Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) this morning told radio host Bill Press that she thinks that so-called "Fairness Doctrine" -- or something akin to it -- should be brought back to the airwaves.
The Fairness Doctrine refers to an FCC policy, eliminated under Ronald Reagan, that requires broadcasters who use publicly owned airwaves to present both sides of controversial issues. It was used during the civil rights era to keep radio in the Deep South from using their stations to oppose civil rights.
The basic concept is that the airwaves are a finite resource, owned by the public and, therefore, should not be used to promoted a biased point of view. But some conservatives fear that the revival of the doctrine is an attack on conservative talk radio which came of age after the doctrine was abolished.
New Yorker audio interview with Kelefa Sanneh, who profiled the bombastic, enigmatic talk show host Micheal Savage for the magizine. This piece is unique for the New Yorker in that it uses multiple clips from Savage's radio show.
In case you haven't been over to see it. New NPR website launched a couple days ago. This video has NPR's Scott Simon explaining the new features. One commenter on YouTube says "This is a beautiful web site! Will this help avoid layoffs?"
Apropos to nothing, really. I like this 2000 Transom interview with the late Studs Terkel. "I'd gone to law school and it was a bleak horrendous experience. Under no circumstances would I ever practice law."
Search Engine with Jesse Brown with a unique interview of Ira Glass about the internet and public radio. Search Engine is from TVO"Ontario's public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought."
Six men who have become islands of loss, guilt, and illness, also live as islands of hope. Over twenty years, they've lost lovers and friends to HIV and AIDS. A beautifully crafted and engaging documentary in the 2009 Global Perspectives series.
An interview with the renowned BBC radio features producer, Piers Plowright. From the Radio Radio series, by PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania and Ubu. A masterclass, and insight into the mind of the man who forms the programmes.
After hosting the UK's most popular breakfast programme for 27 years, Sir Terry Wogan called it a day, on 18 December 2009. He says goodbye to his hugely loyal and involved listenership, on BBC Radio 2.
In case you didn't notice. Cool new designs. Third Coast's, in particular, is a really fun departure as they move to independent organization status (formerly a WBEZ entity).
Collection of podcast and RSS feeds from the International Feature Conference. Listen to all the latest from great radio from around the world without leaving a this single web page. You can build you own, too! Kind of like your own, on-going audio front page.
Every Sunday, BBC Radio 4 presents a 45 minute selection of the week's best speech output. Most of it comes from three of the domestic networks, so provides a snapshot of BBC content largely unknown to listeners outside the UK. The usual mix includes factual, music documentary, comedy, and drama. For contractual reasons, each episode stays online for just one week.
Okay... in "honor" of April 20th -- 420 Radio. Stoned out people doing radio. Suprisingly high production quality. Don't think. Listen. Enjoy. Hilarious. Colorado based. I'd quote it but there are just so many great ones.
Pédilüv is a radio art programme, produced at Campus Radio in Paris. This episode, The Sound of Noise, has more English language content than usual, from a range of sources: The Global Theatre of the Air, Adam Boham, The Poo Lord, John Cage, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It's curious, and curiously engaging.
NPR's All Things Considered just turned 39. Hard to imagine but it's first day it featured a 24 minute documentary of a war protest. Click the link to listen.
Danish features go North American – the Third Coast International Festival's Julie Shapiro guides a listening event in Denmark, with a selection of engaging radio from the USA and Canada.
Third Ear is a Danish features project, and this is their first instalment entirely in English, under the banner of Third Ear International.
As the world's media watches the rescue of trapped miners in Chile, we look back to 1936, when the Canadian Radio Commission reported for six days the attempts to rescue three men trapped in a mine at Moose River, Nova Scotia. A selection of the reports, from the CBC Archives.
Creative audio types from North America get Hackneyed. Award winning British radio producer Francesca Panetta interviews Award winning American radio producers Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad, along with Third Coast Festival directors Johanna Zorn and Julie Shapiro. It's a passionate sound love-in!
This should be interesting. I know in Vietnam, there are instances of lines being crossed (or trying not to cross). Often, it's not the politcal things that a westerner would expect but maybe just a strong sense of pride or tradition. And the standards can vary depending on who is delivering the message. Vietnamese people will tell you straight, there is not freedom of the press here - it goes through the Ministry of Culture. It's a matter of fact. I find, frankly that people don't expect to be able to say whatever they want. Could that be considered more respectful toward the power of words?
So, I caught-up with some of the Clocks and Clouds crowd yesterday. Julie Shapiro is indeed here and as lovely as everyone says. However if it's possible to kill with kindness, or by over-radio-ing, we might just find out by the end of Saturday's event.
Moving on to the other guests:
They include something rather rare: a sound artist who's been accepted into the radio establishment. John Wynne skips between Resonance FM (the radio-art community station in London), and BBC Radio 3, the highest-brow radio station around (whatever about the minging website).
It can be tough to gauge the BBC's documentaries as many of them disappear off-line after one week, for contractual reasons. So we have quite a rare opportunity when Laurence Grissell roots out some picks of the BBC archives for us. For me this is possibly the biggest deal of the event!
But as a boy, I do like a bit of a tech, so Peter Nash's session should satiate the geek-monster within. He's from SADiE, which is the audio editing system used by many of the finest radio makers outside North America. Looking forward to it, and if you're there, say hi!
Connor Walsh, AD, London
Tuesday March 1 2011
There's a one-day crafted radio event coming up in London, and I'll be bringing you updates from it, here on AudioDocumentary.org. The event, on Saturday, is called Clocks & Clouds, and is organised by In The Dark (disclosure: I volunteer for In The Dark as well as AudioDocumentary.org). Guests include Julie Shapiro, well known to radio listeners in the USA from The Third Coast Festival. It's linked there over there in the sidebar on the right, see? This tweet would suggest she's already in town:
@ThirdCoastFest Third Coast representing at the BBC tomorrow, noon. What should we wear?
There are three other guests providing opportunities that we can't really get online, however I will write about those for you on the day, assuming you can't make it there in person – I'm told there are some tickets still to be had. The day will close with Julie Shapiro and Francesca Panetta premiering "When an Angel Passes…" a radio feature, about the the radio feature, made by producers all around the world. If it goes online, I'll share it with you here, because it would take a miracle for those two to work together and produce something not worthy of listen by you lot. Keep checking back, and I'll update this post with good audio finds on Saturday.
An update on AudioDocumentary.Org's exclusive blogging of London's radio features shindig last week. Clocks & Clouds was great. The speakers were delightful, and so were their selections of audio. I came away with lots of good new places to look for interesting documentaries, and will be sharing those with you here over the next few weeks. To start us off, When An Angel Passes, a delicious montage of the passion for great radio, by some of its greatest practitioners, which premiered at the conference. Outside the scheduled sessions, producers paid and unpaid, students formal and informal mingled and learned from one another. It was also good to see staff from the BBC World Service, where hundreds of redundancies have been announced, escaping that worry for a day of positivity and encouragement.
Some of the masters of long form story telling were on hand at The New School in NYC for a panel hosted by Pro Publica. I watched the first 45 seconds. It was okay.
Just kidding. They promise to have the whole video posted today sometime. So put down your smart phone, get off facebook, stop your tweeting and listen, whippersnappers.
In the mean time I found it here:
"These days, radio drama is as dead as disco, kept on life support mostly by the BBC. But it shouldn’t be this way. Sound has a way of slithering into our ears and burrowing deep down into the folds and wrinkles of our brains in ways that sight does not."
Wax Equations is a gem from Resonance FM in London. Aleks Kolkowski uses some of the oldest recording technology, wax cylinders, to make new recordings of speech and music and crazy stuff today. He presents programmes of them on Resonance FM in London. These aren't available to listen to on-demand, so you can dive into the livestream for a serendipituous earfull of the programme, or you can admire the individual recordings and photos of their production on his own website, phonographies.
Be like Radiolab, On The Media, Public Radio International, RTE DocOnOne, PRX, Third Coast Festival and many more. Join us on Twitter @AudioDocs! You could win 1 MILLION DOLLARS (not from us but, you know, you could somehow).
Radio Days' collection of the news breaking on various radio stations. In one, the operator seizes the phone line during a live broadcast from Honolulu (which the announcer pronounces HOE-nah-lu-lu).
After three years of linking in the wilderness, AudioDocumentary.org has company! We would like to offer a full-throated endorsement to the new audio curating site, Audiofiles. In case you haven't seen it (or read about it), Audiofiles is similar in concept to AudioDocumentary.org in that it is an independant site that curates links to radio and audio pieces available free online (you'll even see a number of things AD has featured on there). It doesn't feature any original content like AD and perhaps tends more toward main-stream American public radio ala NPR. Audiofiles, however, adds crowd-sourcing via Twitter integration so that the curating spigot is turned to 11. It also allows users to save links by signing in with Twitter. It's a cool twist on the idea of audio links curating and we hope everyone will check it out!
Ham radio operators can build satellites, that can get thrown into orbit from the International Space Station. This item from Radia is more than a factual narration from NASA, it's a building of tension and wonder, a tie between humans on the ground and somehere out there.
This American Life's gutsy and thorough, 1-hour redaction of their wildly popular episode "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory." An insightful and probing meditation on the difference between fact and fiction. TAL lays out its own mistakes nakedly and outlines everything they can discern about the story's truth or falsity.
You can hear the original story (removed from the TAL website) here.
The BBC World Service has left its famous home, Bush House. For 70 odd years tourists would turn to snap photos of the imposing art deco builing that overseas was known as the home of the BBC. All the while, the the lease was ticking down…
The staff who work there hold the buildiong in great affection, as suggested by this short feature made oduring night shifts by a sound engineer there.
TAL does not have audio of Glass's work for them online because Glass made up so much of his work whole clothe. But here one is on Youtube.
Hindsight is 20/20 so it's impossible to listen and not feel like you can sense that Glass (Stephen, not Ira. No relation) is lying. In his pauses and his bursts of details, his seemingly affected emotions...
Despite the fact -- or maybe because of the fact -- that we are probably hearing unadulterted bullshit, this is really compelling audio.
[quality is not great, sorry. email or tweet if you find something better]
Adding 2 new (long overdue) links to the top of our links section (Look to the right. Over there -->)
99% Invisible and Love + Radio are great podcasts. I am not breaking news here. But if you haven't listened to them your really gotta check them out.
99% Invisible is about design the way that Radiolab is about science. Love + Radio, I am not sure how to describe without sounding stoopid. It's fun and interesting and edgy (see?).
