This American Life host Ira Glass starts this program “interviewing” the Siri talking interface of the latest iPhone, cleverly getting it to refuse to answer one question: Where was the phone manufactured?
Of course the phone is stamped with a place of assembly, major manufacturers have been well-known, and Apple earlier this month disclosed a list of its suppliers.
But Glass has another point to make. His little dialogue with the iPhone introduces a 40-minute audio performance, in front of a live audience, by Mike Daisey, titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” It’s a story I’d like my news writing students to hear, although we probably won’t get around to discussing it for a week or two.
Daisey’s amazing narrative tells how he visited a Chinese manufacturing city that “looks like ‘Blade Runner’ threw up on itself,” and getting Apple factory workers to talk to him about their work and their lives. We usually tell beginning journalism students to “stay out of the story” and write in the third-person. That’s the standard approach in print and Web narratives, and in a lot of broadcast reporting. It separates “opinion” and “interpretation” from “the facts.” But here — as in some feature stories and op-edit columns — a reporter’s experience in getting the story is part of the story.
The NPR site lets you stream Daisey’s piece of stand-up news storytelling — or should we call it “performance journalism”? — plus a 20-minute fact-checking follow-up by This American Life, with links to research reports on Apple manufacturing.
You also can buy the full hour as a single download from, ironically, iTunes.
Related:
Jan. 13 blog after Apple’s release of the supplier list.
Jan. 25 New York Times story, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
In its first week the episode was the most downloaded in THIS AMERICAN LIFE’s history. The internet exploded, and the story went everywhere—I received over a thousand emails in just a few days; the response was overwhelming.
Using a Verizon 4G LTE hotspot as my main Internet connection over semester break — and working on research “in the cloud” — has been piling frustrations on frustrations. They look like the picture at the right.
