A fashionable part of Boston:

I give thanks that I am writing to you from the road, in Boston. I am grateful for the overdue return of good Indian food to my diet last night, and am surprised and pleased to discover that people will still dress up in red suits, gold shirts, zebra-stripe pants, and mirror shades, paying homage to the freaky giants of funk--thanks "Bootie Vortex."

Family and friends, ditto, gracias. Turkey--oh yeah. Hotel hot tub?--how did we survive without them? And all of you out there, who year after year support and encourage us in our work at NCPR--Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A Great Notion:

Citizen journalism is among the hot media topics that we at NCPR have been following with interest. While it may look on the surface like an attempt to get you all to do our job for us, it is, in fact, a new way of doing business--turning the one-way megaphone of broadcasting into a two-way and many-way conversation within a community. This is increasingly important as the twin forces of globalization and new media technologies both tend to reduce the importance of and the visibility of the distinct character of localities. It is our hope that we can use these new technologies in a way that acts as a counter to the homogenizing trend. By bringing our indigenous writers, artists and musicians to the fore, by providing a platform for the views and a forum for the debates that will shape our region's future, by remaining faithful to the voices that make this one particular place, and not another.

Toward that end, we ask you to help us gather together some of the people using the new technologies in this region--mountainside bloggers, garage-band podcasters, school media lab Flash animators, and people who are doing things that haven't got a name yet. Send in your candidates to radio@ncpr.org. Because every country needs a North Country, even so notional a nation as cyberspace.

Pod People Rejoice!

Yes, they laughed at Einstein, too--but we have finally done it--stumbled up over the lip of the new millennium with our first-ever podcast (see Online below). More than a pathetic attempt to garner cool points from our children, better than a jaded jump onto the techno-bandwagon, we have taken the hottest and hippest new high technology and reengineered it from the ground up into--well--public radio. You can still boogie maniacally like the svelte silhouettes in the iPod ads, but we'll know what you're really listening to. And so will your kids. So don't even go there.

Welcome to the neighborhood:

This will be the first issue of The Listening Post for a couple hundred new members of NCPR. This email is one of the benefits of NCPR membership. Each week we give you a heads-up on great new programs, new features on the website, and some items of special interest to North Country communities.

We will understand, however, if you choose to decline this honor. Simply reply to this mailing with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. As responsible stewards of cyberspace, we recycle all returned and unused emails. After the bits and bytes have been shredded and processed they can be remanufactured into beltway blogs, Japanese anime, network screen crawls and many other useful digital products. Look for the "green electron" trademark.