How do you create compelling, ethical audio stories from oral history archives, old and new? In this workshop, Signal Hill editors Annie Rosenthal and Liza Yeager will share clips from Signal Hill stories that employ a range of tools and techniques.

Named one of the best podcasts of 2025 by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the BBC, the new audio magazine Signal Hill publishes audio documentaries of all kinds: longform reporting, essays, profiles, experimental shorts, and more. Many Signal Hill stories are built with oral history materials—and all of them use different approaches for bringing those materials to life.

Using Signal Hill stories as our jumping off place, we'll discuss the challenges of making radio with oral history, including working with archival absences and distilling overwhelming interview collections into documentaries that can pull in broad audiences. Listening to clips together, we’ll discuss stories that use oral history in different ways and the strategies we learned while making them (using speculative fiction as an oral history tool; braiding family histories with academic research and sound design, for example).

Participants are encouraged to bring their own project ideas to the workshop for a collaborative conversation that can cover everything including—but not limited to!—story structure, sound design, software and project planning.

Please note: This event will be recorded. The recording will be available for—and sent to— all registrants

Bios:

Annie Rosenthal is the managing editor of Signal Hill and a correspondent for the magazine High Country News, where she writes about rural communities and life in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Previously, she spent three years as the border reporter at Marfa Public Radio, where she created a Spanish-language news show and an award-winning podcast about reproductive care in West Texas. Her essays, radio documentaries, and reporting have appeared in/on the Washington Post, NPR, Latino USA, Radiolab, and the Oxford American, among other places. She's been a panelist for the Investigative Reporters and Editors association, and has helped kids make radio in small towns across the desert Southwest. Annie's work in print and audio is informed by oral history and community media, often focused on people’s relationships to place.

Liza Yeager is a radio producer and writer, and co-editor-in-chief of Signal Hill. Liza’s audio documentaries have aired on BBC’s Short Cuts, The Dig, Invisibilia, 99 Percent Invisible, WNYC’s Nancy, Planet Money, BirdNote, and Latino USA, among other outlets. She was a 2024-2025 Watershed Fellow at Oregon State University’s Public Humanities Collaboratory, and has developed soundwalks for the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Public Library, and Interference Archive. Liza has spoken about and taught radio in a variety of settings, including at the Third Coast International Audio Festival, the King School Museum of Contemporary Art, Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Chicago. She grew up in Oregon and is also a weaver and rug-maker.