The bugs seem loud tonight, louder lately, when I sit and work/play at day and night here in my room. As I walked home tonight up the dark street, the occasional cockroach scuttling across the sidewalk, I heard odd little chirps emerge overhead from a tree, and wondered what was making them. I remember once walking up the same street at night and looking up to see a flying squirrel on a tree branch — the only one I’ve ever seen. Funny-looking little bastards, especially when looking right at you with those big dark eyes.
It’s official, or as official as can be when you’re dealing with a radio station in the Pacifica network. I will be on WPFW doing newscasts Monday afternoons, at 1 and 3 p.m., starting August 18. Apparently I will walk into the station two hours beforehand on my first day with nary a clue of what I am going to do, but someone, I hope, is going to show me, and quickly, so that I can actually prepare a newscast (of how long? five minutes? I don’t even know!). It should be … interesting. And hopefully not mortifying.
I really want to make my newscasts works of art. The last time I did a newscast was when I was at WFDD, in 1999! And I think I was not the best newscaster you’ve ever heard. But of course I remember the slip-ups and shortcomings more than the highlights. I remember often running down the hall to grab the latest traffic report, coming off of the fax machine, which was still the kind that used that waxy shiny paper on the rolls — man, I haven’t seen one of those in a while. And as a result of the running, doing some newscasts slightly out of breath. But at that time the newscasts were 10 or 15 minutes apart, and I was rushed. I’ll have a whole two hours between newscasts when I’m on WPFW. Nonetheless, I’m anticipating the return of radio anxiety dreams, which I finally stopped having after eight years away from live radio, just in time to start doing this gig.
What are the limits of the newscast form, and how can I push them or break them? Not in a self-indulgent way, but I want to do a newscast that people will hear and think is really different, not like anything else on the air in D.C. NPR’s Tom Goldman once told me in an interview that John Hockenberry, formerly his colleague at NPR, delivered brilliant newscasts. Maybe I can dig up the quote here. (hold music plays while author searches contents of external drive)
Wow, I surprised myself. Here’s what Goldman said about Hockenberry: “To this day, there has never been a more interesting newscast at NPR than the ones he anchored.” Hockenberry used natural sound and was funny, Goldman said. Well, NPR newscasters do use the “nat sound” at times today. (Have you met my friend Nat Sound?) But I have never, ever heard one that made me laugh. It seems almost impossible. How could a newscaster get away with something approximating, gasp, levity in a newscast today on NPR? I’m not trying to undermine NPR newscasters or poke fun at them. I appreciate NPR, I respect their news very much. Some of my best friends (well, one) are newscasters. And the newscasts usually sound great and do all they should do. But they do not make me giggle. It’s not in their genetic makeup these days.
So can I be funny on WPFW? Or artful? Poetic? What are the possibilities?
I also want to try to get the station involved in podcasting. I don’t think there are any podcasts now offered on their website. Of course, I want first to create a podcast of my newscasts, self-interested creature that I am. But that could be extended to all the newscasts. And there’s some local news and talk programming on WPFW that ought to be podcast (podcasted?). Like the Blackademics. (Well heck, they have a podcast on their own website.)
There are a lot of small, mostly volunteer-run community radio stations around the country — I imagine that, with all of those minds out there, someone has developed a relatively workable means of quickly converting audio delivered on a radio station into a podcast, in some mostly automated fashion. I hope. It would save me a lot of trouble if I didn’t have to be the one to create it. I’ll look into this.
Enough blather for now. I should be working on other things, like a blog post for Scanning the Dial tomorrow. Courage.
Posted by nedlog at August 5, 2008 10:39 PM | TrackBack