April is poetry month, but March is verse

Here comes Poetry Month again. Have you sent out all your cards? At NCPR we always make a big deal of it, and this year is no exception. I'll be on the road this Saturday with our Kroc Fellow-in-residence Douglas Hopper to record David Budbill's gig in Montgomery, Vermont. Poetry with shakuhachi flute and gong bowls. How cool is that? You can get a taste on next Thursday's Readers & Writers and tell us how cool, or later in the month on the debut broadcast of our new regional arts program Open Studio. We will also launch the next selection in our Books by Email series: Toward the Distant Islands, new and selected poems by Copper Canyon Press author Hayden Carruth. No poet active in American letters has or deserves a finer reputation. And check future Listening Posts for special poetry features and programs thoughout April.

But this is still March, Seasonal Affective Disorder Month. So here is a truly downer poem for the month of muck, darkness and debris: March Song.

The Persistence of Yammer

The volume number above informs me that this is the beginning of the fifth year of The Listening Post. That's right--I have raved and mumbled continuously for four whole years, and show no signs of letting up anytime soon. If you have nothing to do for the next fourteen hours, you could read it all again in my blog or, you could whittle a little banana tree and a little family of monkeys eating tiny bananas underneath it, and then paint it all in loving detail with itty-bitty modeling brushes, and still have time left to go out for a pizza and beer. One of the beauties--and the horrors--of the internet, is that nothing need ever go away. Newsprint goes to stuff Christmas packages, radio vanishes in the moment it airs, but all the misstatements, rash promises, "seemed like a good idea at the time" brainstorms, assorted typos and grammatical errors that are committed to the Web have a lifespan similar to the Great Pyramid at Giza. Let's spend the next couple of years talking about it.

Down at the Conjunction

As the media realms of print, broadcast and online continue to move toward some kind of conjunction, the role of the blog, or weblog, increases in importance. And not just because everybody's got one--even me--but because the immediacy and informality of the form, when it is well employed, has both news value and audience appeal. In this week's regional news we used as a source for the story on Canadian casualties in Afghanistan the blog of Alan McLeod in Kingston, ON. Today's Photo of the Day comes from the blog of Prairie Summer, a North Country native serving for a year as an international education volunteer. And beginning today, we are delighted to introduce you to Sharie Derrickson, a humor and feature writer living in Cape Vincent. The inaugural entry in her new NCPR Blog, Quirks, is a cautionary tale that illuminates new uses for pork rinds and a yo-yo.

Online Accounting

Thanks to everyone who has been keeping the phone lines and the pledge page busy over the last few days. Our March Membership drive is well on the way to goal. But I would like to talk a little about our online service, and what it takes to keep it going. Station Manager Ellen Rocco says that it costs us about $180 per broadcast hour to operate on air. That cost would be roughly the same whether we had a thousand listeners, or a million listeners. The math is different online--every extra listener to our broadcast stream, for example, costs us about $.04/hour. So if our online stream is your usual way of listening to NCPR, and you are a heavy listener, say 10 hour/week--we pay $20 per year for the bandwidth sent just to your ears alone. Our newsletter service costs us about $.03 per message sent. So if you subscribe to the Listening Post and the Daily News headlines--delivering them to your inbox costs NCPR $9 year. And there are other costs as well.

Now the last thing we want is for anyone to unsubscribe, or to stop listening online as a way to save us money. These costs are an integral part of our public service mission. But there is an anxious debate in the public broadcasting community about whether the member support model that has served us so well on air can be translated to the different world of the web successfully. At NCPR we are confident that it can. That is why we impose no subscription fees on any of our online content; we don't limit streaming time for non-members, as some stations do. We offer it all free of charge, regardless of a visitor's status. And we intend to keep it that way. So, if you have come to value and rely on the services of ncpr.org, we ask that you consider that value in support of the service.

Look Who's Hawking

It's beginning to look a lot like fundraiser; our March Membership Drive begins on Monday. And it was only a matter of time. For five years, I have had the luxury of being safely ensconced, off-air in (as Joel calls it) the web hovel, while everyone else took a turn with the heavy lifting in the pitch room. In an email with the subject line "Read or Die!" Jackie informs me that my get-out-of-jail-free card has been revoked and I will be covering a shift on-air. Good thing I've memorized the toll-free number.

The skills should be there, somewhere in the DNA. In his career my father sold Fuller brushes, Electrolux vacuum cleaners, World Book encyclopedias, Remington Rand adding machines, and, proving that he could in fact sell shoes to a snake--Triangle shoes. "You just have to believe in the product," he said. I hang my hat on that hope--and that a service with real intrinsic worth will mostly sell itself. It's encouraging that I will be paired up with Joel; we can be a little geek support group. Hope to hear from all of you next week.