We are pleased to report yet another first here at the magazine: Last night, we finally took a nap on that old seat-sprung couch over there. (Photographic evidence to the contrary was carefully staged.) This morning, there are lots of reasons why we might want to just close our eyes and make the world go away—but last night’s little episode of shut-eye was actually the direct consequence of the subscription model for online content.
Let’s explain. Many readers have commented on the simpatico they see between the magazine and radio—specifically the more playful versions of public radio—and we frequently work directly with MPR. The relationship extends from a basic story-telling ethic. Great radio, like a great magazine, does not waste words. It rewards you for listening by creating vivid mental pictures (in print, we have the luxury of giving you pictures, true, but we do not have the passive immediacy that a voice in your car has).
Anyway, our obsession with radio’s story-telling possibilities goes way back, predating even a short run of writing for Garrison Keillor. (He didn’t like us very much.) It goes back to the 80s, specifically to Sunday nights in Eugene, Oregon, lying on our back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, and listening to “Joe Frank: Work in Progress” on KLCC. And occasionally we drifted off, in a sort of narrative-induced trance. If you know Joe Frank’s work, you need no explanation—indeed, you realize any explanation is invariably feeble. Frank is typically described as “the master of noir radio,” but that implies that there really is something called “noir radio” and that there are other people producing it. (They aren’t. Well, they ARE, but they are not really being broadcast anywhere. The whole thing with radio is that it is a “push” technology—it comes to you. You get to be passive about it. Any radio-style production that uses a pull model—you go and get it because you know you want it—is probably doomed to fail.) Anyway, noir radio, if there is such a thing, is this: creative monologues, dialogues, fictional sketches, audio experimentation, typically produced with or without sound effects, soundtracks, sound loops, and so on. Ira Glass occasionally tinkers with the form, but less so in recent years. Keillor’s “Guy Noir” has nothing to do with it.
Since we ended up working in a parallel industry, we actually got friendly with Joe Frank a few years back, and we commissioned a story on KCRW, the legendary Santa Monica radio station that used to employ Joe. (A long aside, for extra credit: KCRW is frequently cited as one of the prototypes for our shiny new radio station, the Current. Which reminds us of a conversation we had over the weekend—a smart friend indeed was pointing out that public radio’s original insight was that commercial radio couldn’t or wouldn’t do news in a way that fully took advantage of the medium. Commercial news at the time was pretty much what commercial news is today—top-of-the-hour soundbites and summaries, barely going beyond what in print would be a headline and subheadline. NPR’s genius, born at St. John’s abbey lo these many years ago, was seeing that the listening public could short-circuit the traditional ad-based model and pay directly for more substantive news and thoughtful round-the-clock broadcast journalis. Now, the genius of MPR, and visionaries like Bill Kling and Sara Lutman, is that ~music~ is the next frontier of public broadcasting. We’ve been meaning to say this for a while: it is very gratifying indeed to see that there are still some new tricks left in this old dog!)
So we heard a while ago that there was supposedly some strange falling out with KCRW (and its legendary director, Ruth Seymour); but in hind sight, it might be that Joe Frank had a falling out with public radio in general—although we note that he recently participated in the pledge drive of New York’s WMFU, where they still broadcast back issues of his many, many radio shows. Joe seems to have little or no interest in producing new shows for radio. Instead, he has cast his lot with the Web, appealing directly to his fans to subsidize his work.
Last night we popped for a one-month subscription—feeling magnanimous, we guess, after becoming founding members of the Current—but then realizing we deserve no such pat on the back, having been public broadcasting free-loaders whenever the personal well had run dry. It is an interesting model; Joe is now producing a three or four new audio pieces per month, usually one long piece, several shorter pieces, sometimes posting short films based on his work, and so on.
We intend to make good use of our month-long subscription, and if it means naps every Sunday night on our couch, then so be it. We encourage you to do the same.
UPDATE: Readers have pointed out that there is an advertisement for The Current that pops up right over there, to the right of your screen. We–meaning me, the writer of this particular blog—have no control over which advertisements appear over there. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of control over what I end up writing about each day, either!
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