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Hey there. Rob Rosenthal here. I produce Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling. I make this podcast for PRX and Transom.
WBUR in Boston produces something very unusual.
Cloe - I don't think it actually exists anywhere else.
Which is surprising because on the face of it, it seems rather simple. Invite listeners to write essays on nearly any topic and put them on the air.
Cloe - Everything from the Red Sox to insurance premiums to terminal cancer to Taekwondo by authors who, for the most part are just regular people.
Cloe Axelson is a senior editor at WBUR. She over sees this project which has a peculiar name.
Cloe - Nobody can spell it. Even fewer people can pronounce it.
C-O-G-N-O-S-C-E-N-T-I. Cognoscenti. Fortunately, they call it Cog for short.
Cloe - In the beginning, when we were first named way back in 2012, the idea was that cognoscenti in Italian sort of means people in the know. And I think initially the project was conceived as a place that would really take advantage of Boston's population. So you know Boston is the home of about a gajillion colleges So we have all these academics all these writers, you know super smart people who would share their expertise with us. And that's true. We still do some of that, but I think for us the name has evolved into there's many different forms of effort many different forms of expertise and many different ways of knowing.
Clip - Khari Thompson - Maybe you know Kendrick Lamar from his Super Bowl halftime performance last February when he rocked the Superdome in New Orleans with his smash hit diss track.
Music - Kendrick Lamar - Not like us They not like u…. Fades under….
Here’s an essay from 2025 by Khari Thompson. He was a producer at WBUR for a time. Pay attention to his writing.
Khari -But Lamar's ongoing duel with Drake, his fellow artist and rapper, doesn't and shouldn't overshadow what's actually going on here. Kendrick Lamar is initiating a hostile re-takeover of hip-hop.
What I want you to hear is subtle. So, let me be explicit. His writing is more for the page than for audio.
Khari- In his lyrics, he claims too many rappers and influencers only co-sign what radio does and parade in gluttony without giving truth to the youth. If there's one thing Lamar does more than many rap artists, it's speak to the heart. But he also doesn't shy away from his own contradictions as a person and artist. He acknowledges seesawing between his personal trauma and need for healing, and his mercurial, ruthlessly competitive nature and imperfect past. That's Lamar's magic. He's got love and got troublesome heart inside his DNA.
Do you hear what I mean? It’s not that the writing is bad. It’s just that the sentences are complicated. Put another way, I don’t think he talks like that.
Cloe, the editor, recognizes this is a problem. That the writing should be more radiophonic.
Cloe – We totally whiffed. This could have been so much better. But our process at the time did not allow for it to better. We worked on it. It was just not as good as it could have been.
That process she’s referring to. That’s where things get interesting.
The Cog is considered “the opinion page” at WBUR. In fact, it’s largely a web-based project. Listeners are invited to write essays not for the radio, but for WBUR’s website. It’s Cloe’s job, along with a couple of freelance editors, to usher essays through the publication process.
From time to time, Cloe spots an essay and thinks “hmmmm…. I think this would be good for the radio.”
Rob- What is it that catches your attention?
Cloe – For radio pieces, what I'm always looking for is something that's personal, but not super political… And I think it helps if it's sound rich, if there are elements in the essay that we can find some sound for, that's always very appealing. Music is appealing, if an essay is about music or has some built-in sound element of it, that's also really fun.
Once Cloe spots a radio-friendly essay, she asks the author if they’d like to read their story on air. They usually say yes.
Cloe – People love being on the radio.
But, the essays are too long for the radio. They need to be trimmed. And the way it worked at Cog for years and years was this: The author wouldn’t edit. Cloe and her staff would.
Cloe - We would essentially try to boil down the original essay into just a smaller version of it. So I like to call that like the frozen orange juice concentrate. Like just the tiny thing in it that makes it operate. That's what we wanted to get to. But we wouldn't really talk to the author about it until we shared the script with them. We would just kind of do it on our own.
Cloe says she didn’t want to trespass on a writer’s work while she re-wrote.
Cloe – I was trying very hard to stay true to the original essay. Almost acting as a medium. A translator, for the writer, to get their story on the radio.
But, by staying true to the original writing, that’s what led to the issue of essays sounding written, not spoken.
Cloe - When I listened to some of the work, it just wasn't as good on the radio as it was on the page. Like it didn't it didn't totally translate. And, I wasn't sure why. Like I think anybody who's working in radio, public radio, podcast, whatever, you wanna have those driveway moments, right, where you keep people listening. And I felt like sometimes we got there, but sometimes we didn't. And I wanted to just be more consistent in our process and how we produce them to be able to feel like we were making the best possible thing
Last year, Cloe reached out to me and told me everything we’ve just told you. And she asked “How can I make the essays better?” So, I spent two days at WBUR working with Cloe and her staff. We talked about a lot – the pitching process, story focus, tracking with non-professionals… The whole 9-yards. Especially writing. And we landed on one tactic in particular to help make essays radio-ready.
The authors will still write
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essays for the web. Cloe will still deploy her spidey sense detecting essays that lend themselves to radio. And, she and her crew will still re-write the stories. But, now, the authors help with the writing.
Cloe - We have started asking our authors questions to answer in a voice memo note. And say, I just wanna hear you talk about this. I just want to hear you like reflect on these, you know, seven or eight or ten questions.
And then they send it back to us and… we run a transcript and we see what comes up… The pieces that we've produced for radio since the workshop sound much more… like somebody's just talking, than they do like somebody reading an essay on the radio.
Clip – Khari Thompson - From worst to world champs, the New England Patriots are one game away from making it happen.
This is the same essayist we heard before. Khari Thompson. This time, Cloe used “the voice note method” with Khari.
Khari - If the Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday, they'd be just the second team ever to win a title a year after finishing last in their division and winning fewer than five games. No one, not even the most die-hard fans, could have predicted this team would make a Super Bowl. So, how'd they do it?
Not only is the whole essay orange juice concentrate, as Cloe likes to say, so is the writing. Clear. Concise. Less complex. More straightforward. Plus, he definitely sounds a lot more sure of what he’s saying. Khari is big into sports. And been a sports reporter for an AM radio station in Boston. You can hear that in his voice. But, he even told Cloe he felt more comfortable this time around reading something closer to his own way of talking. That helped him be more expressive.
Rob - And so what happens is that you get the words from them in their own voice that you can perhaps just copy and paste out of the transcription software into a radio script. Is that right? With some cleaning up, I suppose.
Cloe - Yeah, that’s about right. I mean, there may be some lines that we pull from the original essay, if you know, it sounds okay. But we are also just really leaning on the transcripts and the author's own voice, like literal voice, to be able to pull the scripts together.
Here’s an excerpt from an essay from Oona Metz. She’s contributed several print essays to the Cog. This is her first radio piece.
Clip – Oona Metz - On Valentine's day, it can feel like everyone in the world is part of a happy couple. I'm here to tell you that is just not true. I've been a therapist for 30 years, and for the last 15, I've worked almost exclusively with women who are navigating divorce. Even though about half of all marriages end, there's still stigma associated with divorce. So many women I talk to describe feeling isolated and ashamed. They tell me over and over, how is it possible that so many people are divorced and I don't know any of them.
For a long time, actually until very recently, divorce has been seen as a tragedy, a failure, a sad ending. But I wonder what would happen if our culture could start talking, like really talking…(fades down)
Rob - In the original process you said that you didn't really want to trespass on the writer's work. You are very interested in preserving the author's words as they were written as much as you could. Here, you're still doing that, but now it's their actual voice, their speaking voice that you're preserving and the words and the way in which they sent them and so on.
Cloe - Yeah, I think we've felt liberated to not be so tied to the digital essay for the pieces that are on the radio… This has taken a little massaging of our authors who've worked with us previously because the process is, it does feel quite different, but, I think it results in a better product… It just feels much smoother and more natural to how they actually talk.
We should listen to one essay in full. This comes from Brian Trapp. It’s his first piece for Cog. And it was produced using the voice memo method.
Brian - My twin brother Danny could only say 12 words, but each of those 12 words can mean many things.
Mom and Danny - ] Me. Me. Who does mommy love? Me. Say, me. Me. Say, Me. Me. That's good, Dan.
Brian - Depending on how he said my name, for instance, it could mean, shut up you idiot, or talk to me bro, or if he said it very softly, I love you. It wasn't so much that he couldn't talk as it was that most people didn't know how to listen to him. Danny was blind, and he had cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities. I spent much of my childhood pushing Danny in his wheelchair. I made up stories for him and sang to him And sometimes I made tapes of us talking, first on my Fisher Price recorder and later with professional equipment.
Danny and Mom - Twinkle, twinkle little star, I wonder what you look at dying in the sky.
Brian - Danny needed a lot of support. He couldn't feed himself or dress himself. We had to shower him, but he was smart. He knew what he liked and what he didn't. He knew we loved him and he had strong opinions about everything from music to food.
Danny and Mommy - Danny, Mommy made hot chocolate. Do you want some hot chocolate? Do you wanna ice cream?
Brian - And Danny was funny. If you asked Danny who was ugly, he'd shout my name, I-N. Danny loved to joke around. I remember visiting him in his group home before I moved to Cincinnati. We were lying side by side in his bed, teasing each other about who was the good twin and who was the evil twin.
Brian (in tape) - I have a bet who is the good twin and who's the evil twin?
Mom - It depends on what day. Danny, that's because you are my...
Brian - We were having fun, but I was also feeling a lot of guilt. Danny's health was declining and I was moving four hours away for grad school. I was gonna fulfill my dream of writing a book about our life together. It was my way of honoring him, but I had to move away to do it. I knew our time together was limited and that awareness made me pay more attention to Danny, even from far away. When I left home for college at 18, I was desperate to figure out who I was without Danny, but when I moved away for grad school, I wanted to find out who had I been with him.
Briand and Danny - Do you know that I love you? Mm-mm. I do!
Brian - Three years later, Danny died. It was four months after we turned 28. Someone once asked me if I felt like a glass child. People use that term to describe the siblings of disabled kids because they say parents see right through them. But I didn't feel invisible. I'm not trying to hide the hard parts of being Danny's brother. It wasn't always easy. There were times when I wanted our life to be less complicated. But growing up with Danny made me feel less selfish and more mature. It gave me a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Sometimes I had to be my brother's arms and legs, his eyes and voice. It wasn't a burden.
Brian (in tape) Okay, dance, dance.
Brian – It was more like an alternative way of moving through the world.
Brian (in tape singing to Danny) - Take me out to the ball game. Take me to the crowd. Bobby's a beat, it's a cracker jacks. I don't care if I have a go… (fades out)
That’s an essay from Brian Trapp. It aired on WBUR earlier this year. In February.
Since Cognoscenti first launched in 2012, the station has published some 5500 essays from 1300 contributors.
Rob – That seems impossible!
Cloe – I know! (laughs). I think the same thing.
She estimates that one out of every fifteen essays makes it on air. New ones go live every two to three weeks.
Cloe – It is very cool to be able to put regular people on the radio… And what I think is cool about Cog is that we really add different texture to the radio, to the sound, to what you hear. It just sounds different, because it's a normal person. Sometimes we have music, oftentimes we have nat sound. And I wanted to be able to sort of own that. That different way of sounding so we'd be recognizable when people heard it on the radio.
Cloe Axelson is senior editor of Cognescenti, WBUR’s opinion page.
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Cloe has written a manifesto about all-things Cog for Transom. It’s up now. She walks through everything about how the program works. It’s an excellent primer – especially if you’re thinking you should invite listeners to contribute to your podcast or radio station.
One other change they’ve made to their process: table reads. Even though she always felt she never had time, now she sees how essential it is to rehearse a piece out loud with someone listening. Hear what she has to say about table reads at the post for this episode at Transom dot org.
Many thanks to the Sound School team. Genevieve Sponsler at PRX. Jay Allison from Atlantic Public Media. And Jen Jerrett at Transom dot org.
Thank you for listening.
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