For this assignment I ended up listening to “He Inherited The Very Same Name” and “18 Years After Katrina, A Grocer Rebuilds His Community One Shop at a Time.” Both are from within the last year and are less than ten minutes long, with the first being around three minutes and the second being about seven minutes.
What I thought was interesting was the brevity of this story and how contrived it almost feels considering the context. I read the transcript as I was listening and it seems like parts of the conversation were spliced together to create this perfect piece of audio. It looked like it was almost playing into this trend where a lot of long-form content is trying to make itself shorter for virality, it almost reminds me of a much less-exciting promo that I might find on TikTok for a podcast or YouTube video. The quality of the audio is great, but the story almost seems fleeting and I want to know more about this family’s story.
I found the Katrina story a lot more impactful than the first one, mainly because there was more of a dialogue and the host first gave us some background about the situation and the long-lasting effects of Katrina. But also because there was more of a back and forth between the grocer and his mother and there was this sharing of memories, perspectives, and questions that don’t seem at all out of place. The pacing was done well and the way it was spliced made it feel very organic, especially as we begin to hear about how the store had changed throughout the years and even during the pandemic. In this story we get a lot more of the personality of Burnell Cotlon, the grocery store owner, based on his own responses and through the way his mother talks about him while also giving him the space to let his personality shine.
The music was fine in both, it does feel very transitional which makes sense because it ran on NPR’s Morning Edition, but I think it didn’t work too well towards the end. It would almost feel too long and kind of made itself as the last word of the story. Out of the two I would say that I enjoyed Cotlon’s story a lot more because we were able to get to know him more, while I wish there was a lot more of the first story. Out of everything the stories are what needed work rather than the audio quality, which points that the quality cannot stand alone in terms of a good story.