For 15 years, Radio Diaries has been giving people tape recorders and working with them to report on their own lives and histories for NPR. With this approach, Radio Diaries has helped create a new form of citizen journalism and has produced some of the most acclaimed and innovative documentaries ever heard on public radio: Teenage Diaries, Prison Diaries, Diary of a Retirement Home, My So-Called Lungs, Thembi’s AIDS Diary, Mandela: An Audio History (winner of the du-Pont-Columbia Award),  Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair, and others.

Executive producer Joe Richman will be joined by two former diarists, Amanda Brand and Josh Cutler, from Teenage Diaries to talk about what it’s like to document your own life, and how the best scenes are the ones that happen by accident.

Radio Diaries Video Retrospective: 15 Years of Stories

[youtube width=”385″ height=”312″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4D6krZWeJc&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Joe Richman is an award-winning independent producer and reporter for NPR’s All Things Considered and the founder of Radio Diaries, a non-profit organization. Over the past 15 years, Radio Diaries has helped to pioneer a model for working with people to document their own lives for public radio.  Richman worked for many years as a producer on NPR programs All Things Considered, Weekend Edition-Saturday, Car Talk, and Heat. He also teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Los Angeles Times called Richman “A kind of Studs Terkel of the airwaves.”