KBIA- Good journalism first

Amidst all the talk of radio stories and how best to present them, I found the Adderall story on KBIA the best. No, the story did not have any ambient sound. Nor did it have natural sound. It used very little alliteration and even less rule of threes. Everything we were taught in class to do was virtually absent, except excellent storytelling and sound journalism practice.

This story was a great piece of journalism in that it used authentic voices, quoted experts appropriately, told the background, asked "So what?," and tried to map out the future. I felt KBIA tried to thoroughly explain what might be an otherwise confusing situation. I felt attentive the entire time because of how the clips and interviews were arranged. The explanation came first, so we didn't tune out due to confusion. After that came the implications for students, the university, and the community. I appreciated the story's ability to relate to other students by making this a problem about stress and work, not immediately about troubled college students (like we need another story about that!). I simply enjoyed listening to a radio story for once. I had never paid attention to them before, but I feel that if more stories of this quality were on the radio, more people would pay attention to it as a viable news source.

I'd take this story that had no ambient sound over a poorly done story with ambient sound any day of the week.