Dialogorientiertes Storytelling als Inszenierungsstragie

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WNYC Radiolab is a highly successful public radio show in the United States, both on air and online: According to its co-host, Robert Krulwich, Radiolab reaches an audience of several million people per episode. The show has won several awards for excellence in broadcasting, including the renowned Pea Body Award. Furthermore, founder and host Jad Abumrad was honored with a grant of the MacArthur Fellowship for having created a new “aesthetic of radio“. (Phelps 2011, p. 1) Even distinguished radio journalists such as Ira Glass, host of one of the most successful radio shows in the US, This American Life, cherish the show for its innovative sound and format. Thus the following question arises: What do the producers of Radiolab do that seems to be so strikingly different from other radio shows? This paper will focus on one possible aspect for answering this question: the usage of spoken words. It examines the media talk (Tolson 2006) in Radiolab and its strategies for orchestrating speech and dialogues throughout the show. In a first step I will briefly discuss radio’s key features regarding talk. According to Hugh Chignell (2009) and Andrew Tolson (2006) these are mainly liveness respectively liveliness, interactivity, co-presence, performativity and intimacy. Additionally I will present and discuss key functions of common radio personae, i.e. functions of hosts, reporters and interviewees. Secondly, I will give an introduction to Radiolab, its history and how a typical episode is produced. Based on those concepts and other articles about the show I will suggest an approach for analyzing three selected sequences from three Radiolab-episodes. The methodological frame for this analysis is based on Conversation Analysis (Tolson 2006) and partly on the work of Carin Aberg (1999). The main purpose of this paper is to identify a set of characteristics or strategies for arranging speech and dialogue in Radiolab.