1: BLOGS AND RADIO. The NY Times profiles a new show on Public Radio International that draws its inspiration from the web. “Open Source from PRI” uses a public blog to cull topics and story ideas from registered commenters:
“Open Source will not be a show about blogs. It will use blogs to be a show about the world.”
Open Source offers podcasts of its programs, available for free subscription on Odeo and iTunes.
2. WIRES CROSSED. The Associated Press is preparing to launch an online video streaming network from which members can syndicate clips for presentation on their news sites. Clips will be streamed by member sites over branded video players that AP will provide. In exchange, AP will take a portion of revenues generated by interspersed video ads. Most news networks are racing to upgrade their sites to offer more video content alongside text (see “television merging with the web” on this blog).
The intersection of public radio and the internet is not an especially new one, but in addition to Open Source (which is taking the idea to a new level, blogging up the airwaves) there are a couple of websites that are making significant contributions to the fertilization of a radio/web crossbreed. Transom.org is one of my favorites, a website that consistently showcases new ways of thinking about and using sound, and encourages public discussion of radio work. Right now their “special guest” (a regular feature on transom.org, intended to “foster a critical and editorial dialog about radio work, a rare thing.”) is author Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, Demonology, etc…). In his “manifesto” (transom’s way of initiating dialog between “guests” and the public), Moody deconstructs contemporary documentary radio using literary fiction (his own territory) as an analogy. An excerpt follows. The whole thing is worth reading, if you’ve got the time…
“…What, I therefore ask, is documentary radio trying to do? In a way, it’s trying to do exactly what contemporary fiction trying to do. It is trying to do something Aristotelian. It is trying to provoke in, the listener, you the fabled epiphany. It is trying to enact a revelation, a manifestation of the truth. It is trying to make you aware of your surroundings, by exposing you to new environments, and new subcultures, especially those you might not know about, from off in your middle American redoubt. In short, it is trying to create in you the impulse of humanism. … As with contemporary literature, contemporary radio has apparently found that it has to construct a certain rigid notion of humanism, in order to effect this humanist epiphany in you and me. And yet as soon as the construction becomes predictable, homogenized, devoid of surprise, I for one no longer hear the humanism at all. In fact, it starts to sound manipulative, controlling, condescending, perhaps even a little sinister. It’s like piece of music that has been so compressed in the studio that the dynamic variation has been entirely squeezed out of it.”