The Takeaway – new US morning Current Affairs show

A new breakfast news show goes on air three weeks from now.

As the news release says:

New morning drive news program to be produced in editorial collaboration with The BBC World Service, The New York Times, and WGBH Boston

There's a full FAQ that's worth a read. Here's one snippit:

The Takeaway will be broadcast live, rather than featuring pre-recorded interviews and long pre-produced features.
It will deliver all the journalistic depth and excellence that WNYC listeners expect, while offering a dynamic and conversational tone.
It will feature two hosts talking together live in the studio, interviewing guests and responding to listeners on-air and online. Listeners will hear the day’s news and cultural stories — as they are happening — with live reports from the field, along with commentary and analysis from a range of contributors around the table and around the world.

They're promising lots of listener interaction too.

I'm looking forward to this, and I'd love to see behind the scenes too!

Tibet etc

I try not to go on about nationalism here – because if your memories of teenage life in Ireland involve going to peace rallies with strangers in town, and the shock – hundreds of kilometres away – of the Omagh bombing, then you'll probably not think nationalism is the best thing ever.

Anyway, good aggregative blog post on nationalism and media, in China, from Cam at Zhongnanhai.

Complaints to Radio Lab

A recent interviewee of Radio Lab's has contacted them to complain about… um…

Actually I think he just wrote in to grumble. Maybe he was having a tough day or something. Part of it was grumpy-old-man stuff "they put music under someone speaking that's dreadful". Another part was something I have more sympathy for. It's the misalignment that sometimes happens between academics and broadcasters. Ok so let's discount the trivial aims and staff that (not to put a tooth in it) are too common in TV. Let's stick with radio.

Plenty of academics hate having their work edited, they hate having their stamp removed. And a colleague being media-friendly can be a handy outlet for academic snobbery.

But we love them all the same!



And my do I love Radio Lab.

Have a look at the comments.

One in particular put it well, I thought:

I’m a Czech women, musicologist, musician, and for 20 years, a former radio executive producer-author at the French public radio station (France Culture) in Paris. I came in US recently, for my husband’s work. I listen to KPBS and NPR very often, every day; I love radio, I need it. Here in US, I try also to learn English by listening to it. In a very general way, I appreciate considerably the quality of NPR/PRI/KPBS shows. I pitched incidentally upon this particular program, my attention was immediately caught, I stayed with it until the end and - I was literally enrapt: I didn’t know until this moment that it was possible to do & to present such a good, fine, sophisticated radio work in this country. I wanted to know more about the Radio Lab I had never heard before.
Then I discovered this unbelievable letter from Mr. Fox. First I thought I had made a mistake… This is the reason I dare to write you, to express my thanks to the authors of this excellent radio piece (almost a sort of Hörspiel), and to give my contribution to the discussion.
The main (only real) issue here is, in my opinion, the question of a common preliminary agreement. If the purpose and the way of intended use (editing, fragmenting, contextualising) of the interview was exposed and explained to Mr. Fox before his interview, there is no reason to complain. So my question is, was it explained to him beforehand ?
In any case, his reaction is completely inadequate, ugly, obnoxious.
Thank you for your attention.
Daniela Langer

Yes, I think this is almost a sot of Hörspiel, but it's more than that, as it's a different genre. Radio Lab has broken the moulds. It'll be remembered. I'm well-chuffed to be of its generation!

Oops!

Just now I accidentally deleted my iTunes library, so when I re-loaded the files, the played tatus of my Podcasts was reset – this just a week after I backed-up and deleted the first five months worth. So the figure would be higher, but…

Radio Taiwan International Cyber Museum

This is really cool! Lot's of interesting technical stuff (in Times so not very easy on the eye unfortunately), cool design, and a really funky play studio – some parts are more entertaining and intriguing if you can speak or read Chinese – they seem to have a bit of a Chairman Mao thing going on there – well I suppose it is a museum.

Anyway, it's really cool!

The Radio Taiwan International Cyber Museum.

I feel like such a fraud.

When I lived in Auckland, I would watch the Pheonix News & Info bulletin relayed in the evenings on WTV's terrestrial Chinese channel. It felt nice and homely – not that I'd ever watched it before*, and sure, the political stuff was… not very inspiring. But I quite liked the presenter. And ok she was cute but I did convince myself that was just a small part of it.

I thought though that I was also assessing her as a news reader, based on her sense of authority, how engaging she was, her presence, and the stodgier qualities like voice and diction.

But it would seem I was deceiving myself.

Oh, the presenter's name? Jiang Xinrong. Didn't mean anything to me. But maybe it should have, given that in 2003, she (aged 19) became the first ever Miss China.

And here's a nauseating TV show including her, in her diamond tiara, saying how winning a beauty contest changed her life.

Ok so I just based it on cuteness. Poo.


* Never say never. I think it was on one of their bulletins on Pheonix CNE, when in Ireland, that I learned about the Hemepl Hempsted fire in December 2005 – together with a Chinese speaker from London, that took us off guard I'll say.

The Diary of Leanne Wolfe

Gut-wrenching documentary from December.

It's wonderful. I hope it wins awards.

It's on the RTÉ website here.

It's the diary of a girl who was bullied.

My own time being bullied seems very meagre now.

Mark Mardell and complaints

Revisited. He's doing, again, what I consider to me model responses to complaints to the BBC. Lord knows they get a ton of them – when I was there on a quiet late shift I'd go through the listener logs on the intranet for a giggle. It's interesting to see how people can love and loath the same things, and enlightening. But it can get tiresome sometimes too, the things people complain about. I mean, I try to listen to six hours of radio a day, but I still
know I can't say "you didn't cover this"!

Anyway, well done as ever Mr Mardell.

Fab podcast

Facebook is funny. I waste my non-working life on it. So sometimes, just to spite Facebook, I waste my non-working like on the Public Radio Exchange, which is far less of a waste.

So doing I've just stumbled on a fab podcast. The I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour, and related funny stuff.

I've only heard a little bit, and with my unlistened podcasts up around 150, I really shouldn't add more. But this is great – it's a nice change to return to the "early days" of podcasts, when I can hear podcasts that aren't regular radio or corporate programmes.

Okay I'm possibly being a bit harsh on Nature Stories, Nature, and Open Source. I like them all (that's why I subscribe to them, duh), but they are more or less branded, I guess, in contrast to the "it's just me" early days.

This was supposed to be saying "hey listen to this podcast" but instead it's become a piece about how to me, podcasting and YouTube etc is more a way of accessing content from established providers, rather than a way of seeing the great creativity of all those "users" on the web.

And this only two days after I told myself to stop using the internet when half asleep, as it just causes trouble… sigh.

Back to Spent Cattle and the I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour (I like saying that).

He puts music in it, which switches me out. Not being musical, I never got Flight of the Conchords or the Mighty Boosh when they went all musical. Went over my head. Missed out on being ahead of the curve there it seems. Who knows, maybe the World Service's Next Big Thing really has become the next big thing, and I haven't noticed. I can see it's a good idea though.

If you like brain-pushing stuff and tongue in cheek, check out The I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour.