I now spend most of my time running AIR, a production network of nearly 1000  media-makers working across the U.S. and 19 countries worldwide.  You can follow  my latest projects  at two sites: one focuses on recent media works, and the other is  the virtual home of  AIR.  If you’re interested in a new public media production that is  designed to push the  shift of cross-platform production, I recommend you watch our  35 minute  documentary, This is Localore.  If you’re not sure what cross-platform  production is, then you really should watch the video!

My formidable cousin Connie loves to hunt. She’d been tracking a good-sized buck for some time out in the woods of her property in upstate New York when, she recounted to me recently, she caught up with him. She had him right in the sight of her Sako .243 rifle, finger on the trigger and, good hunter that she is, ticked down a quick mental checklist before making the shot: Feet steady, ground level? Breathing OK? … Don’t hold breath! He’s on top of that hill … perfect! What’s behind him — a rock? Tree? No backstop!? What’s the trajectory? … Uh-oh.

“In a moment,” she told me, “I realized if my shot were to go through that deer, the    bullet might likely end up in my neighbor’s living room.” The deer had another day.

We were having this conversation in late August, two days after Jeffrey Johnson shot  his former co-worker in front of the Empire State Building. I asked her what she  thought about nine people getting hit by the police in the crossfire. “Situational  awareness,” she matter-of-factly replied. “The cops didn’t have time to think through  the situation. They had to react. If that deer had turned and pointed a gun at me, I  wouldn’t have had the luxury of remembering Mrs. Bransford sitting in front of her TV set.”

Telling a story is like doing an out-loud situational awareness check — minus the gun — and subject to the influence of time, circumstances, and the intention of the storyteller-mediator. It is not one thing, there is no fixed meaning, and the relative power of a story is bound to this wider context of time and place.

Right now, there is a run on storytelling in public media. We’re seeing a pervasive, competitive focus that promises “reinvention” of the form — with radio as a strong generating medium, from NewsPoets on ATC to deeper, exploratory style (”The Story“), live, stand-up (”The Moth: True Stories Told Live“) and, a grandparent of the live format, “Selected Shorts: Let us tell you a story“). Then there are variations on the one-hour magazine format bringing “storytelling with a beat” (”Snap Judgment“) and, perhaps, the darling of all, “Radiolab.” With this rush underway, “This American Life,” which launched nationally in 1996, no longer stands alone as a reinvention of storytelling, though many of the newer, emergent programs echo back to it. These are, of course just a few of the many boundary-pushers working at stations, the networks and home studios across the system, comprising a whole new phase of evolution.

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Excerpts of my remarks at the Radio Features Think Tank in Leipzig

What do we take with us of our old culture when we have to go to a new country? What becomes moreimportant, what is forgotten, what is diluted or strengthened, what is new in the old or old in the new?

Filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger speaks of the past and thre present and, indeed, public  media makers in the US find ourselves at a crossroads that is affecting the political,  economic, and artistic landscape relative to the role of the maker. With very few  exceptions, the traditional approach to long form, sound rich documentary-making is  at a low point, with little funding and few opportunities of significance in the United  States to reach a meaningful audience. This situation has not come by accident, but is  the culmination of a 24-year trajectory that began with the first comprehensive  national report on the public radio audience. “Audience (19)88” and the well-funded, widely supported evolution of public radio’s research-driven, news journalism franchise has led the industry to great success in terms of building a significant constituency of core listeners (11% of the American public) and a diverse revenue model drawing from government, foundation, corporations, and average citizens. This evolution as resulted, too, in the virtual elimination of experimental work, and minimized opportunity for producers working in any area outside of news reportage.

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Last year, I published a piece co-authored with Jessica Clark from the Center for Social Media at American University. It has been downloaded by more than 2000 individuals and has some generated controversy for the  recommendations we propose.  Since then, I’ve written more about the concept of zing, a term I originally coined at public media gathering (New Realities) several years ago.

Zing speaks to the primacy of the individual maker in media.  We’ve know that the unique potential of traditional broadcast or digital media is realized when a gifted producer with an inspired idea and the level of craft to execute that idea moves a listener or viewer.   Zing describes the moment when this inspired, well-crafted idea — transmitted via the airwaves or across digital media pathways – “hits” the listener/viewer.  It describes the feeling one has when “moved” intellectually or emotionally, or in some cases, moved to action.

When we talk about the impact of media, this understanding is central.  Zing is impact at its most human, fundamental, level.  Loyalty, time spent listening, etc… these other behaviors by which we typically measure the impact of media follow the zing.

Here is an excerpt, and you’ll also find a link to the full downloadable PDF of the  article. Do our ideas hit a nerve in you?

There is an opportunity to move beyond established standards of success that have defined public broadcasting      productions of the past. These standards, such as listener loyalty, were defined by the limitations of the broadcast  technology. The profound evolution of media forms and approaches to craft as demonstrated by projects like MQ2 call for a new vision of who public media users are, what effect multiplatform work has on them, and whether they are being encouraged to learn, debate, and act as informed members of a democracy.

The new vision of public media 2.0 impact moves beyond loyalty or “holding” an individual in place and instead brings into focus individuals who are in motion: responding to the work of producers calling for participation, for example, by inviting them to leave their cars after listening to a broadcast feature in order to go out on their streets to take pictures; to then go online to Flickr and upload those pictures; to take the Flickr link and post it to Facebook or send it out via e-mail…. Read more here.

I’m on the Distribution and Interconnect Committee of the NPR board.  I made some  impromptu remarks to the board during a public session of a meeting.  It so happened  that a reporter from the trade publication — Current — was in the audience and  happened to have a tape recorder.  She transcribed and published what I said (with my  permission), and it turned out to raise some controversy from a few inside the industry,  as well as from outside.

Usually the only speakers in the “public comment” period after an NPR Board  meeting are several regional reps of stations, but they were joined Feb. 25 by Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR). Schardt spoke extemporaneously to the board and NPR execs about how public radio could address criticism that has undercut its case for continued federal aid. This is an edited transcript.

I speak as someone who has 23 years of experience in the industry. What I’ve been thinking a lot about lately resonates, I believe, for those of us who have been around a long time.

We have arrived at a transformational moment for public broadcasting. We must choose whether to let the forces that are coming towards us define what we will become, or to decide on our own terms what path we take.

Whether we articulate it or not, public radio, at its heart, has a feeling of being family, of having created a culture. Those of us who have worked our careers to shape and build this industry — I think I’m not alone when I say I feel as though we are brothers and sisters, we are as a family. The crisis we’re facing threatens this culture we have created.

After working in many parts of public radio — both deep inside it and now with one foot inside and one foot outside — I believe there’s an elephant in the room. There is something that I’m very conscious of as we consider this crisis that I’d like to speak to.

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I’ve neglected you, dear blog. Here’s a few thoughts I circulated in an email awhile back, and decided to put it up here.

I’ve been noticing over the last year or so what seems to be movement afoot of people who are bringing music to storytelling in new ways. I tend to find it as I’m perusing WMBR‘s stacks prepping for my radio show, and maybe you’re on to it, too. I’m loving these new approaches and thought I’d share/attach the latest, Charles Spearin’s “Happiness Project,” which is a collection of some of his Toronto neighbors who frequent his front porch in the summertime.  He says, “I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing and write music based on these “accidental melodies.”

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Others in this vein include Phillip Bimstein (esp his homage to baseball, “Bushy Wushy Rag“) and the Matthew Herbert Big Band whose new CD “There’s Me and There’s You” includes “the sounds contributed by Palestinians of their favorite of their most hated sound…”

good, all, for the ears.