There's a reason people talk about having NPR driveway moments. You know, when you finally get home but keep sitting in your car or pause whatever else you're doing, because you have to listen to the rest of a story. Some radio is that good, that memorable. We're constantly on the hunt for great sound. But some of us at NPR wrote for newspapers before getting here. I'm one of those people. I worked at the Boston Globe for about 17 years, writing countless stories of all kinds during that time. And when I switched to radio, I thought the writing would be the same, but instead of my story appearing in print, I just read it out loud. I immediately learned that a great newspaper story does not automatically

make a great on-air story. NPR investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan used to work for the

Baltimore Sun, and she quickly had the same realization. When you read it a newspaper story,

I mean, it's a nightmare on the radio. It's just this, it's lead in, it's long, it's really

involved. It's one skill to write for print. It's a very different it's lead in, it's long, it's really involved.

It's one skill to write for print. It's a very different skill to write for the ear.

Radio writing needs to be shorter, simpler. NPR's roving national correspondent, Frank Langfitt, also used to work at the Baltimore Sun, and he now prefers radio writing over newspaper style.

We had a certain kind of orthodoxy

of writing imposed upon us that it's not the way anyone ever speaks. I kind of agree. And I was,

I felt that I was completely liberated to write as I would speak. And I'm always thinking, if I'm

having a pint in a pub with somebody, what's the first thing I'm going to tell them? What's the story?

Consider this.

Radio reporting uses the same journalism skills as reporting for text,

but a powerful radio story can bring characters on and off the stage.

From NPR News, I'm Sasha Pfeiffer.

It's consider this from NPR. I'm Sasha Pfeiffer.

Recently, NPR's Laura Sullivan and Frank Lankfit and I met up to talk about some of the ways radio reporting differs from our previous newspaper lives.

I wanted to know more about how they've felt about making the transition from print to radio,

and I asked them to share what makes audio storytelling different, how they know when they've discovered radio gold.

It's a lot like theater in a way or film in that it's a great way to convey to people and sort of what will feel organic to them. And sometimes if I'm building a story, I might say if I've got enough time, I want three separate scenes with different characters. But I'm going to give you an example a little bit about, you know, what it sounds like when you write it, because I wrote this, and then what it sounds like when you hear it.

So, okay, very briefly, I'm tracking elephants in South Sudan. We're in helicopters. We're flying around. We track an elephant. Hit him with a dart. Down he goes. So here's what I wrote. Within five minutes, the elephant's lying on its side, unconscious in a bed of parched grass, the men leap out of the helicopter, go to work, the veterinarian opens the

elephant's nostrils with a stick and tapes a monitor to its eyelid to check vital signs.

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