The value of a live human being talking to you
When I started working in public radio, at WNPR in Hartford, I was a little surprised to see just how many news reporters were working there to gather, edit and report on the happenings of the day. Looking back, I’m even a bit embarrassed at how I was surprised. What did I think they were doing?
A huge draw for me to work at the station was one of its flagship talk shows, Where We Live, hosted at the time by its co-creator John Dankosky. I had been listening to the show since before I moved to Connecticut — I was still living in Springfield and was struck by how incredibly relevant, lively, genuine, packed with information, humorous, compelling, and just overall inside my brain the show sounded.
The only talk radio show that had hit me like that before was The Connection out of Boston’s WBUR station. I had also listened daily to The Exchange out of NHPR when I lived in New Hampshire. But Where We Live was different. It felt more personal. I developed a sense of ownership and ritual for its topics and discussions. I felt as though I was in the room where the conversation was happening. At times I felt Dankosky would say the same comments I was thinking, or ask the same questions that came up naturally for me. I developed a relationship with a radio show that is an odd one indeed. I live-tweeted the show sometimes, or blogged about it like an addict and published transcripts of the conversation bits I found most exciting.
Working on the show itself was therefore extremely gratifying once I was in the newsroom. I already knew and felt the show’s value, because there was Dankosky every day to guide us through whatever had been carefully planned as the day’s discussion along with all the surprises and unexpected things that come with a live radio experience, and it was inevitably illuminating and thought-provoking. I cannot say enough good things about how that felt as a Connecticut resident.
And yet there in the newsroom was also a whole team of reporters, who were busy like bees making honey. They developed story ideas. They researched and discussed stuff and tossed ideas around with editors. They went out and gathered tape at press conferences. They recorded interviews over the phone in sound booths. They joked around and ate lunch and filed stories and went home at the end of the day.
It should not have been a surprise to me that these capable folks were doing this work because they were like any newsroom focused on what needed to be reported. But in some ways the work seemed invisible or like it wasn’t even happening at all. I think that’s because of the way it sounds to the average listener, if they’re listening closely.
As I eventually learned, local news on public radio is typically delivered during NPR’s flagship shows Morning Edition or All Things Considered, also known as the drive time shows. At the top of the hour, and sometimes at the bottom, you’ll hear short news items from an NPR news reader, and then you might hear a few more short news items from a local host who is also guiding you through the experience of hearing the whole NPR show. Sometimes these short items are voiced by a reporter, and local stations make an effort to make it all sound in line with the same style NPR uses. It’s so smooth you might not even realize that there is a huge difference between the national or international stories you’re hearing from the NPR host, and the local or regional stories you’re hearing from the station you’re tuned to. It’s so smooth that you might not even recognize the outstanding value of this local reporting.
Local stations also often produce more in-depth reporting pieces that can be anywhere from three to eight minutes or even longer. These can typically be heard placed somewhere within the hour of Morning Edition or All Things Considered on the local station, because stations have the option to “cover” a segment being delivered by NPR with their own material. Some hours are known as stronger than others for pieces to be heard by the most people, so stations consider that while planning when to air stuff.
Reporters’ voiced work, whatever the length, is written, edited, recorded and mixed ahead of time and made available for a host or a radio board operator to hit play at the right time. The host will talk into it and pick up after as part of the whole thing they’re doing for the few hours they’re on air, constantly playing bits of tape or coming in and out of NPR doing the same thing.
Any public radio station affiliated with NPR is doing this set of things to some degree, and some have the resources to hire their own reporters — and some don’t.
But I think a lot of listeners don’t necessarily realize the strength of their local public radio newsrooms. The way newsrooms’ work is heard is so thoroughly mixed into what NPR is delivering, and the experience of it can be rather fleeting. And if listeners are not hearing live broadcasts as often anymore, the likelihood of them even catching the local news seems like it could be decreasing.
Brendan Mahoney on Twitter asked me this question earlier this week:
Is public radio mostly considered a news source or is it generally something else? Most of the shows on public radio are news analysis. Do people want much of that when there are already endless takes everywhere?
For sure there are a lot of public radio stations that provide music as well as news, but if they are affiliated with NPR there is strong reason to say they are considered a news source even if they also provide music at other times of day.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone conflated a local station with NPR itself. There is such a powerful blur there, but local stations are their own businesses and independent entities. They compete with each other when they cover the same geographic territory.
And they have reporters working hard, and doing great stuff, but the public listening might not realize the extent of it, or how much time and effort it takes to do that well.
Mahoney pointed out in our exchange that reporters’ stories “feel more prominent in written form” than heard on the air. Certainly the web element of reporting has that aspect of being something you can read at your own pace, maybe look at a photo, and even share it with someone else. Radio has its elements like that, where you might have your driveway moment and you tell someone else about it over dinner. But the sense of prominence is an interesting one — since web publishing can be a visual equalizer (headlines have a straightforward set of words no matter how long your story is) and is just a different sensory experience compared to listening.
There’s also something to the pre-taped news reporting compared to, say, a live discussion on radio. There’s the way it comes across when you’re hearing a reporter’s voice reading a script. Reporters and editors work to make it sound good, to make it sound relaxed, conversational and natural. But it’s still a recording. Live radio is a whole different feeling, and the personal connection becomes, I think, more possible when you have a live person in your ear. And over time that can be highly meaningful, as it develops loyal audiences who will want to give their money to make that kind of thing keep happening.
Newsrooms have more of a hurdle there, as it is very tough to portray the value of the work they’re doing in a way that helps listeners understand its value. It’s not just about a live voice in your ear, it’s also about the way it’s set within NPR material and generally can be too easy to miss. It’s not necessarily appointment listening.
Once I started working in a radio newsroom though, and began to understand the incredibly highly valuable work that was happening within — excellent thinkers asking very good questions and doing very, very good writing and reporting — I did start to make newscasts appointment listening for myself. I learned that at the top of the hour, I could tune in and hear the most important news of the moment delivered concisely with precision and grace. And there is something to love about that.