How are great journalists made? Often, it’s pieces of great journalism that help form them, influencing their lives or careers in an indelible way. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 80th anniversary in 2018, we asked Nieman Fellows to share works of journalism that in some way left a significant mark on them, their work or their beat, their country, or their culture. The result is what Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski calls “an accidental curriculum that has shaped generations of journalists.”
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More Nieman Fellows on exemplary journalism that influenced them[/sidebar]
I was 23, in my first year in public media. I wrote local newscasts but harbored grand aspirations of audio storytelling, and this piece, “The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski,” had it all: The distorted voice of a young man, recording himself in the Vietnam jungle in 1966. The sounds of nighttime and rain. The boredom and jokes. A harmonica in a foxhole. The nearby explosions—“Jesus! That’s too close.” The longing in Michael Baronowski’s voice for his family back home in Pennsylvania.
And, like me, this young man had radio aspirations. His friend, Corporal Tim Duffie who helps narrate the story, explains that Baronowski was trying to build a portfolio for when he came home to the U.S. Baronowski says of recording himself, “This is so much easier than writing. You get all the right voice inflections. And I can do it in the dark.”
Audio journalism, at its best, puts voices in your ears that not only inform you, but move you. Those voices are raw, unpracticed. Sometimes in radio newsrooms, we say, “Can we get some ‘real people’ in this story?” We may sound cynical, but the impulse is what drew me to public radio and has kept me there. We have the power to elevate the most normal thoughts and conversations to poetry. Lance Corporal Michael Baronowski is so alive in this story, even though he lost his life in Vietnam.
It takes hard work to make a story like this one. The producers likely listened to hours of tapes Baronowski sent home to Pennsylvania. They chose portions that told a story— tracing an arc from the banal waiting to the intensity of battle. This is where journalism meets art.
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Aired on NPR’s “All Things Considered” April 21, 2000" style="full"]
Excerpt
SOUNDBITE OF MORTAR DISCHARGE AND FIRE
Lance Cpl. BARONOWSKI: Sounds of the enchanted forest.
SOUNDBITE OF MACHINE GUNFIRE
Lance Cpl. BARONOWSKI: Boosha. Jesus. That’s too close.
Mr. DUFFIE: [platoon mate and best friend]: Air strike.
SOUNDBITE OF NAPALM
Mr. DUFFIE: White napalm all over that place. Look at that.
Lance Cpl. BARONOWSKI: (Singing) You’re in the Pepsi generation.
Mr. DUFFIE: I don’t see any indication of fear in his voice. We didn’t know but what we were going to have to grab our rifles and M-14, or grenades, and have at it because if they’d have broken through that point, then we were going to be in an all-out hand-to-hand combat. And that very potential—there was no way I could have stood there and did what he did.
Lance Cpl. BARONOWSKI: Now, it’s dark, quiet. Everything’s been quiet for about 15 minutes now. I was just crouching down in the hole there talking to a hand grenade. I thought it was the microphone. I realized what I was doing.
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