[kristopolous]

The production value and artistic merit of this was quite good but here's the insight ... it's what I call the Ira Glass structure:

1. show the meat, why you're interviewing them - if the person is say, a miner you start off with machinery and sounds of workers

2. do the intro of who the person is - have them state their name and identity (occupation or other story-relevant identity such as an ethnicity or physical attribute that is relevant to the story)

3. give a backstory - relevant details that led them to the present such as where they started, their parents, siblings, etc.

4. identify the present and show the passion - usually with long-form charles dickens details of rooms or where the person lives along with what they love

5. talk about what the person is about to do - a cross country journey, a competition, get married, etc.

6. set the scene - the person getting ready for it and preparing, setbacks along the way, human interest style narratives

7. make it special - try to frame it as either a unique story or something that effects a very small group of specific people

8. conclude with a future oriented framing - say "the story isn't over" such as talking about next years competition or some more ambitious task they plan to do

[forapurpose]

Very interesting. In a way, what you describe is the story-telling technique in media res - start in the middle of things - used by Homer and many after him, and probably a few before: Start with where they are now (e.g., in the coal mine), then go back to their backstory, how they got there, then forward to their future.

It's a bit different for biography, but why not?

[AmigaBill]

Hey that's really cool. Never heard that before. Thanks for that.

[kristopolous]

What makes this format the most obvious in my opinion, is The Onion's knockoff of This American Life: https://www.theonion.com/tag/a-very-fatal-murder

This is also the same format done by Radiolab. I don't know if this is a well-documented structure to be honest.

I derived it myself after becoming lethargically bored listening to these types of podcasts. I realized they all had essentially this structure, sometimes with a few steps removed but rarely, almost never, out of this sequence.

I would like to claim, although a lot of data would need to be collected, that these steps have narrow time ranges with normal distributions and fairly tight bounds. As an extreme example, they don't spend say, 53 minutes on machine sounds and then cram the rest in the remaining time. I think there's more or less a clockwork to them.