ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one of the most significant aspects of public participation in broadcast talk: telling stories of personal experience. Most important for the analyses in the chapter is the fact that a story can be told many times, in different ways, by different tellers on different occasions. The chapter examines a specific context for personal narrative discourse on radio: the mediated narration of someone else's personal experience story. The design of stories as performed narrative events is a result of their local, situated context of production: in other words, the footings and participation frameworks of the storytellings. In all media contexts, mediating narrative is a contextually sensitive discursive activity and that narratives are performed in structurally different ways, depending on the particular activity at hand. Furthermore, how that activity is accomplished has much less to do with participants being 'ordinary', and much more to do with contextually relevant roles and identities as constituted in the narrative event.
