Podcasts 1

NPR August 27: Life After Ice Buckets: ALS Group Faces $94 Million Challenge

Obviously, Ice Buckets is very popular recently. Instead of reporting celebrities and citizens participating the Ice Buckets activities, this news focusing on the challenge ALS Group meets after receiving large amount of money. It is a new reporting angle, and it is also what people care about.

The reporter interviewed the ALS group's CEO, the Charity Navigator's CEO and the associate dean at Indiana University's school of Philanthropy. They talked about the usage of the money and the challenge ALS Group now met from different perspectives. The news was well edited; the editor put the interview recordings across the news to reply to different questions. But I think it would be better if they could interview one or two citizens who donated the money to express their opinions and concerns instead of saying "people may concern".

As a four minutes' news, I think this news did a very good job.

Scientific American 60-second mind. August 30: Talking with strangers make you happy

In personal, I like 60-second mind very much. It will introduce you a new interesting scientific research in 60 seconds. It really has high requirements on editors. They need to pick the most attractive part in a research and use the plain English the tell the audience.

At first, the news asked audience to imagine a common situation in daily life: when you went to the subway, will you talk to strangers?  It is easy to attract audience attention in this way. Then the host introduced the Chicago study about the different feelings about people who engage to talk to strangers and people who would like to keep silent.  The study found that people engaged to talk with strangers had more enjoyable experiences. Then it explained why this would happen.

Although this news is only 60 seconds and it seems to be a little rush, it always had people's attention.