StoryCorps

StoryCorps is a national oral history project that honors and celebrates everyday people through interviews in sound in which participants   choose what they want to talk about with people they care about. Every Friday, StoryCorps broadcasts an edited interview on NPR’s Morning Edition.

StoryCorps will partner with the Latino Public Radio Consortium, Latino-controlled stations, and Latino institutions and community organizations.

The StoryCorps Historias team will have a Latino project director, a Latino producer, as many as five other Latinos on the team, and a project advisory committee that will help guide and support production, broadcast and outreach activities. One of the project’s goals is to integrate and institutionalize the collection and distribution of Latino stories by StoryCorps.
 

StoryCorps interviews are conversations between two people who know each other and choose what they want to talk about. StoryCorps Historias will gather and record 900 individual interviews with Latinos around the country. 

Approximately 8 of the 40-minute interviews recorded for StoryCorps Historias will be edited as stories of approximately 3-minutes in length for broadcast on Morning Edition. Radio stations that partner with StoryCorps Historias can utilize the unedited or edited interviews for their own production of stories or presentation of the interviews. Where interview participants agree, interviews will be archived at a national Latino repository and at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. And community organizations that help bring participants into the StoryCorps Historias experience can also receive a local archive of the interview materials collected through their assistance. 

1. A Door-to-Door visit, in which StoryCorps staff visit your community and record interviews using portable equipment in the familiar surroundings of a local host, like a community organization, library, or your station's own facilities. A Door-to-Door visit can be from 3 to 5 days long, with 6 interviews recorded each day.
2. A MobileBooth visit, in which a specially designed recording studio, housed inside an Airstream trailer, parks in your community for a month, recording about 140 interviews in total.

• An opportunity for the station's listeners to interview the ones they love; receive a free professional-quality CD recording of their interview; and, if they choose, have a copy archived at the Library of Congress and a national Latino oral-history repository to be determined.
• Professional trained staff who assist interview participants during the recording process; log interviews and flag material for potential locally-edited broadcasts; and perform database and archiving tasks.
• Use of professionally produced, unedited interview recordings in which participants choose what they want to talk about, and broadcast and other use of stories edited by StoryCorps for broadcast by NPR.
• Co-branding of all local press materials and promotions with the partnering radio station, and placement of station logo on StoryCorps website.
• A program that builds on the community services, outreach and collaboration stations already provide by placement of oral-history archives with local organizations and institutions.
• And, during a MobileBooth visit, StoryCorps aslso provides a highly visible MobileBooth that resides in the community for four weeks and prominently displays the radio station logo.

•  Promotes StoryCorps on the air.
• Helps StoryCorps identify and reach out to local organizations that can connect potential participants to StoryCorps.
• And, during a MobileBooth visit, but not during a Door-to-Door visit, the partner station helps us identify and secure a visible, accessible place to park the MobileBooth, and helps us secures local housing for StoryCorps staff.

Recognizing the need to cover diverse Latino communities, StoryCorps Historias will gather stories from Latino residents in the US that represent numerous national backgrounds – Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Central and South American – as well as urban and rural experiences.  

The stories will begin to be recorded in September 2009 and the first stories aired on Morning Edition as soon as possible thereafter.

Florence Hernandez-Ramos
Latino Public Radio Consortium
303-877-4251
lprc@comcast.net

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