I have a dream....

One day, one story, by one independent radio producer...will go viral. It will rise like a YouTube video of a talking dog or a dancing baby, and the sharing and linking and posting and downloading and digging and tweeting and buzzing will start a revolution...and everyone will be talking about it..and the ears of the world will come alive and people will beg for more, more, more delicious, nutritious, savory, spicy, mouth-watering radio stories.

Now, waking up to reality...

If you are an independent producer working in public radio, what's the best way to make sure listeners actually hear the fruits of your labor?

If you can't sell your piece to Morning Edition or This American Life or some other fantastically popular network program, you're pretty much on your own, kid. And you need to learn how to navigate through the obstacle course of gatekeepers and blast through the walls between you and the (larger) audience.

Ultimately, your fate may rest in the hands of a News Director or Program Director who is responsible for picking and choosing and balancing a station's unique mix of local, regional, national and international programming. And, from an indie perspective, of course, the hippest stations are those most open to innovative, experimental, funky content often produced by those on the outskirts.  read more »

Earth. Water. Air. Fire. These are the elements of nature.

What are the elements of audio? What elements do you like to work with? To play with?

AIR is looking for 10 producers who want to dig deeper into the craft of sound and story at Sounds Elemental, two week-long intensives for mid to advanced level audio producers.

Each workshop centers on an elemental theme: Earth lands between June 21 - 25, 2010. Sky will fall between November 15-19, 2010. 

"Sounds Elemental has stayed with me, making me a more creative producer," says AIR's Membership Director Erin Mishkin. "I think the most important thing that I gained from attending Fire was being able to tap into my creative side. I had never produced a sound art piece - only documentaries - so, for me, I was finally able to get over that mental block that had really prevented me from 'playing' with audio."  read more »

Who can deny that the quality of political discourse in this country seems to be in serious decline. In the final days of the health care reform debate, national media have reported on various incidents that are disturbing the peace: epithets hurled at members of Congress, threatening voicemails, and bricks thrown through windows of local Congressional offices.

This past week, many public radio programs, from Fresh Air to Democracy Now! to All Things Considered to On The Media have featured interviews with Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who tracks extremist movements of all stripes. The conversations surrounded the Justice Department's bust of an armed and dangerous Christian militia in Michigan that plotted to spark an uprising against the federal government.  read more »

Here’s a new public media project sure to catch some kudos...and possibly some heat.

The premise: Two 20-something white gals move into an apartment that’s home to an expanding family of Mexican immigrants who live in a bustling Los Angeles Latino neighborhood. Sounds a little like a reality TV show, right? Or maybe a telenovela in which one gringa falls in love with a gang member while the other gets intimate with a cop. Sounds very romantic, no?

But This is Not an Imaginary Love Story. Although there’s plenty of creativity involved, and passion: for storytelling and for Spanish.  read more »

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) train has pulled into the Stations, carrying a $10 million payload to boost the quality and quantity of journalism closest to home: local and regional reporting.

At a press conference Thursday at the Newseum, CPB President/CEO Patricia Harrison announced the multi-million dollar investment in the creation of Local Journalism Centers (LJC) in seven regions around the country.

"The LJCs will enhance public media's ability to meet the information needs of local communities at a time when access to high quality, original report is declining," said Harrison.    read more »

Let's see what the search engines do with that headine. :-) Meanwhile, Kitchen Sisters Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson are at it again. The award-winning pair of independent producers reknowned for powerful participatory audio projects such as Hidden Kitchens, the Sonic Memorial Project and Lost & Found Sound, have launched a new endeavor called The Hidden World of Girls. It's an international collaboration aimed at capturing what it means to be young and female today all around the globe. Why girls? Introducing the year-long series on NPR's Morning Edition, Davia Nelson explained, "We've just been drawn to that beat." You can listen to that interview here:    read more »

Ann Heppermann of Mapping Main Street's snapshot of a cluttered kiosk on the UC Berkeley campus reminds us that some forms of old media are alive and kicking. In the blog post below, Ann shares her personal account of "digital conversion" during a week-long Web 2.0 Training fellowship at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It's a lively must-read with loads of links:

I was never born again…(put me in the column of wayward Catholic), but the week I spent at the Knight Digital Media Center feels like I was dipped in a new media baptismal font.    read more »

Today is Davar Ardalan's last day at NPR, the place she has called her professional home for 17 years. Davar is an incredibly talented radio producer who has been at the forefront of digital innovation at the network. She served on the Talent Committee for MQ2, and incubated four of the MQ2 projects at Weekend Edition.

"I am so incredibly grateful for all of the support that Davar provided us with Mapping Main Street throughout the summer and fall," wrote Ann Heppermann. "She took us on board without question and gave our work a home on the airwaves. I'll always be thankful for her guidance and really look forward to the exciting projects she'll be working on in the future."  read more »

So much of what we see and hear about Africa gets filtered through an American or Western lens. One of the great gifts of the "world wide web" and the age of the global internet is that we can seek and find and hear authentic and unmediated voices that connect us to other cultures.

Thanks to the Waves For Change blog, I discovered Durban Sings, a fascinating project from South Africa that is creating a platform for oral history, community engagement, cultural celebration.

Durban Sings invites contributions of raw audio to an open source archive of sounds, and then asks artists and activists around the world to dip into it and "remix" African history using the voices of the people, and the pulse of the community. 

 Durban Sings is facilitated by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Eight editorial collectives in communities around Durban are recording and uploading interviews and ambiences through the end of March, 2010. 

At AIR, we like to say that MQ2 was "taking public media to the streets." Durban Sings is taking the streets to public media, or making public media from the streets.   read more »

More and more nonprofit organizations are using digital media to tell stories about the people they serve, and engage us in advocacy campaigns. Thanks to the Lost Remote, a blog that "covers the exploding local media space, from hyperlocal news to location-aware mobile," I share this provocative project from the streets of New York City. 

Those of us living in urban America likely cross paths with homeless people on a daily basis. Do you stop and offer to help? Give money or buy food? Do you have a policy of only giving to women or disabled people or folks who don't seem to be using drugs? Do you have a conversation, ask their names, hear their story? Do you avert your eyes and rush off to catch the bus, get to work, check email or send a tweet?

The painful truth is that each encounter is ultimately an ethical dilemma that questions our humanity. Homeless people are us. Yet, somehow, most of "us" have found a way to ignore them on both a personal and societal level. They wander through our streets like ghosts, recognized by the rare, sensitive among us tuned in to their frequency. This is what came to mind for me as I watched the public digital installation below.  read more »