Posted by: Pejk Malinovski on October 22, 2005 08:00 PM | Comments (2)

The last panel, Radio across time zones came about because of the discussion after last years festival. It was a great little introduction to Australian, European and Canadian radio. I think the most important moment for me was when Steve Wadham talked about the importance of knowing your radio history and having access to it, to avoid having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Conferences are good for this. PRX is also good for this. Jake Shapiro told me that they have new grants to give out for producers to “reformat� their back catalog of pieces to make them more generic and to upload them to PRX. Maybe one day PRX will be like a babel tower of radio from the whole world. Wadham played one of my favorite pieces ever: the Change in Farming. A lot of people in the room didn’t know this piece. You can find it here.

Maybe PRX could make a "know your classics" section, from Orson Welles to Tony Schwartz to David Isay to Adam Goddard. Guess the tricky thing is copyright. Edwin Brys gave me a 6 cd compilation of the best European Features from the last 30 years, with companion translations in English. It is an amazing document. Unfortunately it is out of print. Why not put it up on PRX? At the Danish Radio it is very easy to get to know the radio history, because there was always only one station and if you’re in radio, that’s where you work, and that’s where they have the tapes. In the US, public radio is a more scattered landscape. But at the same time, the radio classics, the producers who really pushed into new territory can be counted on a couple of hands, and it might not be that difficult to gather that stuff somehow. I guess that quite a bit of it is already out there, and the important thing is really to sit down and listen, I mean a lot of people know of Jay Allison or The Kitchen Sisters, but do they really know the work?

The festival has been amazing. No doubt Julie and Johanna really have their ears wide open and that the Third Coast is becoming THE radio festival in the world. Thank you guys.

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