This is a post about editing radio, not in the small way of removing ums but the big way, like when you have an hour of audio that you need to edit down to 28 minutes, or when you are selecting 30 second soundbites to include in your story.
I was invited to be on the “Philosophies of Editing” panel at the 2018 Grass Roots Radio Conference. I edit podcasts for love and as a professional, including the Radio Survivor program, and I got my start as a radio editor on the daily news program “Free Speech Radio News.” The panel included other experts in radio and editing and the room was full of experienced community radio folks who contributed to the discussion. What follows is mostly from the outline I created to prepare for the panel.
This was a nice opportunity to put into words some of the ideas that I take for granted as I grind away at my work. My favorite part was focusing on philosophies of editing, as opposed to the techniques. Big picture stuff instead of recommendations for software.
First Edit Out Mistakes and Then Use These Guiding Principles
When cutting large chunks out of your audio it’s helpful to think about some core values that can guide your choices. This is even more important if you are on a team of producers collaborating on the work.
It’s an art not a science.
Know your audience.
Know your values.
It’s an art not a science. There are no right or wrong answers, especially in podcasting. Sometimes a chunk of an interview that would be cut from an NPR style program is the most fun part to leave into your podcast or community radio show. I often fantasize that when I’m going through an interview, cleaning up the ums and removing the mouth sounds, and polishing out the stutters or adjusting the length of a longish pause, that I am doing work a computer program will be able to do very very soon (every year that I do this is one year closer to the day I’ll be replaced by AI.) But when I make a choice to perform a big edit, I’m making a very human value judgement. When computers can do that as well as I do then it’s probably no longer appropriate to call them computers.
The point is that choosing what to edit out of an interview can be a lot more fuzzy than it is formulaic.
Know your audience. If you are editing a business podcast you are going to make different choices than if you are editing a podcast for children. If you are editing a podcast for an audience of Harry Potter fanatics you are going to make different choices than if you are editing the same material for an audience of Muggles.
Know your values. This is a lot like knowing your audience, but goes a little bit deeper. For example, when I am editing an interview for the Radio Survivor podcast, one of our core values for the show is that community media is valuable and must be preserved and strengthened, and another is that community media is flawed and we should talk about it to help it grow. It’s possible to imagine a scenario where those two values might contradict each other, and deciding which one is more important can help when you think about what parts of an interview to edit and what to emphasize.
Judge with Your Ears
Audio is different than text. The inflection of a person’s voice gives a lot of unique information to the listener that the written word can’t. If you plan your edits on paper with a written transcript of the audio you’re missing out on what makes radio (and podcasts and sound) special. The written sentence may end in a period, but many people speak a language that follows rules beyond punctuation: Run on sentences, unfinished thoughts colliding with other ideas, ideas tossed off as a joke or spoken in deadly earnest. There’s still no way to comprehend the subtleties of sarcasm (or alternately genuine joy) with text alone. The emotions that accompany a statement of facts and data can be the heart and soul of a piece of audio. Judge with your ears, not just your eyes. That being said, a transcript of your audio is a very useful tool for radio editing and I’m not suggesting it should be discarded.
Radio’s power as a medium is the emotional weight of the voices we hear. When weighing what to edit out and what to emphasize I always keep that in mind. To that end, jump in right at the height of the action (like writing fiction). Especially if time is short in the finished piece.
Do No Harm
Don’t edit someone’s voice in a way that makes them sound weird, like not allowing them to speak in complete ideas or sentences, unless that was the way they in fact sound on the tape before you started hacking away at it. Don’t delete breathes just to save time. Sometimes even “um” is a word that holds meaning, such as when “um” is a stand-in for the word “or” and the word “a” and “I” or ums that are used as verbal commas in a list, or ums which carry the emotional weight of the entire interview like when your guest is pausing before they answer a difficult question.
Never alter or subvert the intentions of the voices you are editing by removing their qualifying statements. If your guest said: “I’m not entirely sure about these numbers, but the last time I checked there are eight thousand dying trees in the city of Portland.” It would be wrong to cut the qualifying statement “I’m not entirely sure…” even though the second half of the quote makes a much stronger headline.
Reporters and radio producers always have the power (and sometimes the mandate from their boss) to put people into boxes and reduce them to 2 dimensional sound bites. Your guests, your sources, and your audience are better served when the voices on your show are allowed to speak their full truth. Don’t edit people into versions of themselves they wouldn’t recognize, or even agree with.
Writing for Radio – Techniques as Philosophies
I tried to exclude technical concepts of editing from my thinking about the topic of the Philosophies of Editing, but some techniques kept creeping back in. Is using a written script to help you “edit” a piece of radio a technique or a philosophy?
Either way, writing for radio is a super power that can be deployed to clarify and simplify an interview. When writing and editing for radio is used to bring more than one person’s voice into the flow, that’s when you get radio documentary. (Someday I’ll write a post about why I believe the radio documentary is the greatest art form of our time.)
Editing and writing are complimentary skills in radio. Selecting an audio quote for your piece is both an act of writing and an act of editing, combining the worlds of text and audio. Thinking along these lines, my next posts on this topic might be titled: Philosophies of writing for radio; Philosophies of mixing; and The techniques of editing.
