Peter Breslow is a senior producer for “Weekend Edition,” a newsmagazine broadcasted every weekend on National Public Radio (NPR). He has been working on the program since 1992 and has traveled all over the country and the world reporting on everything from Mt. Everest to military conflict zones. He is currently teaching a block at Colorado College entitled “Radio Journalism.”
This interview has been condensed and slightly altered for purposes of legibility and conciseness.
What block are you teaching at CC right now? How is it going?
It’s great, you know, I’ve only ever taught a tiny bit ever. I taught one course at GW [George Washington University] a long time ago, so this is infinitely more intense. Fortunately, I did a lot of prep, and I’m really glad I did that because otherwise I’d be underwater right now [laughs]. We’ve certainly veered away from the syllabus, but it’s a good guidebook. I wasn’t sure of the level of the kids, and how long it would take them to write a story. So we’re ad libbing as we go.
Where did you go to college, and how do you feel that prepared you for your post-graduate career?
I went to college for a couple years and had no idea what I was doing, so I quit and traveled around. Then I went back to college knowing that I wanted to study fiction writing… I quickly realized that I was no good, but it was a good discipline and I liked writing. So I graduated with a degree in English from UMass. But it took me something like seven years. But I also got my teaching credential.
After college I ended up in South America… because UMass had a program where you could teach at an American school in Quito, Ecuador. When I came back I applied for some teaching jobs… and somebody actually hired me…but I didn’t take the job because I wanted to write a book about traveling… and I did write that lame book that never got published.
Did you know you wanted to work on public radio? If not, how did you come to that realization?
When I came back and wrote this book, I was completely impoverished… Then a relative of mine—my mother’s cousin—was hired by the people that started ESPN to start a radio version of ESPN. I wasn’t particularly interested in sports and I had no radio nothing, but my mother kept nudging me to send some of my writing to them, and they actually offered me a job…I never had written a script before, I had never voiced anything before, and they just put it [his piece] on the radio. God knows what that sounded like… but I had been listening to NPR for a few years and thought to myself, “Okay, what can I possibly do?” So, I was living on a farm… and I wrote a letter to every public radio station in a place where I thought I could live, all around the U.S. One place wrote back, not offering a job, but asking me to come check it out… I also wrote to the executive producers of the main news shows of NPR and I figured, no one was going to hire me on my credentials, so I just had to write a good letter…
I do remember that I put in that I was an eagle scout… but then one guy, the executive producer of All Things Considered, a guy I am indebted to this day… he invited me down to try out… you can imagine how nervous I was… I hitchhiked to NPR… They finally let me cut down an interview. I didn’t actually get hired, but I wrote again and eventually got hired.
What do you like about radio as opposed to other news forums?
It’s got a show-biz quality to it. That’s sort of the appeal to me. I think my skills are better suited towards working with tape than long-print narration. I think I’m a stronger writer for radio than I would be for print. I think I know how to tell the story better.
So, yeah, it’s a very intimate thing… you’re talking right into somebody’s ear. The cliché is that you get to use the listener’s imagination… with just a little bit of skillful writing and good sound, you can evoke something much stronger than television can with its pictures.
What does an average day of work look like for you?
It depends on what I’m doing. If I’m just in the building, there’ll be an editorial meeting and we’ll toss around story ideas. This show has a voracious appetite for story ideas. And so it’s a weekly show so there’s a little more pressure to do good stuff… there’ll be a whole range of ideas…I just make my pitches for things I think might be interesting.
The tricky thing is, with a weekly show, you can pitch something on Wednesday, and then by Saturday, it’s played out. You really have to be flexible throughout the week…and then usually there’ll be assignments, a lot of times it’s stuff that I’ve already pitched myself… a music piece or a book review… The day before, it’s me listening to pieces and editing them down, making sure the flow of the show works, making suggestions… It has to be a little more artful. But that’s all the mundane stuff. What I live for is going out into the field.
What have been some of your favorite stories to work on?
That’s always so hard to answer because there are a million. I literally have been sent everywhere from Mt. Everest to the South Pole. You know, I like conflict zone recording, breaking news. But probably my favorite thing would be just to go some place and do news feature type things, which we do much less now than we used to.
Does any particular experience throughout your career so far stand out to you?
There have just been tons of trips. The South Pole trip I did [five years ago] was cool. It was part of a climate series… they only allow you there for two days… they screen very closely the kind of people who can go there.
I was also in Libya during the revolution… also tons of domestic stories… John Burnett and I have done some great stories together. [We] did one on the Rio Grande, so we drove up to a pass in the San Juans and found the glacier at the top that was melting that became the Rio Grande, so we were up there recording the drip of the water. We checked in with the water at several points, including Taos, and took it to the Gulf of Mexico. I remember we drove our van onto the beach and got stuck in the sand.
What advice would you give to aspiring radio journalists?
I would steal ideas and styles from other people until you come up with your own style. Listen to people doing interesting stuff, like Ira Glass, Invisibilia, Serial, NPR News. I’d learn the basic stuff and then work your way up from there. Hone your writing skills; writing is usually important. The technical stuff is pretty easy these days… listen to how people write on the radio, listen to guys like Scott Simon, Ari Shapiro, and John Burnett, and try to imitate what they do.
Breslow will give a talk on Thursday, March 5, entitled “From War Zones to O2-Less Zones: Covering the World for NPR.” It will be held in Gates Common Room and will begin at 5 p.m.