This week I’m trying to explain a strange chapter of history to students at NYU’s Podcasting and Audio Reportage program — so I figured I would try to explain it here as well. If you are an audio producer, prepare to have your mind blown. If you are not, this should still be interesting. Because many of us have used the words “true,” “real” or “genuine” to describe media we like — and “fake,” “artificial,” or “contrived” to describe stuff we don’t.
Good tape is … good, right?
In the audio journalism school that I attended (i.e., the Faculty of Hanging-Around-Grimy-Public-Radio-Newsrooms), nothing was more important than “good tape.” Good tape means any kind of recorded moment that evokes a strong emotional response: maybe empathy, laughter, tears, or astonishment. Often, as we listen to a narrative podcast, those good-tape moments are what pull us in — and they are what make us linger in the car or laugh out loud on the subway. A 30-second news spot can become instantly better with a blip of “good tape.” A longer feature or series is usually built around it. A lack of good tape has killed many a story, despite all the work that went into reporting it.
Good tape happens when the people we interview (or generally hang around) stop performing for the microphone and start being themselves. It often arrives spontaneously, in messy and human moments — and sometimes reporters don’t even know they have it until later.
This quicksilver, elusive type of “authentic” audio is a subject of obsession when producers talk about craft. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve our chances of getting good tape, about how to ferret it out from hours of field or archival recordings, and about how deploy it skillfully. You can find dozens of posts about “tape” on the audio storytelling site Transom. There’s even an indie podcast publication (printed on paper!) called Good Tape.
So when I found out, early on in my research into audio history, that tape itself was not considered “good” at all for much of radio history in the USA? That was freaky enough. Then I learned about the era of radio when journalists hired actors to play the parts of real people they’d interviewed, or to illustrate reported pieces from print media.