Despite some variance among the different interviews, StoryCorps follow a fairly predictable and clean formula. It opens on light music with a narrator giving 10-30sec of background information, or it cold opens on an interviewee with no music, usually if its a particularly striking “hook.” While I initially thought that many of these were more soft, slice of life, I was surprised to find almost all of the ones I listened to to be dealing with heavy topics of death and separation.
The pacing for Storycorps is deceptively lean — it sounds more conversational and natural due to leaving more “human” elements and speech quirks in that typically would be cut from say a news interview, using a very clean editing style. These 2-5min blurbs were certainly pulled from 10-60 minutes of interview footage, but it doesn’t sound chopped up much at all.
The audio quality varied from story to story but of course was professional grade throughout. Some interviewees had a very warm, full sound like you’d hear in a podcast while others seemed like an omnidirectional mic was placed in a living room with the ambient sound edited out. Many of the interviews do this audio cleaning technique I wish I had a name for but I hear a lot — when the sound very obviously cuts out to pure silence in between talking, presumably to eliminate ambient noise. I find this technique to be obnoxious when its really aggressively cutting from speaking to silence, but I understand why its used (and its frequently not noticeable).