[MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]. Hello. In the age of the spectacle and postmodernity a key word acquires special importance: storytelling. The concept of storytelling is closely linked to a society, a postmodern society in which the media dominate and construct the so-called public sphere. Storytelling as a concept carries with it one issue already mentioned during the previous week: the like for the easy things, not for the complexity, the deep philosophies. Everything must be explained as a tale for children, based on simple stories, easy to understand and full of anecdotes. The storytelling is the language of the effective advertising and marketing, which was transferred to the political discourse and became into a dominant register in the discourse of the media. [BLANK_AUDIO]. Traditionally films have been a form of storytelling. However, what is more surprising and could be serious, is that TV news have become fundamentally storytelling, because modern audiences do not want complex intellectual arguments and reasoning, but stories for children, easy to understand, as I have previously mentioned. Everybody is able to understand that this growing tendency constitutes a danger for the essence of democracy, although this is not the subject of our course. The Olympic heroes has to be constructed during the time previous to the Olympics and during the actual event. The Olympic hero is fundamentally constructed through storytelling. It is true that the authentic track and field fan does not need storytelling: he or she wants action. Even though, the great majority of the public need stories about the athletes and the Olympics, because the great cost of the Olympics is only justified if the broadcaster gets mass audiences that are composed not only by fans. Who will be the heroes of the next Olympics? As Joe Gesue from NBC Olympics explained to Andrew Billings, a group of media professionals travel around the world interviewing athletes and coaches and officials to learn their stories and help prepare the NBC production team for the Games which is working hand in hand with the Olympics profiles department, which produces the athlete stories that appear in our coverage, according to Andrew Billings. Once identified during the previous years to the Olympics, the NBC creates profiles of the athletes that are more likely to succeed, or that will be the next Olympic stars. However, there is a growing trend to limit the number of pre-reproduced stories of athletes and substitute them for on-site reporters who tell stories as the event unfolds. The great Olympic heroes appeal to global audiences. These are a number of global stars, whose performance followed by vast audiences around the world. This is the case of athletes such as Carl Lewis, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, among many others. On the other hand, every broadcaster helps to create the national heroes, the other successful formula for a TV rights holder. The semi-finals or the finals in which national athletes participate is another key issue to guarantee the success when it comes to audiences. [BLANK_AUDIO]. Anyway, the stories that the audiences really like are the stories of self-improving. According to Dick Ebersol, the vast majority of the audience comes to the Olympics to hear stories of people overcoming obstacles. In fact, the '96 Games had a lot of athletes who'd been through really serious diseases, according to Andrew Billings. [BLANK_AUDIO]. During the first week, we presented how the Olympics are something more than mere sport. They are a philosophy of life, they feature a number of positive values with a great transformative capacity, and therefore, they are much more than pure storytelling or entertaining. There's a constant dialectic among the practical aim and the traditional one. The practical approach tells that media have been very positive for the Olympics, as they fund them and have disseminated them around the globe, turning them into the most important global sporting mega-event. The other element of the dialectic is that storytelling centres on the anecdote, the emotions and forget the philosophy that lies within the essence of the modern Olympism. [BLANK_AUDIO]
