Big Voice, Little Voice

When some communities come together, the speaker gets to hold a stick, and say her piece, then hand the stick on. The stick makes its way around to everyone, and everyone has their say. With the anomaly in community discourse called broadcasting, the stick rarely gets passed very far. The community is divided between the few and professionally loquacious, and the silent many--to the distortion of all our relationships.

NCPR is making a bet that new media technology can help to reduce the distortion that results from the "big voice, little voice" limitations of traditional broadcasting. And that there is much that can be done within broadcasting to level out the power between those who "Got Bandwidth?" and those who don't. And that there is more that we can do as a community of media producers among our many communities of service to bring forward unheard voices, to create opportunities to have conversations that otherwise would never make it beyond the counters of diners and the front porches of small towns.

This bet will be played out over the next year or so in major changes at ncpr.org, in our broadcasts, and in our relations with and among North Country communities. The costs could be large, the opportunities to fail could be many--and kind of epic in scope. But it should be pretty interesting. Got Panic?