The blog lives, and it feeds on your love. We're still writing, now that we're back in Boston, Woods Hole and southwest Chicago; now that you've slept and bathed and are back in front of your computer, we want to hear from you, too. A lot came out of Third Coast, and we took a couple of questions with us out of each session. Answer them. Jump on a comment thread below.

This is what Third Coast does.
Posted by Robin Amer on November 2, 2005 06:36 AM | Comments (0)

I just got off the phone a little while ago with Amy O'Leary, self-described junior producer at This American Life. If you haven't met her yet, she's lovely. Very friendly and generous with her time. (She's also the one who lives in the crazy castle-like penthouse appartment near the MCA.) I was on the phone with Amy because I was pitching her some story ideas. Or rather, I was talking through some ideas that I thought would make good stories for the show, but wasn't quite ready to pitch formally. And I was able to do this because Amy had said I should when I spoke to her at Third Coast. I was talking with her and some other folks over lunch, and sharing some of my thoughts from the pitch session Julie Snyder was on, and mentioned that one reason I found the session so good was that I liked having insight into the brain of TAL, which was good because it's the show that made me want to do radio in the first place, and I've always wanted to do pieces for them. (I am among the great masses of young producers to have been rejected from internships at This American Life. Actually, I think the first year I was at the festival Steve Schultze of PRX interviewed me and a couple other rejects about being rejected by TAL, and what it was like to then be in the same room with Ira Glass.) Amy said, you know, if you want, you can call me and talk over some story ideas if you'd like. And I said, really? And she said, sure. That's my job.

See what happens? You go to these things and you meet people and they're nice and then you can sometimes do work for/with them. I guess some people call that networking. It happened last year, too. At last year's conference I met Peter Clowney, one of the editors for Marketplace (also one of the first producers at TAL, former producer for Studio 360, and a long time arts reporter at WHYY). I said, I'd like to pitch you stories. He said, ok, so...do. Call me when you get back. So I called him a few days after I got home, pitched him a couple stories, and voila. I mean, I'd been working up to it, but gosh, it was so helpful to meet him in person. It made the whole process easier and less intimidating to have a human being rather than a name/unknown quantity at the other end of the phone. I think it also helped that I had pitched to David Krasnow at Studio 360, and even though my pitches to that show hadn't gone anywhere, David liked some of them enough to tell Peter that I should pitch to Marketplace. (Incidentally, Peter is one of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. He is really, really, really fantastic at what he does, and is also incredibly kind. He's so good that I really felt unworthy of working with him. My main goal for the pieces of mine he edited was to just be worthy of working with him.)

Also, through the Third Coast I met Jake Shapiro, head of PRX and former producer at the Connection. We had quite a long talk at 2am the last night of the conference in some Irish bar in Fish Town to which the conference decamped after the awards ceremony. (During which I witnessed an event that at the time seemed impossibly surreal: Jay Allison and Scott Carrier playing darts.) When it came time to help my current bosses hire producers for the new show, Jake was able to pass them my resume for consideration.

Is this interesting? What I'm trying to say is that even if you poo-poo "networking," if you're young and this is what you want to do, coming to Third Coast really helps. You still have to be good at what you do, but there's really never going to be another time when you'll be in a room with so many people who are likely to be in a position to help you get to where you want to go.

5 Years Old. Time for a Facelife?
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So I mentioned earlier that one of the things I wanted to do on this blog was propose a face lift for the Festival. A way to rethink what it means to have us all gather year after year, to talk about what we do and why, and why we love it, and how we can all be better at it. Keep in mind that I really really like Third Coast and that any suggestions for improvement are just that. And that I'm a lifer.

Here's my basic proposal. I would love to come to this festival and do a whole lot more listening. If you've ever been to a film festival, you know that the basic model is to watch as many films as you possibly can in the span of a few days. There are different screenings, and, buffet style, you choose what you want to see when you want to see it. So as a result, you actually get to see a lot of films. Not just the ones that won prizes, but most or all of the films that were accepted into the festival. I want Third Coast to be like that. Rather than listening to short snippets of a handful of pieces embedded in panel discussions, I want to hear dozens of works in their entirety. Short ones, long one, straight forward docs and experimental sound art pieces. All the great pieces that the Third Coast judges get to hear but we don't. Because most of these pieces I will never hear otherwise. Even the pieces that win awards in the festival don't always make it outside to a wider audience.

There are so many good reasons to add this component to the festival. First, if not here, where? Third Coast has already distinguished itself as one of the world's premier audio festivals, and the premier annual festival for great audio works being produced in America. If it's not going to happen here, I don't see where it's going to happen.

Second, every artist and producer is affected by the work of their predecessors and their contemporaries. Speaking from personal experience, sometimes a single piece can change your ideas, your goals, your aesthetics...your entire motivation for doing the work you do. Giving us the opportunity to hear many works in their entirety, while their makers may even be present, would only help broaden all of our understandings about what's out there in the landscape of radio past, present, future. When I heard Kaye Mortley play her work a few years ago I knew I would never think about making radio the same way again. And the fact that she was there, and I could talk to her...well, it was a big deal. But what I would have loved even more would have been to hear a few of her pieces in their entirety, and then hear her speak. (Like Q & A with the filmmaker)

On this note, I think having more listening of more pieces in their entirety could be an amazing way to encourage creative cross-pollination and future partnerships among producers present at the festival. You've got all these producers in a room together, but some of us will talk to one another and some of us won't. But if you play our work, it will undoubtedly cause the people with similar aesthetics or goals to seek out one another. And who knows what could come from that? We already know about a few partnerships that have arisen out of the festival (like Rick Moody, Sherre DeLys and Emily Botein). There's no reason to think that this couldn't happen again on a number of scales.

Two other reasons. Just as in the film world, where independent productions are often picked up for distribution following a successful festival debut, I could totally see small radio pieces being picked up by national shows after having played the Third Coast. And finally. It would just be fun. We all like listening. Let's listen some more.

This is the primary change I would suggest, but in addition, I think it would be cool to add some master classes. Kind of like doctor sessions, only with a few more people. I really like the doctor sessions, and the close listening sessions that were introduced this year seem to accomplish much of what I think master classes would accomplish. But let's do some master classes with people like Walter Murch or Chris Brooks or Andrew MacLennon or Peter Leonard Braun. THAT would keep me coming back year after year.

[UPDATE 11/3/05, 10:39 am. Ok just read Julie's comment under Brendan's posted email from David Schulman. Seems like the good ladies at TCIAF are about 15 steps ahead of me in terms of thinking and planning the logistics of more deep listening. To which I say, hooray! And, that's why they're planning the conference, whereas I am only blogging about it. I actaully had some of what Julie had said about her experiences at the IFC in mind when I wrote this, so I'm glad to hear that is influencing her thinking about next year.]

Center of Gravity
Posted by Jay Allison on October 27, 2005 10:14 PM | Comments (4)

I was saying to Julie and Johanna that the center of gravity at Third Coast has shifted, i.e. the torch has been passed to a new generation of public radio geeks.

Five years ago, the usual middle-aged suspects showed up in Chicago and were excited to see the halls filled with younger faces, new people drawn to public radio by... what? Was it the inspiration of This American Life or a beckoning echo of childhoods spent in carpools forced to listen to the left end of the dial? Is it the mission of public broadcasting, a call to public service? Or is it a chance to say your piece, the art of the thing? Maybe it's a lure of simple narrative, a kind of a multi-media backlash. Or does it come from the rise of youth radio organizations and college programs, the welcoming spirit of decent people already in the profession, increasing distribution options and an awareness of affinity spawned by the Internet?

QUESTIONS: If you came into public radio in the last five or ten years, what attracted you? What did you hope to find? Are you finding it?

In any case, five years on, younger people are no surprise at Third Coast. In fact, they predominate. They exert a gravitational force at the center and draw more people toward them. There is not a sense that people congregate in Chicago to hear from the "professionals," but instead to conspire, grow, network within the ranks. There is a social web forming, a community building. Maybe there is what Studs Terkel extolled in his recent This I Believe essay, a "community in action."

QUESTIONS: If you are one of those people new to public radio in recent years, what do you want to do? How are you thinking about using your gravitational force? Do you feel a sense of community or are you on your own out there? Do you want to work within existing structures, or change them, or make new ones?

Honestly, I don't think the age thing makes much difference on the ground. We all just work together, no big deal. People will find each other and age won't have much to do with it. But it's significant to public radio because if an enterprise stops drawing younger people, it just dies. So, I'm curious about the nature of the draw, and what happens to all of us, once drawn.

(NOTE: by the way, everyone should feel free to post comments in these boards. The Transom Blogging Team are just conversation starters. Click "comments" on any entry and start typing.)

Dr. Glass will see you now
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Emily Sapienza, SALT alumni just sent me this account of her audio doctor session with Ira Glass:

Sitting there listening to my piece with Ira listening made me realize how bad it is. I mean, not that it's total crap or anything, but I could really hear exactly where and how I did a bad job with the music. It was like, having him there made me hear through his ears. So even when he started talking I wanted to just be like "oh my god, I know. It's crap!"

He did a really nice thing and made a point of starting out with compliments after he heard the piece. And when we started talking about my writing he starts out saying "The writing starts out good..." But then, with an equal amount of good nature in his voice says "And then it gets REALLY BAD." And he said it in this way that was so honest, but not harsh that it actually made me smile, even though it had literally taken me almost two whole days to decide on two sentences he was referring to. But, you know, I think he was right. I just couldn't hear it before.

At one point I told him about some tape that I had, that I didn't use: A story about a woman working in a shipbuilding factory during WWII, surrounded by men, welding for the first time. I told him about how one of the men played a "joke" on her, -launching her off the top of the ship and almost killing her. His face was awesome, better than words: saying both: that is a crazy story and I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DIDN'T USE THAT TAPE!

Another thing I got out of the experience was the realization that there was this whole other direction that I could have taken the piece in. When I made the piece I thought I had to include all this tape and all these details. Ira totally zeroed in on the story. And he pointed out how I could have brought it out in the piece. So now I feel like I could go back and re-work the piece, if nothing else, as an exercise for myself.

would be fun to hear from other doctors appointments...

Anne Hull's handout
Posted by Pejk Malinovski on October 25, 2005 11:05 AM | Comments (1)

Anne Hull just emailed me the handout from her session. It's a great little tutorial in field reporting. For print or radio journalists.

"Explore sense of place. What was here before? How has the land changed? How was commerce changed? How has the political climate changed? What is extinct and what is rising in its place? What were factors in the shift? To learn about place, ride with cops, interview old-timers, go through property records, old newspaper clippings, etc. Treat 'place' as a character, because place is context, and context is everything. For inspiration, read Melissa Faye Greene’s 'Praying for Sheetrock,' a brilliant and poetic rendering of place."

You can download the whole thing here. Thanks Anne.

Close Listening: An Email from David Schulman
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David Schulman, he of the Third Coast Award-winning Musicians in Their Own Words just wrote an email, asking if could add to the blog. The answer to him, as it is to everyone, is YES. From David:

One of the real gifts of this year's festival were the new "close listening" sessions — BYOT breakouts where small groups of producers each got to play up to 5 minutes of tape, and then heard a few minutes of live feedback from the group. Sessions were deftly led by Martin Spinelli and by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva.

Not only was the tape often, very, very strong, but the response of moderators and other producers was like the very best kind of editorial feedback — imaginative, empathetic, fair, creative, decisive. Often, these sessions offered more than what even the best editor could provide — it was a live audience response, too, and the format meant that you could hear and feel immediately whether a comment or suggestion rang true for the whole room, or drew a more mixed response.

At a session moderated by the Kitchen Sisters, Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler [ed. That there on the right is a steppin' out Kara, a very fuzzy Ann and Chris Turpin]played two versions of a beautiful work-in-progress. Ann and Kara's intimate and soundrich piece involved a woman recounting her memory of the first song she remembered hearing as a child — an old Irish-American tune her father would sing with his carousing buddies. But the first mix didn't quite deal with a lurking and important question about her mother and father's relationship. The second mix added a very brief comment — I could be mangling this whole story, but I think the added tape was 5 seconds or less. This short additional comment was just enough to address the problems in the relationship, deepening the realness and honesty of the piece without turning the story away from its focus, as Ann and Kara had worried it might. The response of Nikki, Davia and the full group was instantaneous — no question. That goes in.

At other times, the response could be more mixed — a reminder how subjective these things can be. Yet even when people were divided on what would be the right way forward, the differences were themselves constructive. The pattern of discussion often made it crisply distinct what specifics merited attention, or if a larger, structural changes would improve things.

Participants in the close listening sessions included daily news reporters, audio artists/composers, producers of soundrich documentaries of many styles and aesthetics, impressive veterans and extravagantly talented newcomers. This sort of range range meant that each piece was met with with a deep reservoir of resources. Sometimes the discussion quickly went to questions of storytelling and narrative and interviewing. But this was also a safe space to ask, 'can this tape be saved?' — and get an authoritative Rx for EQ.

Maybe it's because the nature of the medium means we so seldom get to feel the responsive energy of our listeners, but, whatever the reason, there was a palpable energy to "close listening" — the sessions provided a rare and wonderful chance to talk about our work (and work-in-progress) with such a generous, and creative group of people who really get it. I hope this will inspire us to try this kind of thing more often — and not just when Third Coast makes it happen for us, but also in small producer gatherings wherever we live.

Pictures
Posted by Brendan Greeley on October 24, 2005 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

Note the sliver of poster in front of Roman Mars' nose. Robin Amer in front of him, Sue Mell behind. A couple of us have been using Flickr to share Third Coast pictures. Here are mine, Jonathan Menjivar's and a bunch from PRX, mostly by Jared Benedict.

And here is everything tagged "thirdcoast2005."

If you had a digital camera at Third Coast, start a flickr.com account. It's free, and their instructions are pretty straightforward. Make sure you tag your pictures with "thirdcoast2005," so the rest of us can find them.

The Art of the Pitch
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This was actually a panel I suggested to Third Coast in the feedback I sent them from last year, although it sounded like I wasn't the only one who requested it. I'll say again what I said to Julie & Johanna: pitching makes or breaks an independent producer. I found this out freelancing last year. If you can't pitch successfully, you can't work. Period. So how do you do it, and do it well?

They had on senior reps from three shows almost every producer wants to get on: All Things Considered, This American Life, and Weekend America. (well, maybe not every producer wants to get on Weekend America, but it seems like a place that will take pieces [more on that later] so if you're independent chances are you've probably pitched to them.)

One thing that I thought made this an interesting and successful panel was the fact that they had three brave souls stand up and actually pitch stories to the panel, as if they were actually pitching a story. And then let the panel tear them to shreds. Which mostly, it did. Luckily, most of the tearing was at least somewhat instructive. The most instructive was the tearing from TAL's senior producer Julie Snyder, who was very good at explaining what they were and were not looking for, mostly by example. (Note: Julie Snyder "do[es] not want to have coffee with you," so don't send her pitches asking to have coffee and talk over the pitch.)

The best set of instructive, pitch-tearing-apart examples sprung from a pitch made by Dacia Herbulock from KFAI's Listening Lounge. She pitched a story about going to Italy to find her family origins...extrapolate from there. Julie basically said three things about why she wouldn't take that pitch.

1) there's nothing at stake. Why does it matter if you go back and find your family?
2) family stories are much more interesting to you than they are to the rest of the world.
3) nothing surprising happens in the story. It pretty much plays out exactly the way you would expect it to.

Here's what Julie said about Dacia's pitch...

You're setting out to do something and find something. But what you want to know is, what's at stake? It's unclear what. Does it matter whether you find it or not? Personal family history is hard to do from a producing stand point because very very often it's a huge wall around it and it's not interesting to anyone else. You have to think of the entire time, what's at stake here that makes it interesting? Or you want to make stuff happen while you're on the road. You've got to have scenes and annecdotes that are going to affect you emotionally. I don't see what matters to you or to your family. I'm not clear about the relationship between you and your grandfather. Also, who's the central character in this? You? The concierge and the cop? What's the revelation? What are you going to discover? What are you going to find out?

I need to pitch your pitch to the 7 other people i'm working with. I have a really good idea of how all my co-workers are going to respond. I know what their questions are going to be, I know what their concerns are going to be. What else happens? If there's something you think is surprising that I think is really expected, I'll ask you about that. If i take your story into the story meeting i want it to be accepted, so I'll ask you about these things before I take it in to the meeting.

Tell me everything you know about the story and the characters. Characters are so important. Characters that are interesting and surprising and in turbulence...a story that is surprising in terms of the story line, that you didn't expect would happen, that opens itself up to something more. For me a lot of detail is helpful. I will pitch it in the most entertaining and annecdotal and entertaining way possible. So if you picture going to a bar with your friends, you're going to tell them anything that's funny or partifcularly sad or emotinoal, you'll use those moments to tell those stories to your friends. And that lets me know that you understand how to do a decent story. I don't totally mind a long pitch. Longer is better than shorter. - Julie Snyder

Julie gave as a counter example a family story that will actually air on TAL in a few weeks. It's about a woman who's mother was a Holocaust survivor, who was saved by a Polish family who hid her in an apartment building for 3 years. The lady goes back to Poland to find the family who saved her mother and say thank you.

Now, at this point, it sounds pretty much like every single Holocaust story you've already heard about three million zillion times. Except this: when the lady goes back, and does reconnect with this family, they say: we've been waiting for you. And you owe us. You owe us big, you owe us money. The Polish government was trying to collect all of these back taxes (not clear on this point...maybe cause the Jewish family had owned the apartment building and now the Polish family did). So now, this lady has spent something like five years and ten thousand dollars helping this Polish family. Because she does owe them. They saved her mother's life. But at what point is enough enough? When does she get to walk away and say, there, I payed you back?

See. Interesting, concrete, specific example of a family story that they would take, vs. one they wouldn't. Although, incidentally...there was a commentary on ATC the other day about a guy who's great great uncle was about to be canonized by the Vatican, and about going back to Italy and meeting his family, and it really wasn't all that different from the pitch Dacia made, save for the part about have a relative who's also a saint.

This made me think about a dynamic that was present in the panel, that was reinforced by another pitch. Independent producer Peter Crimmins pitched a story about a vandal who had been desecrating books in the San Francisco public library. He had been going through the card catalog and pulling out all the books that had to do with gay and lesbian issues, slashing those books and throwing them in a pile 600 deep in the basement. When the library found out, they didn't want to just throw away the books, because they felt that would be continuing the work of the vandal. So the solution they came up with was to give out the damaged books to artists, and have them turned into art pieces that would then be displayed in an exhibition at the library.

I think it's a great story. (Although, I have to disclose, I was one of the artists who received one of those books, although I never finished my piece and the damaged book is still sitting in my book shelf in my house, now also covered in white paint and sewed through with red thread in different places.) More to the point, if he had pitched that piece to Chris Turpin/ATC in particular at the time the exhibition was mounted, it would have totally gone on the air. I'm convinced ATC would have taken it, or at least they should have. It's interesting, it would have been timely, it would have had great scenes, and it's oh so public radio. Yet Chris Turpin was really not that into the pitch. And I'm convinced that it's because Julie Snyder was really shaping the tone of the conversation of the panel by talking about TAL's very specific concerns about character and surprise and character development and conflict. The more she said about those concerns, which I think are always important but are very specific to shaping the exact tone and format of her show, the more Chris Turpin and Jeremy Skeet were like, oh yeah, we think about that stuff too. Which is true. They do. But come on. Not to the same extent that TAL does. Their shows are just different. Which is fine. ATC and TAL are not the same shows, nor should they be. So while I can see TAL not taking the pitch for different reasons,
I think it would have been foolish for ATC not to have picked up the piece.

And a note about Weekend America. The secret dish I got from my friend who used to be an editor there was that their budget is so big (they got $2 million from CPB), and their staff is so (relatively) large that they literally take every pitch they get. All of them. And then they just pay out lots of kill fees to the producers whose pieces they kill midway through the process. Is that true, Jeremy Skeet? Barbara Bogaev? If so, well, then the notion of Jeremy Skeet talking about what makes a good pitch is kind of remarkable and funny. My question to him then might be, uh, so why take everything? And then, what do you kill? And do you know that those will be the pieces you kill when you take the pitch? Aren't you just messing with producers' heads by doing that? And making extra work for your staff? WTF?

More Soon
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So, sadly, I'm back in Boston. Well, it's not sad except for the fact that I'm no longer in Chicago at Third Coast. I will relive the magic tho, cause I still have about 3 or 4 entries I was working on during the conference to put up on the blog. So if you're reading this, keep checking back in a couple days to see blog entries on:

-the Art of the Pitch: what are these editors really looking for, and why TAL senior producer Julie Snyder's presence on that pannel dramatically made the difference.

-Radio, With & Without Boarders: pieces from abroad courtesy of the ABC, the CBC and our friends in Europe (in which I will talk about why we should all move to Australia or the Netherlands).

-Conference Post-mortem: why Third Coast should take their 5th anniversary as an opportunity to radically rethink the festival (or just give it a face lift).

-and, Because Johanna Asked: my own little first moment of radio obsession, the first piece I remembered hearing that made me want to do this stuff.

Jared Benedict's Third Coast Photos
Posted by Brendan Greeley on October 22, 2005 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

If the pictures on the blog are blurry and poorly framed, I took them. If they actually show elements of purposeful composition and competence with light metering, they were taken by Jared Benedict at PRX. Jared's been at every session taking gorgeous shots -- like this one here of Steve Schultze, Jones Franzel and Lorne Matalon bathed in the warm glow of a PRX upload -- and you can find a complete catalogue of them, licensed for your own non-profit use (and who here makes a profit, really) here.

The Managing Editor Who Gave Out His Email
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Jeremy Skeet, in the running with Dacia Herbulock for coolest name at Third Coast, is the managing editor for Weekend America. WA has national carriage but is still in the fun place of trying to figure itself out, which makes it a good target for your pitches as a freelancer. Jeremy was at the BBC for fourteen years, which means he uses words like "slag" and wears really cool sneakers. He gave out his own email address (jskeet (at) americanpublicmedia (dot) org) for pitches and talked a little about what Weekend America is looking for: "Furniture," the regular components that'll make up the broadcast each week, bits that can be repeated twelve times or 52 times a year; and one-off features: two, five or seven minutes.

"We know roughly how a show works. We need four or six features, but we never want so much furniture that we can't respond. Itd' be nice, though, to get to the stage where we know the structure of at least a third of the program before we get to thinking about it."

"I think what we're providing is live radio, something that had been missing at that time of the day. Our listeners are doing whatever they do on the weekend, so I'd say the stuff we're looking for should feel above all conversational. We'll do anything if it's fun; I'm quite obsessed by death, and we did a piece about a bloke making a coffin for his wife. It was hilarious and fun, you don't have to treat heavy subjects as downers."

British people are weird.

Collaboration, Mixing, Writing...and Static
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I was excited to hear Emily Botein's session called Anatomy of a Radio Piece after hearing Rick Moody read the short story on which this radio piece was based at last night's performance. Also because I love Australian producer Sherre DeLys, who was a main contributor to the collaboration. Here is the version of the piece as it aired on the Next Big Thing.

This was a pannel about process, and product and collaboration.

Emily played the piece you can hear above. As you'll notice if you listen, the script is preserved in its entirety. It's narrated by a male voice (which i didn't like as much as Moody's own reading of the piece) and generally a pretty literal interpretation of the sounds described in the text of the piece. Description. Sometimes like the sound has been Foleyed.

Upon listening to this version of the piece, I wished the piece were a little more atmospheric. And that the narrator's voice wasn't always so up front in the mix. That there was more space between the text, that the sound got to sing a little bit more. But a lot of these are my personal aesthetic preferences, and have less to do with whether they were successful in the execution of the piece. The piece comes to an interesting end after the end of the text. a kind of audio crescendo chaos, like the last gasp of the pirate station. With applause. With a trail of static.

Emily goes through a series of emails tracking the correspondence between Sherre, Rick, and herself, all the back and forth, the logistical minutiae of getting this piece together. First there's recording of the narrator's voice...so much bass in the voice. it's really buttery, but also guttural. But they think it's flat. Rick sits in the booth and coaches the actor. Emily thinks he should riff on the script to loosen up, Rick gets upset when the actor adds words that aren't there.

So lots of back and forth. Finally, Sherre kind of passes it off to Emily saying, do with it what you will. Emily says Sherre is like a walking pirate radio station herself, with all of these sounds stored in her head and in her personal archive.

Later in the session Emily played Sherre's version that aired in Australia...ahhhh! This is what I'm talking about! In the Australian version the narrator's voice competes with the sounds, in a way that makes the piece that much better. Really it felt so much less stiff. And, I think, more appropriate for the script. I just liked the interpretation better. Felt a little darker at the end, too. Which I liked. Weird music (Ottis Redding?) behind it. It was weirder, and had more energy and more of an edge. In a weird way, it made it feel like there was more at stake in the text. It was very cool. Sue Mell great point that the changes in the ambience in the mix made it feel like the pirate station was a character in the first version narrator talking about the character. I'm not sure where you can hear the Australian version, unfortunately, cause I can't find a link to it on the ABC's website.

Radio across time zones
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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.

Alan is enthusiastic about the enthusiasm
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Ok, the last cut from the corridor in which Alan Hall of Falling Tree Productions in London gets worked up over the enthusiasm in America and I mumble something about a "grim explanation".
Download file

I Witnessed My Parents Making Out to That.
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Jad Abumrad's session -- he's the producer and host of Radio Lab -- was more than I hoped for. "Music is segmenting [your words] into bite-size chunks," he said, "if your piece were text, music would be the highlight marker."

As an audience, Jad explained, we pay more attention to audio after a fade-out of music. It's like putting a big exclamation point at the end. Also, for five minutes, Jad talked about using six seconds of music between narrations and interviews. For some unexplainable reason, according to Jad, six seconds is an important number.

And, forever embedded in my mind is how to and how not to use mainstream music. As Jad put it, "It's like the K-Mart models. They're beautiful, but you don't recognize them." As a producer myself, I've learned through painstaking trial and error that using a popular piece of music will almost always take the audience away from your story. As the listener, we'll start to get off subject and concentrate on the music. "Oh, they played that tune at my prom." Or, "I heard that on the subway." Or my favorite, "I witnessed my parents making out to that."

Of course, Jad suggested exceptions to this and explained how it could add color and texture to a piece. Just be aware, he said, of the possibility of drawing your audience from the story that you worked so hard on. This session was, to me, one of the most helpful and most inspiring.

What they do in Australia
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Robyn Ravlich of Australian Broadcast Corporation tells me that her favorite piece is "The last of Jones Town". Listen to Robin here.
I also want to plug the fabulous Australian show Night Air. You can subscribe to their podcast here.

Bob Edwards: "Find a Good Place to be Bad."
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Yesterday at Susan Stamberg's session on interviewing, Bob Edwards stood up to thank her for showing him how he could be him. Bob we have to thank for -- in addition to twenty-five years of Morning Edition -- sponsoring ice cream sundaes yesterday to promote The Bob Edwards Show on XM. Right here he's talking to Rene Gutel, a producer and host at KJZZ in Phoenix (and a Transom alum). I grabbed Bob for second this morning to talk about finding voice as an interviewer.

"Young people don't know who they are, they've been watching and listening to other people all their lives, and they're tempted to become their heroes. It's unfortunate, because broadcast media leave you vulnerable; people can spot a phony and they know you're trying to be somebody, whoever that is. But someone brand-new is exciting."

"When I started out, I wanted to be Murrow. I was very reserved, very deep, very businesslike, [affects a Murrow voice] rigid, I avoided any kind of anything that wasn't deadly serious. [end Murrow voice] And Murrow wasn't really like that, so I don't know what I was doing. But Susan was just so, so herself and such a natural, an engaging personality on the air. I woke up out of a fog. I realized that people like her because she's her, and then I started asking 'Who am I?'"

"You have more latitude to figure these things out at a station; I would definitely recommend that you spend time at a small station. I started out at a thousand-watt daytimer in New Albany, Indiana. George Burns used to say about vaudeville 'It's a good place to be bad.' He could bomb in Cincinnati, and by the time he got to Cleveland he'd figured out the bit. You go on national television and you bomb there, you're done, so I think you need to find a place to be bad."

"I'm freer to be me with the new gig. I'm not really doing breaking news, it's an interview program, and don't have all of those editors, subeditors, managing directors, telling me who I should be and how I should sound, even how I should pronounce words. I love NPR; I've been urging people on my show to support their local stations, I've been doing fundraisers for local stations, but I'm unshackled from all of the micromanagement now."

I'll Buy You a Cup of Coffee
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If you can tell me the provenance and the meaning of this weird brass representation of -- of what? America? The world? Harold Washington's brain? -- that's embedded into the marble in the floor of the Harold Washington Public Library.

One Ring Zero
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The nerdiest band ever. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but they performed a song written around a haiku they had commissioned from a person they read about in the New Yorker. The blurry people on stage are Dean Olsher, Bob Edwards and, from Third Coast, Julie Snyder, Roman Mars, Johanna Zorn, some person behind the guy playing the melodica and Cally, whose last name I don't know but promise to find out soon.

They're blurry because they're swaying. They're swaying because they're singing.

If there was no culture of feature film making
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Ben Shapiro had a thought this morning. He told me about it in the lobby. This is NOT tight. But there are some interesting thoughts in there. 5 minutes.

Download file

Short Docs Recap
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For the first session of the conference we all gathered in the grand ballroom on the second floor of the hotel for the first panel of the conference, the presentation of this year's Short Docs. Four producers were selected to create 5 or 6 minute pieces around the theme of Games. The panel was moderated by All Things Considered hostess extraordinaire, Michelle Norris.

Here's a run down of the pieces presented.

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BLAKE ESKIN presented a piece that was roughly about go, the Chinese game that sounds similar to chess to the ears of a know-nothing. Apparently it's so popular in China it has two t.v. channels devoted to it. So it's like celebrity poker, only the game is like, 2000 years old. Really the piece was a profile of one of only two women in the game's history to reach its highest rankings. She also happens to be struggling with her husband's illness, and uses the game to talk about that.

I decided losing my husband is like playing go...sometimes I'm behind but what should I do? Resign? Give up the game? No, i can't. - Fung Yen, Go player

The piece had very simple sound elements: the quiet clicking sounds of the stones on the board, and the layers of the main character's voice.

The [sounds of the] stones follow the rhythm of the game. You play one down. Then you think for much longer periods. You capture them and put them in a dish, that rumbling sound. at the end you clean up and close the lid. I knew it would be a slower piece. The game is very austere and silent and I wanted the piece to communicate that. And thoughtful. But it's not one particular go game. If you listened to a professional go game it would be about 200 clicks over 9 hours. -Blake Eskin

Did he feel like he had to explain the game to listeners?

It's a hard thing to explain to people who don't play. It's a challenge. Either you fully explain the rules or you won't undersand unless you do it, or you leave people wondering how it works. If you picked up the sports section and didn't know anything about sports, none of the stories would really make sense. But if you said, the guy picks up a stick and hits the ball and runs around the bases, I don't know it would make any more sense. - Blake Eskin

So I guess he felt it was better to leave it out all together.

There was a really interesting moment in the piece. She seemed very calm, but there was a hint of aggression in her voice and her personality, that came out especially when you heard the tape of her dealing with her students.

Professional athletes burry their aggression until they need to use it. The person she's beating 35 to 28 is a 7 year old girl. And she took great pleasure from that. - Blake Eskin

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MELISSA ROBBINS - Play by Play

Apparently Melissa's original proposal did not predict the shape the piece would ultimately take. Her original proposal was to do a piece about how everyone plays games to get ahead. She planned to interview a homeless drug dealer, a policeman who plays cat and mouse game, a high school girl, a high powered attorney, a stripper and her 4 year old nephew.

I interviewed all those people and even the 4 year old nephew was fairly cooperative. Originally the plan was to have all these people talking about these different games, and it would sound like they were talking about the same thing, and they would be finishing each other's sentences. It was working to a degree, but I think collage is a really hard thing to set out to find. And i knew from the outset it would depend on the tape, but it still ultimately wouldn't come together. - Melissa Robbins

So apparently she didn't get the tape she was looking for. Except from the high powered lawyer, who surprised her with the personal information he revealed in the interview...about his fundamentalist upbringing, alienation from his conservative family who disapproved of his being gay, his valium addiction, and finally, his ultimate suicide attempt. So that ended up being the driving force behind the story.

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MICHAEL KAVANAGH's piece There was a Whole Lot of Hundreds was about high school students and the culture of cheating. It was mostly done with phone sound tape, and the best, most fun, interesting thing about the piece was how proud the kids were of themselves. How easy it is. And how fun. And how it's a gleeful challenge. That there's a creativity, and pride, that comes from getting away with it

There are kids who will cheat when they feel like they have to. Then you have a group I would consider hard core cheaters. It's almost a game to them, to see what they can get away with. - expert

It's so normal. People say, damn I should have sat next to that kid.

There's not a lot of sound there. I think that's the point. Cheating is something that's quiet! -Michael Kavanagh

I got much more outrageous stories. I got Watergate break-in stories. But they weren't told that well. -Michael Kavanagh

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JUDITH SLOAN - Tongue Twister

Judith's piece was the most sound rich of all the pieces presented. It was about the hand-clapping games played by her students from other countries, and how it helped them deal with the more painful parts of their emigration experience. It had layers of very rhythmic clapping and stomping and singing and even nonsense chattering, and then tons of tongue twisters in english and other languages.

The tongue twisters that happened in the beginning. I first had them do the tongue twisters and then tell me what they meant, and then an extended theater piece with character walks as if they were talking to the audience. They all had the clapping rhythms. They all had the same hand moves. The Afghani girls were doing something slightly different but all over the worlds the fils play these clapping rhythms...then teach it to the younger girls. - Judith Sloan

What came out in the conversation about the piece was equally fascinating. Judith formed a close relationship with one of her students, an Afghani girl who was being sent to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. Some people wondered about the disjunction between the lighthearted novelty of the games and the dark undercurrents of the stories behind the stories.

That's a really fun piece, and the kids are still performing, and they're always doing this mix of clapping games and songs and these really heavy stories because that's what their lives are like. -Judith Sloan

Youth Producers
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Three high school students who are part of three different youth radio organizations: Curie Youth Radio in Chicago, Andy Zanca Youth in Colorado, and Outloud Radio in San Francisco. Moderated by the indomitable Czerina Patel of Youth Radio in New York.

It's always been interesting to me how many of these groups have a social justice mission. And how the racial diversity of the youth producers is much greater than the overall diversity of public radio producers. Let's face it, public radio (like a lot of institutions) is very, very white. So it's refreshing to see so many young people from so many different backgrounds with the agency to be media producers.

I wonder, how many of the teens doing radio now will stick with it? I know it's not necessarily the point of these programs (or not the whole point) to groom kids to be professional producers, but it would be nice if in a generation from now the general pool of public radio producers was more diverse, and it would be nice to bring a lot of the issues they deal with and the life experience they have into the fold of public radio story telling.

One of the youth producers, Celia La Luz of Outloud Radio, compared her experiences of having her pieces reviewed on PRX and then having an audio doctor session here, and how much more helpful it was to parse through a piece versus that block of text. There seemed to be a desire for honest critique from peers and producers. So if you're here this weekend, check out the work of some youth producers on Generation PRX and give them some honest, critical feedback.

Celia's piece exploring the trend of being bisexual, by the way, was f-ing AWESOME. What an amazing writer. Please listen to Celia's piece here,
and this piece by Catalina Puente here. Two of the best pieces I've heard recently, period.

What if you don't have a trust fund?
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The session "Podcasting, believe the hype" presented by Todd Maffin of CBC and Benjamen Walker of Benjamen Walker, opened with the rhetorical question What makes a good podcast? And they answered themselves: The same things that make up good radio. Go figure.

So what is good radio? Tod kept coming back to Dean Olshers presentation two years ago about having “it” (listen here), defining “it” as intimacy, originality, being "true to ones own voice". Yes, podcasters are good at this, and many of them are good at it without even knowing it cause often that is what a podcast is really all about. Being your own weird self. Tod played a cut from a "how to" podcast he’s been doing. In the cut Tod was having his ass vaxed. There was a countdown then there was a sound that I’m sure you can imagine and then there was screaming. Intimate? Certainly. Original? Revolutionary? Hmmm. Fun? Yes, we laughed.

Ben played a series of interviews he’d done with people about how they use podcasts, and what they want to hear and it confirmed how this medium favors the geeky, techie, narrow content. One of the interviewees said he would listen to a show about a man walking down the street. Yes, a man walking down the street. Someone do that show – quick! before Ben does it.

Eric Nuzum from NPR came to the mic and informed us that npr has done a little stat on the phenomenon; basically those who listens to postcasts are men (96%) and they’re between 25-40 years old. The demographics it seems, don’t really match the inherent democratic nature of the technology. Guess the same was probably true for the early days of the internet though. Eric said NPR have had 3 million downloads of their podcast since they went up 7 weeks ago. This is not just a hype. Ben told me later he has about 8000 downloads per show. That’s a lot.

But see, here is my problem with the hype: everyone keep saying how great this tool is for independent producers. Yes, independent producers with a trust fund. Ben spends a lot of time doing his show (the excellent Theory of Everything) and he doesn’t earn a penny. He has a day job. He might have gotten his day job because of his show, but, hmmm, Ben feels that it would be "degrading" to set up a pay pal and ask his listeners for money. I can understand that. There is a certain amount of integrity and dignity at stake here. Because Ben’s show is so much Ben I guess, you know that IS weird, to ask people to pay him for being him. Ideally he would get funding through CPB. Interestingly, the single most popular podcast of TOE was "The Grant Application" where Ben traces his efforts in writing a grant to the CPB to get funding. He didn’t get any. This time anyway.

I'd be interested in hearing some comments about what people think is really in it for independent producers. I mean, I know there is a lot in it, but how are we going to pay the salt for our hard boiled eggs?

In Which We Discover an LPFM
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I just saw the Otis guts of what pulls an elevator up and down a twenty-eight story building, all perched on the top of a penthouse. On top of THAT was the roof, twenty-eight stories up, with the Sears Tower next door and the lake visible in two directions. Jake Shapiro liked to pretend to run at the edge of the roof because he's cruel like that.

Even better: in the attic of the penthouse at 215 Cedar street, along with the greasy rags and the elevator bits, there is a license for a temporary low-power FM station, dated 1999. Amy O'Leary, our hostess for the evening and a producer for This American Life, has a radio station.

And I didn't even say anything about the penthouse.

More tomorrow.

Now I sleep.

Go drink with the locals
Posted by Pejk Malinovski on October 21, 2005 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Anne Hull opened up her session "Sense of place" by playing
The Lord God Bird by the excellent Long Haul Productions. Her talk was fascinating. If you have a chance you should go to it tomorrow.

She talked about how place is a character in her pieces. Anne Hull is a print journalist for the Washington Post, but everything she says is really valuable to radio folks. Well first of all her thoroughness was admirable and inspirational, oh my god if every journalist in this country worked like her, not just rewriting wires but relying on local sources, hooking up with the sheriff. Talking to the librarian. Going to the football match. Doing what the natives do. Listening closely to what people say, giving the details, beating the temptations to generalize.

In fact her philosophy of using place as a "character" made me think of the long-format features of the Montage Department at the National Danish Radio where I did some pieces. Often these 50 minute features are un-narated, and because they’re un-narated they use a lot of sound from the environment around the charaters and the scenes that unfold there to weave the stories together. I often miss this in American Radio, I think we should always ask this question when we do a story: why radio? What is the sound element that will drive the story, give us sense of place, take it to another level? Hmmm, anyone?

Explaining the World in 4 Minutes with David Kestenbaum
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David Kestenbaum has a hard job. He's a science reporter for NPR, and regularly reports on complex subjects like string theory, the storage of nuclear waste, and how centrifuge works. To do it he has to talk to some people called "scientists" who, unfortunately for the public, don't always speak English. At least, that was the overall premise of the discussion. Science is complicated. And scientists aren't always so good at explaining what it is they do or why it's important. And listeners...well, it's not that they're dumb, but in order to explain things like the genome of plants or the threat of avian flu, sometimes the reporter has to pretend that they are.

To illustrate this point, David played several pieces of tape, including some hilarious (and sad) tape of a Nobel Prize winning physicist struggling to explain what exactly he did to earn this highest of honors. Mostly it's unintelligible. David says one of his colleagues uses the standard of a "potato farmer in Rhodesia" when envisioning his average listener, to force himself to keep things simple. David takes it even further.

I use the standard of an illiterate, blind potato farmer in Rhodesia...or my uncle... who has a short attention span and is often drunk...You really have to kill yourself to get good tape when you have a complicated story. I mean really kill yourself. And then threaten to kill the other person. - David Kestenbaum

Basically, I see a set of issues here around the central issue of expertise. And what it apparently does to experts, putting them in a realm of communication, a language of great specificity, and, a set of concepts, which the average person sans Ph.D. does not have access to. So the reporter must act like a translator, and somehow move the concepts and ideas of rarified science into the language of casual conversation, in which centrifuge is explained by spinning an egg, plant genomes are explored by rooting through decorative cabbage patches in the middle of the night, and black holes swallow not mythical bits of "information," but entire Cadillacs. Like David said:

If you go to a science conference people are talking about things in this level of arcana and if you read about it in the press it's very simplified, and there's a gap between this. So I feel like this piece is about that gap.- David Kestenbaum

It's a valuable service. I don't have a Ph.D. in physics but I'd like to understand the ramifications of storing nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain. So hopefully people like David Kestenbaum can help me understand them. But I found myself frustrated at times, because of some of the suppositions being made by the reporter, on my behalf as a listener. David played one piece in which he had interviewed two scientists about the top 10 unanswered questions in physics. Number ten was something about the 11 dimensions of the universe implied by a branch of theoretical physics called string theory. But Number 9...

We'll spare you Question 9.

Huh? But what if I want to know what question 9 is, cause now you've got me curious? What is it about number 9 that makes it that much harder to explain than Number 10? And why is it o.k. for you to brush it aside so casually? And have you just abandoned your responsibility to me as a listener, even if I am your drunk uncle or an illiterate potato farmer?

I asked David during the session: are there some things that are just too complicated to be explained to lay people? And his answer was yes. And that makes me a little sad. Are my expectations too high? I'm curious to know what you think.

I don't think I'm dumbing it down. I think I'm putting it back into proper mode for communication. That's how things happen in the real world. When you hear the press conference version of it that's not how it actually happens. - David Kestenbaum

I tend to think the techniques (/gimmics/strategies) David and other successful reporters employ tend to work pretty well in endearing themselves to their listeners, and in creating moments of memorable pleasure in what would otherwise be a dry, boring piece. David's point was that If the scene is effective, you will remember the grain of scientific information contained within.

Scenes can't be gratuitous. Scenes have to make a point. If that fact is embedded in the scene, you remember it, because you remember the guy digging through the decorative cabbage bed on 11th street, and that maybe you can grow that plant in the arctic. - David Kestenbaum

But I'm not sure I buy that. One of my favorite NPR news pieces I heard in the last year was a science piece about venus fly traps. The reporter (Nell Boyce) goes to a scientist's house with a small venus fly trap in a paper bag and says, "Look, I brought you a present!" Then later, she sticks her finger in the plant and it clamps down and bites her, causing her to exclaim on tape. It's really fun. It's surprising. It's a great moment. But can I remember a single thing about the mechanics of a venus fly trap? No. Not a damn thing. So was the moment successful in its dual purpose of education and pleasure? I would say no. But then, maybe it proves David's point exactly. Maybe it's a bad moment because it didn't convey a bit of scientific knowledge I'll remember along with the piece.

One or two other great quotes from David on the subject of not being overly reliant on the same experts, once you find the ones that are good talkers.

Sometimes the problem is when you find someone who's good you just want to build an ISDN line into their house. What I hate is that we constantly have experts and academics on and I hate it. I just want real people. Sometimes when i pickup a journal i'll pick the guy with the weirdest name. Like it's Lovejoy and it's a story about birds mating. - David Kestenbaum

And, on length.

4 and a half minutes is a lot. If we were to sit here for 4 and a half minutes in silence it would feel incredibly long. And boring pieces feel incredibly long. - David Kestenbaum

Blushing in the Dark
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Alright guys, my first audio post: What can European producers learn from American producers? I give you Edwin Brys, from VRT (Vlaamse Radio en Televisieomroep), he talks about the short form and the involvement of the maker. For 3 minutes and 49 seconds. No edits:

Download file

No, not pictures, pitches. Yes, he will take them: edwin.brys@vrt.be

Edwin, by the way remembered a quote when he woke up this morning; “Radio is the only medium that can make you blush in the dark.”

Edwin, what does that mean exactly?

I don’t know, but I think it sounds good.

Oh, and let me just add this crazy anecdote that has nothing to do with what Edwin is talking about: When I met Edwin last night for the first time, we realized that he is from the same little village in Belgium that my stepfather is from. AND he knows the parents of my childhood friends. Here is the map of his street. Right across from him is the little bar "De Pomp" - the pump, an old filling station which is now a great little bar. Edwin and I have been there many times and both know people who work there. Oh and a little further down the street is where my brothers girlfriend grew up. No, really the same street! But no, it doesnt stop there. In the late 80's Edwin took a photograph for the cover of one of my mothers poetry collections. Yes, this is true. Weird but true. Sorry about the digression, just had to tell you that.

The Stars Mean We're Special
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Anne Hepperman and Kara Oehler: Five times at Third Coast, every year since the festival started in 2000.

...And I'm Here with Work Recorded in my Closet
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This is Carlos Maeda from Curie Youth Radio in Chicago. We are composed of about 30 high school students working out of a tiny room in the high school, crammed with 30 computers and five file cabinets. The computers are PC's, so they're big. It's an actual class and not an after-school program. Getting a grade for something you love is a bonus. I'm here with five of my classmates to cover our first visit to the convention.

The day started off with an awkward introduction after registering; the fifteen minutes of silence was agonizing, and the small conference room didn't help. Then, someone brought up her problems with Pro Tools. The whole room joined in, troubleshooting each other. We had found our ice breaker. From there, we split up into our own little discussion groups, talking about gear, each other's pieces, and ideas for the future.

From the Wyndham Hotel, we all walked about 12 blocks to WBEZ on Navy Pier, an amusement park/museum built on a dock extending into Lake Michigan.

After a look at the ferris wheel -- built in 1893 for the World's Fair -- we hopped on an elevator and entered Chicago Public Radio. Listening to each other's pieces and speaking our mind in one of WBEZ's editing rooms was fantastic. At Curie Youth Radio, we do everything from idea to CD in the classroom so listening to my own work through reference speakers for the first time was exhilarating and somewhat disappointing. All the other youth groups rent out studio time to record and edit and I'm here with work that was recorded in my closet. Obviously not the best.

Just the sheer amount of technology available in the editing room was overwhelming. The walls were covered with gadgets and the mixing boards were actually functional. It was great. Towards the end of the night, someone threw out an idea of creating a gang-related piece that would involve all of the youth groups. It sounded like a great idea, actually working across the country with different producers, so expect something soon.

Barrett Golding: Getting Good Stuff on Air
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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.

1. It's no good.
2. They don't know what to do with it.
3. 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.

Love and Technology
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In Chicago now. This is Steve Schultze of PRX and Tod Maffin of I Love Radio. They're posing, obviously, but right before they were posing they were doing a much more subtle version of what they're doing right there, which is falling in love with Steve's new video iPod.

Technology is important. I know that Third Coast is about storytelling, and it should be. But the medium matters, and it affects the storytelling. A half-hour ago Ben Adair, the dude behind the excellent Pacific Drift, said that American Public Media had determined that it took carriage on 230 stations for a program to break even. Ben has a handlebar mustache, so you can't take what he says too seriously, but the point is, Tod and several hundred producers from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, while on strike and locked out of the studios this summer, reached a huge audience this summer through podcasts and CBC Unplugged. The FM signal isn't over or anything, but things have changed. Podcasting is not just for dorks anymore. Also, just for the hell of it, here's a picture of Ben Adair and his mustache.

The Most Violent Wedding Cake Fight Ever Caught on TV!
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...was the teaser for a local news spot Brendan and I just saw on tv. Seriously people, do you ever watch tv? It's so great! Forget about this radio b.s. I mean, OMG, whatever.

Anyway. Because the only flight I could get out here put me into the concrete behemoth, i.e. O'Hare Airport, a little after 8pm, I missed much of the opening schmooze fest. And the snacks. Bummer. However, I was able to reconnect with a number of folks I've been dying to see. I always find these things a little overwhelming, in part because my social butterfly tendencies are greatly exacerbated by the simultaneous presence of so many awesome people. It's like being set on warp speed, or hyper overdrive, or too-much-input-does-not-compute. It's like being a puppy with a severe case of ADD.

Among the joyful reunions: NPR Interns Class of 2000. Independent producers Michael Kavanagh, Anne Hepperman, Eve Troeh and I were all interns for NPR in D.C. in the summer of 2000. Michael and I were at Talk of the Nation during its unfortunate Juan Williams phase, Anne was at WESAT, and I think Eve was at the Cultural Desk. I'll let you look these folks up on your own, but they are all pretty amazing. Michael was at The Connection, and then at the Next Big Thing and Radio Rookies before taking off to cover Afghanistan and Rwanda, Anne's done some amazing work for WBEZ, Eve was producing for American Routes, and both Michael and Anne are Third Coast Short Docs winners. I find it remarkable (although not necessarily surprising) that we've all stuck with radio in a serious way, and that we're all still connected and friends, in part because of Third Coast. Tomorrow I'll post pictures of all of us, new and old (if I can find them).

Also tonight was Barrett Golding's presentation of short radio pieces from his series Hearing Voices. It was nice to start the weekend off with some listening, in addition to the socializing. Barrett's done some amazing stuff over the past few years, and like Jay, should be given a lot of credit for helping bring the work of other producers to the main stage. Probably my favorite piece of his is one he did with Scott Carrier and Ira Glass about 7 or 8 years ago in 1987 called The True Story of St. Patrick where he and Scott wander drunkly around a town in Montana on St. Patrick's Day, and almost get shot by some guy after kicking down the door to his building for fun. I'll have to ask Barrett about that tomorrow...

Getting Psyched
Posted by Robin Amer on October 20, 2005 01:00 AM | Comments (0)

So I'm staying up much later than I ought to, considering how early I have to get up tomorrow. But that's my M.O. the night before I travel...stay up very, very late. Pack...watch some weird West Wing special on t.v. ...obsess over whether to bring fun shoes or sensible shoes...and write! Always a good excuse. I'm excited to blog conference this year (sanctioned! by Jay!) especially now that I've cut my teeth blogging a little for Open Source.

I can't believe this will be my fifth straight year at Third Coast. I think I said the same thing last year (only, uh, it was my fourth straight year) and Julie (Shapiro)'s response was something to the effect of, well, I guess you're a lifer. I guess so.

I love going to Third Coast. I can trace my evolution in radio thus far through my attendance at this conference. And I feel like I owe a lot to this conference. Were it not for Third Coast, I would not have my present job, my present interests/obsessions, or most of my friends & contacts in the radio world. My first year at the conference I was a pretty young go-getter, doing radio documentary at school, and I remember meeting people like Gregory Whitehead, Kaye Mortley, Scott Carrier and John Biewen of American Radioworks, and kind of swooning. Professional and artistic inspiration/crushes, old and new. Being exposed to the European style of features radio as presented by Kaye (impressionistic, painterly, personal, memoir-eque) was an especially big deal for me.

If I try to dig up too many other details from years past, or separate one year from the next, things start to swim a little bit. But I do remember these things: hearing Chris Brooks from the CBC play snippets of Peter Leonard Braun's Bells of Europe, and what a revelation that was...meeting Roman Mars and bonding over D.C. punk music...watching a new friend from the Salt Institute sneak off from one of the sessions to play fiddle with the banjo player from the Books on some random private yacht that happened to be sailing by on the river behind the hotel....Joe Frank's quasi-bizarre live performance (interpretive dancer?! And did anyone realize that David Lynch turned his radio pieces into black and white movies for the Playboy Channel circa 1985?!)...Anna Friz's beautiful, eerie performance involving her pirate radio transmitters set up around the Art Institute's theater in place of speakers (Berlin, Rome, London, Moscow, are you out there?)...hearing Alan Coukell play snippets of the most amazing live reporting from five decades of radio (made me think that the gulf between journalism and art wasn't a severe as I feared)...fantastic PRX dance party on the top floor of some building in industrial Chicago, and hanging out on the roof there with Ben Walker and radio my girl pals from school...Anne Hepperman and Cara Oehler's 'Thirst' short doc about Mexicans dying of thirst in the desert as they try to cross into the US, and the one under 'Dark' by Jude Fletcher called Momento Mori about taking pictures of the dead.

That's enough for now. Now for my valiant attempts to go to sleep. At least I won't have to stay up 'till 5am finishing a print story on deadline like I had to on the first night of the conference last year...

Starting to Think About It
Posted by Brendan Greeley on October 19, 2005 03:49 AM | Comments (0)

Producers Sean Cole (left) and Ben Walker (obscured because he insisted on it), pictured here in Cambridge, couldn't be more excited about the Third Coast Audio Festival. Ben, responsible for last year's Third Coast blog, is presenting this year on podcasting. I'll go, because Ben knows what he's talking about and I'm a podcast dork, but my question for you is, who do you want to hear from?

Robin, Pejk, Carlos or I will be at every session, so take a look at the list of presenters and leave a comment on this post: what questions do you want to ask of these people? If you're feeling bold, what should we tell them from you?

Transatlantic mission
Posted by Pejk Malinovski on October 18, 2005 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

Pejk signing on from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, town of horseshoe crabs, marine biologists and public radio geeks. Things are shaping up here. I am filling my bags with excitement and microphones and the Marantz PMD 660 flash recorder, my new favorite tool.

One of my ideas for the blog here is to make little interviews with the international guests to hear what excites them about American public radio, and what doesn’t and about the differences across the Atlantic and what we can learn from each other… To carry on the torch from last years very inspiring conversation that Miss Shapiro sparked on the last incarnation of this blog (still makes for interesting reading).

What else? Can’t wait to see you all!