Michael Barbaro and Zoe Chace in Conversation with Daniel Alarcón

Michael Barbaro, Zoe Chace and Daniel Alarcón talk about audio reporting at Columbia Journalism School. 

Michael Barbaro, Zoe Chace and Daniel Alarcón talk about audio reporting at Columbia Journalism School. 

The 2019 duPont-Columbia Awards open for entries May 1.

Enter at duPont.org.

To celebrate and inspire, take a listen to this episode with last year’s winners.  

On April 19th, we invited our two 2018 duPont-Columbia Award podcast winners to speak at the Columbia Journalism School.  Michael Barbaro, host of The New York Times’ podcast The Daily, and Zoe Chace, reporter and producer for This American Life, are making some of the most compelling audio journalism today.  They spoke in conversation with acclaimed author - and a podcaster himself - Columbia Journalism School Professor Daniel Alarcón.

"The beauty of narrative news is that it's just a highly rational, nice way of absorbing the news," Barbaro said, "because you're asked to settle in. We ask you to give us 20 minutes and really tell you a story with lots of voices and sound. That's a pleasant way to be told something really awful is happening." Chace, who has been working in radio for ten years, feels a similar mission: "The goal was always telling these longer stories that would explain the moment in a way that had not been explained that way before;  give you a new insight."

They spoke about the rewards and challenges of making stories for audio, the "tyranny of the good talker," and the sense of intimacy that comes from the voice alone. Plus an inside look at the nuts and bolts of how to make duPont Award-winning audio.

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