And checking it twice

I'm not an avid mass forwarder of email. I receive and send too much in my day job to enjoy doing more than the necessary off duty. But as a public library trustee I was interested to read a forwarded list of titles that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was supposed to have recommended for removal from the town library. The list purported to originate from the minutes of the library board. I was on the verge of forwarding it to my library director and fellow trustees, when I thought to check into its veracity. Good thing--it was bogus.

There are claims in the press that Palin had a conversation about policy regarding library books she considered inappropriate with the library director, and a claim that she subsequently tried to have the director removed, but no list has ever been unearthed, nor evidence that any particular titles were ever proposed. It is now unlikely that there ever will be a credible list, or that the other claims will ever be substantiated or disproven.

Because the entire conversation has now been overtaken by the question of who floated the bogus list and why. And why so many people were ready to accept it at face value, and whether it could be additional evidence for this or that conspiracy theory. Bad info not only drives out good, it poisons the well of further discussion and investigation. It reduces all claims to equal veracity and converts what could have been a dialog into twin streams of disconnected invective.

This is one of the great dangers of the new media landscape. We get too much of our news from sources of untraceable provenance, from "redmeat14@yahoo.com." If there is a bright side to this tawdry episode, it is that it highlights the continuing value of professional and accountable media sources--despite what you might be reading about them in mass emails.

Politics and whiskey

The sign above the bar used to read "Check your guns with the barkeep. No discussion of religion or the president." Small wonder--politics is intoxicating enough all by itself. Under the influence of a hot campaign, otherwise sensible people will say and do almost anything. Examples abound from both Denver and St. Paul, and the rhetorical binge will last until November. Speeches, ads, debates, press conferences, town meetings, photo ops, talking points, rallies, interviews, analysis, commentary, spin control, message management, opposition research, triangulation and segmentation. Yikes!

While I have had to forgo the consolations of whiskey in my life, I am unable to wean myself from politics. It sort of sneaks up on you, just like whiskey, and the sane person at the back of the brain looks on in horror as the tirade pours forth. I slip away from work to sample strong drink in the dim back booths of the blogosphere. I bolt my dinner, washed down with shots of cable news. Mornings lost in anger hangover, evenings lost in partisan email. The disease is progressive, and prone to quadrennial relapse. I would pray for recovery, but don't get me started on religion.

The world looks back

Online, NCPR's main aim is to inform the region about itself and about the world. A secondary aim is to inform the world about the North Country. In crunching the numbers, I am amazed at the way the second task works. One third of our traffic arrives via search engines such as Google. Most comes from North America, but in the last month we have had visitors from more than 100 countries, including 310 visits from the United Kingdom, 99 from Japan, 68 from Brazil, 107 from Austalia, 12 from South Africa, 20 from Jordan, and two from Fiji.

One of the slightly creepy wonders of a good stats package is that I can tell where visitors from a given country or city landed in our site. One of our Fijian visitors viewed an audio slideshow about an Ontario beekeeper. A visitor from Myanmar looked at our series on biofuels. One visitor from Sarajevo went to The Folk Show page; another went to the Community Calendar. Three visitors from China apparently wanted to know about finding nude models in Chestertown. Visitors from Iran wanted to know about trash burning and to hear a review of "My Fair Lady." One Ukrainian likes Celtic harp and flamenco guitar, while our single Paraguayan visitor favors String Fever. UpNorth Music performer Kevin Irwin has at least one fan in Poland. Next door in Germany they are listening to Celia Evans and Scott Shipley.

All told, the world appears to be getting a somewhat quirky and spotty view of the North Country. But then consider what I know about Fiji--nice beaches, or Paraguay--it's in South America. I have to wonder though, just what do they make of 'enry and Eliza in Tehran.

Rain of soup: the NPR API

For a longtime advocate of emphasizing the "public" in public broadcasting, this is an exciting moment. My online colleagues at National Public Radio have made it the first major media company to hand what amounts to the "keys to the kingdom" over to the public. They have done this via the introduction of an open API, or application programming interface--a mouthful of buzzwords describing a feature that allows the public to access the entire archive of 250,000 NPR stories, and to use them as they see fit within their own sites, pages, and blogs. Included are tools to organize collections of stories by topic, program, series, reporter, and/or search term, and to receive those stories in a wide variety of formats and at varying levels of detail.

Within a few months, NPR stations such as North Country Public Radio will also be able to make their own stories available to the public using NPR's API. So, for example, if you had a blog dealing with environmental issues in the Northeast, you would be able to create a collection of stories on the environment from NPR mixed with local stories from NPR stations in the Northeast. Or a bluegrass fan might collect all the performances by and interviews with bluegrass artists at NPR and mix in performers from the UpNorth Music project. Or you could just grab every story since 1995 about James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. Sweet.



Even better, outside developers are already building new tools to use the API in novel ways. John Tynan at KJZZ has worked out a widget that takes NPR stories by topic and drops them onto a timeline, so you can see how coverage of a given issue develops. Here is a sample of the work in progress. Geoff Gaudreault of Reverbiage has built a widget that combines a 3D globe mapping out the latest NPR stories with an embedded player to listen to the stories. See it work and get the code. At NCPR, we are in the process of switching to the API for all the NPR features syndicated within the site. You can play with the API yourself, and should. Use the "Query Generator" to select and view different slices of the NPR pie. Register to use the NPR API.

Barbed reply

If the internet is--as Sen. Ted Stevens maintains--a bunch of tubes, it could sure use a dose of Liquid Plumber. The most persistent rap against the web has been that it's almost impossible to tell whether you are getting good information or not. In a time of reputation management, viral marketing, buzz doctors and spin control--not to mention the assortment of more pedestrian rumormongers, outright liars, and smear artists--who can you believe? Then there are the soreheads, the crackpots, the professionally paranoid, and the wearers of tinfoil hats. It boggles the mind (if the mind is not already boggled).

I assumed that somewhere in the jungle of social networking tools that is burying traditional media like a collapsed barn under grapevine, there would be a service that allowed the surfing community to tag specious content as crap. Something like :
428 readers reported (link to offending content) to SepticTank.org.
Tags: bogus (412), twaddle (15), how do i log in? (1)
Veracity score: 00.23%
But there's no such thing. I should know because I checked it out… on the internet.

Community self-policing works pretty well on individual sites like Wikipedia, but we lack a scheme that will apply to the whole ball of bits. Long before the days of cyberspace my friend Allen proposed the following, which can be taken as a model. Repeal all traffic laws and give every driver a dart gun. Each time a driver jumps the light, cuts someone off, straddles both lanes, or drives while shaving, a vigilant motorist fires a barbed dart with a red flag into the body of the offending vehicle. Collect enough flags and police wave the idiot over and ask him to step out. Then a big electromagnet lifts his car into the maw of a portable crusher. Harsh perhaps, but then Allen is a bit of a sorehead himself.

Where did the future go?

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.

Inside the anthill

Things get a little crazy around here during fundraiser time. At the moment I have three windows open to edit frequently updated web pages, two photo editor windows, one email application, a calculator, four web browser windows, a Word document, and an IM chat room connecting the various pitch people throughout the station. And I'm having the least crazy day. The news department is roiling like a kicked over anthill trying to keep pace with developments in Albany.

Radio Bob is just back from an epic arctic journey up Blue Mountain to put us back on the air in the southern Adirondacks after a prolonged outage. And everybody else is teleporting themselves up and down the hall trying to keep the wheels from flying off the fundraising cart.

Left: Why we were off: NCPR's "iceproof" receiving antenna on Blue Mt. before and after Radio Bob climbed the sucker and whacked on it with a hammer.

You all, on the other hand, remain calm, patient and dependable--sending in your usual generous support for our operations, along with a little extra to help celebrate our 40th birthday. We've been able to count on you all these years, and believe me--we remember who "brung us." Our heartfelt thanks to all of you who have supported us in this drive, and a special thanks to our volunteers, and to the businesses who have donated the great daily drawing prizes: Old Forge Hardware, Mountain Man Outdoor Supply Company, Red Truck Pottery and Clayworks, and Northern Music and Video. You can still get your name in the hat for tonight's drawing on a set of handmade serving dishes from Red Truck. And tomorrow's winner can live out his or her rock'n'roll fantasy with a Fender guitar from the folks at Northern. Call 1-877-388-6277 or visit us at ncpr.org before the drive ends.

40 is the new 19

NCPR turns 40 tomorrow. Your fortieth birthday is supposed to be the one you dread--the first stale breath of mortality--but we're pretty excited. And not just because many of us at the station look way back over our shoulders (if our necks can still turn that far) on our own 40 candles. The celebration just happens to coincide with our annual March Membership Drive (Tuesday-Friday). Being ravenous public radio mendicants, we hope you will dig a little deeper this year to help secure our next four decades on the air, or on whatever platforms public broadcasting homesteads by 2048--cyberspace, hyperspace, digital telepathy, or multiverse transdimensional tachyon distribution.

Perhaps the century-old Magliozzi brothers will still be razzing the owners of junker hovercraft, and GK will be the world's oldest as well as tallest radio comedian. You never know. What we do know is that we won't get there without you and your support. To sweeten the deal we have some excellent swag on offer, including a geekly bonanza giveaway for early renewals.

Give early and often, and drop by anytime to see us on the radio.

All in

No one imagined, when it was just an invitation to apply for funding, just how all-consuming the UpNorth Music project would become. 38 full days of recording in eleven communities, more than a hundred individual sessions, at least a thousand hours mixing and producing songs, interviews, broadcast features, podcasts. Designing and rebuilding the production studio, identifying, recruiting and paying artists, finding studio venues, planning a concert tour, mastering a compendium CD set, clearing performance and publication rights--a million details from remote broadcast setup to getting our new logo printed in frosting on a concert reception cake. Enormous big "ups" to production manager Joel Hurd and to project coordinator Jill Breit for all the sweat and blood.

It's all coming to a head tomorrow with the opening concert in the UpNorth Music Series at St. Lawrence University's Gulick Theater, and with the release of the project highlights in the 3-CD set Music Heard UpNorth. I've been working my way through the set with great delight. It sounds like the North Country--talented, inventive, diverse, quirky. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought I knew the musicians of the region, or at least the best of them. But on each CD in the set, there are at least half a dozen artists I had no idea were out there. Fantastic songwriters, monster instrumentalists, voices to make you cry. When NCPR takes on a project, I'm proud to say we go "all in." And the North Country, I'm proud to say, is full of artists who do the same.

If you can't pick up a copy at the concert tomorrow, Music Heard UpNorth will be available within a few days in stores around the region, and online via cdbaby.com. Or you can contact the station to place orders.

In the family again

All week I have been looking at the home page at NCPR, seeing the holiday themed Photos of the Day, the winter reading list, a gingerbread house slideshow, the holiday specials schedule, etc. Everything you would expect for the holidays, except for the ongoing coverage of a dispute with our public radio neighbor to the south. I had planned to give the matter a rest today, and write some holiday anecdote here, such as an account of my marathon journey across the North Country in belated search of a Christmas tree.

Instead, a real holiday story has just fallen into my lap. As of 1:30 pm, NCPR has reached an agreement in principle with WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, that will settle the conflict to the benefit of all. Read the joint press release outlining the agreement.

Our warmest thanks to all who showed their concern and support. And best wishes to everyone for a joyous holiday season.

In the family

How you report the news when you have become the news is one of the most ticklish problems in journalistic ethics. A case in point is a story that will air in a few minutes on All Before Five, and again tomorrow (Friday) during the Eight O'Clock Hour. Recently, in a rare FCC "filing window" for applying for broadcast licenses, NCPR applied to upgrade its facility in Lake Placid to a higher-power license. Our public radio neighbor to the south, Northeast Public Radio (WAMC), also made an application that, if successful, would transfer the Lake Placid 91.7 fm frequency from NCPR to them.

The news was first aired in the region this morning on Saranac Lake station WNBZ, in a feature story by Chris Knight who, in addition to his duties at WNBZ, is a frequent freelance reporter for NCPR on Adirondack issues. While NCPR is committed to retaining the frequency on which it has served Lake Placid for over twenty years, we needed to find a way to cover the story in a fair and balanced way that would place the public interest ahead of the institutional interests of the station. Toward that end, the station manager and the news director sought advice from the Poynter Institute, an organization that provides training in journalistic ethics. They recommended that we use an outside editor with no connection to either of the parties to the dispute to oversee NCPR's coverage. Suzanna Capelouto, news director of Georgia Public Broadcasting, agreed to fill that role. The reporting by Chris Knight that you will hear on NCPR tonight and tomorrow was edited by her.

NCPR's position on the dispute and links to other coverage, including Northeast Public Radio.

In their own words

A couple of weeks ago I was bemoaning the effects of the Hollywood writers' strike on the one-eyed monster in my living room. But as the labor action continues to drag on, and the world has not come to an end, I have had time to consider the possible benefits of being bereft of words. In particular, bereft of words put into the mouth by others. Consider the possibilities of a political speechwriters' strike. Would candidates just do reruns of previous speeches, or would they take the gamble and communicate with constituents in their own words? And what if talking heads had no one to write their talking points? What if the slick hired guns of Madison Ave. walked off the job, leaving products stripped of all pizzazz? Would we just buy last year's model? Would we forget to go shopping altogether? Silence speaks, as any poet could tell you (as long as the poets aren't out on strike.)

Goldfish and radio

With the writers' strike going on in TV land, all the time-sensitive programs have folded their tents for the duration, and the new series episodes that were already in the can are running dry. Since I find the network and cable news impossible to stomach without the antacid of The Daily Show ready at hand, that leaves me thumbing down through the reality shows, the game shows, the one-and-a-half star movies, the obscure team sports, infomercials, and reruns from the 70s. I kind of knew it was this bad, but I never realized it was this much--from 2 to 998 and back to the top again. Fortunately the south wall of the living room has a hundred feet of books, and the east wall another hundred feet. Then there are the shelves in the back room, and the stash of books burying my bedside table. Also, of course, the neglected gems of the CD collection, and that friend who will always talk to you when no one else is around--the radio.

If it is absolutely necessary to stare at something from my rump-shaped depression in the sofa, a goldfish bowl placed on top of the TV will do the trick. Goldfish plus radio. You can get two fish and name one of them Ofabia Quist-Arcton, and the other Mandalit del Barco. You can paste an NPR logo on the lower right portion of the bowl. You can drape a gaily embroidered runner over the darkened TV.

New territory

Welcome to those of the 348 brand new members of North Country Public Radio who are receiving this newsletter for the first time. Your generous contributions, joined with that of more than 2100 renewing members, have taken us well past our Fall Fundraiser goal to an unprecedented total: $307,912. Thanks to all our wonderful listeners, volunteers, organizations and businesses for an amazing show of support. You're all fabulous.

I think the thing that makes NCPR attractive to new members and listeners is that even though we are on the eve of our fortieth anniversary on the air, we keep doing new things: expanding our base with new transmitters this year in Chateaugay and Schroon Lake, expanding our offerings with new voices and programs, expanding public service through efforts like the UpNorth Music studio outreach project which is just wrapping up its first year, and the North Country Reads one community, one book project, now entering its third year.

Rather than ask listeners to help us maintain a comfortably familiar vehicle to cart us all off into retirement, we ask them to come along while we explore new arts and technologies, while we do our best to remake public service media according to the needs and possibilities of the new century. You aren’t going to believe what we get up to next year. Stay tuned.

Hundreds of villages

It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes hundreds of villages to raise and support a station like North Country Public Radio. All week, that support has been pouring in, from every "crick and holler" in the region, and from former strangers living everywhere from St. Johns, Newfoundland in Canada to La Canada in California. And it takes a volunteer effort on the scale of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps. 116 kind souls signed up to take shifts answering your calls. Hundreds of businesses contributed everything from composted manure to posh weekend getaways to encourage your support, along with copious food and drink to sustain the staff and volunteers. It's an incedible experience to be at the focal point of so much generosity, and a humbling one.

People sometimes poke fun at our "mendicant" business model. But I've got to tell you, it feels good--light years better than sending dunning notices to subscribers. Way better than having paid call services ringing you up at home during dinner. We're proud to do it the old-fashioned way--we ask, you give. And that's all it takes--except for lots of nerve, a powerful jawbone, gallons of sweat, and the amazing support of thousands. So we're feeling great, and we're doing great, well on the way to our goal of $290,000 and 450 new members by Saturday at 8 pm. If you haven't already, please take a moment now to support public radio in the North Country.

On to the next level

Thanks to everyone who suffered patiently last week and this while we struggled to recover from a major hacker attack on ncpr.org. We have almost everything back in shape, and now that the worst is past it is possible to see the episode in a more positive light--in a Darwinian sort of way. Having someone delete all our many thousands of audio files, like the prospect of being hung in the morning, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Consider the Permian extinction—the asteroid might have been very bad news for the dinosaurs, but it caused the little proto-rodents to kick their whole game up to the next level, on their way to becoming saber-tooth tigers, giant sloths, spider monkeys, and you and me.

I just don’t want you to think that I broke every page at the website--except the pledge page--in order to channel your attention toward our fall fundraiser, scheduled to leap out of your radios beginning 6 am on Monday. The pledge page and all member information are housed on high-security servers not connected to our public website and they were not affected. So--on to the next level, which in this case involves reaching a score of 290,000 points--if you’re playing a buck a point. But we are fearless and somewhat maniacal. With your help we’ll get there; you’re top players.

I look forward to hearing from you in the coming days.

Slack time

I seem to have been avoiding vacations lately, taking less time each year, dragging a laptop and cell phone everywhere, just in case. But I broke down and took a few days off in Maine this week, leaving the portable electronics at home. And the world seems to have kept up its regular rotation, even without me working the crank. I don't know why this should come as a surprise to me, considering that I fully expect the tide to rise and fall on schedule off Wells Beach whether I am there to watch it or not.

But we give so much to our jobs, if they engage us--all that time and sweat, all the plotting and the brainstorms. It should, by rights, all go to the devil as soon as we hit the outskirts of town. And the many places that try to do public radio without me--VPR, NHPR, WBUR, Maine Public Broadcasting, WAMU--they all (from my highway listening) seem to muddle through somehow. I can't explain it; I'll just have to rest up a little and give the matter some thought.

Looking in the mirror

If you ask somone to describe what they look like, they will usually stare blankly for an uncomfortable number of seconds, then tentatively offer a very few general details. As an organization, we found ourselves in that position recently, having engaged the services of that institutional version of the police sketch artist, a logo design firm. Like many approaching forty, we had decided that our old look was getting harder and harder to pull off, and that something saying "Twenty-First Century Me" was in order. Having worked as a graphic artist, I had some notion what a convoluted process this might become. It takes the sharp ears of a dog to hear the hints of direction, and the armored hide of a rhino to survive the feedback.

We have gone through multiple meetings and two extensive sets of sketches without getting quite there yet. But an unexpected bonus of the process has more than compensated for the angst and crossfire. For the first time in a long time, people all over the station are debating our essential identity, purpose, and meaning as an organization. And not just the usual loudmouths like me. We hope the visual fruit of the process will suit us and suit you as well. And we hope our designers will survive our zig-zagging and contradictory demands without constant recourse to whiskey. But the bull session is going great.

Here there be transmitters

With the little time left me this week in racing on to page 759 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I have been playing with the niftiest thing since sliced bread, a free web application that allows you to make up and mark up your own interactive maps and drop them onto your website. Geo-cachers and other cartographic weenies take note--you'll love QuikMaps. Whether you just want to chart and annotate your latest pub-crawl on some pseudonymous blog, or plot out all the locations for a county-wide arts tour, it's easy--not "as long as you're a webmaster easy"--but actually easy.

I registered with the site at noon yesterday, and by four pm had created several maps, including a new NCPR coverage map, with all our transmitters and facilities plotted to within a couple of feet. You can zoom down on our studio icon, switch to satellite view a find yourself looking at the roof over the control room. I can tell which car in the parking lot is mine. Look for news and event maps in the future. My geeky heart is going pitterpat.

Shifting sands

Like many of you, I am a big fan of Chris Lydon, you might even say (to borrow one of his favored adjectives) an enormous fan. So it is with very real regret that I report the end, for now at least, of his innovative and lively evening program Open Source. The producers were unable to put together secure funding to continue national distribution, and made the difficult decision to suspend production this week. Chris has been a great exploiter of both the countertrend—an unabashed intellectual in the age of dumbing down--and of the coming trend--building a radio program upon the swiftly shifting sands of a community of bloggers. That community lives on at the Radio Open Source website, and I encourage you all to visit, join the conversation, and help in the process of either reestablishing the program, or inventing an even better platform for this remarkable radio talent and his remarkable team.

While it might be tempting to do something conventional to fill out this weekday evening slot, NCPR has decided to continue to cast its lot with innovation, introducing a new program--a new kind of program--for public radio audiences. Fair Game, with host Faith Salie (a Rhodes Scholar and a comedian), disassembles the news and events of the day and, with the help of newsmakers, notables, musicians and comics, reassembles it with wit and humor into something new. Please give it a listen, beginning Monday, July 2 at 7 pm, and let us know what you think.

Outside the box score

Covering an area the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, NCPR does not have the option to covers sports news in the same way your hometown paper or broadcaster can. There are just too many schools, sports, teams and events for us to do a comprehensive job. In fact, you could mark our graduation from being a college-based station to becoming a regional community broadcaster from the date that our intrepid station manager had to inform the university trustees that we would no longer be carrying Saints home games live. In a station retreat exploring the new possibilities of micro-journalism, Brian Mann maintained that the best that we could provide, given our huge footprint, was "the ethical illusion of localism." Ethical in the sense that we try to create a true reflection of the rich diversity of North Country life in all its aspects and locales, but illusion in the sense that we can't cover life in Glens Falls, for example, to the extent that the Post-Star can.

So what we look to do in sports reporting is to find the stories that best capture a slice of the sporting life unique to the region, that highlight athletes and sports that are shaped by the region's geography, weather and culture. And we look for sports you aren't likely to run across in the ESPN headlines. This has taken our reporters down some unique pathways, following wilderness marathoners and ice climbers, talking to students who write hockey poetry and profiling zamboni drivers, covering rutabaga curling and NASCAR bobsledders, an ironworker decathalon and the competition to create the world's loudest car stereo. This "outside the box score" approach to the topic has brought our news team carriage on national programs such as Only a Game, and frequent broadcaster awards for individual features. This week, the 2007 National Edward R. Murrow Award for Sports Reporting went to Brian Mann for his August 2006 feature on the Mountaineers Old Boys from Saranac Lake, local favorites in the 33rd Can-Am Rugby tournament. Give it a listen on today's news page, or in the news archive.

Strange Meat

The hot weather perks some people up, but I must have a touch of the reptile—I downshift and dawdle, distracted from my labors. I wander off into odd byways of the web, looking for snack fare. From before the glory days of the "Hamster Dance," similarly disinclined technorati have left behind a trail of low-calorie and completely pointless websites. I drag this strange meat back to the ncpr.org cave complex in the occasional feature called BITIL—Breathtakingly Inane and Totally Incomprehensible Links.

There’s must-hear audio ranging from Dolly Parton singing Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven" to the alt-Christian performer Yodeling Theresa. And music video nuggets, such as Leonard Nimoy singing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." For the macabre there is The Death Clock, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the compelling but cruel Yeti Baseball. There are animated gems such as Muffin Films and my sullen favorite, Strindberg and Helium. The three newest BITIL entries are Improbable Research, Crank Dot Net, and the endlessly fascinating Zen Toy. While the warm weather lasts, submit your own delicacies to BITIL. Mmmm—tasty.

Geek pride

The leaves are halfway out, the black flies are all the way out, and lightning is driving the golfers off the course behind the station the way the angel with the flaming sword evicted humanity from the Garden. A perfect May day in the North Country. But it can do its worst outside, as long as the power holds out—I’m deep in the guts of ncpr.org and might as well be in a mine for all I care about the weather. Tweaking screenloads of gibberish to make infinitesimal improvements in the community calendar, rendering down volumes of old static content for the few drippings that will add to the savor of the database. I may not be able to move mountains, but I can move domains--clicking away in the half-light and chuckling to myself.

Aside from the somewhat rarified pleasures described above, yesterday brought a long-awaited satisfaction. A public version of NCPR’s homebrew web content management system, Public Media Manager, has long been on offer to other stations in the public broadcasting system. And I was beginning to feel like a guy who puts all this good stuff out by the road, and weeks later, no one has taken a thing. No more. First dibs goes to the Bloomington, Indiana community station WFHB, who filed off the software’s serial numbers, installed a roll bar and Hollywood mufflers, painted it all metalflake purple, and took it out on the road. Check it out: http://news.wfhb.org.

It’s like watching the kids grow up. I think I’ll print out a screen shot and tape it up on the refrigerator.

Five ounce bag

Ever since I was a kid, everything has been getting smaller—phones, computers, stereos, my old neighborhood, the dollar—everything except soft drinks and baseball players. So one of the pleasures of working online is the seemingly infinite expansiveness of the work space. I think of my twin monitors as viewscreens on the bridge of the Enterprise, peering into vast domains as I bark orders and warp my way through galaxies of cyberstuff.

NCPR Online is entering the seventh year of its voyage to explore strange new worlds, so I’ve been doing a complete fresh backup onto the studio computer: tens of thousands of files, gigabytes of audio, video, and pictures, whole library stacks of text. Six years of work by a hardworking bunch. All this vastness squeezing down the tubes of the internet into what? A bite-size corner of a five-ounce hard drive. It just doesn’t seem right. The sucker must be made of dilithium, or neutronium or something. Right under my desk. It’s a wonder it doesn’t collapse into itself like a black hole. Or reach some critical mass and explode, blasting out the windows with the long lost voices of Jody Tosti and Gregory Warner, blowing off the roof with old news and art exhibits, festooning toxic blog debris miles downrange. It scares me just to look at it.

Swing away the gantry

Radio people are as susceptible to their fantasy lives as anyone else. There are three basic fantasies endemic to the public radio crowd. There is the hot DJ fantasy—“Just let me have my own show and I can put together all that great music that gets lost in the shuffle. Etruscan nose-yodeling just doesn’t get the airplay it deserves.” Then there’s the Ira Glass fantasy—the pernicious desire to put together long-form essays that are witty, ironic, hip, intimate and surprising. How hard can it be? (Don’t make us play the demos.) But the most serious condition arises from the Garrison Keillor fantasy. “Let’s put together a two-hour variety program, with a studio audience, aired live. Garrison does it once a week; surely we can do it once. Doesn’t it always turn out great when Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney and the kids put together a show in the barn in those movies from the ‘30s?”

Weeks of sweat and panic later, drafting help from anyone unwise enough to come in range, we’re finally almost ready for tomorrow night’s live Open Studio special. Now we know how Garrison does it—decades of experience, scores of bodies, tractor trailers full of equipment, and a limitless supply of nerve. Maybe we’ll tackle Ira next; or maybe it’s time to launch Bagpipe Fever.

Tough sledding

Radio Bob is on arctic safari today, hauling radio gear by snow machine up through the ice fields on Blue Mountain. If his mission to replace our damaged antenna is a success, we will be able to stop apologizing to everyone in the central and southern Adirondacks, who have had the insult of no radio added to the injury of a late spring storm. The Blue Mountain facility is a central distribution point for us, feeding our signal on to other transmitters in North Creek, Lake George, Glens Falls, Newcomb and Speculator. We hope to have good news soon. Thanks to everyone for their patience.

This has been a tough week for public broadcasting infrastructure in the North Country. Mountain Lake PBS suffered the collapse of its 400-foot broadcast tower during bad weather on Lyon Mountain. On the other hand, it looks like cell-phone service will soon be extended onto the currently uncovered stretches of the Northway, with the just-announced agreement between the Spitzer administration and Verizon.

It pays to be humble before the power of the weather, though as it turns out, the weather will humble us whether we agree or not. But this just in—the good news I hinted at above--Radio Bob reports the fix is done, and all the transmitters are on. Weather permitting, of course.

Postmodern Situation Room

My brain, alas, is slightly pre-postmodern, and discombobulates when frames of reference become too tightly intertwined. Take the fake news—The Daily Show from Tuesday--CSPAN shows a congressman objecting to calling a group of senior Bush advisors “the Vulcans” because, given what he sees as their truculence and deficiency in logic, they should instead be called “the Klingons.” News of a sort. The Daily Show picks it up and calls the nearest thing to a Vulcan, Spock portrayer Leonard Nimoy, for comment. Another Trek veteran, George Takei interrupts. So we have policy examined via fantasy, reported as news, rendered as satire, given context by actors reprising their fantasy roles. Small wonder that modern newsrooms all appear to be modeled on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (the set of the bridge, that is). In the next half hour we find that fake conservative talk host Stephen Colbert will have real conservative talk host Bill O’Reilly (who was the mold from which Colbert was struck) as his guest, and that Colbert will also appear on O’Reilly’s show. A double-dittoheader.

Looking for relief from the media mirrorball, I fire up my office radio today for On Point, only to find an hour-long look at anti-terrorism policy as colored by the Fox thriller series, 24. The superhuman antics of Agent Jack Bauer are contrasted with actual ops, and an alarming number of real anti-terrorism types declare their fandom—Yikes!

Mostly I like to think “What is reality?” is a rhetorical question. But apparently, this is a fantasy I can no longer afford. The “point of contemplation” in my yoga class this week concerned how the body can experience that which has never happened to it, solely through the impact of our thinking. In a sense we become, therefore, what we watch. At the moment, I am sore all over.

You too

Much has been made of Time magazine’s person of the year selection for 2006—You—as in you, the citizen journalist, blogger, YouTuber, myspacer, etc. The accompanying article describes the selection as helping to deconstruct the “Great Man” theory of history, and to recognize the increasing democratization of media. Never mind that Time has been dining out on the “Great Man” theory since 1927 with this very feature, and that the ownership and control of mass media continues to consolidate toward the fortunate and unaccountable few, despite the explosion of new media. As one of Time’s “yous,” I appreciate the value of the growing capability to communicate to audiences without mediation. Old wisdom said “Freedom of the press belongs to them that own one.” In the new paradigm we all—potentially—own one. And that is big news.

What we don’t each own, however, is an audience. My home video—yawn; Osama’s home video—above-the-fold news. The large impact made in 2006 by citizen journalism, the “macaca” video and similar bits, comes when they are echoed in the larger media that has a mass following of eyes and ears. And that media world is an exclusive and ever-shrinking club. For them, new media is a new source of sources. While that has value in itself, it is not the Revolution. New media looks to me more like the Gold Rush, where everybody and his brother set out to stake a claim and started panning streams in the wilderness. A few got rich, most went home, and the big mining companies bought up everything in sight. The $1.6 billion Google gobble of YouTube is a case in point.