Here’s to fresh starts, false starts, and utter failures. More importantly, here’s to giving back to those who give to us. Happy New Year’s. Let’s fix what’s broken, and make the most of it. 2009 will be what we make of it.
In the last week of the year, many media outlets slack off a bit, opting for lots of year end lists and retrospectives. Fortunately NPR had several interesting new stories today, only one of which involves a list: – As part of the running “Best Books of 2008” series, there’s a list of five books [...]
I was looking for a story from “This American Life” which understood and delineated exactly how I feel about local TV news – it’s all panicky and yell-y about every last little thing (DID YOU KNOW ONE DROP COULD KILL YOU??). I was looking, but I didn’t bother finding it because I found a link [...]
I have been obsessed for years with the musical phenomenon known as song-poems. Song-poems were a semi-scam that ran for a while from the late 50′s to the late 70′s. People would write lyrics to songs and pay services to put them to music and record the song. The budding lyricists were then sent the [...]
Happy holidays, everybody. Let’s see what OTM got us for Christmas: First up, a story about the Iraqi journalist who chucked his shoes at President Bush last week. The incident has spawned a ton of news coverage, a flash game, and some of Bob’s famous dad jokes. It wouldn’t be Christmas without some dad jokes. [...]
It would figure that I would find and fall in love with a show that’s being canceled. Despite hours spent on the NPR Web site since we started this blog, I just now found “Daydreaming”, the blog for “Day to Day”. I’m not sure what happened, but in 15 minutes, I had become an instant [...]
A long time ago, I made a solemn oath. “Every time news reflects stupid internet videos,” I swore, “I’ll make a blog post about the news, while posting the video, even if I’ve already posted it.” Except that I never made that oath. But there’s no real shame in acting in accordance with it anyway. [...]
Sure, you could always get your friends and loved ones one of the year’s best books of letters or one of the records featured on “All Songs Considered“, but this holiday season you should also consider donating to one of your favorite public radio programs in the name of someone you love. Before this week’s [...]
This week’s “On the Media” seems to be a pretty solid theme episode which actually avoids – mercifully – dealing too much with either the election or with the economy. Well, it doesn’t deal with the economy so much as one facet of the economy – Brooke and Bob do still seem to be having [...]
R/S on Twitter
NPR lets listeners roll their own
I wish I could come up with a better way to introduce this, but here’s the best way ever – from the Twitter feed of NPR’s Andy Carvin: Â Seriously, just about anything works. I’ve created a podcast, which I call “Night of the Living Deford,” in order to play any story featuring Frank Deford [...]