Radio Chops
Posted by sbroun on November 1, 2006 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

Sam here. Back in Woods Hole. This year, as in years past, I find myself tired out, content and inspired post-Third Coast. It’s a nice place to be.

I’m left with some miscellaneous thoughts and figured I’d share them here.

• Jonathan Mitchell. I realized that we didn’t blog about his session. Apologies, Jonathan. I sat in on Jonathan’s session the first day. Jonathan is a sound designer. A composer. For Jonathan, all radio is music. He is meticulous and exacting in his work. Every sound in a piece has a purpose. The sounds say something the words don’t say. And each sound, each word, each musical note, moves the whole piece forward. The session made me sit up, lean in, pay attention. I was reminded of the importance of the smallest details in this work. Thank you, Jonathan.

• Pulling the curtain back. I was in two sessions this year where the presenters opened up ProTools sessions and shared their process for organizing their work and how they use ProTools. In both cases, they were ProTools sessions for pieces I have heard. So seeing the sessions, and hearing the producers talk about the piece, it was as if they pulled the curtain back a bit…and let us in. More please.

• Creativity and constraints – came up several times throughout the three days. How, for example, the constraints of the 99 Ways call or the constraints of producing a non-narrated piece generate a certain type of creativity. So that what may at first appear to limit, actually becomes a muse. I get that.

What I take away this year from Third Coast is a reminder of the ‘chops’ radio requires. Writing, voicing, structuring, editing. While instincts go a long way in making a good piece, honing these skills (along with using your instincts) is what will ultimately help you make the best radio. Onward...

End of Conference
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At the end of the Conference, I learned many ways to make a good radio piece, such as a good radio piece should have a good sound, capture attention, stand out, interesting characters.... and changing your tone while you speaking on radio, can change the felling and the mood of the listeners.
From this conferece, I greeted lots of teens from everywhere in U.S. I loved Teens doing the radio, that can tell what are teens' thoughts to the society, and the world.

Permanent State of Love and Terror
Posted by sbroun on October 27, 2006 07:42 PM | Comments (2)

Each year, Third Coast invites someone – usually a well known someone – to comment on radio and pieces of radio that they find especially outstanding for one reason or another. Robert Krulwich was this year’s speaker. If you’ve never heard Robert’s work, he’s one of those people who can explain complicated stuff really well. He gets into small tight places and expands them. He names what is gracefully, simply. He makes you say, “Yes. That’s it.” So to hear Robert Krulwich speak about radio was, well – amazing.

If these closing sessions are meant to inspire, which I suspect they are, then job well done. My heart is full. And I’m ready to go make great radio. Here is some of what I take away…

• Danger and Draw – Robert selected pieces to play for us which he considered dangerous. Dangerous because they are different than typical radio pieces. Different in their structure, in how they are edited, in how sound was used, in how the story was told. They are risky. And because they are dangerous and different and risky, we are drawn to them.

• Working in radio is like being in a permanent state of love and terror. Robert says, "You should feel both privileged and lonely."

• Put yourself in your pieces. Sometimes you will be able to sing loudly, sometimes you will sing soft – the important thing is to keep on singing.

Kenneth Goldsmith - On Transgression, Modernism, and Free-Form Radio (Or, why if something's not on the internet it doesn't exist)
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Kenny G knows all about transgressive radio. In the last twelve years as a DJ on WFMU, he has done the inconceivable. He has aired three hours of snoring and farting, whispered the entire communist manifesto while wearing couture clothing, and done his entire show blindfolded, bound and gagged. It's just the tip of the iceberg. "Modern art is a sanctified lunatic asylum," he says. That's his analysis, but it could also be his m.o.

Kenny played a selection of strange and shocking sound clips taken from his site Ubu Web, the largest repository for avant guard works on the web. After he played ramblings by famous modernists like Joyce and Man Ray, outsider art, kitsch, Dutch sound poetry and some good old fashioned screaming, we sat down for a chat in the hotel bar.

Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith of Ubu Web (28 min)

Friday
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Barbara Price

Part 2

The day started gray and misting devolving into rainy and windy, but it didn’t matter much since we were mostly indoors for sessions. The afternoon session of Grant writing was solid and straightforward. It was geared for less experienced grant seekers so it may have seemed a little superficial, but there were great reinforcing thoughts.

I met several SALT people including Posey Greuen and Nancy Rosenbaum who are both graduates of the writing program (do they say “graduate”?) and both had praise for the program. I hadn’t been aware that they offered programs beyond radio, but I am very interested in the writing section now.

The weather dampened our spirits for the evening events last night. We did make it to Powell’s Books for a little more of Matt and Jessica.

Woke up today feeling that the time is more than half over and I need to move from my laissez-faire attitude of passively meeting new people to assertively reaching out to meet people I’ve circled on my attendees list. Time to get out of my comfort zone. And it’s working.

Plus, just the shift in the way I am approaching the day has trigger thoughts for new projects and suggestions for the 2007 TCF. Laurie Mask is always at the 3rd Coast desk whenever I’ve got some query (often something could be answered if I just looked at the conference materials.) But she knows off the top of her head, and she always has a smile – she’s instrumental in creating a Good Experience for conference goers. Over all it’s a good energy, and everyone is incredibly receptive and supportive.

Time for the Invisible Narrative.

Telling Story far from Home
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Have you travel to any parts of Southeast Asia? Have you ever listened to any radio stations from Southeast Asia, or any pieces about that part of the world? "Telling stories far from home" is a breakout session which helps you understand how to do radio documentaries internationally, and this session focused partly on working in Southeast Asian culture and doing radio shows in an undeveloped country with limited resources. The reason that its important to do this kind of work is because there is not enough discussion about international issues on the radio in the U.S.

One of the pieces that most influenced me was a story about girls and women in Cambodia. The piece helped me understand how the women fought for their freedom in undeveloped countries where they were kept in brothels. I also learned more about their cultures.

Sources, Correspondents, Fixers: Making Radio with Bloggers
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Yesterday I blogged a session about blogs for the bloggy radio show I work for.

That, plus the fact that I climbed up and down 7 flights of stairs to get to and from breakout sessions, made me feel like a character in an M. C. Escher drawing.

Brendan Greeley wants to change the way you think about blogs. Bloggers are more than their opinions about national politics; they're people, and most of them would love to tell their stories to a public radio producer. With search tools, blogs become a searchable database of 50 million people's stories, hobbies, obsessions, and email addresses. When you don't have Scott Carrier's travel budget to wander Antarctica yourself, you can at least find someone there to interview on the phone. (Or if you do have Scott Carrier's travel budget, then find them this way, go visit, and get richer tape).

Brendan suggested a few webby tools to find and keep up with your favorite bloggers:

* Blog search engines like Technorati or Google Blogsearch.

* RSS feed-readers like Bloglines: once you find a blog and a storyteller you like, subscribe to their RSS feed, so you'll know whenever they post something new. Feed readers aggregate new posts on the blogs you like so you can read them all at once.

* Flickr, a photo sharing site where photographers upload pictures and tag them by date and location, so you can easily find a person in a specific location. If a photographer has taken a picture of Sarajevo, they can probably tell a good story about Sarajevo, or direct the enterprising producer to someone who can.

* Better Whois: When a blogger doesn't list contact info, enter in the blog's URL here, and if the writer has registered the site herself (rather than using a platform like blogspot or myspace), you might be able to find a phone number here.

For me, the highlight of the session came when we got to see Open Source methods put to work by an independent producer. Brendan teamed up with new producer Zak Rosen. Zak decided he wanted to know more about the zipper industry, so he contacted bloggers to find sources and "fixers" (so-so talkers who know the terrain and can suggest great talkers) and created a short piece from his material. After a few blog searches and a lot of slogging through boring material, he'd found enough industry insiders to piece together a (slightly scattered) documentary, with incredible turnaround and for the cost of a few international phone calls.

Talk The Copy
Posted by sbroun on October 26, 2006 07:42 PM | Comments (0)

Marilyn Pittman - a comedian at heart - earns part of her living coaching people on how to use their voice. Teaching them to read copy, to narrate, to host. Here's the thing. It's not as easy as it seems and yet....there are simple things that you can do that can make your voicing so much better - more real. And, things that will help you to command people's attention. There were brave souls at the session, who offered up pieces they had voiced for Marilyn to critique. And even braver souls who stood at a mic and read copy there in front of all of us. I saw two Youth Radio kids' voicings transform before my ears.

Some things to keep in mind:

*punching the copy - think about the words that convey meaning
* pause before or after key words
* mark your script with places you want to breathe. Underline the words that convey meaning.
* Play with the tempo -- fast and slow
* Play with your pitch
* Beware of the tendancy to be "sing songy" changing pitch and emphasis for now apparent reason.
* See what you're saying

Simple. And hard. Very, very hard.

Mission Possible: Finding Grants for Independent Producers.
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Amie Miller. An A to Z on fundraising. The good news is that the number of foundations is growing each year and they are giving away about $33.5 billion dollars. The bad news? That out of 68,000 foundations 1,000 to 1,500 give to individuals who work in media. Sigh. For independents, Amie recommends partnering with a fiscal agent - an organization - or officially forming a 501C3 (non-profit) yourself. One more bit of good news in all of this, Amie says foundation folk like stories and that when pitching a project you should tell a story. Now, we know how to do that! Onward!

Telling Stories Far From Home
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Not really a practical course in how to make international documentaries, this session offers insight into the way that one group does it. It's a way that Stephanie Guyer-Stevens knows is controversial. Call it advocacy journalism if you want, she says. The women who work at Outer Voices are not aiming for objective journalism. It's a straightforward mission: Stephanie meets people who want their stories told and her group cobbles together a small budget and goes overseas to record them. They don't make much effort to balance the stories with oppositional points of view. As she says, when you're recording stories of the victims of a military regime in Burma, what's the use of recording the military's rhetoric?

Stephanie confesses she's not a radio person, she's an activist. But she does offer a few practical tips for the aspiring documentarian:

* Before you go, establish contact with an ally, a fixer, in the field. Have a best friend waiting there who will help you get the inside story.

* Different places have different degrees of access to electricity, so bring extra batteries.

* To prepare for weather, especially if you expect extreme humidity, bring two of every recorder, two of every cable, two of every mic. (To complicate things, Stephanie later recommended bringing as little equipment as possible). Silica gel that comes in shoe boxes will absorb moisture like a charm if you store it with your equipment in a Ziploc bag.

* Besides Outer Voices, pitch international documentaries to Worlds of Difference, or try to find communities who are starting local radio networks with groups like Developing Radio Partners, AMARC, and InterNews.

Steve Menscher
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Steve Menscher, formerly of Justice Talking, in the very crowded hotel elevator.

TAL's Nancy Updike
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This American Life producer Nancy Updike, spotted outside the elevators in the hotel. Check back later for an account of her very excellent pannel, "Die Mediocrity, Die!"

Kari Hesthamar and Radio Norway
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Kari Hesthamar of Radio Norway story-boarding one of her pieces

Kari Hesthamar of Radio Norway is probably one of the most compassionate producers I've ever encountered. After hearing several clips from her work, it's clear she has incredible compassion for her subjects, which translates into a kind of intimacy that is probably one of her work's greatest strengths.

More than once she expressed feeling pain when her subjects felt pain,
only able to stop herself with the thought, "it's not Kari in this situation it's the journalist Kari in this situation." It's not stereotypical bleeding-heart-liberal journalism though. It's true and honest empathy and compassion. She played tape of a piece she made in an infamous children's institution in Norway, which included tape of a child spitting in the face of one of the adult caregivers. She said that the children were so hungry for attention that she felt bad leaving when she was done taping, as if she were just another person not staying in the lives of these children. closest to recording the truth. children didn't manage to pull themselves together the way that adults often do.

She played clips from several long pieces, two of which were really remarkable. One was about the love affair between a Norwegian woman named Marianne, immortalized in the Leonard Cohen song So Long, Marianne, and the musician himself. The tape is incredible, very intimate. The story is moving. The pacing is perfect, and the depth of memory and emotion her subject expresses makes for a really compelling story.

The second was a piece that begins like a fairy tale. The Brown Parcel - a woman is given a parcel by her father and is told not to open it until her mother has been dead for two years. About the piece Kari said:

You make a contract with the listener. The plot is so clear. You set up these expectations. Where shall I start? What do I want the listeners to wait for? This is a clear case of old fashioned story telling, of dramaturgy. What is working for the main character, what is working against him? You get a deeper and deeper picture of the person, like in a novel. Here, what we're waiting for is the day Cecilia opens the parcel. Everyone brings the parcel into their own lives and talks about what they would have done. Would you open it? Would you wait? But you can't talk about what's in the parcel for 40 minutes. You have to figure out, what is this about?

The woman had been waiting to open the parcel for ten years, and when she opened it, Kari fainted. And got it on tape. Kari was pregnant, and thought to herself, I can't throw up now, she's been waiting 10 years for this!

We were in the basement, my head was outside, feet were inside. I listened back to the tape, and I heard her in the back of the recordings say, "Oh my god, she's dead! We've got to stop this now. This is my father from heaven saying we've got to stop this." So I left that in. It's in the documentary.

Wow.

Kari has a really envious work situation. She makes only about three, forty minute long documentaries a year, working with a "coach" (another member of the NRK features team) and an engineer. Included in the NRK's mandate is to win prizes, to experiment with radio, teach other radio shows within the NRK about what they're doing, and to develop radio as a medium. How much do you want to work there right now???

A few other things about Kari's work methods:

-She storyboards her documentaries using time-lines and colored pens to keep track of her material. That way, she says:

I know where to begin, what the climax is, where the point of no return is. The point of no return is where you're in so deep in but don't know what the climax is yet, and the ending. This is the presentation. This is where we're going to know the main character better and better. Here are the obstacles and other people helping.

-She has an interesting interview set up. She sits next to her subjects rather than across from them, because she says looking into their eyes can be uncomfortable for both her and the subject, and doesn't get her material that's as good.

- She never takes written notes into an interview, because she thinks it draws the attention away from the person she's interviewing. She always prepares but never carries written questions. "I try to be quiet and shut my mouth. Sometimes I explain how I'm working. If I'm silent it doesn't mean I'm stupid, if I ask for details its not because I'm not listening."

Something About Last Night
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So this morning I wrote a lovely little something about last night - because the first night of Third Coast is a beautiful thing. The energy. The love. But alas...what I wrote didn't post. I ended it by thanking the folks from Big Shed - for sharing gems from their podcast. Here's Jesse (another conference attendee and fellow Salt alum) to tell you more.

I would like to say this about Big Shed's listening session; Well, I have a lot to say about the event, but I keep forgetting or running out of time, and so I’m going to hold it to a couple of essential scenes. The setting, Shea and Jennifer talk about Big Shed, the podcast project that they do, as far as I know, for free, in order to probe possibility.

Scene 1: A hot dark room, the sound of music made from a washing machine, people sprawled out all over the floor, their eyes closed, just listening. It was more intimate than a conference room and seemed to invoke what I imagine all of our radio heroes were up to in 1984 or so.

Scene 2: Shea introduces the bartender and who tells us the bar is closing in 13 minutes. Shea reiterates that we have 13 more minutes of free booze. Then, they try to mic the sound of a beer opening, it doesn’t work, Shea imitates the sound, and everybody laughs. This is like the Big Shed Podcast, but live, with real people.

Scene 3: We talk a little about how Big Shed likes to let tape run on for a bit—that the Big Shed version is usually a little longer (or a whole lot longer) than the public radio version of the same story. Why? I think Jennifer said that Big Shed “errs on the side of too long” and I think Shea chipped in: “It’s just podcasting”. Some people intuitively agreed with this approach. Others didn’t seem to.

Why do we care? I always have a hard time with that question. In my case, I wasn’t all that interested in Podcasting a year ago. Like Jennifer, I don’t have strong feelings about whether it’s a good or bad thing. However, as they said, it is obviously happening. And it may very well mean something.

If we’re paying attention, we realize that every medium has different forms and structures that work for a particular audience. I think most of us appreciate that forms that public radio people have figured out over the last thirty years or more. With podcasting, an interesting question arises: Is Podcasting the same thing as Radio? By that, I mean, do the same forms that work to make brilliantly listenable public radio work in an “audio documentary podcast.” Mostly, I think what Shea and Jennifer are up to is asking this question. They don’t have answers yet, but they have their suspicions. One principal seems to be a willingness to substitute passion for polish, if you have to make that choice (or even if you don’t).

Is Podcasting different than radio? What I come away with is: “Yes.” Podcasting is different. It doesn’t just go by once. You can listen to very specialized content. You can skip the boring parts. Different.

What does this mean for all of us? I don’t know, but it’s an exciting question to try to answer.

Zwerding on Radio
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Do you like writing journals? Are you struggling how can make the way interested when you talking on Radio? Zwerding On Radio can help you!

Conflict, Surprise, Place, Action, strucure, Plot, Resolution, Turning-point... how can them connect together to make an interest radio talkshow. Come to Zwerding On Radio.

At the Zwerding On Radio, it can teach you how to make it interest. One thing I learned from the Breakout Session is the way you talk, the word you choose, can let the listener imagine the character how is look. People does not like listening a boring radio. Daniel Zwerding will share his experiences on the radio to teach you. It is a funny session, but it has a little boring, but still I will think that will be interest in you.

Different teens sharing their experience
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Last night, 10/25/2006, teens from different States around U.S came to the radio festival at Chicago. They were sharing their radio pieces, the most influence radio piece is the teens with drugs. Teens around 15 -17 yrs old were already addicted to the drugs. They got the drugs from the parties, and other ways. When they wanted to go back, they think it is too late for them, they have been in a program where can help them get away from drugs. At the end, they graduated from the program. Their families and friends are always support them. Drugs can affect everyone's life. DO NOT TRY ANY DRUGS IN YOUR WHOLE LIFE.

BRING EXTRA BATTERIES
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Bring extra batteries? What is that means to you? Is it bring more batteries? From the breakout session, you will learn what is the real meaning for the "Bring extra batteries."

How to do a good radio piece?
Here is what i learn from the session.
A good radio piece contains these elements:
1. good sound
2. capture attention
3. make you care
4. stand out
5. active and visual
6. new perspectives
7. knowing your story. etc...

If you have not get a chance to take a look the "Bring Extra Batteries"
There is a chance at tomorrow at 9:00am. Do not miss THIS CHANCE.
you will learn how to make a good radio piece and radio story. The one thing most important thing I learned from the session is if you have a good, interesting radio topic to write, it will take lots of planning to make that become a successful radio story.

Short Docs: 99 Ways to Tell a Radio Story
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Bed time story, absurdist holiday fiction, hysteria verite, and meta-audio. These are only a few of over 70 different ways to tell a radio story included in this year's short doc competition. Rather than select a theme and commission a few pieces based on producer pitches, this year's short doc competition was based on a set of narrow guidelines to structure production. Each piece submitted had to: be exactly 2 minutes and 30 seconds long, contain a pre-recorded voice, a syncopated rhythm, and an exclamation, and start with the sentence, "To begin with, they never got along." At this point over 70 people from 14 different countries have submitted pieces, and they're hoping for 99 by the end of the year.

This panel was a great thought experiment on the pacing and craft of story telling. The challenge was all about taking basic elements of a story and chopping them up and re-arranging them a thousand times over (or at least 99) so that the basic elements are recognizable but the final results are like a delicious buffet where no two dishes are the same.

Hearing some of the results was fascinating. David Henderson's The Long Way Home, produced in the style of "pseudo-found audio," was a hilarious re-telling of the Odyssey based on "Penelope's answering machine tape found in a thrift store in Athens." Odysseus is a philandering old hippy on a road trip with his buddies who promises to be home soon (as soon as they fix the Taurus that's broken down on I-80), and Penelope is his long suffering wife fielding his phone calls from the road.

Christian Gasser's The Yakuza Code was based on some marvelous Chris Marker-esque field recordings from Japan -- laughing voices, singing in an elevator, fuzzed out sound from game-show television, censor's bleeps -- written into a the saga of an estranged brother and sister, he "the king of profanity on Japanese tv," and she "the most popular elevator girl in a Japanese book store." In addition to being one of what seem to be several pieces dealing with sibling tension, the piece was incredibly dynamic and reminded me how non-English speaking voices presented for an English speaking audience allows the sound to function more like sound and less like language.

Scotland's own Zoe Irvine submitted two different pieces including Au Debut. The piece is mostly French speaking voices translating the original sentence ("To begin with, they never got along") into French, and talking all the while about the inexact nature of the translation. The voices are set in the background off mic, sometimes whispered, sometimes exclaimed, while Zoe directs and talks back. The piece is set to Brazilian mandolin music, which Zoe chose for its "lightness and momentum," saying she needed both to make the piece work. It was a piece made beautiful because, as Julie describes it, "there's no content. It's just an experience. She pushed the story aside and made a listening experience, and something's happening as you're listening."

Now I want to go home and sit and listen to the other 70 pieces. And make one of my own...

Doing Some Digging
Posted by Robin Amer on October 24, 2006 10:43 AM | Comments (1)

So I've been poking around a little online this morning, trying to get my head back into radio for this weekend. I know that may sound a little strange, given I'm working in radio full time, but I feel like I have much less time to look, listen and ponder than I used to. I used to spend so much time just digging around online for interesting pieces and producers, taking special interest in people coming at the medium from a more experimental angle. I love my job, but I definitely envy people like Julie and Kenny from UbuWeb for being able to do that kind of digging and curating and obsessive listening full time! There's so much good stuff on the Third Coast site especially that I have to go back and listen to.

Here are some little moments from my digging I'll submit for your enjoyment.

1) Did you know the Bauhaus has a degree program in experimental radio?! Sign me up!

2) I can't find the actual article online (more digging needed) but The Wire had a great piece last month on experimental music and sound art in Melbourne, Australia in the late '70s. More relevant and interesting, less obscure than it may sound off the bat. It's all about trying new forms and new technology, and building community amongst like-minded artists and producers. Sound familiar? Anyone here ever been to Melbourne? Now that's a city I could get my head into. Amazing art and music scene, great radio (ABC and the community version alike) great public libraries and a kick-ass tram system.

3) Ok, this one's courtesy of Julie too, but apparently the MCA is hosting a series of New Music performances on Saturday. Included are performances by the pianist Frank Abbinanti who Julie says is "amazing," and Osvaldo Goliijov, who, if I'm not completely mistaken, wrote the theme song for Open Source?! [Update: Osvaldo Goliijov did not write our theme music. According to my co-Open-Sourcer Katherine Bidwell, "He lives in Brookline and consulted with us about music waaay back before we had a radio show. He's an amazing composer. Yes, we've been thinking of doing a show with him for about 18 months now."] I'll do some more digging on the other featured artists and get back to you, but I think I may try and check this out after the conference. (Now that the end-of-the-weekend party isn't at the MCA, I have to get some Chicago art museum time in somehow, right?)

I should say on the subject of digging that I'm especially excited to try and interview Kenny G from UbuWeb this weekend. That site is the closest thing we have to a definitive archive of sound works, certainly online and maybe anywhere. Is there anything else that comes close to a radio and sound version of the Anthology Film Archives? I want to ask him about the pleasures of reveling in the obscure and the miscreant, and about his home at WFMU, a place that clearly appreciates the outsider and the oddball. Submit your questions for Kenny G or your reminders of other such sound archives in the comments below! And thanks.

A Word from our Sponsors
Posted by Robin Amer on October 23, 2006 08:54 PM | Comments (2)

T-minus two days till Third Coast and I'm getting psyched. Psyched to go to Chicago, psyched to reconnect with friends and colleagues, psyched to blog, and psyched to check out all the exciting events Julie and Johanna have put together for this year's conference. I spoke to Julie on Friday to get a sense of how things were shaping up for this weekend. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

Robin Amer: In past years you've talked about your "festival crushes" - the people or events you've personally been most excited for. One year I remember it was The Books. Who are your festival crushes this year?

Julie Shapiro: I feel like I'm a cheeleader for the international people. But I know Kari Hesthamar, who makes radio in the features department of the NRK, the NPR of Norway, and she has consistantly blown my mind with the way she talks about radio and the work she makes. And she's a warm and friendly person. In the European scene she's younger compared to some of the other established producers. We've listened to a couple of her pieces, where at the end, for example, of her profile of Leonard Cohen, you have more questions about him than you did when the piece started. It's not an informational thing. Her work raises a lot of questions, which I think is really powerful.

RA: Which is so different from how it would be if a piece like that were produced in the States.

JS: Especially for a profile of a musican. She's always getting at the human side of things, whether it's a piece about orphans or musicians or crazy kids. She gets really close to her subjects and she transfers that to you.

I'm also really looking forward to Kenny G's breakout session, The Sounds of Madness. He's the currator of UbuWeb. He told me, I'm having so much fun putting this together. It's a portal. He's excited about it. To be perfectly honest, it's not about how to do stuff, it's just an opportunity to experience a lot of weird stuff. It's a survey. We like to reserve one breakout session that's more show and tell.

My crushes are very personal as far as what I'm excited about. If I was working on a weekly show for a station I might be really exicted for Daniel Zwerdling or Nancy Updike. It all depends. Hopefully people can really mix and match do a little bit of both. I'm hoping people feel adventurous enough to go to things that they don't think they might initially be interested in. There are six breakouts this year, three a day. Last year there were just four. We decided we could do it differently this year, and give people the opportunity to customize their experience a bit more. The first thing of the conference and last we're all together, and the rest you choose.

RA: I noticed that this year you're doing something called Group (Radio) Therapy sessions. Can you tell me a little bit about those?

JS: People kept saying, "I want feedback on my work." So we started last year with the close listening sessions. This is all bring your own work. Dmae [Roberts] will moderate. This is really just about critiquing your work. People who haven't had a chance to sit around and talk about work will have an opportunity to get some feedback. They'll be offered once each day. Personally my experience going to the International Features Conference is that being involved in a week long critique is so valuable - hearing what other people are thinking about, developing a working relationship with someone, hearing how they fucntion, having a variety of responses to something, and even hearing directly opposeite reactions. It's really good.

RA: Tell me about the short docs you've commissioned for this year, which are so different from past years.

JS: We have been shocked and delighted about how many people have sent in work. I have to admit I thought it was going to be a bust about two weeks before the deadline. Our plan had been that the archive would grow slowly over the year, but of course 65% came in the last two or three days. We picked four winners along with Matt Madden the cartoonist. That's been really fun. He's brought some really interesting non-radio stuff to the table. Matt and I are going to present the winners together.

RA: Have the winners been announced?

JS: If you look carefully you'll be able to figure out who won. But I didn't want people to hear the winning pieces before hand, and I don't want to draw attention to them. I want people to hear them for the first time in the room, to debut them there. It works out cause they're so short. The session will be full of multi-media, and should be pretty fun, and, we have a special surprise incentive. We want to get to 99 ways by the end of the year. It's not too late. People can still submit pieces by the end of the year.

Meet You in Evanston
Posted by sbroun on October 19, 2006 03:48 PM | Comments (1)

Sam here - from Woods Hole, MA. Gearing up for Third Coast. This is my third year in a row at Third Coast. Three years ago, I was working in education with youth and came to check out the radio scene. And I'll admit here, that I left Chicago with a crush on all of you. Last year, I went to Third Coast as a student -studying radio at Salt. And this year, my third year, I come as a rep from Transom and Atlantic Public Media. Bliss. My experience of Third Coast and of radio, in general, is that radio people are generous. They are happy to share - their love of radio, their knowledge, their advice. And they'll encourage you along if you love radio too.

I'm SO looking forward to seeing you all in Evanston. And if you can't make it (or even if you can) keep tabs on things by following along here. Robin Amer & Greta Pemberton from Open Source, Alex Chen from Chinatown Youth Radio and I will be blogging our hearts out. Send us your thoughts and questions.