A

IRA GLASS
1959-

JOURNALIST

Revolutionary Journalism

At the end of the 1990s Ira Glass was changing the face of American journalism with his weekly radio program, This American Life. Run out of Chicago public radio station WBEZ, This American Life was a show of stories held together by a theme. After only three and a half years on the air the program aired on 350 public radio stations to an audience of more than 830,000. The show began when WBEZ received a MacArthur Foundation grant to create a weekly arts/news show and asked Glass to produce it. Instead, Glass pitched the station his idea for a human interest show he wanted to host featuring stories about everyday Americans. WBEZ bought the idea, and the show began broadcasting in November 1995 with an annual budget of $224,000. In its first year it won a Peabody Award and in its second year was awarded a $350,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Later the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts became underwriters, and the show developed a collaboration with Amazon.com that brought in about $125,000 per year. Even Hollywood had contacted Glass about a possible television version of the show.

Background

Glass grew up in Baltimore and then attended Northwestern University and Brown University. His first radio job was selling one-liners to a shock jock in Baltimore. After his first year in college, he volunteered to produce promotional announcements at National Public Radio (NPR) and eventually worked that position into a paying job. For the next sixteen years he worked as a producer and reporter for NPR before becoming host of This American Life.

Telling Stories

According to Glass, the aim of This American Life was to tell stories that go straight to the heart. He introduced the show as "documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tapes, anything we can think of." He also kept in a lot of the voices and moments edited out of other shows, producing a more raw, realistic sound than most TV or radio programs. While realistic television tended to play toward the prurient, This American Life presented reality without tabloid hype, presenting stories about ordinary lives in old-fashioned ways. Glass credited the Readings section of Harper's magazine for some of the ideas of This American Life. Like the magazine section, This American Life was a collection of odds and ends—performance pieces, memoirs, reported pieces, some by big-name writers who normally commanded exorbitant fees but who worked for a few hundred dollars just to be on Glass's show. The program has included a piece about a secular Jew who journeyed to Colorado Springs to try to understand a group of evangelicals who spent their days praying for strangers and a story about a middle-class couple who moved to a poor Missouri town to try to improve things—with very bad results. One show, on the kindness of strangers, featured pieces on a locksmith rescuing a stranded motorist, a white teenager who ran away from home to move in with a black father figure in Harlem in the 1950s, a crazy woman who posted notices on the door of her neighbors accusing them of being drug dealers, and a man who entertained his block with Sinatra songs. Journalist Bill McKibben wrote in The Nation in November 1997, that This American Life is "simultaneously 'light,' in that it doesn't discuss Madeleine Albright/global warming/the Teamsters election/budget deficits/the Gephardt campaign, and 'deep,' in that it gets at what matters to us most of the time. It is, for instance, almost the only journalism I've ever come across that manages to cover religion as the experience it is in contemporary America. And at the same time there's room for a report from rock-and-roll fantasy camp."

Exerting Influence

The impact of Glass's use of stories told in authentic voices was felt across the world of journalism. NBC Nightly News created a segment called "In His Own Words," in which the subject told his or her own tale. The New York Times, Washington Post, St. Petersburg Times, Baltimore Sun, and Philadelphia Inquirer all began to use more narrative, including even the occasional fictional piece, and more and more they turned to stories of ordinary people. Paul Tough, editor of the Canadian monthly Saturday Night, modeled his magazine's front-of-the-book section on the program. Tough described This American Life as "applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives." At the end of the decade that was still the kind of journalism Glass preferred: "I feel the stories in my heart. There's still a huge, undiscovered country."