Speaking to radioinfo during the Sydney Writers Festival, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet told Steve Ahern, “a small story can tell a big story.”

She is known for her ability to get a range of grass roots views from ordinary people and present them in a way that encapsulates multiple perspectives on an issue, with a personal insight that comes from people who are living through whatever news event she is covering.

She says she gets the best responses when she records audio for her radio reporting.

“I often say that when I do television, I try to bring to it the analysis and the depth of radio. And when I do radio, I try to bring the pictures of television.

“So I’m always very conscious of all the details around me. I want to try to bring people to where I am.

“There’s an intimacy about radio, you listen to radio in a different way that you watch television, and you sometimes feel that whoever is speaking is speaking right to you in your home… when you broadcast on radio, think of yourself as talking to one person. I think that emphasises the intimacy.“

In this age of social media and filing multimedia content, is there still a place for audio reporting?

“What I find now is, when I go into countries where there are efforts to control what people say and do, and people are nervous about speaking to television cameras, because they fear consequences, when I say to them, there’ll be no face, there’ll just be your voice, then they speak.

“Often when I go to places now, I do radio first, to find out what people really feel.”

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