Pretty good radio

Fundraiser is coming around again, starting Monday, and one of the things it brings to us twice a year is an opportunity to reflect on just what it is we do. At NCPR, the job set is so eclectic that demented dilettantism might be a phrase that captures the spirit. You might say that it is our job to make ADD look good. So we endeavor to be great at being pretty good at everything. This puts us in line, I think, with the spirit of work as practiced in the North Country, where every job description has the closing caveat borrowed from auction notices “And much miscellaneous, too numerous to mention.”

There are a whole slew of projects on the burner, ranging from the UpNorth Music studio outreach project to the North Country Reads one book, one community project. We will be helping public broadcasters do better online via shared resources at PubForge. I find that I will be involved in creating and maintaining a PubForge wiki—and I don’t know a wiki from a kiwi—but I’m willing to give it a shot. We’ll be turning some attention toward a new project, the Public Radio Talent Quest. There’s a new Book by Email, There’s a new audio play by Betsy Kepes set in an 1890s schoolhouse. We will be building a big chunk of webspace to examine the “Summer of Love” during its fortieth anniversary year. You get the point—we’ll try nearly anything, and I think our track record is, well--pretty good. There’s a lot more to public broadcasting than grabbing a signal off the satellite and passing it on to your radio. At least that’s what we think—when we have any time to think.