A few years ago, NPR’s This American Life highlighted comedian Mike Birbiglia’s struggles with sleepwalking. This summer, that report has morphed into the semi-autobiographical feature comedy Sleepwalk with Me, produced and co-written by show host Ira Glass. The film opened in New York last week and expands tomorrow to LA’s Nuart Theatre and several other cities.

As Glass and his star tell LA Times reporter Amy Kaufman, there was a key difference between the radio and film production processes. The decibel level:

“We turned a corner where you felt comfortable shouting at me,” Birbiglia said. “And vice versa,” Glass added with a smile.

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Out of 184 applicants, Berlin-based SoundCloud has chosen 15 finalist projects for its 2012 Fellowship program. LA came out swimmingly, with four locals among this well-deserving group:

David Weinberg (Random Tape): Random Tape will create a series of special episodes that would involve tape that listeners would submit through SoundCloud… A game of telephone around the globe using SoundCloud. They will start with a recorded phrase then post it on SoundCloud for people to translate, record and then post again to translate and record, etc. They also want to have a “Random Skype Day” where they pull people’s Skype handles out of a hat and have them call each other.

Jack Kennedy (NightBus Radio) We’re traveling across North America, writing one song in each town with a stranger, recording their stories, and releasing them online in radio style program, Once a week for three months… an audio version Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. For the digital age, by Greyhound Bus.

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“This American Life” has retracted its HUGE story on working conditions at Apple’s Foxconn factory in China. It turns out major parts of the piece were fabricated by performer Mike Daisey–who drew material for his story from his one-man show “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

From a TAL release:

During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story, “This American Life” staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter’s contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn’t work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

“At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” says Ira Glass, executive producer and host of This American Life. “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”

The ruse was uncovered by “Marketplace” reporter Rob Schmitz, who tracked down Daisey’s Chinese translator Li Guifen after the show aired. She disputed much of Daisey’s story–including Daisey’s claim to have interviewed workers suffering from n-hexane poisoning.

“We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio,” says Glass. “Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.”

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In the wake of the reporting from – wait for it – Glenn Beck‘s website saying that the James O’Keefe‘s newest selectively edited hit piece on NPR – Ira Glass asks for public radio to stand up for itself.

At the end of the clip On the Media agrees that they will take on the challenge of sticking up for themselves against accusations of liberal bias.

Uh huh.

Hat tip TPM

Ira Glass is a story teller but he’s also a journalist and Steve Poizner current State Insurance Commissioner now vying for the Republican nomination for governor warranted some investigating. Uber-rich Poizner was a volunteer teacher for a month seven years ago at a high school in San Jose. He wrote a book about it titled “Mount Pleasant” that is thought to largely be an exaggeration, at least when held up to scrutiny. Anyway, the This American Life piece about it is fascinating as always.

So, leave it to Chicago Public Radio to vet our California politicians. How embarrassing.

Here’s the story.

This honor highlights NYU’s ability to recognize great journalism more than anything else.

The press release in full:

“THE GIANT POOL OF MONEY” DISTINGUISHED BY NYU AS ONE OF THE TOP TEN WORKS OF JOURNALISM OF THIS DECADE

CHICAGO PUBLIC RADIO’S THIS AMERICAN LIFE AND NPR SHARE HONOR

FOR LAUDED EXPLAINER OF SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRISIS

April 5, 2010; Washington, D.C. – It was a compelling, even humorous, hour of radio, making sense of the mortgage crisis and Wall Street turmoil, and in the process creating one of the finest pieces of explanatory journalism on the economy – months ahead of its collapse. Now, “The Giant Pool of Money,” an hour-long documentary co-produced by NPR News and This American Life from Chicago Public Radio and distributed by Public Radio International, has been named one of the decade’s best.

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When we read James Rainey‘s column about Ira Glass and Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life doing a “groundbreaking investigative piece” we looked at the date to make sure it wasn’t an old story. From the financial meltdown to the Iraq War to possibly the best overview of the health care industry ever produced, TAL has held there own in the investigative department.

Rainey writes:

That does not mean that Radio “TAL,” as loyalists call it, has reined in its ambitions. In the next few months, Glass said, the show will present “a huge, groundbreaking investigative piece of journalism” that it’s producing with the public-interest journalism site ProPublica.

When I spoke to him this week, Glass didn’t want to go into any more detail about the impending scoop. But he also wanted to make it clear that the show’s staff, not to mention its core audience, felt a lot like I have — that it’s important to balance the weighty, policy-driven shows with ones that simply catch the world a little off-kilter.

Previously on FBLA:

How much for a night with Ira Glass? Snicker.

KCRW Presents
A NIGHT WITH IRA GLASS:
Radio Stories & Other Stories
Two shows, One Night ONLY!

SATURDAY, MARCH 27TH
7pm & a special late night edition at 10pm!
Royce Hall, UCLA
Los Angeles

For one night only on Saturday, March 27th, Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life and winner of the prestigious Peabody Award, brings his story-telling genius to
UCLA’s Royce Hall.

It’s a night not to be missed and you’ll have the chance to ask your own questions to the creator of one of the most original radio programs in America.

Buy tickets here.

Previously on FBLA: This American Life Breaks Down the Break Down

Jesse Thorn is the creator of The Sound of Young America, which has nothing to do with Up With People!. As his website says,

Think of it like Conan O’Brien on public radio, or “Fresh Air,” but more fun.

Or think of it as Terry Gross on mescaline. A grad of UC Santa Cruz, Thorn lives in Koreatown where he blogs, produces his show, and obviously agonized over our carefully crafted questions. (If we were really clever, there’d be a podcast. Sigh.)

1. What newspapers do you read? The only actual physical newspaper I get is Current, the industry rag for public media. I read the New York Times online a lot, along with the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports section for a Giants fix.

Reading the NYT (and the New Yorker) is a contractual thing for us public radio personalities… there are pop quizzes, and you can actually lose your show if you don’t remember the subject of Frank Rich’s last column or whatever.

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? I actually read everything out loud as slowly and clearly as I can (to practice my gravitas).

3. Which Web sites (besides FBLA)are on your favorites bookmark? Bloglines, for the quajillion blogs and news feeds I read compulsively. I love Boing-Boing and Ask Metafilter, and the Apiary family of comedy blogs particularly. A couple of forums–my site’s, where I mingle with my really cool smart interesting listeners, Okayplayer.com, where I argue about rap music, and aspecialthing.com, where I talk about comedy with fellow comedy super-nerds. A couple of sites of questionable legality, where I make up for the fact that I don’t have cable. The usual, in other words.

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Vanessa McGrady was way crunchier than any of your Prius-driving Santa Cruz-alumni friends: She was so crunchy, a bear once pooped on her coffee table.

But McGrady eventually realized that peeing in a tomato can sucks. She moved from the Pacific Northwest to civilization, bought expensive cheese and now works in L.A. for an investor-owned utility (her blog post on Grist.org doesn’t say which one).

She bills herself as a kind of enviro-mole, someone working from the inside to preach conservation and energy efficiency. But what she really is is a This American Life contributor in the making.

We don’t know McGrady. And we don’t know Ira Glass. But if this media-centric blog can do one good deed this year, it’s to introduce the two and help create the next media darling.

You’re welcome.