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.