A Belated Welcome

to The End of the Dial, home of new work produced by the audio reporting workshop in NYU's journalism department. It's a place where we're working out solutions to problems that arise when you post audio journalism on the internet. For example:

1. How do we meet the internet's demand for visuals in a way that is true to our medium? We resist the addition of photos or video, since the beauty of working in sound is it requires the listener to supply the pictures. If we wanted to do our audiences' seeing for them, we'd have become filmmakers.

2. Can we take advantage of the internet to compensate for radio's main weakness, which is that it is a terrible medium for communicating information? We've tried to offload some overly specific information onto the screen, freeing the reporter's storytelling from encumbrances. Our first attempt may have overloaded the part of the brain that processes words. We've posted two other sound-only files until we work out the kinks.

3. Some people want to simply download audio and listen while driving. Even if they are streaming over their computer, they may want to do other tasks that don't require them to look at a screen. Our goal is to create work that is self-sufficient as audio but offers added value when viewed. Is this possible?

4. How do we create the expectation in the end user that this is not going to be a movie? How do we communicate up front that nothing has gone wrong, for example, that only the titles had been rendered but the video track had been erased?

We invite you to listen and give us feedback.