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Barrett Golding: Getting Good Stuff on Air
Posted by: Brendan Greeley on October 21, 2005 06:34 AM | Comments (1)
 This is my arty picture of Barrett Golding. He's playing sound and talking about it, and I'm resting my camera on the bar. Barrett, one of the producers behind Hearing Voices, spent an hour making the point that it's not impossible to get good stories, told well, on national programs like Morning Edition. Actually, his real stress was, and I'm quoting, on "Day to Day, Day to Day, Day to Day, Day to Day, Day to Day, Day to Day, Day to Day." He offered three possible reasons why your stuff, if you've been pitching it, isn't getting on national shows.
- It's no good.
- They don't know what to do with it.
- You don't have the right phone number.
He had no advice for #1. #3, evidently, can be fixed, though he didn't say how. He focused on #2, using as an example Hillary Frank's In a Bubble, which ran on Day to Day shortly after the Red Lake school shooting. Barrett's point was that Hillary gave the show a peg, a solid reason -- that fit into the show's plan for the day -- to run her piece, which was only tangentially related to the shooting itself. Here's Hillary's piece description from PRX:
Whenever there's a school shooting, the first word people use to describe the shooter is "quiet." In this non-narrated piece, four teens talk about what it's like to be quiet in school -- and show us that quietness isn't always scary. The voices are complemented by sounds of a school bell going off and kids shouting in the hall.
A year of working with John Barth at the Public Radio Exchange taught me the same thing: "It's really, really, really good" is not reason enough for a station to pick up a piece. "It's good for YOUR air, NOW" is. (And frankly, we learned that a good peg is often -- sadly -- much more important than the quality of the piece.)
Extra Credit Reading:
JJ Sutherland's Transom Review on creating Day to Day.
If you work at a station or a national show, drop in the comment thread below and tell us what you want to hear when you get pitched.
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