https://overcast.fm/+AATXlFld6-4/1:12:18

Today in a call with Steve H and friends, I was reminded I’d sat on sharing this…

This is from On Being. Specifically from the unedited version: Krista Tippett releases the whole raw conversation alongside the produced show, and this one is with the poet Ocean Vuong, recorded on stage at On Air Fest in March 2020 — or, as she puts it, right before the world changed. After about an hour they opened the floor, and a producer and professor from Toronto — she uses those raw interviews as a teaching tool in her own classroom — asked Tippett a question about her own work rather than Vuong’s: how do you choose what to cut?

Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. Well, so so you know, sometimes people who are younger ask me, “How did you start your podcast? And I say, “Well, we started a public radio show. And they look at me like, “You know, what am I talking about? So because you know, podcast didn’t exist when we started this. So interestingly, I mean, even I had to fight so hard, you know, those years ago. Even to say we’re going to do one conversation for the whole hour-that felt way too long form. People were very uncomfortable with it, and as a result, we’re on not prime time. I want to be quick because I want to get back to you. But at some point before podcasting, maybe right as podcasting came along, Lily’s here. Actually, it wasn’t my idea. One of my producers, Trent Gillis, at the time said that if we really believe in this value, virtue of transparency that we talk about, that the digital world is calling us all to, then we need to walk the talk. And it felt really counterintuitive, having been in media before this digital world. And I think we had this impassioned discussion for a year. I was like, “Why do we do all this work to get it down to 51 minutes if we’re going to give people the mess? And it is messy. I mean, it’s this is less messy. But if I’m in the studio with somebody and I have 90 minutes, I can let them go down some road that I really don’t know if there’s going to be anything there, but it’s okay because there might be, and if not, we can come back. We found with younger people, and we found that it gets used in like high school classes, and because we have they we give the raw, they trust the rest of the media project more. So that it’s been, and it’s huge. It’s hundreds of 1000s. I mean, I don’t know what the numbers are now, but it’s a very large percent, very large numbers of people in every show who listen to the unedited.

~ Krista Tippett

ɕ