Wattpad brings you a guest post originally published in Teen Ink magazine:
NPR Radio Host Ira Glass
By Rosemary H., Scituate, MA and Blair H., W. Newton, MA
”This American Life” host and producer Ira Glass started working in public radio when he was 19 and has since worked on nearly every NPR news show, and done almost every production job out there.
“This American Life” went on the air in 1995. Each week the staff chooses a theme and invites writers and performers to contribute items on the theme. The mission is to document everyday life in this country.
Glass says to think of it as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries, a public radio show for those who don’t necessarily care for public radio.
(text adapted from ThisAmericanLife. org)
So of all the things you could do in life, why is radio the most worthwhile? If you couldn’t be in radio, what else would you do?
Um, I’m not sure radio would be the most worthwhile, but I stumbled into it when I was 19. I talked my way into an internship at NPR headquarters in Washington even though, like most teenagers, I had never heard of public radio. I didn’t come from the kind of family who would listen to it, but the people were really young and funny and smart, and they had these really cool studios and I thought, well, this would be a really fun thing to do. I was an unpaid intern, and the following summer got a job there. It wasn’t a plan, and I’m not really sure how deeply worthwhile it is, but I just got lucky.
When you were in Chicago, you talked to a lot of kids. Do you think popular or unpopular kids have more pressure on them?
Wow, I mean, I think all kids have a lot of pressure on them. It’s hard to feel bad for the popular kids. My heart goes out way more to unpopular kids; I wasn’t especially popular in high school so I felt like I understood them immediately, and also their stories tend to be more dramatic. It’s harder to do a story on somebody who is on top. It’s more
interesting to find somebody who is sort of in the middle or at the bottom, and most of us can relate to them more.
Yeah, there are more advantages to being an outcast.
You think there are advantages to being an outcast?
