Search Results for: oral history

The Agony and the Angst: An Oral History of My So-Called Life

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“Television is a very different world now. But you know what? The show had the perfect life.” Winnie Holzman, the creator of “My So-Called Life,” tells the story behind the show, along with crew and cast members including Wilson Cruz, Devon Odessa, and Devon Gummersall.

Source: Elle
Published: Nov 16, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,959 words)

‘Let’s Suck This Week Less Than We Did Last Week’: An Oral History of The Stranger

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Twenty-five years after its debut, here is the story of an independent newspaper in Seattle that spawned Dan Savage and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Source: The Stranger
Published: Oct 12, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,636 words)

‘Let’s Suck This Week Less Than We Did Last Week’: An Oral History of The Stranger

(Left to right) Nancy Hartunian, Tim Keck, Dan Savage, Sean Hurley, James Sturm.

Amber Cortes | The Stranger | October 2016 | 15 minutes (3,636 words)

The StrangerTo celebrate its 25th anniversary, we’re proud to partner with The Stranger in featuring their oral history about the early days of the pioneering (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) independent newspaper. Read more from their 25th anniversary celebration here.

In July of 1991, Tim Keck moved to Seattle from Madison, Wisconsin, to launch a newspaper. He’d recruited a handful of friends and colleagues from the Onion, the satirical weekly he’d cofounded and recently sold (yes, that Onion), to help him conceive a new, irreverent publication—one which sent-up the weekly newspaper format and had equal doses of reporting and criticism as it did satire.

Among those who joined him were James Sturm, Peri Pakroo, Nancy Hartunian, Wm. Steven Humphrey, Christine Wenc, Johanna “Jonnie” Wilder, Matt Cook, Andy Spletzer, and, later, Dan Savage.

Armed mostly with hubris, a few thousand dollars, and three slow-as-fuck computers, they initially set their sights on appealing to University of Washington students, but quickly found their real audience among the queers and weirdos who (used to) populate Capitol Hill. Their coverage of Seattle was necessarily informed by their perspective as outsiders, transplants… (are you really going to make me say it?) strangers. Read more…

An Oral History of ‘We Built This City,’ the Worst Song of All Time

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Warning: This link autoplays the song. It will be stuck in your head all day.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 1, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)

Angels in America: The Complete Oral History

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Twenty-five years after its premiere, the behind-the-scenes story of Tony Kushner’s landmark play.

Source: Slate
Published: Jun 28, 2016
Length: 68 minutes (17,161 words)

An Oral History of “An Inconvenient Truth”

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The 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary on climate change originated as a slideshow. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the film’s director and producers trace the origin story, production, impact, and legacy of the film.

Source: Grist
Published: May 21, 2016
Length: 23 minutes (5,958 words)

An Oral History of Langtang, the Valley Destroyed by the Nepal Earthquake

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In Outside magazine, Anna Callaghan and Rabi Thapa compile an oral history of Langtang, the valley destroyed by the Nepal earthquake in April 2015.

Source: Outside
Published: Sep 28, 2015
Length: 21 minutes (5,292 words)

An Oral History of Langtang Valley, Destroyed by the Nepal Earthquake

We spent our first night there not really sleeping at all, just kind of leaning with our backs against this boulder. It snowed most of the night. Everyone was really on edge, and every time there was an aftershock, people would start screaming and running. I was terrified of every aftershock. We were saying that we couldn’t tell if the earth was still moving or if it was just us trembling.

I had a satellite phone with unlimited minutes, so I became the telephone booth for the village. Some of it was logistical stuff: the leaders of Kyanjin Gomba were using the phone to call the Nepalese army to make arguments for why the helicopters needed to come, but the majority of the calls were people calling family members. Each day, people would line up and have a number written down on a scrap of paper, and we would try calling. These people were crying into the phone. You don’t need to speak Nepalese to understand that.

American mountain climber Colin Haley, in Outside magazine, recounts waiting for help after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Langtang Valley, 40 miles northeast of Kathmandu, on April 25, 2015. In this oral history compiled by Anna Callaghan and Rabi Thapa, residents and foreigners describe this day of destruction, how half of the village population was buried, and what happened in the days that followed.

Read the story

The Oral History of the Launch of Epicurious

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Recent history: How to put together a website in 1995 when very few people understood how to put together websites.

Source: Epicurious
Published: Aug 18, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,646 words)

The Sale of the FT and an Oral History of the News Business

The FT Group, which includes standout business newspaper the Financial Times, is being sold for $1.3 billion to Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company. Established in 1888, the FT has been lauded for its digital transition as the newspaper industry has declined. “Riptide” is an oral history project that was first launched in 2013 about what “really happened to the news business,” by John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Sagan, and John Geddes—and it includes an interview with a former FT.com managing director about its beginnings on the web in 1995, and its decision to start out as a free website:

I have to say, I think, in the early stages, free was the only way that people knew how to do it. Just from a technical point of view, a free website is the path of least resistance. All you need is a CMS and an ad server and, hey, you’re in business. The other element within this was, I think that the leadership at the “FT,” and I think at publishers across the market as a whole, simply didn’t really understand some of the long term strategic implications of this stuff.

They understood that they needed to be involved in the Web, but I don’t think anybody had really thought through how was this going to play out, and at the time, it was a really pretty small part of the business.

They were presented with a proposition that said, “The quickest, easiest, simplest way to do this is a free website, and we’ll make the money through advertising.” That ticked the boxes, so that’s the way everybody went.

I don’t think there was a point where the whole industry sat down and decided, they compared all the models and advertising was the way to go. As I say, it simply was the path of least resistance.

The “FT,” had a reassessment on this, around about 2001, when the dot com bubble started bursting. At that point, we had noticed that there were some issues for us as an organization with the advertising model.

Read the interview