My favorite parts of the article:
National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes—are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts.
In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.
There’s no well-known radio equivalent of the Emmys or the Grammys or the Oscars (or even the Tonys). In a sense, I think, this reflects public radio’s smooth professionalism—it’s gotten so good at its basic task that it’s taken for granted, a kind of information utility.
Radio was dead—it was top 40. All the smarties were at the Times or The Washington Post, or if you didn’t want to be Woodward and Bernstein you went to work for Walter Cronkite at the Tiffany network. This group of nutty people wandered in and said, let’s do radio. We’ll reinvent it. Jump thirty-five or forty years ahead and where is Walter Cronkite? What happened to The Washington Post? And guess what, the nutty radio people have suddenly emerged as the focus for a huge audience. And now they have a little of the swagger of the Timesmen.
In the rest of the public radio world, however, there’s invention underway at an unprecedented pace. Those who restrict their listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered are well informed—there’s no better news operation in English-language broadcasting. But they are missing a quite different world, one that’s never been richer or, thanks to the Internet, easier to access.
But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that’s what he’s done in This American Life. “During the early days, Ira would always say, ‘I just put a piece on our show that was rejected by All Things Considered.’ He was really proud of that,” recalls Torey Malatia, president of WBEZ. The pieces were often long—sometimes one would fill an entire hour. And they sounded odd: Glass himself doesn’t exactly have a Bob Edwards radio voice, but some of the people who joined his ensemble (the wonderful Sarah Vowell, Joe Richman, Scott Carrier, and others) wouldn’t even have gotten an interview at the smallest commercial radio station. What they shared, besides wit and intelligence, was a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn’t show up on the newscasts. It’s about life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions.
Studio 360 (which covers culture from Iranian rock and roll to novelist Gary Shteyngart to a convention of black banjo players in rural North Carolina) or Hearing Voices (tour a mosque, visit the Crow Reservation), or in NPR features like Radio Diaries, or in documentaries from Homelands Productions about the daily grind of work for people ranging from a thirteen-year-old Bangladeshi in a shipbreaking yard to a low-end Bulgarian nightclub singer.
It’s not all about or by newly minted hipster urbanites. Wisconsin Public Radio has for many years produced and syndicated the low-key and in-depth To the Best of Our Knowledge, and from Alaska comes from the remarkable Encounters, which is mostly just nature writer Richard Nelson out in the Alaskan wild with a microphone. Radio Open Source features the passionate radio veteran Christopher Lydon in conversation with a variety of contemporary intellectuals, among them David Bromwich, Nicholas Carr, and the psychologist Paul Bloom.3 “There’s a small world of heartfelt passionate people trying to do big work,”
You can listen to people starting out at Transom.org, a website designed to teach newcomers and showcase their work, and if your local radio station doesn’t air much of this material, you can assemble your own listening schedule quite easily at PRX.org, the Public Radio Exchange, which serves as a middleman for independent producers and local stations.
If there’s a next Ira Glass, it might well be Jad Abumrad, who has teamed with the veteran reporter Robert Krulwich to produce what may be the most- talked-about show of the moment, Radiolab. In an almost comic attempt to make their job hard, the duo take only the most difficult subjects from science and philosophy: “Time,” “Morality,” “Memory and Forgetting,” “Limits.” They’ll usually interview a few experts, but the beauty of the show is the interplay between the hosts, separated by several decades and by sensibility. A musician by background, Abumrad plays with the sound of voices to underscore points, to circle back, to undercut assumptions. “Jad uses a layered, jazzlike metric,” says Krulwich, “creating breadths and spaces and layers of sound that are new. Not new to Tchaikovsky or John Cage, but new to radio.”
Meticulously engineered, the soundtrack often repeats, stutters, returns. The recent show on “Numbers,” for instance, begins with Johnny Cash’s famous song about the last twenty-five minutes of a condemned man’s life and proceeds to an interview of sorts with a thirty-six-day-old baby and a Parisian neuroscientist who has demonstrated the early age at which children acquire numeracy. You can hear how infant brainwaves respond to a picture of eight ducks—and what happens when sixteen suddenly appear. “I remember when the show began, I’d get this comment all the time: ‘I really can’t wash the dishes when I listen to you guys,’” says Abumrad.
Meaning, there’s an expectation that when the radio is on you’re only using a quarter of your brain. But now that we’ve got podcasting, people will put it on iPods or whatever. People will listen to it many times, will appreciate the layers and the details. Before it was hard for us to justify the amount of labor we put into it.
Tough as the show’s topics are, and demanding as the sound can be, it’s also remarkably intimate because of the interplay between Krulwich and Abumrad. “We knew we could make the material interesting to each other, and that if we did it in duet form and showed our affection to each other, it would be kind of a warm place,” says Krulwich. “That’s intentional, because the subjects are kind of cool."
So in one sense this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It’s like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules. New technology lets you make radio programs cheaply: Pro Tools sound-editing software has now replaced much of the equipment used in big, expensive studios. Listening is even cheaper: the iTunes store has thousands of podcasts, including all the ones described here, available for free download in a matter of seconds. “It’s a transformative and exciting moment, a huge revolution,” says Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio.
WBEZ in Chicago, home to This American Life, also produces a show called Sound Opinions, which has been airing weekly for more than a decade. It’s a show about popular music, in the vein of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s At the Movies, but much better. The hosts, Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, are the longtime music critics at the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times (though DeRogatis has just left the Sun-Times for a job at a Chicago website), and they began the program on a commercial station in Chicago.
The first time you hear it you think: Why haven’t there always been programs like this on the radio? Intelligent and funny discussion about music, interviews with articulate musicians who play on the air, long and careful dissections of classic albums. A show will begin with five minutes about the greater significance of current teenybop sensation Justin Bieber and proceed to a half-hour analysis of London Calling, the great Clash album that helped mark the punk era of the early 1980s. “When people hear it, what they hear is two excitable guys who are almost nerds about their music and aren’t afraid to let it show,” says Kot. Much of the pleasure is the interplay between the hosts, Kot understated and DeRogatis over the top—there’s an element of dorm room conversation carried on at the very highest level. And every week, for almost every listener, there’s the pleasure of discovering new sounds you didn’t know were out there. Their annual trip to Austin for the South by Southwest music festival shows you just what cultural reporting should really sound like, full of bias and brio and the joy of discovery. The show’s audience is almost as fanatic as Glass’s—its weekly podcast is one of iTunes’ most popular downloads.
If they’re not careful, NPR could wind up without a farm team of experienced new program makers, and with the same demographic problem now crippling public television (to see what I mean, check out your public TV pledge drive and try to imagine what age group they’re appealing to with overweight doo-wop groups squeezing into sequined suits). Sound Opinions is as good a barometer as any; if your local public radio station isn’t airing it, they’re not trying very hard. ...A better agent of change would be more program directors like Malatia, who takes real chances despite the fact that at WBEZ he has a huge station to care for.
Others—particularly young listeners—are listening to The Takeaway, a morning news show that pairs veteran public radio voice John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee. It takes stories one after another, and gives each a few serious but fast-paced minutes. It feels electric, alive—Web-paced journalism, purposely not as polished as Morning Edition but every bit as intelligent.
In fact, the first account of that bubble and one of the best came from This American Life, which has the financial resources (it’s carried on virtually every public radio station, and at decent rates) to let Glass put a reporter on a story for three or four months, something unheard of anymore outside the Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and a very few other outlets.
It tried to answer the question that everyone else should have been asking: “Why are they lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back?” Davidson and Blumberg tracked down Nevada mortgage brokers and Wall Street technicians and many other people who could actually provide some clues. “It’s just brute force reporting, going through so many guys till you meet someone who will be honest with you,” Glass told me. The show won the Peabody, Polk, and duPont-Columbia awards, and it awed almost everyone who heard it
My favorite footnotes:
Taken for granted, but not always understood. Though listeners often refer to their "NPR station," in fact public radio licenses are usually held by a college. The individual stations buy programming from a variety of sources, including National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and other smaller consortiums. Most of the funding for public radio comes from individual listeners and local business underwriters; 10 percent comes from the federal government, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a percentage that has declined sharply over the last four decades. ↩
I should note that as the author of thirteen books I've appeared on many of the shows described here; that indeed they've been the intellectual oases amid the desert that is a book tour. ↩
