One thing that really interests me about WBUR is the way that it, as a news outlet, combines audio and written stories as well as live and recorded stories. Before the Internet, you likely couldn’t easily go back and re-listen to an interview that had happened live on the air, but now that radio stations themselves have their own websites and homes for their content online, these stories are archived a lot easier.
I decided to take a look at a recorded story that is up on the WBUR website to see how it is represented through multiple mediums.
This short interview, which aired on February 25, between Ibram X. Kendi, who is also the founder of BU’s new Center for Antiracist Research, and Morning edition host Bob Oakes is recorded on the WBUR website in its own article entitled “’Four Hundred Souls’ Creates ‘Choir’ Of Black American History”. It discusses Four Hundred Souls–A Community History of African America, 1619-2019,” a book which Kendi edited which collected 90 different authors together to tell the story of Black people in America over the past four hundred years.
On the site, right below the headline and widget that allows you to listen to the recorded interview, is a partial transcript of what WBUR calls “Interview Highlights,” or the most important parts of the conversation.
The interview has been edited to some extent, and one thing the transcript summary below leaves out is a lot of Bob Oakes’ narration and the longer versions of his questions. They’re instead condensed into headings that precede the longer quotes from Kendi in the interview. From what I can tell, this might be intended so that the focus is not on the host’s contribution to the conversation, but on what the guest, Kendi, had to say. At one point Oakes read out a portion from one of the essays in the book, which isn’t included in the transcript either.
It’s interesting to look at the differences between the transcript and the audio interview. When people are “consuming” news these days, though people are home more often than not in the era of COVID-19, they might not always be in a situation in which they can easily put in headphones or turn up the speakers and listen to an audio story. Including a written transcript or text portion, while also being an accessibility feature for those who may not be able to listen to audio, is also a way to get more eyes and ears on a story from people who might not have otherwise clicked through and explored it. It make sense as a strategy, even for a news outlet that is primarily audio based. I also noted that this article itself includes a couple of images–portraits of both editors of the book, Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi, and then later down on the page, an image of the cover of the book itself.
On a different topic, one thing I noticed as well about general coverage on the WBUR website is that there is now an entire section dedicated specifically to “Vaccine Coverage.” It seems to be linked to an internal tag on the WBUR website for “coronavirus-vaccines”, and all stories that are coming out of WBUR now that have to do with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine are now accessible through this page. A text box describes the page as “WBUR’s ongoing coverage of the testing, approval processes, safety and distribution of vaccines to fight against the coronavirus pandemic.” It’s interesting as a choice of organization because it represents a sort of temporary home for stories that cover a very specific beat–the COVID-19 vaccine nationally and in Boston–that is more specific than, for instance, the larger CommonHealth desk at WBUR, which handles heath news otherwise. We saw something a little similar over the course of the impeachment trial when I first started this blog a few weeks ago, but this seems to be something a little more formal and that WBUR is promoting to viewers from the front page.
The stories in this section come from a number of different parts of the WBUR newsroom–the WBUR news desk, CommonHealth, Edify, and Here & Now. There’s also a lot of content just in volume on this page–six stories published in the past 24 hours, and 32 stories in total over the past week (since I last published a post on this blog). Part of this is because there have been a lot of updates in the realm of vaccines as around a million more people became eligible for the vaccine in Massachusetts over the past week due to some regulation changes, but it’s still really significant that there are this many stories from this many different parts of WBUR on this one topic.
Julia Maruca 
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