Diary of Leanne Wolf wins at Third Coast

An outstanding RTÉ Radio One documentary has won an award at the Third Coast Festival.

The Diary of Leanne Wolfe is superb. It's gut-wrenching, and it's tough to listen to only because it's so sad.

It has been honoured by Third Coast. I am very pleased at this. Making a radio piece is a way of honouring a story, and radio makers recognising a particular piece is honouring it further. I suspect a tremendous radio documentary means something small to Leanne Wolfe's family. That piece winning a Richard H. Driehaus Foundation award half way across the world can, hopefully, also mean something to her parents and sister.

I was bullied in school, but this documentary helped wipe that experience from my past. It's wonderful.

This week:

On Sunday, the batteries that came with my Olympus LS-10 finally gave up the ghost. I bought it in late June, and recorded about three hours of audio, but had also used it as my regular mp3 player almost all the time since then too. Awesome battery life.

Changing tack, an interesting post (they all are, but this one is more of a sharer, I guess) on James Cridland's blog about personality radio.

Flickr, CNN, and Christopher Lydon

I've started an internship – no comments about denying my age, please – outside radio. Chatted with the media analyst there the other day, and somehow we got talking about France24. And he told me of a time he was interviewed there during a bulletin and got all tongue tied: he couldn't concentrate because the presenter was so pretty.

Ok we probably got talking about that because Mishal Husain was presenting on BBC World News just then on the TV set above his head.

Still, I didn't know it at the time, but my new colleague had just given me an opening to a blog post I've been considering for a few weeks now.

A lot of people – mostly male, I'm thinking – watch more TV news because the person on screen looks good. Ok maybe I do it too, and maybe even with radio presenters, but thank heavens there's no website that holds onto things like blog posts you once wrote then deleted in a blush.

Since I paid up for a Flickr Pro account, I've been able to see which is my most visited photo. The search-engine grabbing tit shots perhaps? How about a shag from above? My collection of antenna masts in New Zealand? Amazingly not.

It's this one:


A photo of me in studio, or is it a photo of CNN International anchor Kristie Lu Stout somewhere outside the usual set? Flickr also kindly tells me the referring site, and it is a forum thread on CNNfan.org simply called… Kristie Lu Stout:

Wendy Mok took the picture, I think with Rik O'Shea's camera (yeah I'm still a name-dropper!). The photo data is wrong though, it was taken in late-summer 2004.

So right. Does it make people follow the news more? It does with some, yes. How does it change the authority of a newsreader – either by increasing or decreasing it?

CNN rarely employes unattractive presenters (okay they have that odd western aesthetic with Asian women. Fine), and if your favourite correspondent gets sent to a different bureau or beat, she'll bring your interest with her. Anyway. I'm not going to get intellectual about this because I'm not sufficiently equipped.

To me, for now, yes I reckon it's rather immature.

Back Home

What about radio? Painting your own pictures… how much better is that!

There's a discussion thread about that over at The Sound of Young America (no, I don't understand the branding. Maybe young Americans are very ironic. Many of those I've met are super-well informed and pleasent. I'm stumped by the cheesiness thing though). Anyway, as well as the wholly deserved adoration of Jad Abumrad (can't wait for the new season of Radio Lab, eeee!), and the delightful description of him as "adorkable", there is something I had only the vaguest sense of. That Christopher Lydon. All I know of his work is the Open Source podcast , with The Watson Institute at Brown University, An American conversation with… etc. Okay I thought, he's an academic who's doing a podcast as part of the course. Good on him.

Ah ignorance.

How surprised was I to find on that forum that there's a song about falling in love with Christopher Lydon! And in that song, the heart-broken Dresden Doll sings she won't contribute to NPR… naturally I have educated myself, slightly, about Christopher Lydon's career, though I have a way to go yet on that.

So how about this: Christopher Lydon interviewed the Dresden Dolls!

Musicans write and sing songs, radio producers get ideas of who to interview, and presenters make the sounds that reach us – the touch at a distance.

And in case you don't know it, here is surely one of the greatest break-up songs in the history of fantasy and broadcasting: stream.publicbroadcasting.net/ros/open_source_051005_lydon.mp3

Orientalism, China, radio.

I've just been listening to Studio 360's piece on the poetry of Mao Zedong. Raised some thoughts.

It started in the menu, where they played a clip of a Mao poem being read in English – by what sounded like a Chinese student. I guess I was pre-disposed to question the piece after it flagged itself as representing Mao with a young, weak voice.

The piece itself followed an item on how tyrants (their term), including Mao, ease themselves into the psyche through graphic and architectural art.

The first interviewee was an American expert on Mao – Willis Barnstone. I'd never heard of him so I was immediately interested in what he had to say. I was happy with that, and happy to hear a new voice on modern Chinese history, even if it's one of which I have no contextual knowledge – a glance at his bio is well-impressive.

The next guest, though made me feel less comfortable, when she said Yan'an as if it rhymed with Yemen. I reverted to the old habit of doubting the authority of someone who pronounces the names wrong (a habit that was only slightly softened by how most Chinese Olympians were given names with "jeee" in them for much of August on British TV). It led me to question why both their specialists were Westerners. But with a bit of thought: if I were working on a US radio piece about modern Chines poetry, who would be my first port of call? Prof Heather Inwood at Ohio State University. Though at least I could be sure she'd get the pronunciation right.

The arguments for using a westerner could include how clearly the person will speak English. You have to balance that with the practicality of taking who you can get. That said, for a timeless arts piece, you have little excuse for not getting the best person who will speak to you. And then, perhaps the most significant point: the piece was re-versioned from a podcast. As a podcaster myself, I think that's freaking awesome! But, should that be enough to excuse some weaknesses?

It's maybe a bit harsh of me to say weaknesses. As an independent, producing for little or no money, arranging quality interviews is very tough – sometimes even a TBU is out of the question, and Skype is your only way of getting an interview. While I feel radio has to move away from phone audio where possible to strengthen itself in the age of diverse digital media, I also accept that there are practical difficulties for the individual.

Back to the point of using Western experts. If you're an expert, you're an expert. So it shouldn't matter where you grew up. Where you grew up may mean your starting point is closer to that of the listener – so that would be an example of an American academic being better for Studio 360 than a PRC academic, for example.

Helping a listener see the PRC understanding may be very valuable, and may be very difficult – a level of difficulty that Radio Lab could take on, better than most, although it can be far less comfortable to talk about another race or culture than about science.

But you know, I could have been being sexist or agest too as the speaker was young and female. I'm not sure I'm equipped to examine that.

Now back to the young weak voice – indeed, Mao wrote poetry in his youth, and it is possibly a good challenge to our presuppositions to have him portrayed by an early-20s Chinese student in the US. That's likely a fair comparison to who Mao was in his day.

So this has become more of an analysis, than a criticism: and I would hate to think the producers would be in any way put off by some guy writing stuff on his blog.

And a final note, I don't actually know who read the poetry, how old he is or any of that. Though I know they could have gotten someone pretty good at London Chinese Radio ;-)

UPDATE, Sunday 5 October: With a bit more distance, I've been struck by the obvious point that this story comes from a poetry background, while I was hearing it from a Sinology background. If you work on a poetry podcast, and poetry is you field, of course you will find most of your experts from that field. And that's media – it gets heard by people in all sort of different fields. And to be fair, I was listening to an arts programme, not a history or, um, China Studies programme.

In Brief: Merchandising

Radio 4's Today programme had presenter-head eggcups; NPR allows loyal listeners even more unashamedly celebrate their passion:




It's a tote – which I guess is a more American term for a shopper, or shopping bag, or canvas bag, or cloth bag, or… oh just look at the picture. It's one of those, punning on the name of their Legal Affairs correspondant Nina Totenberg.

Simple pleasures :)