The Radio Documentary Handbook: Creating, Producing, and Selling for Broadcast

Bruce K. Filson was a freelance writer and critic residing in Chesterville, Ontario.

This is a book that neither requires nor deserves a full review. As a primer for doing radio documentaries, The Radio Documentary Handbook merits a nod of approval. While self-help books offer a fleeting impression that life could be somehow uplifting and directed, good hand-books merely get read, dog-eared, referred to, and exchanged among the few who read and need them. Unfortunately, I’m afraid the size of the market for radio documentaries dictates that these few works remain very few indeed.

Perhaps Hesse could have told us where and how a budding freelance radio journalist could take his or her product and how much he or she might expect to get paid.