Antal Tre
Hello again everybody.
We’ve started working on our feature stories for the class now. My story is going to be about the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. One of my group members, Sam, is doing an article on comedian Les McGehee. Losa’s story focuses on an extreme case of streaking at LASA last year.
For the feature we’re required to interview at least one person to include quotes from in our article. I’m a little nervous about the actual interview, although this won’t be my first one. Right now I’m more worried about finding someone to interview. Ms. Richey, my teacher, recommended Mr. Risinger. But Mr. Risinger felt that he was not very knowledgeable about the incident and recommended another teacher. So I’m getting a little worried about finding someone, but it’ll work itself out in the end. I guess I am also a little nervous about what questions I’m going to ask in order to get useful responses from whomever I interview. I guess my final fear is that I won’t be able to write fast enough to get down what my interviewee is saying and take notes on actions/surroundings but I may be able to make a recording of the interview to supplement my notes.
My current idea for the story is as mentioned above. In the article I want to discuss the genre of radio plays and how they reach out to engage the audience using the War of the Worlds broadcast as an example. The reason I chose this radioplay was because the public believed so strongly that the story was reality that people fled from imagined gas attacks and lightning in the distance caused by the “martian invaders.” The angle that I want to put on the story is a big fat why? Why was the broadcast aired, Why did they present it in the form of news reports, and why it illicited such a widesrpead public response.
We’ve been taught that the best form to write a feature in is “quote, transition, quote, transition” and so on. Since this broacast occured in 1938 interviewing people with firsthand knowledge of the event is a bit unreasonable, so I plan to use quotes from someone knowledgeable about the event and radio plays as wellas quotes from media printed in 1938. I also intend to include quotes directly from the transcript of the play. Again, there’s likely to be a bit more narrative in the article than in most feature stories but I believe the quality of the product will not be affected.
’till next week,
David
The voice in this is nice. It’s David’s voice. I don’t necessarily know if that is a good thing, but it is definitely there.
Also, you combined “well” and “as” in the last paragraph. Might want to check over your entries before you post them.
Until next time…
kira
Mr Risinger isn’t doing the interview? Crap. Maybe you could save the HG Wells story for an opinion or other story and do something else? It doesn’t really seem like an interview is really necessary for the story, considering you can’t really get anyone who actually heard the broadcast. Trying to work in an interview may not really do the story justice…
You may be set on the HG Wells story though, and I bet you could find a few comments on the story by several people if that’s enough.
Like Sam was saying, it might make more sense to use the HG Wells thing as a commentary… features normally focus on people, and it would be a tad bit hard to find people who were really involved in something from the thirties.
I can totally imagine you reading this/talking just like this. It does sound like you. Good luck making something work.