Pushkin's Julia Barton on The Best Audio Storytelling of the Year

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

It's the middle of the night. Your room is dark except for the LED numbers on your alarm clock. They spell out 3:30 am. You've just woken up with a great story idea. You need to scratch it down on the pad next to you so it doesn't disappear. 

It doesn't. You get excited about it, you start doing some research. Maybe you talk to a few people, ask some questions. The story starts to take shape. You invite a guest to record an interview. It's starting to have form and meaning and music. You're up late too many times trying to make it great or maybe just finish it and put it out there in the world. Why? 

I think for all of us, it's because we want to make an impact. We want listeners to resonate with our work, we want to know it matters. 

Along comes Julia Barton. You might not know her name, but you definitely know her work. She's the vice president and executive editor of Pushkin Industries, Malcolm Gladwell’s company. She shapes Revisionist History and so many more of Pushkin's podcasts and audiobooks. She's a force, which is why you need to listen to Pushkin's new anthology, The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022. It's a first annual collection of the finest work Julia and her colleagues at Pushkin and beyond identified as powerful and innovative. David Sedaris wrote the foreword.

Coming up, Julia and I pull back the curtain on the creative choices of three of the top audio makers in this collection. Tune in. Next time you wake up with a brilliant idea in the wee hours, you'll be glad you did. 

This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved podcast host by pulling apart one episode at a time together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.

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Elaine Appleton Grant: Storytellers, this season is ending soon. To celebrate, we're sharing your voices on a future episode. Record a voice memo telling us your favorite Sound Judgment episode, and why. Include your name and the name of your podcast. We may air your message as early as our season finale on June 29th. Email it today to allies@podcast allies.com. That's allies@podcast allies.com. And see our show notes for a contest entry form to win merch from one of the podcasts we featured this season. Good luck, and thank you. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Welcome, Julia Barton, to Sound Judgment. I am so delighted to have you here.

Julia Barton

Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

Elaine Appleton Grant  

I want to start by asking you to read something you wrote for a column you named Audio Danger more than a decade ago.

Julia Barton 

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That's what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face, to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don't drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

Elaine Appleton Grant

That piece was reprinted in a new Audio Danger column, a column Julia revived recently for Storyboard, a publication of the Nieman Foundation. Nieman is an incredible organization that administers the oldest fellowship for journalists in the world. Julia recently won that fellowship. She'll be part of the 2024 class. 

I love that passage.

Julia Barton

Thank you.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So with—because I think about it the exact same way, but I have never summed it up so eloquently, and with so much fun. You know, I mean, in public radio, one of the first things that we all learn is all listeners have something else to do. They're washing the dishes. That's the typical line. Or you're driving. I love ignore your children. That's hysterical.

Julia Barton 

Also impossible. But why not throw it in there?

Elaine Appleton Grant

Exactly. Yeah.

So with the Audio Danger passage in mind, as we're about to talk about, you just curated what you folks claim is the first audio anthology of best audio stories of its kind. How do you define what the best is?

Julia Barton 

Well, I mean, it's a word that's a conceit. It’s a nice, tight word that fits on a cover. But it's also things that—when we put out the nomination process, first to the staff at Pushkin, and then we reached out to people whose opinions we value, just to get a wider diversity of of nominations, we were thinking about stuff that we as practitioners can learn from, that would inspire us, that would create our own professional admiration, and also challenge us to do better in our own work by hearing people successfully take risks with the form.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

And you use in particular, the words innovative and powerful in the description of the anthology. With so much audio being produced every single day, how much did you wrestle with what actually is innovative?

Julia Barton

Yeah, it's a big challenge, right? So some of the stuff in there is weird. So to me, that's hard to pull off. Again, it's things that took risks. And then there was also sort of an informal test, which was, did it stay with me days later? Was I still thinking about it or ruminating on some moment, or puzzling over some question? Did I want to hear more? If it was part of a series did I want to hear the next episode? Did I want to go into the back catalog and see what else this person has made because they’re so original? 

So there were all those kinds of questions. As well as technique—could I learn from this storyteller? Or this production team, or their choices? Would it make me better at my job?

Elaine Appleton Grant

Mm-hmm. And then the other word was powerful, which I was particularly curious about. How do you determine whether something's powerful?

Julia Barton

Again, all of those criteria, but also, did it just do something that I don't understand? Like, I don't know how they pulled that off. I don't know why I'm crying right now, but I'm crying about this person that I previously, until I started listening 20 minutes ago, I didn't—I knew nothing about. 

And I know, from making audio, that those are choices that the producers make. It doesn't come out of the microphone or into the microphone in that particular fashion, usually. There's something about the elements of writing, of voice, of adjacency in the way you assemble the tape, that creates that emotional impact. Or even that intellectual impact. Or it's making me laugh, and I'm still laughing about it three days later, when I remember it. All of those things are challenging to pull off.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right? And let me try to understand what you're doing. I mean, that's what Sound Judgment is all about, is let's pull it apart so that we can understand what you did in such and such a spot, or throughout the structure, or your choice of a particular topic or a person in the first place. All the different choices that we make as producers and hosts, delivery, to keep people compelled, listening all the way through, and coming back. There's so much attention paid—and in all the writing and talking about the podcast industry—to the industry and to the business behind it. And so little attention paid to the craft.

Julia Barton

I'm right there with you. Shining a light on this craft that is literally invisible. So people need to shine a light on it. Because otherwise, if we don't do it ourselves, no one's gonna do it.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Well, and you called out one of the biggest problems, I think, in the industry right now, in your first Audio Danger column of this year, when you said the democratization of the technology that's allowed the podcast industry to boom has also sort of doubled down on this idea that it's just talking. 

Julia Barton

Yeah. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right. Talk about that. And then we'll launch into pulling apart some of some of the audio.

Julia Barton 

Right. So there's a great benefit to having a form that's accessible. You can upload a voice memo and call it a podcast. And there's value in that. I definitely think that is true. But the issue is, can people make a living at it? Is there a way to be—have a profession? And that's the challenge, right? And I think, especially because audio is not visible, it sort of bypasses the part of our mind that categorizes things. 

I think it's easier to categorize things when you see them than to hold all the audio categories in your head, so to speak. And so when things are not categorized, they blur together as one thing. So the show that I make with Michael Lewis, where we spend a good part of a year creating seven episodes, comes across as the same as the voice memo podcast. I mean, you could hear them side by side and know they were not the same thing, but you might not know exactly why they're not. 

It reminds me of—there's this funny spoof of podcasting on Portlandia where they're narrating the podcast in the police station, and then sticking the microphone in front of people to talk about the crime. And there's a little ukulele, mandolin player behind them, scoring instantly. I mean, it was making fun of podcasting, but it was also—that's what people maybe think how it's made. You know, it takes 20 minutes to make a 20 minute show, and that's just so not true. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right? It's not true at all.

Clip from Portlandia 

Man: I'm Darren Blum. 

Woman: And I'm Dana Bloom.

Man: And this is Forgotten America: Rural Footprints.

Man: Pretty good little tune right there. 

Woman: It's only been three hours since the body was discovered, but already this case is being badly bungled.

Man: It's important to remember that many of these cops are poor, uneducated, and bad at their jobs. There's an old saying in this part of the country, and it goes like this. I can't read. 

Sheriff Hicks was visibly upset. You would… 

Julia Barton

Yeah. And there's an illusion of ease that I think we have to openly talk about our craft and about the challenges and also show appreciation when someone pulls something off. So there's different ways of doing that. There are awards, there are shows like yours. And Best Audio Storytelling is just one iteration of that project. I think anyone who's in the profession wants to stop having these arguments about how hard can it be, because it doesn't serve anybody. It doesn't serve even the people who think it should be easy, because then they end up getting frustrated when it's not easy, and when the thing that they thought they could get for $9 is not Invisibilia.

So it's in everyone's interest to try to bring more attention to the craft and the difficulty and the celebrating the risks. Because when people take risks, there are probably a lot of other versions of that that got tossed, because the only way you know it's working is to keep trying it and then listening to it again and again. And then having other people listen to it, and then tweaking it, and then listening to it. Again, it's time intensive.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Let's dive into a couple of your choices. One is I Can Do Anything, which is written and hosted by the author Jason Reynolds. It's part of a four part Radiotopia podcast called My Mother Made Me and it's very much about his relationship with his mother, Isabell. This is an essay, but it's a richly produced one, and it does include some conversation with Isabell. Why did you choose it for the anthology?

Julia Barton

Well, I wanted to start the anthology with something highly written, and then kind of cross over through different types of storytelling to something that was highly non narrated. And then when I listened to this first episode, I was like, That's so great. His writing—you know, because that's a real high wire act, when it's just you and your voice. There is tape in there, but it really stands or falls on whether you want to listen more to this writing, basically. And he's such a master of wordplay. I mean, the whole title, I Can Do Anything, and also the series title, My Mother Made Me. He's playing with the nuances of those verbs. There's such a delight in that and his confidence in that. 

But then he also—the first episode of My Mother Made Me is like a mini overview of the state of podcasting. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yes, it is!

Julia Barton

There's a lot of montage and play with tape. And so it serves as an introduction, a second or third introduction to the collection, right?

Clip from My Mother Made Me

Jason Reynolds: Podcasts on sex and love, on crime, true and otherwise. And of course, there's no way to overlook the, I don’t know, at least 2 million interview shows.

So, what would I have to add to this overloaded treasure trove? Well, turns out, not much. I'm only doing this because my mother made me.

Julia Barton

He's really playing with how to engage listeners. And something that was a real revelation for me when I went from editing for public radio to editing authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis and Jill Lepore, Michael Specter—these people are masters of prose. And sometimes…You know, we have all these folkloric rules in broadcasting, like, Oh, if your copy is more than an inch long or it's like—then it's bad broadcast style.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right.

Julia Barton

And these people don't subscribe to any of that. They're like, I have to write the words and keep people entertained with just my words. And sometimes the job of the editor is to just get out of the way. And we couldn't do that in broadcasting, really. I mean, we did have these little audio essays on public radio occasionally. But that form kind of died out in the 80s and 90s, the weird audio essay, and then I started to miss it. 

But now it's back with a vengeance, which is great. And it's a way for authors also to stretch their skills, and reach people in different ways and to play with words and new ways. And there's a joy to that that's new.

Elaine Appleton Grant  

What made me want to move from print to radio many years ago was its immersive quality, the theater of the mind. That as listeners, we can be stuck in traffic one minute, and in an entirely different world rooting for a character we just met in the next. It takes all kinds of skills to create these worlds in listeners’ heads, from writing to sound design to story structure, to delivery, to the ability to paint scenes so well that as a listener, you can smell the coffee—in this case, the instant coffee. 

Let's take a listen to such a passage from Jason Reynolds’ I Can Do Anything episode from My Mother Made Me. I loved this passage. It shows off the specificity of his writing, his use of place as a way to tell us who his mother is and how he feels about her, and also his particular understanding of the role of the host. I often find that when we talk about audio storytelling, we ignore actual performance on the mic, which is crazy, because this is audio and what goes into our ears matters. Notice how confident Jason sounds. He's bringing the listener along on his journey and he seems to simply know that we'll go with him.

Clip from My Mother Made Me

Jason Reynolds: Now that you're all warmed up, let's talk about my mom. 

Most Sundays I pull up to my mother's house with a coffee and the New York Times. I stop in the middle of the driveway to grab the Washington Post she has delivered every week. Then I ring the doorbell. I got a key, but I never use it, mainly because I love the look of excitement on her face when she opens the door, even though she's always expecting me. Other than holiday decor—and on this Sunday, my mother had broken out the browns, oranges, and yellows for the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner—this house ain't changed in years. From the green carpet, to the tchotchkes and old knickknacks that pepper the coffee table, to the gallery wall of random art, including a framed Washington Post profile on me from years ago, as moms do—to the strange assortment of clocks scattered around the living room, dining room and kitchen, all of which are set to different times. Some 10 minutes fast. Others six minutes slow. The radio is always on in the kitchen, unless the television is on. And on Sundays, it's the TV, which is strange because my mother don't never sit in the kitchen on Sunday. She sits in the office, where there's also a TV.

Julia Barton

He's very confident with his sentences. And I noticed that as an editor, because I would be like, that introductory clause, about the yellows and the gold, is going on way too long. You're gonna run out of breath before you get to the verb. But he does it in such a great way, the way he reads it. That the verb is this place ain't changed in years. And it comes at the end of a really long introductory clause. It's hard to pull off in audio, but if you do it, it just lands it. But he's clearly confident in his prose and his ability to read his own prose.

Elaine Appleton Grant

His delivery is magnificent. 

Julia Barton

And then there's sort of a mystery, of—why isn't—where's his mom, when is she coming in? And I remember the first time I listened, I was impatient. And I'm like, Oh, he knows what he's doing. Do you know what I mean? So that house is her. He's building her character by describing the house.

Elaine Appleton Grant  

And you feel like you're in good hands. 

Julia Barton

Yeah. And he's bringing his own coffee. And then she's drinking instant coffee… 

It feels like visiting my grandmother's house. There's the specificity of it that's beautiful. And also, he keeps her off stage as long as possible. It's all interesting moves. You know, say you're a producer and you're working with a host who's a writer, let them do their thing and see what happens. You might be surprised.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So I could talk about this particular essay all day, but we do not have time. So storytellers, I want to urge you to listen to the anthology—that link is in our show notes, of course—but also to all of My Mother Made Me. 

Another piece that you chose, Julia, is Armand’s Garden, which is an episode of the Peabody award winning podcast Rumble Strip, created and hosted by Erica Heilman. Julia, sum up this piece for listeners who haven't heard it,

Julia Barton  

Rumble Strip has a simple mission. Erica is talking with her neighbors and random people in Vermont, and just really diving deep into their lives, whether their lives are, quote, unquote, ordinary or tragic or funny. So one sort of turning point in a life. It's kind of a documentary show, but it's a poetic documentary show. And that's a style of storytelling that is hard to pull off. But it's kind of in the DNA of public radio in particular, and community radio, this voice-driven witnessing of people's stories.

And Erica has an amazing way of getting people to tell her their deepest, intense inner life moments that's incredible.

Elaine Appleton Grant

It is incredible. And let me play a clip for you that is very interesting. It's very early on in this piece, Armand’s Garden. 

Clip from Rumble Strip

Erica Heilman: When I went to visit him, we sat in the tea house and drank coffee. We talked about gardening, and what God has to do with gardening, which it turns out is everything. It's funny, one of my strongest memories from childhood is finding my mother digging in her garden, and talking to her plants, which I didn't understand at the time. But now I do. I'm not a very good gardener. I don't understand design. But I love my plants. And I love to think about the dirt under my plants. At the end of a long winter, I start dreaming about my plants. And sometimes I just look at a single plant or a tree for a really long time. And I get something—or I hear something? I don't know what it is. But I think Armand does. Here's Armand Patoine. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Erica says that sometimes she stares at her plants and she hears something and then she says, I don't know what it is, but I think Armand does. What do you think admitting on air that she doesn't know something, but her subject does, do for the podcast overall? 

And what lessons does that present for creators more broadly?

Julia Barton

Yeah, it creates intrigue. It creates curiosity. And he does have an answer to that question by the end. So she sets up the thing that's going to have a satisfying conclusion. But I think something that it's hard for all of us to remember. It doesn't matter how experienced you are. But—you gotta leave a hole for the listener to do some work, to fill in, to want to know things. And then it's the credits. But I'm intrigued, I'm like—my brain can't figure all this out. So I better listen to the next episode. Even though it's not related directly, it's a thing to puzzle over. It's a gesture of, you hand it back to the listener and I know you're out there, doing whatever you're doing, you figure it out. It's hard to do it when you're producing, you're just like, Oh, I gotta cut that line. It doesn't make any sense. Or, I got to answer that question sooner. It's not answered, it’s taking too long. I think we can overly sort of fuss and clean up our audio and our stories in a way that—this form, we don't even know what's going on once we put it out in the world. So the more we try to button it up to our satisfaction, the less that gives listeners something to do with the sort of mystery and curiosity and intrigue that we want them to feel. So Erica is just—she's just like, there's a big mystery here. I don't understand it. I feel it, but I don't understand it. Okay, let's go to this guy. And then your setup for the oddness that is Armand.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right, right. Right, right. 

Creating momentum for the listener is one of the hardest things to do. Most conversations aren't just naturally suspenseful; we need to add a mystery. I wanted to know how Julia does that. So I asked her for an example. She told me about a Revisionist History episode called Burden of Proof. The link’s in our show notes. It takes Malcolm Gladwell 11 whole minutes to do tell listeners, what that episode is actually about. In that time, Malcolm wanted to play clips of a speech he'd given, about how much denial people were in, a century ago, that coal mining caused black lung disease, and that miners needed protection. That seems obvious now. And the audience was—as Julia told me—sitting there all smug thinking, wow, how stupid and cruel people were 100 years ago.

Julia Barton

And he's like, Yeah, but we're doing it right now. In fact, all of you in this room right now, are in the exact same position that society was about coal mining. What am I talking about? I'm talking about football. 

And so he wanted to recreate the sort of mic drop moment of that in the episode.

Elaine Appleton Grant

But how? 11 minutes of not talking about football, withholding that information, is a long time. The danger of losing listeners was great.

Julia Barton

You needed to follow the line of reasoning that he was doing to create the impact of the reveal. Basically, what I was trying to think about was like, What can keep people intrigued and interested until they get to the reveal of the speech?

Elaine Appleton Grant

11 minutes in.

Julia Barton

Yeah. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So Julia came up with a novel idea. They’d let listeners in on what it felt like to be Malcolm Gladwell giving that speech.

Julia Barton

So what does it feel like to be up there, giving a speech that in and of itself is challenging, and knowing whether the audience is following you? So I was like, provide some commentary on your own speech. And then we will feel that that's weird. Oh, this is what it's like to give a speech. This is what it's like to feel the room drifting away. That's what the solution that we came up with, was that feeling of giving the listener a glimpse into what it's like to give a speech. And you can kind of enter into a dream state of that speech, the interior—you know, the words coming out of his mouth versus his feelings on the inside, right? And so for me, that was a lot of intrigue.

Clip from Revisionist History

Malcolm Gladwell: 20 minutes in, I began to panic a little, because I'm going on and on about Hoffman, about coal mining, about how big a deal coal was at the turn of the century. About how much dust the process of coal mining created, about how coal miners would have coughing fits and spit up this black inky substance. 

Recording of Malcolm Gladwell: And they would cough more and more of it, the more they mined and the more time they spent in the coal mines. That was absolutely beyond question. 

Malcolm Gladwell: The audience is incredibly quiet. And I couldn't figure out if that was because they found the subject as fascinating as I did, or if they were thinking, what on earth? 

Recording of Malcolm Gladwell: The thing that no one…

Julia Barton

Our challenge as producers—the sound designer, the composer, Luis Guerra, the producer, Mia Lobel, we were all thinking about: how can we build this sequence in the first third of the piece to be interesting enough so that the withholding of information is powerful rather than just annoying and boring?

Elaine Appleton Grant

What Julia did with that Revisionist History episode wasn't just about the power of withholding information in order to create suspense and momentum. It's also about the power of pulling back the curtain to show what's going on behind the scenes. In this case, in Malcolm's mind.

There's another episode in the anthology that also pulls back the curtain. The episode The Tunnel, from the podcast Will Be Wild, which Julia describes as a “first draft of history” about the January 6th riot.

Clip from Will Be Wild

Andrea Bernstein: Three months after the January 6th riot, in a drab room with a long white table, two FBI agents begin their interrogation of the man who allegedly tased Officer Mike Fanone. His name is Danny Rodriguez.

FBI Agent: What I want you to do is kind of just explain what's happening. Kind of help us understand, you know, what happened from from your perspective, okay?

Andrea Bernstein: Normally these conversations are private. But in this case, the tape was made public by a judge after Rodriguez’s lawyer released the transcript. We reached out to his lawyer. We didn't receive a response. 

Just a note, this interview tape is nearly four hours long. We're using just parts of it, and we're playing some of it out of order. Because part of the story of January 6th, and the lead up to it, and the aftermath, is about fake news and media manipulation, we want you to know we've kept the meaning of what people said intact. If you want to check out the original tape and transcript you can find that in our show notes. 

This interrogation…

Elaine Appleton Grant

Since one of the main goals of Will Be Wild is to explore the dangers of disinformation, it does seem like it's powerful to fold that goal explicitly into describing the production process, and to acknowledge that on air—which is a very unusual thing to do. What is the lesson here for creators looking to weave clear themes throughout their podcasts?

Julia Barton

Have an editor? I think that's the number one thing. Because I'm sure it took them a lot of attempts to get that right. That language right, the placement right, the sort of tone right. She's very matter of fact, she's not condescending about it. I admired it for its concision, and I know as an editor, that's hard to do right. And so I assume that took a while. If they got it right the first time, good for them. But to have that instinct to take risks and to also be clear is an editorial process? 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Do you encourage more of that pulling back the curtain? I mean, you're talking about that even in the example that you just mentioned about Malcolm Gladwell—pulling back the curtain during his speech to say, this is how I felt at this point.

Julia Barton

Yeah, I think that audio is a really powerful medium for that. Because—it can get a little self indulgent, but honestly, people are curious. And because we're only voices to them, to the listener, anything that allows us in and to feel that we're not just being talked at, but in conversation with somebody who doesn't quite know, who is thinking out loud or is curious about their own choices— it makes us feel more like participants in the story, I think. If it's handled well. But you really need to calibrate that with outside people. Like you give it a try. They're like, eh, I feel condescended to. And then you try it again. And they're like, I don't know what you're doing there. I'm confused. And so you need those notes beforehand, just to keep trying. And so it's challenging, right? It's a risk and risks take time. But I think they're better than just doing formulaically the same thing over and over again, because it's safe.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Talk to me briefly about what's on the horizon for Pushkin, and especially this sort of transitional landscape between podcasts and audiobooks, which is a boundary that Pushkin in particular is exploring.

Julia Barton

Yeah, I mean, we are doing a lot of experiments with audiobooks. So thinking about—how can we take something like an audiobook, which is just straight read, and play with it? So there's just a lot of different ways to make audiobooks. I mean, I wasn't a big audiobook listener before Pushkin started making audiobooks. It's a new frontier for me as a producer. And then there's a whole crowd of people who only listen to audiobooks. And so something like Best Of, if they run across it because they're fans of David Sedaris, or something like that, it might expose them to work that they might not otherwise even know how to find. 

So thinking about the ways that we can bring these forms together, because they're all audio forms, they have different economies, which is a challenge, and different publicity mechanisms. But in the craft itself, there's great potential for crossover. So it's really exciting. 

It's also a production challenge for people who got their start editing 90-second standups or three minute features, to now be working on a nine hour audio book. It's like a different planet. And that's fun, too. It's part of the fun of being in the business at this time, is there's this huge landscape of on demand media that we didn't have access to 10 years ago, really.

Elaine Appleton Grant

And we can really see the evolution of it, especially in that particular crossroads between…when people talk about podcasts and video and going well as a video, you know, what's what here—but we don't talk about that transition, or that blurring of the line really, between audiobooks and podcasts very often. And that's a really interesting, very edgy place to be. And exciting, as you said.

I'm gonna give you a couple of lightning round questions. And then if we have time, if you have another minute, I'll ask you one or two more questions. So lightning round, Julia, who would be your dream guest for Sound Judgment and why?

Julia Barton

I would bring in someone who's like a show director at one of the big ship shows, either at the BBC or at NPR…

Elaine Appleton Grant

Which show?

Julia Barton

ATC, Morning Edition—but the person who has to make so many decisions on the fly. I interviewed a couple of them back in 2013 for 99% Invisible, for this episode I did called The Broadcast Clock. And I could have done the whole episode just about them, because the stress that they voluntarily put themselves under, day after day…They’re making all these decisions on the fly about what to do, because you know, there are tape segments, but it's a live thing. And to me that mindset is fascinating. 

It's air traffic control mindset. And it shapes the sound of everything we hear. That high level of constraint is useful to learn about, because then you think about how precious every second is. In that world. You can't go over by a second, you just don't have that freedom. And you also don't want to go under by too many seconds, because then you have a flaccid show with problems to fill.

Or Marketplace? That's another crazy one. All those shows are intensely difficult to build. And I just really admire that craft and I think those people don't get enough attention. So have one of them on if you can get them.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I'm gonna say so, I'm gonna say Julia Barton tells me that I have to have you on and so they will. Exactly, yeah, great. I love that idea. 

Julia, you have reported or edited for virtually every well-known network there is. And you're also a journalism trainer, and you have taught in places like Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia. From your vantage point now as executive editor at Pushkin, what role do you see spoken word audio creators playing in this sort of increasingly challenging world that we're in?

Julia Barton 

Yeah, that's a big question. I think, especially in terms of international reporting, there's something really great about audio because it strips away all the visual cues. I do think there's something very powerful about getting to know you know, Armand’s story, or hearing Danny Rodriguez, and picking up on the cues without seeing those people. And sort of filling in information that maybe doesn't belong in your assessment of them. And getting straight to the story that they're trying to tell. And I think that's very powerful in terms of just allowing our imaginations to reach into communities and human experience in a way that visual media—you know, it's just harder to do it, because we just bring our own assessments to people when we see their faces. So that's one powerful, sort of vague sounding answer to that. But I do think it's really important.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Great. Will there be a 2023 Best Of?

Julia Barton  

There’s definitely talk at Pushkin of trying to do it again, because it was really fun, and it was a great chance for us to reach out to our colleagues in the business and give them some love. And also push the audiobook form in a new direction, which is something that people are really behind here.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Well, Julia, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. It's been so interesting.

Julia Barton

Thank you for a lovely conversation.

Elaine Appleton Grant

At the end of every episode, I give you a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are today's.

1. The best audio stories have a clear sound vision. In other words, they really take advantage of the medium. A clear sound vision isn't just sound design, although that's critical. It's also the tone of voice, the pacing, the dynamics of the voices. It all adds up to how you want the listener to feel. Notice how different the sound visions are of the three stories we talked about.
2. Suspense and curiosity helps create the momentum for the listener. They propel us forward. When there isn't any in the subject inherently, experiment with ways to create it. Jason Reynolds keeps his mother off stage for as long as possible. Malcolm Gladwell and Julia integrated a long speech with his interior thoughts and feelings while giving that speech, which makes you wonder along with him whether the audience hates it or loves it, will they hang in?
3. Consider pulling back the curtain on your process or someone's feelings, like we just talked about. Don't be indulgent, but know as well that listeners are often curious. And when it's completely relevant to the topic, like it is with Will Be Wild, being transparent about your process helps ensure credibility.
4. Finally, experiment. Test your work with others. Is it innovative, powerful, entertaining? Take notes, revise. 

That's all for today. Thanks for being with me. When we talked about getting a sound designer involved in your team upfront, I mentioned a few other Sound Judgment episodes. If you're interested in sound design, you’ll love Gilbert King and Kelsey Decker's episode on Bone Valley and Sally Herships’ on The Heist. The links are in our show notes. 

Want to help other audio creators and writers find our show? Please give us a shout out on social media. And if you do, tag me on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. 

Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Audrey Nelson helped produce this episode. Sound design by Andrew Parrella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell. Podcast management by Tina Bassir. 

Coming next week, the makers of Famous and Gravy—the podcast that asks, would you want this dead celebrity’s life? So much fun. And that will be the last episode in this season, before we take some time off for the summer and get ready for season three, launching at the end of August. See you soon.