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