Current (https://current.org/tag/radio-programs-content-news/page/17/)
… David Isay, along with a growing number of gifted documentary-makers, are now experiencing the satisfaction of creating serious inquiries into contemporary events and, especially, human nature….
In the long ago 1950s, a friend of mine, the gifted writer Marya Mannes, composed short features for a lively magazine called The Reporter. Each was a fictional profile of some recognizable personality, a “type” that most of us encounter in life’s daily round: a nervous business executive, the owner-manager of a small restaurant, a bag lady picking her way daintily through the damp contents of a public trash basket. The column was called “Any Resemblance?” and it persuaded most readers that they, along with Ms. Mannes, were splendidly perceptive. I often think of these descriptions when listening to David Isay’s radio documentaries, most of them concerning mildly eccentric persons from, as he says, “the margins of society.”
Nobody in public radio has encoded and streamed as much audio on the Internet — or had to automate the handling of such a large volume of material — as the staff at NPR Online. What advice do they have for stations that are new to streaming, or just thinking about starting? The writers are Rob Holt, webmaster of NPR Online, and Chris Mandra, production supervisor. The statistics are clear: the time to webcast is now. There are more than 14,000 radio stations on the Web right now, building the interactive future of radio through the Internet medium.
Ira Glass has another vision. The first one launched his hugely successful show, This American Life, which developed a fresh narrative style for public radio. Now Glass has a plan for an entirely new generation of storytellers who can bring public radio into the new millennium. But that takes talent, something that many say has been in short supply for public radio the past few years. At the Public Radio Conference last month in Orlando, the buzz about the talent crunch dominated discussions among managers, producers, editors and engineers alike.
A weekly half-hour program about space aliens — probably the only one in public radio (but who knows?) — has just been renewed for 26 weeks. Starting last Halloween, SETLAB Radio (the acronym means “Study of Extra-Terrestrial Life and Answers from Beyond”) has aired Sunday afternoons in south Texas — on KMBH in Harlingen and its repeater, KHID in McAllen. Host Russell Dowden says he’s gotten dozens of reports from Rio Grande Valley listeners that they, too, have seen unidentified flying objects. Then, several weeks ago, someone anonymously sent in a “very weird and very real-looking” image of a bulb-headed alien supposedly photographed aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. “It looks a little different from the normal Gray alien type, and has funny, textured skin.
This American Life is hot. The weekly radio program produced by WBEZ, Chicago, and distributed nationally since June 1996, airs on 325 public radio stations. Ira Glass, TAL’s creator and producer, has become something of a celebrity. The subject of lengthy feature stories in national magazines, he now turns up in TV and radio interviews to publicize a Rhino Records CD, “Lies, Sissies and Fiascos: The Best of This American Life.” His own life, frequently described by himself and others, emerges as one of frenetic activity, a contemporary Scheherazade, obsessively devoted to creating stories that he hopes “will give voice to those outside the mainstream.”
Terry Gross is interviewing the actor Dustin Hoffman. He is about to launch what is probably a set piece about his work with Mike Nichols on The Graduate, an obligatory story in most of his interviews. She knows this, having set up the subject. She also knows it is a story the audience may have heard before. He explains that Nichols offered him three pieces of advice.
As we debate how best to program classical music on public radio, we seem often to take for granted that we face an “either/or” conundrum. We seem to assume that our music can only serve either mission or market, can only please either music lovers or music likers, can only achieve the music’s full artistic potential or build audience. I believe that a “both/and” solution to the puzzle exists at a sweet spot in the middle of these divergent pairs of broadcasting goals, a solution which surpasses mere minimal compromise. Please note that my belief is not based on any kind of argument for or against the inviolable sovereignty of classical music. This will be a radio-based manifesto, not a music-based one.
All of these years, Diane Rehm’s voice: the vehicle for ordinary sentences she enunciates so emphatically that they carry their utmost weight. But creaky on the edges, hitting snags. It’s a voice reliably there at midmorning on her NPR talk show, familiar; listeners love it. Except for the inevitable detractors, who say they find Rehm grating, or schoolmarmish. Love or hate that voice, it’s illuminating to learn that a physical problem contributes to Rehm’s on-air distinctiveness.
When the NPR-distributed program Piano Jazz had its 20th anniversary in 1999, Current Contributing Editor David Stewart wrote this profile of the program and its host. Marian McPartland is the host of the longest-running jazz program in the history of network radio. Her Piano Jazz has also enjoyed the longest run of any entertainment series on NPR. In March 1998, she celebrated her 80th birthday on stage at New York’s Town Hall. Billy Taylor, himself the host of an NPR jazz series, Billy Taylor’s Jazz from the Kennedy Center, kept up the musical action as a parade of Marian’s friends came to perform and wish her well: pianists Tommy Flanagan, Jacky Terrasson and Ray Bryant, bassists Christian McBride and Bill Crow, drummers Joe Morello, Grady Tate and Lewis Nash, and trumpeter Harry (“Sweets”) Edison, among others.
Public radio’s Gen-X listeners don’t fit their generational stereotype; they’re closer to its older audience than to their peers, said a report from public radio’s Audience 98 research project. Pubradio programmer J. Mikel Ellcessor comments and then trades letters to the editor with the Audience 98 researchers. Dan Yankelovich and Pete Townshend: are they the conceptual bookends of generational cohort analysis? In the mid-1960s, Dan Yankelovich explained the “generation gap” and introduced the world-at-large to generational cohorts. These “cultural variations in time” articulate the enduring importance of key life-stage experiences, and the social context within which they occur.
Believe it or not, there’s a stone tablet full of radio principles guiding This American Life. Ira Glass laid them out in a talk …
Hands-up, all those who listen regularly to My Music, the half-hour radio panel game produced by the BBC and distributed by WFMT-FM in Chicago to about 60 public radio stations in the U.S.
Ah, I see a hand there in the back. It’s all right, you may remain anonymous. How many, then, have heard of its companion program, My Word!? Two more. Let the four of us leave the room to recall some favorite segments from these superb series, two of the most civilized radio programs on the air today.
See Jane. See Jane run WBUR. See Jane ditch the music for NPR news and talk. Grow WBUR, grow. Why the primer approach?
Public radio audience researcher David Giovannoni this week will present findings from Audience 98, a major study that aims to extend programmers’ understanding of listener behavior developed in the widely influential Audience 88. Audience 98 is based in part on a rare re-contact survey of 8,000 Arbitron diary-keepers who indicated in fall 1996 that they listened to public radio. The survey was designed to elicit their pledging behaviors, personal beliefs, and attitudes toward public radio. Giovannoni will release Audience 98’s first national report, “The Value of Programming” Sept. 11 when he gives the keynote address at the Public Radio Program Directors Conference in Denver.
The minority of public radio stations that use listener preference data to choose music is becoming a little less minor as music testing spreads to jazz this fall.
The new owner of Rabbit Ears Productions, Millenium Media, says the company will continue producing radio and video childrens’ stories, despite having fired virtually the entire Rabbit Ears staff (pictured) at the end of April. Millenium will move Rabbit Ears operations from Connecticut to its home base in Philadelphia and rely on freelancers for future productions, says Chief Operating Officer Robert Weissman. The CD-ROM publishing company bought Rabbit Ears Productions–perhaps best known for its two-year-old Rabbit Ears Radio–from founder Mark Sottnick about six months ago. Sottnick says the firings took him by surprise and he is quite unhappy. The event shocked those close to Rabbit Ears’ small, family-like operation, and left observers wondering what will become of the enterprise without the staff that was responsible for its critical success.
Talking about the current status of drama on public radio, NPR’s cultural programmer Andy Trudeau thinks back 10, 15 years ago, to a panel session on audience building. Someone had asked the speakers, “When is the best time to air drama?,” and a panelist shot back, “1939.” Despite this pervasive belief among station programmers — that radio drama doesn’t draw or hold modern audiences — Trudeau is spearheading an effort to revive the genre. At the very least, his is an attempt — perhaps a last-ditch one — to bolster the only regularly distributed national outlet for radio drama, NPR Playhouse. Trudeau is asking the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) to fund research on the appeal of drama to NPR’s core audience, and he is asking drama producers to be signatories to the proposal and give the project some cash.
This is the view from Martin Goldsmith, then host of NPR’s daily classical music program Performance Today, who served as announcer, producer and program director at Washington’s WETA-FM between 1974 and 1986. From the same thinking that has offered “seamlessness,” “affinity,” “modes” and “appeal-driven programming” as ways of capturing the public radio audience now comes “customer service.” At first glance, this concept seems perfectly reasonable, even admirable. It conjures up images of the radio programmer as shopkeeper, hustling to fill his customers’ orders, keeping them satisfied so that they’ll continue to place their orders at that familiar stand on the dial. With customer satisfaction, so the theory goes, comes customer loyalty …
Not all classical music is created equal. Exactly what is meant by this seemingly heretical statement? Simply, that in the ears of listeners, some classical music is appealing and some is not.