Station Showcase with PRX

“With radio, you become more of a writer…your words (and other sounds) have to create the picture, whereas in TV and film, you can be a relatively lazy writer if you’ve got great images. Working in both formats gives me an opportunity to develop different storytelling muscles. And in the end, it is all about telling a good story.”
- Amber Edwards, WBGO Radio Producer (and NJN Television Producer)

[Download this week's MP3]

Hi, this is Aaron Henkin, curator of the NPR Station Showcase with PRX. Each week, producers at public radio stations around the country are creating outstanding reports and features for their local listening audiences, and on this podcast we take the time to meet some of the talented folks who bring those stories to life. This week, we’re introducing Amber Edwards, a producer who’s put together a wide range of original stories for Newark, New Jersey’s public radio station, WBGO. In 2004, Amber produced a short radio history on an obscure but really fascinating topic — ocean liner and cruise ship musical entertainment. She interviewed a maritime historian and a cruise ship entertainment director for the project, and she decked out her feature with a very evocative array of musical selections that have been played aboard famous ocean liners over the past century. Here’s a short Q & A with Amber about her broadcasting background, and about what inspired her to pursue this week’s featured story, Music at Sea…

Tell us a bit about how you got involved with NJN and WGBO…

I grew up in Kansas City, came “back east” to college (Yale) and never looked back. My original dream had been to be a Broadway Star (I thought I’d simply go to a few auditions in New York and instantly be vaulted to fame and fortune) but I learned quickly that I didn’t have the stomach for a life of daily rejection and grinding poverty. So, with zero experience, I took a TV job in Utica, NY and gradually worked my way up to larger stations. When I arrived at New Jersey Public TV (NJN) in 1987, I realized I would probably never find a more flexible, hospitable home for what I wanted to do: arts programming and documentaries–which even back then, were an endangered species. NJN allows me to host and produce a weekly television arts program, “State of the Arts”, and also produce and direct national PBS documentaries – five to date, with two more currently in production. I am definitely the beneficiary of new technology, as I am able to work from home, in Connecticut, most of the time, using recording and editing equipment I’ve accumulated over the years on various projects. (How I landed in CT is too complicated for a short answer: but it involved love, marriage, real estate, and money, as do so many things in life.) I started doing radio only a couple of years ago, when our “State of the Arts” TV series decided to expand its on-air presence to radio, which included sharing stories with WBGO in Newark, NJ, one of public radio’s biggest all-jazz stations.

You’re someone who does both television work and radio work, and I wonder if you might talk about what you’ve learned about how to approach each of these formats as a producer? Are there major differences to consider when you’re putting together a radio story versus a television story?

When I first started producing radio stories, I was struck with a sense of relief from the TV producer’s constant burden of having to SHOW everything you’re talking about: If you can’t see it, you can’t say it. When you do historical documentaries, it’s even more daunting…you often feel as if the whole project hinges on what kind of archival material is available (and affordable) or you have to come up with really creative ways to visualize concepts and abstract ideas. With radio, you become more of a writer…your words (and other sounds) have to create the picture, whereas in TV and film, you can be a relatively lazy writer if you’ve got great images. Working in both formats gives me an opportunity to develop different storytelling muscles. And in the end, it is all about telling a good story.

I know from your other radio work that you’re a music enthusiast, but how was it that you fell into the music-and-cruise-culture idea for this story?

My husband and I know John Maxtone-Graham, the maritime historian, socially; and we had spent an evening with him and his wife Mary, hearing about their experiences on the maiden voyage of the QM2. He and Mary live most of the time at sea, writing and lecturing about ships and ocean liners, and their view of shipboard life is tempered by reality. It wasn’t at all the glamorous Cole Porter world I’d envisioned – especially the entertainment. As I got a sense of the depth of his knowledge of the Golden Age of cruising and crossing, in such delicious detail, I knew I had the ingredients for a really interesting radio feature and went back the next day with my mini-disc for an interview.

Have you ever taken a cruise yourself? If you have, I wonder how the experience compared to your expectations. You point out an interesting paradox that the cruise industry is facing – trying to appeal to opposite ends of the demographic spectrum. It seems like there’s sort of an inevitable gap between the fantasy of what a cruise is like, compared to the real thing…

I’ve never been on a cruise, and don’t plan to. The idea of being trapped in the middle of the ocean with thousands of people you don’t know (and probably don’t want to) with no graceful exit short of going overboard is my idea of a nightmare!

This radio feature is embroidered throughout with really great, evocative music. Talk a bit about where you found these recordings and what you think they bring to the narrative…

Well, I couldn’t have done the story without the music; in this case, the recordings are the TV equivalent of archival footage, and utterly necessary. The rarest piece, “Songe d’Automne”, which was played as the Titanic sank, was actually recorded privately for John Maxtone-Graham by the Turtle Island String Quartet, and he generously shared it with me. The other clips were either from my own CD collection (hot jazz from the 20s, big band swing from the 40s) or were discovered on the internet. The Library of Congress has a remarkable audio collection from the wax cylinder era, and there are hundreds of private collectors who post their files just to share with the world. I’m grateful for them.

You can hear other features from WBGO producer Amber Edwards online at The Public Radio Exchange, where producers from around the world post their stories. Write your own reviews and help decide what ends up on the radio at www.prx.org.

“I wish there was more abstraction, more subtlety, more innuendo and suggestion on public radio!”
- Jenny Asarnow, KUOW Freelancer

[Download this week's MP3]

Hi, this is Aaron Henkin, curator of the NPR Station Showcase with PRX. Each week, producers at public radio stations around the country are creating outstanding reports and features for their local listening audiences, and on this podcast we take the time to meet some of the talented folks who bring those stories to life. This week, we’re traveling to the west coast, where KUOW broadcasts to the Seattle area from the campus of the University of Washington. Producer Jenny Asarnow started as a volunteer there, and she’s ended up as a valuable freelancer who’s currently doing everything from spot news reporting to producing long-form features about the character of public spaces around her city. This week, we’re doing something a little different on our podcast: We’re actually featuring one of Jenny’s very earliest radio creations, a piece that she put together when she was a student at Brown University. It’s utterly unlike anything you’re likely to hear on the airwaves, but it’s a great demonstration of what can be accomplished when someone with an artistic mind (and a penchant for abstraction) approaches the radio medium as a blank canvas. Jenny calls this piece Julie the Amtrak God. It’s essentially a phone conversation with a computerized voice-recognition program, and it manages to evoke a wide range of emotional responses from us as listeners without explicitly telling much of anything. Here’s a short Q & A with Jenny about her background and her inspiration for this unusual radio experiment…

Tell us a little bit about your background, what brought you Seattle, and how you ended up getting involved with KUOW…

I grew up in New Jersey where I fell in love with freeform radio through listening to the wonderful station WFMU. I moved to Providence and studied history, literature and media at Brown University. I got involved at the freeform student-run station there, BSR, first as a DJ, then as a producer and editor for a features show. After I graduated in 2004 I moved to D.C. to intern for NPR. I wanted to try working in public radio but didn’t have much of an idea where or how to do it. I just knew I didn’t want to move to New York, where most of my friends had gone–I felt like I needed to go on a far-flung adventure. My boyfriend was moving to Seattle and so I hopped on the train with him and arrived here without a job. I’d never even visited the Northwest before! After being here a few months I scored an unpaid internship at a KUOW talk show…several months after that I started doing freelance work for the station.

What sort of work are you currently doing for KUOW?

I do a lot of different work for KUOW. I think of myself as the fill-in lady. In the past month, for example, I’ve filled in as a spot news reporter, produced the morning talk show and the afternoon fast-paced news talk show, produced spots for the pledge drive, and filled in for the receptionist! My main ongoing project is a series of half hour portraits of public spaces in Seattle. They are sort of extended vox pops–I go somewhere and talk to the people there in an effort to illustrate the character of a place and the different people who inhabit it. I also record a lot of public lectures for the station, and I used to produce a weekly lecture series.

Your story, “Julie the Amtrak God,” is completely unlike anything most public radio listeners have ever heard before. I wonder if you could explain a bit about how the idea for it originally popped into your head, and what happened from there…

To be honest, it’s probably unlike what you hear on public radio because it was NOT made at a public radio station. I made this for a class in college. I didn’t have to worry about money or time. I thought of a neat idea and I attempted to create it. It’s more comparable to art than your typical feature story in that way–there were no outside constraints on the work other than my own imagination and the materials I had to work with. Here’s where the piece came from, as best I remember: I called the Amtrak line to book a reservation on a train. I had a cold so I kept coughing and sneezing into the phone. Julie, the automated voice, kept mistaking my coughs for names of cities. I thought that was bizzarre and amusing. I started to wonder what would happen if I put myself in her seemingly all-knowing, yet strangely inept hands. I think of ‘me’ in that piece as a kind of character. Maybe it’s a part of me, helpless and searching for direction. Julie’s job is to provide direction. I called her a bunch of times and used the best takes. The AM radio sounds you hear underneath and in between the conversations came from an idea I had about fuzzy signals. I thought about voices transmitting over telephone lines and the information getting lost somewhere in between, and I associated that with a bad radio signal– I wanted the fuzzy sound to communicate that idea. Also I liked the way it sounded. Most people I’ve talked to seem to have not liked that aspect of the piece, but I do!

What have people had to say to you in the way of feedback when they hear this piece?

I’ve gotten a lot of positive reactions to the piece but for different reasons. Some people just think it’s hilarious. Some people think it’s melancholy. I’ve had people say they appreciate how personal it is. Radio professionals have sometimes thought it was too long. Maybe the biggest compliment I’ve gotten is that the professor whose class I made the piece for, Roger Mayer, still plays it for his class.

I think this piece says a lot about solitude and alienation, but it does so without actually saying much of anything… I wonder what your thoughts are about the power of the abstract in radio. It seems to me a lot of public radio producers can get trapped in the I-have-to-over-explain-everything mode of thinking…

I wish there was more abstraction, more subtlety, more innuendo and suggestion on public radio! My favorite radio is a little opaque and strange. Sometimes I think of radio compared with film–filmmakers are ‘allowed’ to use their medium so much more creatively than many radio producers, especially in the U.S. Radio can be an art form and I wish it would be used that way more often!

You say you made this piece when you were a student at Brown University. Now you’re a working, free-lance contributor to a metropolitan public radio station. How do you think your radio work has changed between then and now?

Well, now I am doing radio as my job. I’m producing work for a station, not for my own amusement. My radio work is much, much less personal now. I am much more focused on getting across information. And I have a lot less time. But I do still try to be creative with the work I do at KUOW. For instance, my programs about public spaces use a lot of sound and I try to juxtapose sounds and voices in interesting and delightful ways. I’m much better at getting to the point of things than I used to be. If I made ‘Julie’ now it would probably be shorter. Actually, I’m not sure I could make this piece now. At this moment in my life, I tend to use my most inner creative energies on other projects, like music.

You can hear other features from KUOW producer Jenny Asarnow online at The Public Radio Exchange, where producers from around the world post their stories. Write your own reviews and help decide what ends up on the radio at www.prx.org.

“Many of our impressions of Iran are based on a now-outdated news story we once read, or a book about Iran written a decade ago. Iran’s youthful, educated population is bringing about social change in spite of the slow pace of political change. As the accepted norms evolve, it’s causing conflict and confusion.”
- Steve Zind, VPR Producer

[Download this week's MP3]

Hi, this is Aaron Henkin, curator of the NPR Station Showcase with PRX. Each week, producers at public radio stations around the country are creating exceptional reports and series for their local listening audiences, and on this podcast we share some of the best and brightest of those stories with you. This week, we’re shining the spotlight on a piece called Making Ends Meet from producer Steve Zind at public radio station VPR in Colchester, Vermont. This story is one of five parts in a series called Iran Today. Current top-of-the-hour newscasts and newspaper headlines give us a very narrow stream of information about Iran, a country that’s going through dramatic social and economic upheavals within its own borders. Thanks to the enterprising work of Zind, we’ve been given a clear window onto some of the struggles that define the lives of everyday Iranians, citizens who are searching for stability and justice in a political climate that’s undergoing constant mood swings. Here are some of Zind’s thoughts on a few questions about what went into his radio series, and what he’s taken away from it…

I think people might presume that local public radio stations only make local stories. Obviously this isn’t always the case. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what inspired you to go to Iran, how long you were there, and what sort of radio work you did over there…

I’ve been to Iran twice -each time for two to three weeks. Originally I went to search for my family’s “roots.” My name is Persian and my grandfather was Iranian. From that trip I produced a series of first-person journal pieces, which aired on Vermont Public Radio and nationally on WBUR’s “Here and Now.” I was inspired to return as a reporter because of my fascination with Iran. The more I learned, the more questions I had. I particularly wanted to focus on the domestic issues that we don’t hear too much about in order to give listeners a better idea of daily life in Iran. It may seem unusual for a local station to devote resources to this kind of endeavor, but it makes sense to the degree that our listeners, like public radio listeners everywhere, are curious about the world. I think they appreciate that VPR has given them information they weren’t getting about an important country. I still get comments nearly every day about the Iran stories.

It’s complicated enough putting together all the disparate pieces of a local radio story into a coherent whole; I imagine it must get exponentially more complicated when you’re in a foreign country… how does one make narrative sense out of such an unfamiliar environment?

It would be hard to land in a place like Iran and get beyond superficial first impressions without some preparation. I’ve spent the last few years reading about Iran, talking with Iranians who live in this country, corresponding with friends in Iran and learning a little of the language. Even before I went the first time, I felt I’d established a baseline of familiarity that helped me understand the environment. For my second trip, I developed a list of potential stories and interviewees. At first I was asking only questions in interviews that related to my list of story ideas. I quickly realized that I might be missing stories that were right in front of me. So I started asking everyone about a wide range of subjects. Themes and story ideas emerged based on their comments. I was also fortunate to have a translator who works for state-run television. His familiarity with journalism and his knowledge and connections were an invaluable help. He’s also representative of many young Iranians – combining religiosity with a modern outlook. I learned a lot just shooting the breeze with him. Interviews were challenging. People are careful to measure their words: Those who are critical of the government are afraid of getting into trouble. Those who support the government are mistrustful of Western journalists. It was a challenge to get people to clarify vague and sometimes contradictory statements. It was also difficult to get “everyday” Iranians to speak on the record. People are justifiably nervous about having their comments recorded. As they see it, they have nothing to gain by calling attention to themselves.

The only thing most of us hear about Iran is its foreign policy and its nuclear ambitions. I think one of the things that makes your story unique is that you go halfway around the world to look at some very domestic issues, like poverty and unemployment… What do you think is the thing we Americans misunderstand the most about Iran?

From a distance, it’s difficult for us to see how dynamic Iranian society really is and how much spirited public debate takes place around important issues (the ones not deemed too sensitive by the government.) Many of our impressions of Iran are based on a now-outdated news story we once read, or a book about Iran written a decade ago. Iran’s youthful, educated population is bringing about social change in spite of the slow pace of political change. As the accepted norms evolve, it’s causing conflict and confusion. One young man told me with some consternation, “Change is happening so quickly. The best man of today is the worst man of tomorrow.” All of this is taking place in the context of Iran’s political isolation and economic stagnation. When you’re in Iran you can sense the country’s enormous potential – along with the formidable obstacles that lie ahead.

You can hear the other stories in Steve Zind’s Iran Today series, and more work from VPR, online at The Public Radio Exchange, where producers from around the world post their stories. Write your own reviews and help decide what ends up on the radio at www.prx.org.

“As far as editing the tape down, it’s like taking a picture with audio; you take the snap-shot ONLY when you know everything you want is in the frame.”
-WFUV’s George Bodarky

[Download this week's MP3]

Hi, this is Aaron Henkin, curator of the NPR Station Showcase with PRX. Each week, producers at public radio stations around the country are creating exceptional reports and features for their local listening audiences, and on this podcast we share some of the best and brightest of those stories with you. This week, we’re turning our antennae to New York City, where WFUV broadcasts from the campus of Fordham University. They bring us an original short series called “Odd Jobs.” It’s made up of four sound-rich, first-person profiles of people with, well, odd jobs: a chess hustler, a match-making cabbie, a street juggler, and a guy who removes chewing gum from sidewalks. “Odd Jobs” was created by a production team that includes WFUV’s George Bodarky, freelancer Michael Rice, and Fordham University seniors Evelyn Lombardo, Annmarie Fertoli and Shane D’Aprile. Here’s what the team has to say about how the series got underway…

The ‘Odd Jobs’ series seems like it was a great idea just waiting to happen — how did the concept get rolling?

Our News and Public Affairs Director Julianne Welby suggested the idea as we approached Labor Day and we all put our heads together to find New Yorkers with the most interesting or unusual jobs. New York City is full of unique individuals with amazing stories to tell — once you put your head to it — it’s not hard finding folks.
 
On this week’s podcast, we’re hearing four vignettes from the series. Talk about your department’s experiences interviewing these different characters for the series…
 
All of our producers had a blast. George Bodarky spent a few hours riding shotgun as cabbie Ahmed Ibrahim’s picked up fares and played matchmaker. He had quite the ride and most importantly was able to document it all on tape.

Production-wise, these features are very listenable because they’re so short and tight. I wonder if you might give listeners a sense of how much audio you were originally working with and what it takes to edit it all down into these audio microcosms…

All of our producers had quite a bit of tape. As far as editing the tape down, it’s like taking a picture with audio; you take the snap-shot ONLY when you know everything you want is in the frame.
 
When and how have you aired these audio moments on WFUV? And how have audiences reacted to them?
 
We’ve aired them as a series during our morning show, City Folk Morning. We’ve also aired them on our weekly public affairs program, Cityscape. These kinds of segments provide listeners with a slice of New York City life from a pie that will never run out. Sometimes listeners contact us for more information or simply to say the story put a smile on their faces.

You can hear more radio stories from WFUV online at The Public Radio Exchange, where producers from around the world post their stories. Write your own reviews and help decide what ends up on the radio at www.prx.org.