The other side of the microphone

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is October 26th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: behind the scenes at WORLD Radio.

Every week, we say thank you to all the people that make this program possible. But you only hear a fraction of what goes into the reporting and writing and producing of each episode. You hear the finished product. What about all the steps that came before?

WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown is here now to give a peek behind the curtain.

JOHANSEN BROWN: Colorado State Patrol officer, Brian Lyons says investigators will—hang on, who wrote this sentence? Josh!

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: Do you know how many times we edit ourselves around here? It’s a lot.

JOHANSEN BROWN: Uhh, let's say ‘will look into.’ There we go.

It’s not just reporters on the air, either.

WATTERS: I'm Harrison Watters, and I'm the producer of the world and everything in it, which sounds rather blasphemous. But it's the title that I have. Which sounds dumb. I'm not actually gonna say that.

See? Even our producer.

A lot of people have their fingerprints all over each program here at WORLD Radio. That’s why we have so many strategy meetings.

WATTERS: So I've got scripts started for that. I mean, it'd be mainly working on World Tour, but or Washington Wednesday, if anyone wants to work on a kicker.

Usually, these meetings are over Zoom. But for this one we got to be in person, everyone gathered in a conference room in Asheville near WORLD’s headquarters. It’s loud because people from all the other departments like the magazine and marketing are milling around chatting. A lot of us are meeting each other in person for the first time.

BUTLER: So, I’ll make sure there’s two mics over there in Jonathan’s office.

Here at the round plastic table are Mary Reichard and Nick Eicher, Paul Butler and Myrna Brown, Mary Muncy, Kristen Flavin, Benj Eicher…you know, the usual suspects.

As producer, Harrison is usually the one wrangling the cats.

WATTERS: In some ways, I think what I do is a little bit like a square dance caller. Like I'm not necessarily the one dancing, but I'm the one that's helping make sure that everything happens when it needs to.

He helps make sure all the pieces of the program work together. Different editors work on our features, news, and commentary segments, so we have to make sure we’re not overlapping or overlooking coverage.

WATTERS: How do we want to tell all these stories? And when do we want to tell them? Does it make sense to put two education stories next to each other or on different days? What commentary is going to help land the week. What kind of tone do we want to end with versus start with?

Because we’re all in different places all over the world, it means a lot of communication over platforms like Slack, Google Docs, and Dropbox.

WATTERS: Nobody hears the final program, except Johnny and Carl who stay up late, until the day it comes out. So we're all seeing all of this in scripts. And so being able to see…okay, this is how it's going to sound if all of these pieces, some which were written today, some which were written two months ago, are going to all come together in one product.

Breaking news is a whole other puzzle to fit together. Six times a day, the breaking news team puts together the Sift. It goes out on its own feed and on syndicated radio stations across the country.

SCHUMACHER: We basically write two of them the night before, and we write four of them the day of…

Josh Schumacher is on the breaking news team, dashing out scripts every couple of hours. You might think that having so many hard deadlines would mean a reporter has to be very disciplined. Which is true. But more than that, they have to be flexible—able to turn on a dime if the news changes.

SCHUMACHER: We're having to flip so fast between different topics with different kind of rules and different terminology and stuff like that. Eventually, you just kind of like run into this fear that like you're not digging deeply enough to like, actually get things accurate. That's my biggest fear.

There are checks in the system—editors pushing back, asking the writers, “Are you sure 20 states have done that? Are you sure it was a coast guard vessel and not a naval vessel?” But Josh still stresses about it.

SCHUMACHER: It is this kind of a nightmare for me like me, and that neurosis, like, we know each other pretty well.

Sometimes, things still slip through the cracks. Harrison listens to the program with bated breath.

WATTERS: There are mornings where I get up and listen, I'm like, What on earth like, that was the dumbest thing. Like, either we left something in or we said something that was done like this morning, we we forgot to update Travis's title in the program.

The audio techs are the last line of defense. They take all the raw sound…clips from interviews, press conferences, ambient sound, as well as the reporter’s narration, and cut it all together into one seamless product.

SOUND: [Typing and clicking]

BROWN: Ukraine’s parliament…

BENJ: Okay this is going to be crazy long.

Benj Eicher puts together most of the Siftcasts, and he does rough cuts for the program. Those are kind of like audio drafts of each story. So we can hear what the segment will sound like and make final tweaks to sound design or content.

EICHER: Oh wait, that’s all I need from that bite. Woohoo! Okay we are 30 seconds over.

Once we’ve made final changes to the rough cut, Benj sends the files on to Carl Peetz and Johnny Franklin. And if you’re wondering just how late do they stay up to get the program to us early…

FRANKLIN: Actually about about 11:30 or 12 I will start to go and my efficiency becomes very—decreased. Yeah, what used to take half an hour now takes about an hour, hour and a half, because I'm just kind of staring at the screen for a while and then I'll look at finder and say, Okay, what was I actually looking for?

Johnny and Carl put all the pieces of the program together, and then they send it out into the world.

That’s just a sliver of what goes into the making of the program. I didn’t even get into the interviewing/reporting process, editing and voicing, pre-rolls, billboard, kicker. It’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of collaboration. Often with hiccups along the way.

But at the end of the week, I think Harrison speaks for all of us.

WATTERS: Friday morning is such a joy to be able to listen to that program and then hear Myrna or whoever the co host is that day, encouraging us to go to church. It's like that's when my weekend can begin, is on Friday and know I've done I put in a good week's work to be able to get to that point.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown in Asheville, North Carolina.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.