Post by Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), a unit of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, will hold its first national conference February 25-27, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

Keynote speakers will include Professor Paddy Scannell of the University of Michigan, a noted radio scholar and historian, and Sam Brylawski, former Head of the LOC’s Recorded Sound Division and a digital recording pioneer.

In 2014, the National Recording Preservation Board recognized the need to address the perilous state of the nation’s radio heritage, which has not received the archival and critical attention of other U.S. media. Over the last two years, the RPTF has coordinated a nation-wide effort to identify major collections of radio recordings and other materials that will help to raise cultural awareness of America’s rich tradition of radio-based soundwork and make it accessible to future generations.

A year and a half later, we have built an organization consisting of more than 130 media studies scholars actively engaged in researching radio’s past and identifying key archival sources; over 350 affiliate archives, collections, and radio producing organizations across the US and Canada; and a growing number of online partners who aid in critical discussion and dissemination of our efforts.

The most recent additions to our group of affiliated organizations include NPR, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive, the Paley Center for Media, the Prometheus Radio Project, the Media Ecology Project, the Studs Terkel Archive, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

The Library of Congress Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center located in Culpeper, VA.

Our first national conference, Saving America’s Radio Heritage, will bring these groups together, along with members of the broader academic, archival, media, and general public, to discuss what we have accomplished and plan for future activities. Over three days in February, we will tour the LOC’s Packard Center, meet for a day of panels focused on radio’s history and cultural significance at the LOC’s Madison Building, then move to the University of Maryland’s Center for Mass Media and Culture (formerly the Library of American Broadcasting) for a second day of workshops and caucuses focused on issues of outreach, growth, and education.

The Radio Preservation Task Force curates a regular series for Antenna about radio history and archival issues, which can be accessed here. More information about the RPTF can be found at the organization’s new website. Stay tuned for further news and discussion of the conference and the RPTF’s activities. For additional information about the task force, please contact: radiotaskforce <at> gmail.com. Questions about strategic planning and partnerships can be directed to the RPTF’s National Research Director, Josh Shepperd (Catholic University): shepperd <at> cua.edu.

Post by Lauren Bratslavsky, Illinois State University

“You’re early. There’s an episode… houseguest arrives early and I’m unprepared.” Peg Lynch’s voice trailed off as she opened the door to let me in. At the time, she was 94 and still mentally composing episode plots for the long-ago radio and television program she created, Ethel and Albert. It was a show about nothing really: a miswritten phone message, a broken light bulb, a failed dinner party, and so on. I stumbled across her show when I was poking around my university’s special collections. I read some Ethel and Albert scripts and was amused. I researched what I could about the show, but was disappointed at the overall lack of information. I learned from the archivist that Lynch was still alive. I nervously called her up and asked her some questions about what it was like to work in radio and television, especially as a woman. Lynch didn’t think it was that special, or why anyone would care about her experience in the business, but she invited me to her home to meet her. I later learned this was one of her endearing attributes – that is, inviting people to her home and treating them lovingly as long lost relatives.

I was a bit stunned to see Peg Lynch’s obituary more than a week ago in The New York Times. I knew that her health had taken a turn for the worse and that this may have been the 98-year-old woman’s last leg. What surprised me was the fact of the obituary itself, which led to obituaries in Variety, LA Times, and elsewhere. It was not that Lynch didn’t deserve the lengthy write-ups and accolades of her work in radio and television; she was long over due for such recognition. I was amazed that her little-known career was finally gaining notice. For a few years now, I’ve queried radio fans and television historians whether they’ve heard of Ethel and Albert, which gained a nation-wide audience in 1944 to 1950, then a television audience from 1950 to 1956, and back to radio until the 1970s. For some, the characters rang a bell, but very few clearly recognized the show or Peg Lynch.

To be fair, there are many radio and early television programs that are obscure, and indeed unmemorable. What makes Ethel and Albert, and the later radio incarnation, The Couple Next Door, remarkable is that Peg Lynch created the show and wrote every single episode by herself and starred in both the radio and television versions. The only analog to Lynch’s creator-writer-actor career was Gertrude Berg. Berg’s career is well documented in the history books and broadcasting lore, most likely in part due to the notoriety associated with the blacklist as well as awards, as noted in her obituary. Lynch’s work, never touched by controversy or industry awards, became just one of the thousands of entries in program encyclopedias. Without mechanisms such as television syndication or lasting celebrity status, like that of Lucille Ball or Betty White, Lynch fell further into obscurity. Had it not been for an email sent by Astrid King, Lynch’s daughter, the New York Times most likely would not have picked up on the news of her passing. And then, write-ups of Peg Lynch, “a pioneering woman in broadcast entertainment,” would not have circulated as it did.

A page from Peg Lynch’s scrapbook, posted to her Facebook page.

Why is Peg Lynch’s career significant for radio and television history? While obituaries frame her as a pioneer, I think a more apt description is that she persevered in an industry that was constantly changing and predominately male. As outlined in her obituary and in far greater detail on her website, Peg started in radio as a copywriter in the early 1930s at a local, small-town radio station in Minnesota. When she asked for a raise that reflected her many responsibilities, which included such tasks as writing ad copy and a daily women’s program, she was denied. She quit and continued to work in different radio stations, making her way out of the Midwest and to New York City. All the while, she held on to her creation, Ethel and Albert, a middle-aged married couple who were known for their gentle and realistic bickering. She first pitched Ethel and Albert to NBC in 1944, who made her an offer but wanted 50/50 ownership over the rights of the show. Lynch walked way. Instead, Lynch secured a network deal around the time NBC-Blue turned into the ABC network. Someone at WJZ (NBC-Blue/ABC’s flagship station) got a hold of Lynch, offered her an evening slot and allowed her to retain full ownership. Ethel and Albert was not sponsored by one company, but rather was part of the co-op model of radio sponsorship. In 1946, Ethel and Albert was a short-lived test case for television at WRGB, GE’s experimental studio. Ethel and Albert remained on the radio until 1950, when Lynch was offered a real television opportunity: a ten-minute recurring segment on NBC’s The Kate Smith Hour. First, in 1953, NBC had Lynch turn her popular ten-minute segment into a half-hour network sitcom, sponsored by Sunbeam. Sunbeam dropped the live sitcom in favor of a different genre, the spectacular (as chronicled in Variety). CBS then picked up Ethel and Albert, sponsored by Maxwell House, as a summer replacement for December Bride in 1955 (an awkward promo for the switch over is on YouTube).

Despite decent ratings, CBS did not continue working with Lynch. I suspect this decision had something to do with I Love Lucy and CBS not wanting to have two programs featuring bickering couples, even if Ethel and Albert were far more subdued and realistic than Lucy and Desi. ABC aired Ethel and Albert’s final television run, which was sponsored by Ralston Purina (Chex cereal and dog food). The show ended in 1956, at another transition moment when sitcom production moved from New York to Hollywood and from live to film. As Lynch recounted in her oral history (available through the University of Oregon’s Special Collections), there was talk of moving the show to Hollywood, but she preferred to stay on the East Coast. And really, she was tired of the weekly pressures to write new episodes while rehearsing and performing live. After television, she did some commercial work. Oddly enough, Lynch went back to radio, penning a near-copy of her original creation but under the title, The Couple Next Door for CBS Radio. Lynch had a couple more runs on the radio in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically on NBC’s Monitor and then NPR’s Earplay. With the last radio show in 1976, titled The Little Things in Life, Lynch’s long broadcast career ended.

The story of Peg Lynch can serve as a sort of public service announcement to those of us who toil in archives and seek out broadcast history’s margins. Two points in particular come to mind: the materiality of broadcast’s forgotten histories and the active role we play in shaping the use and availability of the material record. First, echoing Laura LaPlaca’s recent Antenna post, if we focus on all that is gone (and resign to the fact of this lack), then we overlook “the broadcast archive’s extraordinarily expansive physicality.” Lynch’s creative output is indeed physically available, even if mentions and critiques of her work are largely absent from our histories. The initial radio and television broadcasts were ephemeral in the sense that they were live broadcasts, moments of popular culture that began and ended in their programmed time slots. But there is a whole swath of materiality that exists in various forms and locations. There are the paper materials that Lynch saved throughout her career: scripts, letters, and a few other paper materials. Lynch’s mother compiled news clippings, photos, and various correspondence into scrapbooks. Decades after the height of her career, Lynch received an invitation to establish an archival collection at the University of Oregon in 1969 (how and why that happened is a whole other story), so all those scripts, scrapbooks, and paperwork are open for research (and soon, there will be more).

Throughout the 1970s and well into the 2000s, the physical meetings and tape-swapping of old time radio fans sustained the memory and the audio record of Ethel and Albert and The Couple Next Door. The fan conventions seem especially crucial in the age before the internet, as in, a time before old time radio websites posted shows and interviews. The conventions, and later on, the fan websites, fostered networks of old and new fans (Lynch loved her fans and her fans loved her). Even more material records exist now that we can search databases of digitized trade publications (like this article in Radio and TV Monitor, written by Lynch about the benefits of marital bickering, that is available on Lantern). References to the production side of Ethel and Albert certainly exist in the vast NBC corporate archives. The audio tapes exist in physical form and circulate digitally on the web. And the live television program? Those exists, too. Nearly every episode was filmed on a kinescope, which Lynch owned and now safely reside at the University of Oregon.

Which brings me to my second point: As radio and television scholars, we participate in recirculating the canon as well as seeking out new examples that corroborate or challenge existing histories. Just the very act of taking an interest in a little-known program or writer can help broaden the scope of broadcast histories or refine particular stories, such as the case of a little-known woman who was among the very few people to create, write, and star in her own show. The Peg Lynch Papers at the University of Oregon had been mostly dormant since they arrived decades ago. The archivists had various priorities in their immediate purview – the limited resources in such an institution necessarily limits which donors to follow up with in their twilight years. Thus, active interest from a faculty member or a researcher can help call greater attention to little-used or little-known collections, especially those collections whose creators are still alive. Those kinescopes of every episode? Up until two years ago, those were under Lynch’s couch and in cabinets in her home. After my first visit to Lynch’s home, I told the archivists about my visit, including the films and the fact that Lynch was still relatively lucid and had stories to tell. I’m sure that those kinescopes, as well as more papers, audio tapes, and ephemera would have made it to Oregon, thus joining the rest of Lynch’s collection. But the oral history? The personal relationships? The chance to participate in a collective nudge to ensure the preservation of a so-called ephemeral broadcast history? That probably would not have happened without some active participation and good old phone calls.

We can celebrate all that has survived, while prodding to discover what else exists. And we can continue to draw from the canon, while interrogating the wealth of materials that exists in the hopes of broadening and refining our histories. So long, Peg.

Post by Brian Fauteux, University of Alberta

This is the first post in our new series “The Podcast Review,” which offers critical appreciations of podcast series or episodes and other notable digital soundwork.

Podcasts about music come with a particular set of challenges. For one, it can be difficult for hosts to balance their own musical preferences against those of their listeners. Also, for more amateur productions, there is the tricky question of whether to acquire the rights to use songs in the podcast, to rely on brief clips that may fall within fair use (or its equivalent in other countries), or to just risk it and worry about consequences if they arise.

For these reasons and others, music podcasts, especially those that aren’t produced by a radio station or network like NPR or KEXP, often have a limited run. Staffan Ulmert of The Only Music Podcast explains that he and his co-host Louise Hammar had no idea why so many music podcasts barely make it to twenty episodes. He wonders if it’s because of licensing issues or if those involved in creating music podcasts start to resent each other around episode fifteen. Their new podcast, created just this year, provides an excellent perspective on how labels, artists, and listeners are discovering music today and how various facets of the music industries work.

The Only Music Podcast is produced in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is available via iTunes or from the podcast’s website, which organizes its episodes into a visually striking grid of images that are demarcated by a topic. The episode titled “Girls!“, for instance, is marked by a photo of Björk’s face surrounded by a black background. Episodes are released every two weeks and the goal of the podcast is “to avoid being too nerdy” and to ensure it appeals to listeners beyond those who “consume music and music news 24/7.” Staffan is a music producer who has released sample-based music under the moniker Mojib and is also the founder of Has it Leaked. Louise co-runs Telegram Studios, one of Sweden’s biggest indie labels; she has also managed a number of international artists.

Each episode is broken down into three distinct sections: News, “what we’ve been listening to,” and a distinct topic such as remixes. Two episodes have deviated from this format due to summer holidays: One, a list of guilty pleasure songs, and the other, a list of cover songs the hosts enjoy. Featured news topics are related to the music industries, such as the release of Tidal and its lack of transparency in terms of what they pay artists, recent album leaks (Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta”), and the popularity of surprise album releases in the United States. When introducing listeners to Tula, Louise does so by explaining the creative process behind the group’s music and offers some insight into why she thinks it resonates with listeners. She is able to provide this context since Tula works with her label, Telegram. During a discussion of Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” from Episode 3, we learn about the samples used on the track and the process of mixing and remixing. Louise then takes us through the history of remixing by rocksteady, reggae, and dub artists.

The final section of each podcast installment is particularly appealing for music fans, since it deals with compelling and familiar issues in the music industry, but with a refreshing perspective that isn’t filtered through the United States or the U.K. On Episode 5, “Girls!” (April 28, 2015), the discussion of women in the music industry centers on the year 1996 when Sweden was “bombarded with U.K. rock bands” and the “laddish” culture that accompanied it. The hosts discuss how there were many women artists on the charts that year (Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion) but argue that because the industry was heavily dominated by men, it was hard for women’s perspectives to emerge. As a point of comparison, they then discuss Robyn and her promotion of women in technology. In the next episode they mention that this is a much larger topic and one that they will discuss again on a future episode.

Being able to hear the podcast evolve over the course of its 11 episodes is a fascinating component of The Only Music Podcast. At this year’s ICA conference, a panel on podcasting was followed by a discussion of the increasing popularity and professionalization of the podcast. A few points that were brought up included the “podcast/public radio voice” and the importance of large distribution channels. By contrast, the 11 episodes of The Only Music Podcast allow us to hear the hosts working through technical issues such as having two microphones recording at the same volume level (they have yet to receive their proper microphones). At one moment Louise admits that her iPhone battery has died and that the audio quality may now decrease. Many episodes end with Staffan asking listeners to write to the hosts if they have suggestions for improving the format. So, while the two hosts are clearly experts in their fields, I enjoy hearing the podcast develop and change over each episode. In the pilot episode Staffan admits that “It’s very difficult to create a podcast. We thought it would be very easy. It’s not…” He adds that he had a hard time listening to the first few episodes but supportive emails from listeners gave them the confidence to continue.

Staffan says that he and Louise are getting better at being themselves once they hit the record button. He imagines that they will run into some problems with licensing music if the podcast develops and its audience grows. If that’s the case, he hopes that sponsorship can help. This is a great time to tune into The Only Music Podcast, both because it deals with the ever-changing contemporary music industries, and because we can hear a podcast develop and find its voice.

Distribution brochures for instructional radio series, from the paper archives of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) at University of Maryland

Post by Stephanie Sapienza, Project Manager at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)

Historical collections of audiovisual material are housed at repositories of an extraordinarily varied nature: within museums, libraries, historical societies, private collections; within media production units; and within traditional archives (only a small percentage of which are specifically dedicated to audiovisual collections). Archival paper collections are certainly more ubiquitous across all these institutions and more, representing the vast majority of the overall archival record.

As someone who has utilized, studied, worked in, and then managed projects related to audiovisual archives, there’s a trend I’ve been tracking for some time which continues to vex me. This trend relates to a very common scenario – split collections of media and related paper/textual collections – which are accepted into archival repositories and then, for lack of a better analogy, “separated at birth.” The collections are accessioned, and then broken apart and processed using very different and separate techniques, guidelines, and description schemas. Quite often, the two collections never get near each other again – physically or ontologically.

I will try to succinctly break down how this phenomenon occurs. Archival institutions often utilize a traditional description approach for paper-based materials such as transcripts, production and field recording notes, press kits, photos, correspondence, provenance and copyright materials. This usually results in an online finding aid. Conversely, institutions with significant audiovisual holdings traditionally favor an item-level approach, often with the aim of preparing for a preservation effort which requires metadata on item condition, formats, etc. Often the “split but related mixed media collections” scenario occurs within an institution that holds both paper and media materials, yet processes them differently and in different departments. Other times, as with the case study I’d like to discuss, the paper and media collections are also geographically separated.

Paper archives of the NAEB Collection

The National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) historic radio collection spans the breadth of twentieth century mass media. Throughout its 60 years of existence, the NAEB ushered in or helped to enable major changes in early educational broadcasting policy. The NAEB audio collection, now fully digitized through a collaboration with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, is held at the University of Maryland Libraries and represents the archives of the radio programming service of the organization, known as the National Educational Radio Network (NERN). The paper materials, comprising correspondence, reports, clippings, speeches and more, remain at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The finding aid for the NAEB paper collection alone reveals that it contains a depth of contextual information relevant to the study of the tape collection. Digitized paper materials would reveal even more.

For example, The Jeffersonian Heritage, a 1952 series of 13 half-hour radio programs, was recorded by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and syndicated for commercial-free broadcast. Funded by a Ford Foundation grant, The Jeffersonian Heritage starred English-born actor Claude Rains, made famous by appearances in The Invisible Man, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. An attempt to create radio that could be both “educational and appealing,” The Jeffersonian Heritage began its first series by educating the public about Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to have an anti-slavery clause written into the U.S. Constitution. With subsequent episodes attempting to tie themes from Jefferson’s personal and political history to contemporary events, The Jeffersonian Heritage provides a rich vein of material for explorations of how mid-twentieth century Americans engaged in remembrances of an agrarian past. How was Thomas Jefferson presented through the lens of anxieties about America’s place within the Cold War world? How were these episodes marketed and promoted to the public?*

Aural Press brochure, describing the American Life Series

To gain an accurate picture of the importance of these broadcasts, researchers would need to understand not just the content of the broadcast but also the circumstances of its production and its reception. For starters, the NAEB paper collections contain a brochure which reveals that the series was marketed by Aural Press of Western Michigan University as part of an “American Life Series” alongside other program series such as “Patterns in Pop Culture,” “Women,” “Abortion,” “Sounds of Poverty,” “Censorship,” and “The Nostalgia Merchants.” Placing one highly specific (and dramatic) series in context alongside such broadly-conceived topical documentary programs indicates that it held a certain level of specialized merit as an individual historical record.

A speech by former NAEB Chair William Harley which says the following about The Jeffersonian Heritage: “In 1951 we produced a dramatic history series called The Jeffersonian Heritage starring Claude Rains as Jefferson; a dramatic series on cultural anthropology called ‘Ways of Mankind’ and a series produced in conjunction with the Russian Institute at Harvard called ‘People Under Communism.’ The significance of this project is that our products convinced Scotty and his Board that educators were professionally competent and deserved support as they ventured into the new field of television. Thus did educational radio help the launching of educational television, for the Fund for Adult Education and later the Ford Foundation itself poured millions of dollars into projects fostering the start of education television.”

The above two pieces of contextual detail were uncovered only from the two small boxes of paper material that was retained with the audio collection at UMD. The Wisconsin finding aid reveals two additional folders of information on this series, which could unearth a great deal more contextual information which is ripe with potential for teaching curricula or individual scholarly research.

A second example is the series Why is a Writer?, which originally aired from 1960-61. The individual media records for the series contain the following description: “Produced by the Iowa School of the Air, this series focuses on various works of literature from Shakespeare to Twain.” The description for one individual program, “Critic of the king,” has an additional program description: “This program focuses on English writer Leigh Hunt, also known as James Henry Leigh Hunt.”

UMD has, by all means, a very richly descriptive individual record for this one individual program recording – even to have two separate descriptions (one for the series as a whole and one for the program) is uncommon in most descriptive catalogs.

A cursory search in the NAEB paper archives unlocked the following information:

Iowa School of the Air Teaching Aid for Why Is a Writer?

In 1967-67, several years after it originally aired, Why is a Writer was still being distributed to educators throughout the country through Iowa School of the Air, along with teaching aids and instructions on how to teach the material. This teaching aid included instructions for educators such as “Every broadcast should be preceded by a short warm-up period so that the pupils know why they are listening to and what to listen,” and “Every broadcast should be followed by an integration period during which the students tie together facts, form generalizations, discuss ideas presented, and plan related work.” Additionally, the teaching aid contains a much more detailed program description for “Critic of the King:” “‘Critic of the King’ is another way of describing the English writer Leigh Hunt. Through history the writer has often been a critic of powerful through corrupt men. This is often a dangerous practice. Leigh Hunt knew the danger, but wrote as he felt, nonetheless. James Henry Leigh Hunt, 1784-1859, was the friend of many great romantic poets, including Byron, Shelley, Moore, and Lamb. He was a liberal in politics and was the editor of many periodicals.”

Why is a Writer shows up again in paperwork related to programs later rejected by NPR in 1976 for “content validity.” To pass the content validity test, NPR required “users and/or producers of Instructional Program materials to provide documented research and evaluation results on the utilization and effectiveness of such radio program materials in formal teaching-learning situations.” This indicates that sometime between the mid-60’s and the mid-’70s, Why Is a Writer? became “invalid” for teaching purposes. This raises two interesting research questions: 1) What pedagogical changes or educational reform may have led to changing perspectives on the “validity” of Why is a Writer?, and 2) How did educators and users of the Instructional Program materials feel about NPR making content validity assertions which affected available content?

Both of the above examples have relevant contextual information related to both the subject matter inherent in the content itself, as well as the cultural and sociological forces which shaped its production and distribution. The NAEB collections account for more than a record of a specific broadcasting entity and its industrial/narrative production. They also provide an in-depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century. This may be evident in the recordings themselves, but the potential scholarly and educational insights are particularly apparent when presented with rich, contextual materials to accompany it.

The fact stands that there is a lost opportunity here, and in many similar instances. Unless researchers are able to travel between Wisconsin and Maryland to conduct this research (assuming they even know that there is deep contextual information to be found there, since no electronic catalog connects the two collections). Additionally, in instances where these two collections are linked, it could partially relieve the burden of catalogers, lessening the amount of labor needed to provide access to richer descriptive detail.

Despite public broadcasting’s mandate to “inform, inspire and educate,” most of this important historical content, produced at significant cost, has never been seen or heard again after its initial brief moments on the air. MITH is developing and seeking funding for a project which aims to create a prototypical user interface which would allow researchers to explore the split NAEB collections together in context, and hopefully provide a blueprint to inspire further work in this area. The broader goals of the project are to look at ways in which scholarly and archival processes and needs can converge in order to raise awareness of the cultural significance of broadcasting collections.

*Select prose from the discussion on The Jeffersonian Heritage contributed by Jennifer Guiliano.

WMUC Archives, 2012.

Post by Laura Schnitker, University of Maryland, College Park

On March 26, 1971, an up-and-coming folk singer named Don McLean sat down for an interview at WMUC, the University of Maryland’s student-run radio station. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, McLean discussed a number of topics with DJ Craig Allen, including American music history, environmentalism, and contemporary singer-songwriters. When the conversation turned toward the tensions between commercialism and folk music, McLean introduced a new song. “Take you back about ten years ago when Buddy Holly died,” he explained as he tuned his guitar. “He was my idol. He’s the only idol I ever had. This is a rather long song,” he warned, “so better light up.” McLean then launched into an early rendition of “American Pie.”

Since it would be another two months before McLean’s iconic and best-known song debuted on commercial radio, its audition for a college audience is well-placed among historic gems of American popular music. And it might have been lost forever had it not been recorded and preserved on a 10” audio reel tape that floated around WMUC for over three decades before I spotted it in 2008. I was interviewing the general manager for the college radio chapter in my dissertation when I noticed a tape box on his desk with the inscription, “Interview with Don McLean, Spring 1971. DO NOT ERASE”. I asked if there were any more like it.

WMUC’s Don McLean reel from 1971.

Quite a few, in fact. Over 1,800 audio reels, cartridges, cassettes, and DATs documenting WMUC’s unique history were stacked to the ceiling in a dark, dusty storage room in the back of the station. Some of them were lying under piles of old equipment. Some were tangled in long tails of audio tape that had fallen off their cores. And with no climate control, the natural deterioration of magnetic tape in flimsy cardboard boxes happens at a much quicker pace. These recordings badly needed to be saved. But what constitutes “saving” beyond merely keeping something out of the trash, and whose responsibility is it to do so at a college radio station? Furthermore, what value might college radio archives have beyond the occasional interview with a Pretty Famous Musician?

One thing I’ve learned in the 10 years I’ve been archiving broadcast history is that radio stations have been notoriously remiss in preserving their histories. If they saved anything it was usually printed records; audio recordings were most often destroyed after the stations were reformatted or sold. With no aftermarket for old broadcasts, and the added complications of performance copyright and rapidly changing sound technologies, many station managers probably thought these recordings were more liability than asset. A large portion of the audio collections I manage at the University of Maryland Libraries came from unionized, dumpster-diving sound engineers whose appreciation for their historic value outweighed everything else.

College radio archives are just as elusive. I’ve heard from participants at other campus stations who have described their own storage rooms of neglected recordings that no one knows how to manage, or even care about. I cringed when one station advisor told me that an old reel containing a remote broadcast of Woodstock was being used as a coaster by their current DJs. However, the difference here is that most colleges and universities have the built-in resources to both save their materials and provide public access to them. This is precisely what they should be doing.

As student organizations, campus radio stations are part of university life, and their historical records belong in their university archives. When I asked Maryland’s university archivist Anne Turkos to establish a WMUC Collection in 2011, we embarked on a mission to demonstrate the station’s importance to campus history. With the help of WMUC student staff members, we identified the historic audio and print items that were no longer being used and moved them to the more stable environment of the special collections library. We created inventories and a finding aid, and thanks to the libraries’ new media reformatting center we began ongoing digitization of the audio materials. Listening to them revealed a multi-faceted history I hadn’t expected to find. In addition to music, there was 50 years’ worth of news, sports, dramas, live performances, promos, community affairs and even self-help programming.

Pat Callahan & Herb Brubaker, WMUC, 1955.

In 2013, we created a gallery and digital exhibit to honor the station’s 65^th anniversary. “Saving College Radio: WMUC Past, Present and Future” opened in September of that year, and over 150 station alumni showed up to celebrate what had for many of them been the most important aspect of their college careers. They had been vital in helping us reconstruct the station’s history which forever changed my perception of college radio.

Like most people, I considered college radio a mostly anti-commercial musical format favoring the experimental, the up-and-coming, the never-heard-of, the sometimes-unlistenable. While this may be true, college radio should not be solely defined by its relationship to the music industry. Since the first student-run station almost a century ago, college radio has represented empowerment and agency on many fronts: an opportunity for students to find their voices, gain hands-on technical experience, navigate local and federal policies, and influence campus culture. What’s missing from both popular and academic understandings of college radio are these unique station histories that illuminate how college radio stations are also shaped by their relationships to media, politics, geographical regions, campus administrations, the student bodies and the students who run them.

Beyond its significance to popular culture, the Don McLean interview marks an era in WMUC’s past when DJs were bent on professional careers as journalists, producers, and programmers. Many of them fashioned their broadcasts in early 1970s commercial parlance, while others emulated a then-fledgling NPR. It also reflects a time on campus when tensions between students and the administration were high; less than a year after the Kent State shootings, UMD students responded unfavorably to the police presence outside the Steppenwolf concert at Ritchie Coliseum (McLean was the opening act). Four years later, the next crop of students would dedicate their energies to obtaining an FM license, the ones after that to advocating for an all-freeform format. In this context, we see that college radio is not and has never been a fixed entity, but a continuously evolving collective of ever-changing identities.

Much debate surrounds the future of college radio, as streaming services and podcasts have shifted popular attention away from traditional broadcasters, and reports of recent NPR takeovers of college stations have some alarmists claiming that the latter’s demise is imminent. Of course, competition among noncommercial broadcasters for these coveted left-of-the-dial frequencies is not new; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had college radio in mind in 1972 when it asked the FCC to stop issuing licenses to 10-watt stations in order to open channels for public radio affiliates. Yet despite these threats, and despite rapid developments in media formats, listening habits, access to music and administrations who are tempted by the PR boon and generous price tags that NPR offers, many college radio stations have still managed to thrive. I am not apprehensive about its future. It is time we focused on its past.

Mickey Guyton (Image: KMLE/CBS Local)

I recently read a piece on All Access (a radio/music industry website) by R.J. Curtis, trumpeting 2015 as a possible “Year of the Woman” for country music and country music radio. As various country music programmers trumpeted the up-and-coming female country acts poised to break through this year, many of them scratched their heads as to why they have to try so hard to push female artists to the forefront. It’s a question I found myself asking when I was in their shoes in a similarly male-dominated music radio format.

The year was 2003, and I was the Program Director/Music Director at Revolution 103.7, an Alternative station in Chambersburg, PA. “Why Can’t I,” the lead single from Liz Phair’s self-titled album was going for adds, and remembering the important place Phair’s work held in 1990s indie rock, I added the song without hesitation. I immediately got pushback from my general manager and others whose opinion I trusted. Granted, many music critics decried Phair’s move toward “pop-rock” status, but it shouldn’t have mattered. Ask anyone who owns a copy of Exile in Guyville if Liz Phair could ever be considered a “Pop” artist. Still, it was a time when I was expected to play Godsmack or Slipknot instead. Concerned about losing the coveted Male 18-34 listeners to the newer, testosterone-heavy Active Rock format, we Alternative programmers were supposed to mimic them as much as possible.

In the R.J. Curtis piece, Lisa McKay, a Country program director in Raleigh, states that their sister Pop station has a rule about playing no more than three females in a row, while she works to force three females into an hour. My first reaction to this statement is that it shouldn’t need to be forced. Country is a radio format that appeals equally to males and females, and the sales data backs this up. Yet in research that I presented at last April’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) conference, Country playlists skewed 83% male, and it is apparently getting worse. Curtis pointed out that just two of the 30 most played songs at the Country format right now are sung by women. Two. Thus making the current national Country playlist a staggering 93% male. These are numbers I would normally expect in the alpha-male-driven Rock formats, but in a climate where “bro-country” is considered the prevailing trend today, perhaps we should not be surprised.

My second reaction to McKay’s lament was, “Why do we even need a rule about how many consecutive female artists is too many?” Curtis compared the Top 30 Country songs to the Top 30 at Pop radio and found that nine of the top Pop songs were sung by women. Better than Country to be sure, but still producing a national current playlist that is over two-thirds male, and in a format whose target audience is women. Would women really change the station if they heard too many female voices in a row?

In this same article, Los Angeles Country program director Tonya Campos stated that people want success for female artists, “but only for the really good ones,” adding that she cannot add female singers just for the sake of having more female singers. Quality should of course be the rule, but there is also the possibility that a stigma exists about the quality of female country singers. During my dissertation research, I sat in with a Country DJ who took a call from a female listener, complaining that Taylor Swift cannot sing. After politely handling the call, he turned to me and said, “And yet, we never get a call saying Toby Keith or George Strait can’t sing… We only pick on our female artists.” Stories like this probably make Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie nod knowingly at the way radio and the music industry justifies the marginalization of women.

Author Eric Weisbard recently wrote a piece for NPR, collaborating with such music journalism titans as Maura Johnston and Jason King to note how the splintering of music radio formats has caused each to begin dictating the terms by which a song could be classified as Alternative, Country, and so on. So it is that we have come to a point where the two major rock awards at this year’s Grammys were won by artists who many immediately claimed were “not rock.” Beck’s Morning Phase won Rock Album of the Year – a win that was apparently just as controversial as his upset win for overall Album of the Year – and Paramore’s “Ain’t it Fun” won Rock Song of the Year. The band Trapt, a hard rock group best known for the raging 2003 hit “Headstrong,” immediately claimed that these two selections were part of a larger establishment conspiracy to prevent “anything too threatening or in your face” from dominating the rock scene.

Hayley Williams (Image: Neil Roberson)

This complaint could not be farther from the truth when it comes to radio airplay. Although Trapt has not had a hit in years, the “aggro” brand of rock has become so dominant on Rock radio for so long that Grantland music critic Steven Hyden recently described the state of mainstream rock as “ossified.” In other words, an entire generation has been raised on male singers pairing aggression with perceived alienation, entrenching the angry white male aesthetic into a dominant position from which it cannot be pushed aside by newer trends. Formerly an Alternative mainstay, Beck’s lighter fare was immediately ticketed for Adult Album Alternative, and Paramore – fronted by one of the heretofore few acceptable female rock singers, Hayley Williams – was sent directly to Pop radio despite far more critical praise than Liz Phair received a decade ago.

At least Country is trying to stop the same thing from happening with the “bro-country” movement. At times like this, I am reminded of Honna Veerkamp’s terrific piece, “Why Radio Needs Feminism.” Perhaps at least one male-dominated radio format will see the light this year and recognize that women listen too.

Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio’s (NPR) daily call-in program, broadcast its final show on Thursday, June 27th. Talk of the Nation (TOTN) has been a part of NPR’s programming bundle since 1992, and has been anchored by current host Neal Conan since 2002. NPR is replacing TOTN with an expanded two-hour version of the previously one-hour afternoon news magazine program Here and Now. Here and Now is produced by Boston public radio station WBUR and previously distributed by rival network Public Radio International (PRI). Apparently the TOTN Friday program, Science Fridays with Ira Flatow will be produced as a stand alone program and still distributed every Friday (flew!).

The Talk of the Nation studio last Thursday, June 27th. Photo by Kainaz Amaria, NPR multimedia staff.

This change in programming at NPR is significant for several reasons. First, while NPR executives deny that cancelling TOTN is related to last year’s $7M budget deficit, replacing it by distributing a program made by a large local member station like WBUR relieves them of both the costs and risks associated with in-house production. Second, in collaborating with Boston’s local public radio station WBUR to expand and distribute Here and Now, NPR seems to be taking a page out of the PRI playbook–which reminds us that public radio’s institutional structures in the US are more complex than many realize. I wonder how many people understand the decentralized structure of public radio, wherein the very term NPR has become generic for all public radio, while in fact there are two competing public radio networks, NPR and PRI. These networks operate similarly to national commercial TV networks in that programming is sent to a network of local member stations (public radio lingo for affiliates).  However, other than the obvious difference of a non-profit production culture, public radio operates differently from national networks in that all programming decisions happen on the local level, and NPR member stations can also buy programming a la carte from PRI.  And unless you are streaming content directly from NPR or downloading a PRI podcast (like This American Life, Markeplace, or Prairie Home Companion) you are probably listening to NPR and PRI content via your local public radio station, where it is scheduled alongside local programming as well. This is Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) where I live in Madison, however, I was just talking with other parents at my daughter’s school PTA meeting who continue to call WPR “NPR” even after I correct them. FYI, this type of behavior will not endear you to other people on the PTA, although if it were me, I would want to know I was wrong.

But back to Talk of the Nation. While denying that this change is a result of budget cuts, programming executives attempt to explain that member stations were hungry “for a stronger news presence in the middle of the day,” something almost exactly like Morning Edition  and All Things Considered  to bridge the gap between our morning and evening straight forward news magazines.  In a way, this brings NPR’s bundle more in line with their no-nonsense (aka no fun) brand of “hard” news. If you listen to TOTN, you know that Neal Conan covers breaking news by selecting callers who are speaking on emergent issues. However, using a terms like  “strong” or “hard” news to explain programming shifts works to masculinizes the objective, straightforward reporting style of shows like Morning Edition that seem to just let us hear world events by playing back actuality recordings coupled with terse journalistic verbal accounts. And feminize TOTN implicitly through contrast. Indeed, you might consider Neal Conan’s daily call-in program more feminine in its format that gives voice to the unwashed masses, what Stuart Hall called the true “other.” TOTN gave a voice to the average listener, not only reporting on current events, but through caller participation, engaging in contemporary issues in a more personal, intimate, and individualistic manner. And if you listen to TOTN, which is mainly formatted as long form interviews with political and cultural figure or journalists with calls and emails from listeners, callers are often emotive when they call in to discuss political issues, definitely more so than NPR’s trained emotionless robot lackeys, ahem, I mean reporters. Certainly, we must also admit that Talk of the Nation is at least somewhat responsible for the prominence of NPR distributed programs like On Point , Tom Ashbrook’s live roundtable discussion program, and the Diane Rehm Show, another  call-in show whose slogan is “One of her guests is always you.” This is in addition to the countless call-in programs your local public radio probably produces. And listeners responded to hearing untrained voices call-in to debate contemporary politics.

Indeed, TOTN ends in the midst of huge popularity, as it was broadcast by 407 stations and reached 3.53 M listeners every day. To put this in perspective, this is more than the 2.7 M viewers who tuned into Mad Men‘s season six finale last week.  There are 907 comments on the NPR page that posted their announcement cancelling TOTN, they range from outcry in support of a favorite program, to conspiracy theories about why NPR canceled the show, to fannish interpretations of Neal Conan as some sort of super human journalist, and more. I won’t get into the trollish badinage. Suffice it to say, TOTN is a cultural landmark that many listeners engaged with.

And they participated quite literally when they called or emailed in with questions or thoughts about the issues of the day that Neal was discussing with his guest(s). I feel that the call-in aspect of TOTN is the most significant loss from this show. And in removing TOTN, NPR removes a venue that allowed the “voiceless” that public radio is meant to serve and give access (albeit highly filtered access) to a public forum on the air. I, for one, am not sure I agree with Neal Conan, when he recently told listeners on the NPR program Tell Me More “Don’t Panic. Radio is gonna be fine” in reference to the demise of his own show. As NPR culls programs like Car Talk and Talk of the Nation from its line-up in order to distribute more news magazine programs to compliment its “hard hitting” brand, it begs the question of where the line between brand and public service exists.

In short order, this non-event became “news” meriting still more local and national print and broadcast coverage. “We Are All Abigael Evans,” declared TIME.  NPR itself issued an apology to Abigael on “The Two-Way,” its “breaking news” blog.

On behalf of NPR and all other news outlets, we apologize to Abigael and all the many others who probably feel like her. We must confess, the campaign’s gone on long enough for us, too. Let’s just keep telling ourselves: “Only a few more days, only a few more days, only a few more days.”

 In an era that does not lack for examples of and metaphors for the feedback loop between old and new media, Abigael’s tantrum might not merit much more than the fifteen minutes of viral fame that it garnered. But I am willing to spend a few more minutes on it because of the nifty way it gestures toward the role of affect in old and new media. In particular, I’m interested in how it crystallizes the challenges of NPR’s campaign to re-create itself as a fully modern and digital multi-platform news, information, and culture channel, while maintaining its distinctive affective character.

In the stories that NPR has always told itself about its special appeal, affect has always been central. The vocal performances of the network hosts, commentators, and reporters have been powerful tools in conveying not just the news but also an affective relationship to it. As I have written elsewhere, these voices function as sound effects for a set of political and class-bound tastes and predilections: post-feminist, neoliberal, and most of all, inward-facing.  Crucially, NPR’s affective appeal has always been understood as part of a logic of equivalences between listener and speaker.  “NPR news,” according to McCauley, “is made by people like me for people like me.” Jack Mitchell, a former NPR producer, is also confident that “the listeners we attracted were pretty much like us.” The slippage between the audience, performers, and producers means that NPR’s affective magic works best in those moments of communitas—immediate, shared rituals of reception/production, epitomized by the Driveway Moment.[1]

The Abigael Affair presents a wonderfully subversive take on the Driveway Moment: a family fleeing their car radio, the youngest one in tears. Communitas comes virally and digitally, when the tot’s emotional response to NPR’s coverage stands in for a universal fatigue, if not of NPR, then of the mainstream media for which it stands. NPR’s subsequent effort via its clunkily-named “Two-Way” blog to seem “just like us” in wishing an end to the election and its relentless coverage, strikes a decidedly false note, as do its follow-up questions:

Meanwhile, have any of your children said something like that? Do you feel like Abigael? Tell us in the comments thread.

This episode highlights the clumsiness of NPR’s attempts at converting the intimacy of its distinctive radio sound to the web. Driveway Moments emphasize radio’s simultaneity, its ritual power to stop time and arrest the forward momentum of modern life. Lingering in the driveway, prolonging the liminal space/time of driving between work and home, the archetypal NPR listeners are caught up in the matrix of narrative, solitude, and dashboard, heeding the imperative to “only connect” by sitting alone in a car.  This spell of non-productive pleasure, of time stolen from economic functions and domestic intimacies, is a model of reception as balm, as escape. Human connection, through narrative, through the gorgeously modulated voices of NPR reporters and hosts are figured in network promotions and listener testimonials as intensely private goods. Private listening creates the conditions for fleeting moments of empathy, a seeming luxury in times of budget austerity, cascading crises, and the neo-liberal turn inward.

Web-based interfaces like “The Two Way” don’t yet convey a comparable affective power of NPR’s radio programming. In part this is because the two-way nature of new media is more literal than metaphorical. Radio’s “intimate public,” I’ve written in another context, lies in its uncanny ability to seem to blur the very boundaries that it is obsessively re-inscribing—between public and private, between performer and listener, between expert and amateur and between myriad shifting and contested social identities. In the world of viral videos, audience reception practices are more unruly and unpredictable, more diffuse in time and space. They are also subversive of the immediacy and simultaneity of media rituals like Driveway Moments. Abigael’s video moved virally, which is to say, quickly but over time, an almost endless series of repetitions of the same message, each one making the original case that Abigael is “just like us.” Sharing, re-posting, and responding to this video gives us an opportunity to reconstitute our own intimate public of reception, a serious challenge to NPR’s traditional affective power.

Glass’ celebrity is further influenced by fan engagement and productions such as Adam WarRock’s “Ira Glass” rap. Throughout all of this, we see Ira Glass very much constructed as a figure who has brought pleasure and entertaining aesthetics to broadcast journalism. Though the paratexts mentioned above arguably create as much meaning about Glass’ star text, his celebrity is always constructed in reference to TAL, and the program’s unique exploitation of the radio feature format. For this reason, we can see how TAL shapes our understanding of Glass’ radio pioneer public persona.

TAL‘s aesthetics make it markedly different from other television and radio journalism. TAL invites listeners to revel in a sort of postmodern opposition to mainstream journalism. The program weaves together informal conversation, first-person monologues, actuality field recordings, sound bites, music, and more into a hip, irreverent weekly radio show. Its self-reflexive style is one aspect that differentiates it from traditional hard news. The show’s commentary and reflection in its own production, usually heard via Glass’ conversation with a producer or participant, works in conjunction with its commentary on traditional journalism to sonically construct the show as self-aware. We see this in the first 10 minutes of Episode 455, “Continental Breakup,” which first aired on January 22, 2012.  This episode is about the European debt crisis, and is guest hosted by Alex Blumberg. Here we see TAL taking up a traditional “hard” journalism topic. Yet, the topic is presented in an informal and playful manor. Glass’ nebbish, high, nasally voice begins the program as if in the middle of a private conversation with the listener. He begins quickly by saying, “I think at this point even the most casual news consumer has run across a lot of stories like this….” Next, TAL edits in sound bites from recent news stories and we, the listeners, hear a serious sounding male news reporter saying “The focus of the European debt crisis move today…,” and other successive sound bites related to the economic situation in Europe. This informal, stream of consciousness opening is typical of TAL, as all TAL episodes begin without an introductory frame. This might give listeners the feeling that we enter the show already in the middle of a conversation with Glass and company.

Next in this episode, Glass does introduce the program, and turns it over to Blumberg. A conversation between Blumberg and Glass ensues, and includes several informal moments that convey naturalness and liveness. Before Blumberg takes over as host, Glass announces, “From WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Alex, I’m just going to hand they show over to you.” This is followed by an unpolished moment of confusion:

Alex Blumberg: All right and I say, like, “from WBEZ Chicago,” that thing?
Ira Glass: No, I just said that. So you don’t have to say that.
Blumberg: So I don’t have to say that?
Glass: So you can just proceed. Have you heard this show before?
Blumberg: No, you didn’t say “today’s program.”
Glass: All right, I’ll say – you can say “today’s program.”

Blumberg and Glass speak over each other, laughing in a light, friendly way. This unpolished exchange could have easily been edited out in post-production, especially since the trained ear will notice that besides laughter, all signifiers of the body (breathing, et al) have been smoothed out through dialogue editing. This apparently unscripted moment is, however, kept intact, and accomplishes the task of conveying an artificial spontaneous liveness to listeners.

Overall, Ira Glass is repeatedly constructed in TAL and other media as a charismatic, jovial, informal, self-reflexive, and playful radio journalist. This difference from traditional broadcast journalists who you might find on CNN or even NPR’s All Things Considered has contributed to Glass’ personality as a pioneer of the new age of radio journalism. This is further shaped by TAL’s experimental distribution via events like This American Life LIVE!, where the radio program is performed live onstage with dance numbers, animation, other video, and more. The performance is beamed to movie theatres across the country live. First done in 2009, a new This American Life LIVE! is being broadcast around the country on Thursday, May 10^th, and I know I for one will be attending it at a local theatre here in Madison, Wisconsin.

This blurring between storytelling, journalism, and media formats troubles traditional notions of ethical reporting and conceptions of truth. Glass goes to great lengths to distinguish himself as an untraditional journalist, and despite (or perhaps because of this) he has received countless major broadcasting awards for journalism.  The most recent coverage of the kerfuffle and drama surrounding the veracity of an episode aired earlier this year, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” and TAL’s subsequent retraction of the episode in the March 16^th in the TAL episode “Retraction,” points to mainstream journalism’s inability to reconcile TAL’s postmodern style of journalism. Having heard the original “Mr. Daisey” episode, I question TAL’s retraction, as the program was very clear that it was featuring portions of Mike Daisey’s one-man play “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” and even included a disclaimer at the end noting what Glass and his team were able to fact check and what they could not.

However, this controversy is significant, not because it questions or clarifies the “truth” of This American Life’s episode featuring Daisey, but rather it points to the significance of TAL within the American mediascape. Moreover, at the end of the day, it recuperates Glass’ integrity. In “Retraction,” Glass doesn’t just retract TAL’s previous episode, he interrogates the show’s fact checking process and interviews Daisey again, during which he is self-reflexively critical and idealistic about the boundaries of radio features. Thus, in his humility and self-awareness, Ira Glass is ultimately able to retain his persona as an unconventional, pioneering radio journalist.

On Radio is a new Antenna column dedicated to contemporary radio programming and other issues surrounding the medium in all its forms.

Hands down, Radiolab is the most interesting American radio program of the past decade. Although, that’s not a particularly bold claim, really, as there are plenty of people out there who have heaped similar praise upon the series, not least of all Ira Glass and the MacArthur genius grant folks. Produced by the New York City public radio station WNYC and distributed nationally through National Public Radio (NPR), Radiolab is a math, science, and philosophy show hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. The program deals with “big questions,” as their website puts it – things like life, death, knowledge, the universe – typically through broadly themed episodes on topics such as laughter, the human brain, race, time, deception, and randomness. Radiolab is a radio feature in that it is a (mostly) non-fiction program that mixes fairly traditional elements of journalism and news reporting with more artistic and dramatic elements. If non-music radio programming can be placed on a continuum with straight news talk placed at one extreme and the fictionalized radio drama at the other, then the radio feature (or “radio documentary,” as John Biewen and other radio producers refer to it) is situated somewhere in the middle, a mix of words, sounds, and music that merges the informational content of journalism with the form and emotion of art.

Just as standard NPR news programs like All Things Considered are often called “news magazines,” in that they consist of numerous stories reported more in-depth than standard “headline news” style broadcasts, the term “radio feature” insinuates an even more extended, highly focused examination of a story or topic, similar to a thoroughly researched and contextualized cover story in a print magazine. Often, as is the case with Radiolab and also This American Life, multiple stories may be covered within an hour-long episode, but they nevertheless all tie into an overarching theme or narrative. This is not breaking news, even though it is journalistic in the sense that it is informative, educational, and frequently timely and topical.

Emphasis is placed on characters – people – who the audience is invited to identify with through fleshed out, exceptionally visualized scenes. This is where the artistic and dramatic elements come in: the focus of a radio feature like Radiolab is on storytelling rather than mere reporting of events and facts, and this is often achieved through vertically structured and intimate, slice-of-life narratives. NPR’s news magazines regularly attempt to craft similar segments, but what really sets a radio feature apart is its meticulous attention to form – Biewen, in the introduction to his edited volume Reality Radio (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), calls radio documentarians “journalists/artists” who “use sound to tell true stories artfully.” This emphasis on form can range from simply playing with voice and basic narrative structure to experimenting wildly with actuality sound and music in a way that verges on sound art – it does not always need to be “complex” or affectedly avant-garde. Still, radio features are able to sidestep conventions and engage in a level of experimentation that standard radio news programming rarely, if ever, does.

Radiolab tends more toward the “wild experimentation” end of that spectrum, even though the core of its aesthetic is what host Jad Abumrad, in an essay he penned in Reality Radio, describes as “the pleasant illusion of ‘two guys chatting’.” He’s referring here to the back-and-forth dialogue that occurs between co-hosts Abumrad (pictured left) and Robert Krulwich (pictured right) – a loose, conversational style that is also extended to the discussions between the hosts and their interviewees. And indeed, there is an emphasis placed on voice and narration – the voices of the hosts and interviewees stitched together to recount experience. Still, the show is, at its most basic, “about curiosity and discovery,” to quote Abumrad again, and this inquisitive, innovative spirit is extended from the show’s focus on “big ideas” to the way it explores, through sound, those ideas.

Most notably, the producers quickly and often abruptly butt voices up against one another, as well as layer voices on top of each other and then layer atmospheric sound, sound effects, and music on top of (or underneath) it all. For instance, in the recent Radiolab episode “Patient Zero,” the hosts examine the concept of “patient zero,” meaning the case that can be identified as the starting point of an outbreak. They begin with the story of Typhoid Mary, the woman who has been commonly understood as the source of the first typhoid fever outbreak in the United States, in the early 1900s in the New York City area. But in fact, they begin the episode somewhat confusingly with a pair of producers randomly speaking to one another (“So have I said where we are? Am I on tape yet?”) in what is clearly an outdoor environment, a brisk wind creating loud distortion in the microphone. Abumrad quickly identifies the producers but does not otherwise introduce the story or the episode. Returning to the actuality sound, one of the producers explains from the field that they are on an abandoned island where a woman with an infectious disease was at one time quarantined, but the exact location and identity of the woman are still unnamed. Then, Abumrad and Krulwich begin their host narration, which takes the form of a conversational, improvisational-sounding dialogue. Krulwich asks, “This is a story that begins when?” to which Abumrad responds, “Well, actually, it starts in 1906….” The narration continues in this conversational back-and-forth mode for awhile, Krulwich playing the inquisitor to Abumrad’s more authoritative storyteller, though quickly a third voice joins the conversation, that of UW-Madison medical historian Judith Leavitt. This is clearly a storytelling style compared to news radio’s standard narrative flow of a host intro and hook followed by a reporter opening. Information is revealed quickly and yet incrementally, and much attention is paid to context and creating a visual image for the audience to imagine. Rather than the thesis, characters, and scene all being set immediately, it is two minutes into the episode before it is clearly established that they are talking about a typhoid outbreak, it is more than three-and-a-half minutes before it is announced that this is the story of Typhoid Mary, and it is not until after the four-minute mark that Abumrad and Krulwich announce the theme of the episode.

Radiolab is about exploring ideas – big, difficult, abstract ideas – and more than anything it achieves that through experience. Here, experience is meant in a double-sense: creating a fun, adventurous listening experience for the listener, as well as connecting, through intimacy and description, to universal thoughts and feelings that the audience will be acquainted with personally. For instance, the tone is loose, accessible, even fun, with digressions and moments of humor interjected. The dual narrator device functions to bring the audience into the story, Abumrad and Krulwich expressing amazement and asking each other questions in a way that often reflects what the listening audience is likely to be thinking. The banter also underlines the sense of discovery. For instance, when a startling point is revealed, the narrator’s stop and spontaneously declare, “Really?!” Moreover, the back-and-forth dialogue also functions as a kind of theater, more akin to a radio play than a news story. This intimate, first-person narration builds tension and draws the listener in, like a group of friends telling an amazing story at a bar.

Music is particularly integral to Radiolab’s aesthetic. Referring again to the “Patient Zero” episode, almost as soon as Abumrad and Krulwich’s introduction starts, musical stings begin to creep into the piece. At first, these are curious sounding, modern classical style piano and string arrangements that quietly stay beneath the voices, mostly solitary notes that sound as though they are searching for something. However, as the Typhoid Mary story begins to build with Abumrad, Krulwich, and Leavitt describing the typhoid outbreak of 1906, the music perks up, horn bursts and tense strings serving to underline the impending danger. The voices and music continue this way, emphasizing and building upon one another in a montage fashion. Pauses and silences are interspersed to highlight moments of confusion or revelation.

Indeed, these elements all work together to make Radiolab sound like the process of intellectual discovery – it is the research and problem-solving process manifested audibly.