For More on the Making of "This American Life"

Believe it or not, there's a stone tablet full of radio principles (links below) guiding This American Life. The public radio program's host and executive producer, Ira Glass, laid them out Feb. 11 [1998] in one of Minnesota Public Radio's broadcast journalists' lecture series, at Macalester College in St. Paul. Glass says the principles add up to "more, better radio."
The production team at WBEZ in Chicago put the weekly show on the air nationally in June 1996; it was airing on 130 stations within a year, when Public Radio International became the distributor, and it's now heard on 252 stations. By last fall, the show's weekly cumulative audience had grown to 565,000, according to PRI.
This is a complete edited transcript from Glass's talk. A large excerpt was published in Current, May 25, 1998. Thanks to Minnesota Public Radio for the photos by Dan Monick and the tape.