New connections

Sometimes the clock just sits there, slowly grinding gravel into sand, and sometimes everything seems to happen at once. We're heading into one of the latter times now. Stuff from the back burner, things we have been chipping away at month by month, all come to a head. A lot of the action is being driven by new projects and initiatives from our network partner, NPR.

The big news of the last few days was NPR's acquisition of Public Interactive, the platform host of many public radio websites, and a service provider to many more, NCPR among them. The merger may save us some change in the long run, but it will help most in facilitating our use of content from public radio programs that originate with PI's former parent, Public Radio International, and with other media services PI has under contract. It will beef up NPR's digital shop and will help PI stations play more effectively on the national stage.

NPR is making a big investment in social networking for the public radio community and is set to roll out a platform on which stations can foster their own communities within NPR.org. Look for lots more on this in late September.

NPR has also jump-started stations into the arcanely-labeled field of mobilecasting, making a mix of station and network features available via cell phones and other mobile devices. NCPR expects to join them by November. For those of you who wish your cell phones had a cord and a dial, there will be a regular phone number you can call from any type of phone to get the latest NCPR and NPR news and features. This will make NCPR available for the first time in remoter parts of the region that don't have broadband internet, or cell service, or even radio reception.

Speaking of mergers, I have saved the best for last. NCPR station manager Ellen Rocco is tying the knot this weekend with Adirondack potter Bill Noble. We wish them all the best.

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.

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.

Hypernation

Animal wisdom tells us that this is the time of year to lay low, to snooze--round the clock if possible. The thermometer is regularly below zero, the once-mellow meadows resemble the surface of the moon. Frogs are frozen freaking solid within the stony mud. But human contrariness insists that this is the time to get everything done, despite the brevity of bleak winter days. A dozen different projects are ramping up to speed all around the station. Fortieth anniversary events, concert plans, next month's member drive, the website redesign, conferences and collaborations, construction work. It never stops.

It all makes me, I confess, a little sleepy. But it must be the same impulse that got Cro-Magnon man through the last Ice Age: Want to stay warm?--Keep running. Just one more day on the trail and it's mammoth blubber for everybody! Unfortunately, it always seems to be the trail today, and the blubber tomorrow. And so it will go until the lilacs bloom. Until then, keep moving, and drink lots of hot chocolate.

Imaginary vacation

I had another writing assignment today, to write about an imaginary vacation for tonight's meeting of a local poet's group, but my nose is so firmly to the grindstone at NCPR that I am doing double-duty. Here is my offering, with apologies to our patient listeners in the Adirondacks, and to station engineer Bob Sauter for involuntarily sharing his little getaway.

Radio Bob's Vacation

At home, his voice mail fills with calls
from WXLH, Blue Mountain Lake.
but at Sosua by the Sea, I imagine Radio Bob
is adoze beside an aquamarine pool.

In his pocket, the cell phone vibrates urgently
but he can't tell it from the Magic Fingers
in his suite's king-size bed.

He turns over the tiny paper umbrella
from a tall cool drink, but it does not
remind him of a satellite dish.

On Blue Mountain, the NYSEG crew plods
through drifts; their bootprints lost in the blow.
I imagine Radio Bob is lost in thought, walking
the beach at Sosua by the Sea, his footprints
filling up behind him with surf.

His radio is tuned to the Caribbean World Series,
to reggaeton during the seventh inning stretch; it blast
sall across Latin America without his lifting a finger.
Life is good at Sosua by the Sea.

At home the transmitters fall like dominoes
away to the south. Homes fall silent but for
the drip of icicles on the sill. And Radio Bob
falls silent, contemplating nothing but the sweet breeze.

Obscure passages

If you have gotten past the homepage at NCPR in the last day or two, you'll have noticed that the new site design is starting to appear. My apologies for the interim confusion, but it is nothing compared to my own. It's ugly down in the crawl spaces of cyberspace. And the basic tools of web design are still primitive. Picture monks in the scriptorium, transcribing obscure passages from Leviticus by tallow lamp. Church Latin has nothing on javascript. What could "for (i=0; i<(args.length-2); i+=3) { test=args[i+2]; val=MM_findObj(args[i]);" mean? All I know for sure is that it is tiny and made of pixels I can barely read. And that you can't get the code wrong without sending people off to fan sites for Romanian calvary collectibles, or injecting heresy into scripture, or creating some other form of disproportionately large trouble. If by mischance you run horribly astray, just keep clicking. Eventually you will come across me in one of the sub-basements, busting my knuckles applying a torque wrench to a gunked-up function. We can help each other find the way back to daylight.

All things made new

Home renovation on the internet can be as messy and frustrating and time-consuming as in the real world. It's also prone to schedule creep, going over budget, etc. If you've been tuned in, you know that NCPR has moved into its 40th anniversary year, and you may have glimpsed our new logo on station correspondence. But so far you have not seen much at ncpr.org. That's about to change in the next few weeks, as we roll out our first complete website makeover since 2002. Things may be a little squirrely during the transition, with parts of the site being updated and part not. We'll do our best to keep the train on the tracks.

The look is intended to be more clean and contemporary, and more user-friendly to navigate and search. You will find that the menus will be consistent in content and location from the home page on throughout the site. The page itself is larger, taking advantage of the shift toward larger monitors in recent years. And we have taken a close look at how people are using the site to introduce some new pages that bring what people are looking for more front and center.
Take a sneak preview of the new design in progress.

It is a test page for the news section home page of the site. Most of the navigation works, sending you to pages in the old site. Some links to new pages do not work, and some of the destinations will have additional and/or changed content in the new design. But let us know what you think, quick, before I mess everything up. Email dale@ncpr.org.

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.

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.

Rate of Change

Things happen by fits and starts. There are rumors of change, meetings to plan this and that, and lots of waiting in between. Then--and I'm not sure if it's a fit or a start--everything happens at once, creating a level of chaos that requires, as Hunter Thompson says in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "a real connoisseur of edge work." Such a fearful convergence rules the station today. The long anticipated building renovation is heralded by jackhammers and sawzalls, and the operation of a large orange crawler-thingie that causes the whole structure to shudder and groan as if was being chewed and shaken by a tyranosaurus. The production studio is gutted out to accommodate new gear to serve the next round of the UpNorth Music project. Joel contemplates a stupendous new computer screen that gives one cause to wonder, "How big is God's monitor?" And Radio Bob is teleporting himself back and forth between Waterman Hill, where our new transmitter tower is dragging itself up toward the stratosphere.

Amid this high craziness, more meetings are going on behind the plastic sheets that serve in place of windows in the station kitchen. Whatever comes of this round, it is likely to happen at the same time as everything else.

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.

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.

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.

Dread air

It was 4:25 am when my phone rang and the voice of Radio Bob delivered the prerecorded message “Gee! It’s awfully quiet here at North Country Public Radio.”--the silence detector on the transmitter telling me that my hasty training as cub radio tech acolyte was about to be put to the test. My first reaction was “Good grief, don’t you realize you’ve reached an English major?” But I was soon engaged in remote viewing of the dimly-understood station automation system via my laptop at home. No joy. So I put on my coffee and drank some clothes and by 5 am was at the station, clueless, but proud to serve. First I woke Joel Hurd from his well-deserved rest to interrogate the transmitter, then I woke Radio Bob in mid-getaway at a downstate hotel room. Yelling “Help” real loud is within my skill set.

Soon Bob was talking to Joel in the studio on one cell phone, and to me—exiled to our Waterman Hill transmitter shack to read dials—on another cell phone. This made it hard for him to use his hand puppets. While Joel may be an engineer, he's a production engineer, and compared to a radio engineer, that’s about as relevant as being a choo-choo engineer. As for me, the web manager—that may sound techy, but web geeks think radio technology is made up of tyuubes and—things. Actually, with the online stream still working, I was thinking “Ha—so much for the legacy platform, it’s time for the true masters of cyberspace to rule. MWAA-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Some hours later Bob had distilled enough information from the mash of our ignorance to make a diagnosis, and Ellen Rocco and Sandy Demarest dispatched themselves south on a high-tech treasure hunt. They brought back a brand new stochastic deverbillator (or something like that) and a mere eleven hours after the dreaded call, we were back on the air. For those who take an interest in the technical specs; it was a metal box, sort of rectangular in shape. I think it may have contained both tyuubes—and things.

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.

Postcard of doom

Writing in haste again, taking a break between sessions at my annual geekfest, the Integrated Media Associates Conference, this year in Boston. Nice for me, because I get to bunk with friends in Medford and hang out a little with my daughter in her adopted town. Yesterday was the hard-core techie sessions, with a higher concentration of bluetooth ear phones and bitty foldout keyboards than anywhere outside freshman orientation at MIT. Once again, it's the end of the world as we know it, according to keynoter Michael Rosenblum, video journalism guru. The explosion of services like You Tube represent the tipping point from old media to new. That is, from centralized, cash-fat and exclusive media, to lean, inclusive, democratic media. "Adapt or Die!" is the cry. The difference this year is that CEOs and senior producers are joining the ranks of the believers and the terrified. The message is received, but what will be done with it is totally up for grabs.

Somewhere the mix of social networking, blogging, visitor submitted video, audio and text will intersect with professional curation, the necessary resources, and the deep storytelling expertise of old media to create a synthesis that doesn't have a name yet. At least that is the hope. The alternative looks like holding stock in buggy whips and Betamax. That expressionless psuedo-personality The Market, as always, shrugs and says "Tough noogies." Next up, a day of sessions at MIT, with the title (ominous to many in the room) of "Beyond Broadcasting."

Close to the bone

So much of the news, particularly the headline variety, just flows by, lost in the background clutter of life. Another bombing, another storm, another debate, a new candidate, a famous passing, an expert head articulating a sage opinion. We are poorly equipped to absorb information via newscasts and sound bites. Our ears have been trained by a hundred thousand years around the campfire, and what we want is a story. The news is beamed to us from without, but a story is something we can climb into and experience, as if it had happened to us. This is the power of narrative, and when the right story comes along, it not only sweeps the news aside, it colors our hearing of all the news thereafter.

I think of the dry-as-dust debate now current on the costs and prospects of the war and the merits of this strategy or that for going forward--the carefully tuned language, the assembling of consensus around various resolutions--and then I think of the story this week about a horribly wounded soldier and his brother’s reassignment from the war zone to Walter Reed in order to care for him, and of his family’s move to DC to help out. I could put myself in the place of the soldier, or the place of the brother, or the displaced sister-in-law. I could not put myself in the place of the committee chair or the think-tank pundit. And so I hear the war news now with an ear borrowed from that family’s experience.

Closer to home is the story of a couple whose car went off the Northway, unseen on a bitter night. The husband froze while his wife tried to raise help in a cell phone dead zone. Anyone who has driven winter roads in the North Country long enough has been in that car, watching the windows frost up, listening to the silence. Years of debate on how and when and who and whether to build out phone coverage along the road has changed overnight. No one will be able to speak on this issue again, without reference to this story. And I doubt another winter will come without a network in place. The various stakeholders will work it out--because the story runs too close to the bone.

Change is gonna come

The program director’s job is one of the toughest in radio. I give regular thanks that it is Jackie Sauter's, not mine. At the core of the job is the mandate to keep the sound fresh, to find voices both diverse and comprehensive, to balance the need for information with the need for entertainment, and to have a global view of everything that goes out over our air. It requires an exquisitely tuned ear, telepathic connection to the audience, a thorough understanding of mission, and a bushel basketful of tact and sensitivity. The test of these qualities comes at times of trepidation and excitement, at times of change, like now.

Beginning Monday, February 5, NCPR will be refreshing its weekday lineup with a number of new programs. At 2 pm weekdays, Dick Gordon, the much-missed former host of The Connection will return to NCPR with his new program, The Story, which looks at the world through the real-life experiences of ordinary people, with the aid of the innovative Public Insight Journalism service. At 1 pm on Friday, we will introduce a variety of limited series and specials, beginning with Radio Lab, the imaginative science series from WNYC. Open Source, formerly heard once a week and a day late, Wednesday at 2 pm, will now be carried live and in full Monday-Thursday at 7 pm. The program offers analysis, commentary and features, developed through a unique network of bloggers and citizen journalists, and is hosted by the peerless Chris Lydon.

To accommodate these additions, weekday broadcast of The World and Performance Today will be moved back one hour, to 8 pm and 9 pm respectively. The Folk Show will also move, from 8 pm to 7 pm on Friday. Please give these new programs an advance peek at their websites above and, as always, let us know what you think about these or any of our programs. Write jackie@ncpr.org.