apartment. "I'm just trying to sit and wait it out," Dula James told Wertheimer, as gunfire exploded less than a block away.
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During a January blizzard, most media were reporting on how the weather was keeping people at home, closing the roads, and generally complicating life. Noah Adams found a Presbyterian minister who confessed he actually liked the weather -- and who told ATC what's redeeming about a two-foot snowfall.
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Contents Copyright 2001, National Public Radio