Two weeks ago, the awesome and talented Laura Conaway was kind enough to let me interview her for the day job. Like a good journalist, I had to check the spelling of her name before I posted the interview (I have a tendancy to spell it Conoway, even though that’s very clearly wrong).
So, I went straight for the Planet Money page, which lead me to the NPR bios page. The bios page is kind of a beautiful thing – it’s like a Who’s Who of worldy educated accents and hypenated last names.Which begs the question – did hypenating our last names increase our chances of working in Public Radio?
It also made me realize that the way I was spelling reporters’ names in my head are, for the most part, way off. Is NPR like roller derby? When you sign up, do you get to pick a public radio name? Are you allowed to use the public radio name generator?
Also, public radio people, y’all have some interesting hobbies. Like Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson – in addition to sighing heavily in her sign offs like a bored teenager, Nelson enjoys speaking Farsi, Dari and German and bargaining for carpets.
But it’s little things like this that make me love public radio even more. Now, when I hear Soraya’s sigh-off at the end of a story, I’m going to think that she just wants to get the story done so she can go haggle for rugs. And every time I hear one of Ofeibea Quist-Arcton’s stories, I’ll picture her all smiley like she is in her bio photo.
3 Comments
My husband and I once wasted an entire work day perusing the NPR bios page and emailing back and forth about our findings. That page is a secret treasure!
Wow, this is exactly what I have always thought! I was looking for a list of reporters’ name when I found this. I also realized that their names were spelled much differently than I had thought. Thank you for the link to the bios page.
Just for fun, we made this Public Radio Name Generator so that ANYONE can have a cool NPR name!
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