R/S reader Patrick Baker dropped us a line today to tell us about the Radio Bookmark.

It’s a USB keyring. It works like this: hear a song or story you like, click the button and it records the time of day. When you plug it into your computer, it pulls up the time (like a Web browser bookmark, rather than a book bookmark (neé simple “bookmark”).

It then scours the Internet for data about what was playing then, and it’ll help you find the song, story, or program you were listening to.

It doesn’t seem as simple or as magic as Shazam, but at least you aren’t left in the lurch when it can’t find the song you like because the radio stations you listen to are just too cool for school. Or too drunk for this lame-ass club.

Even with it on my keyring all the time, I’d still probably forget to use it. Let us know if you’ve tried it, and what you think.

Brooke,

I’m sorry about that gushy voicemail I sent. Sort of. The sentiment behind it was sincere, if strong enough to be a little embarassing.

Anyway, Kerry and I are both extremely grateful to you and everyone at WNYC for scoring us the tickets. We didn’t expect it at all.

I’d love to tell you all about the show, but it’s been posted already.

I’d love to show you pictures, but I didn’t want to be the guy taking pictures of the show instead of watching it. The only one I even tried was extremely blurry, and I didn’t want to try again.

Thankfully, This American Life posted some photos of their own.

Like this one, where, if you click through to Flickr and view it big, and then probably squint some, you can see us slightly to the left of the center of the 8th row back:

The whole thing was really great. Ira Glass was predictably charming. Mike Birbiglia was predictably hilarious. Dan Savage unexpectedly made us all cry. (Except for the part where I had a terrible coughing fit right when he got to the REALLY serious part.)

Starlee Kine was charming too. I was expecting that. I wasn’t expecting her to be actually kinda cute. I had kind of a big crush on her before, but her piece about family aggression therapy (it’s hard to figure out exactly how to explain) sealed it for me.

Between my thing for Starlee Kine and Kerry’s thing for Dan Pashman, I’m sure I speak for both of us when I say I’m a little relieved we decided to just exclude public radio personalities from our lists of free-pass-affair famous people.

But I digress.

It was completely unnecessary – but completely awesome – for you to go out of your way to find those tickets for us.

Our minds will never cease to be blown that you even know about us two kids fawning from Tennessee.

Thanks again. We’ll never be able to top that vacation. I just probably should have stuck with Kerry’s choice of words and said “I heart you” instead.

- matthew

After doing some serious hunting for local jobs today, I decided while I’m at it, I’d throw my resume at some other, less practical work places. I’m not up for moving out of Memphis just yet, but what’s the harm in looking, right?

 

It seems that WKNO, our local NPR member station, is an equal opportunity employer. I wonder how much of this is owed to the fact that said opportunity is nil.

Meanwhile, WNYC, hosts to “On the Media” is on something of a hiring tear. If Kerry and I were up for moving anytime soon, WNYC would see my resumé submitted no fewer than 10 times.

Along with that same Radio Lab gig that I mentioned a while back (when are they going to realize that they’re looking for someone who probably doesn’t exist?), they’ve posted what might be the most awesome internship ever. If it’s paid, and I can telecommute, I’m there. It doesn’t seem like a telecommuting-type thing. But maybe it could be. Can somebody find out for me?

And – hey – if I can telecommute for any of those, what are the chances I could get a reference from, say, Brooke Gladstone, Bob Garfield, Bob Boilen, or – wait for it – the Hugh Hefner of public radio himself, Carl Kasell?

Which sucks, because “Day to Day” meant I didn’t have to listen to classical music or commercial radio on my lunch break if I left my iPod at home.

Lest you think we’re going to get all testy over this one, I want you to know, it’s clear from everything I read that this cut was not made lightly. It’s clear that the decision was deliberate and measured.

And short-sighted, if you didn’t already know my opinion. NPR’s listenership is growing, along with their reputation and cultural caché. Now seems like the worst possible time to risk that by cutting employees, who are – as hippy-dippy as it sounds – the resource that NPR most needs in order to really connect with its audience.

Problem is, that growing audience is probably facing a budget gap not much smaller than the one currently faced by NPR itself. As a result, they’re not pledging their support like they might. Also, have you noticed the major corporate underwriters? Financial corporations, auto makers.

Something tells me that they’re not crazy just now about donating to the world’s greatest resource for news about their own demise.

What NPR needs to do right now is to put is strongest most powerful resources behind…

No, honestly, my opinion right now is meaningless. Rather, not meaningless, but powerless. And I’m fine with that. It doesn’t matter what I think NPR should or shouldn’t do in times of financial crisis; I’m not the one dealing with the real (and limited) money coming in.

What NPR needs to do right now is to tell its staff to gather their friends and loved ones and make with the hugs and comforting.

Also, someone should give David Folkenflik a hug. No one wants to write about how 64 of their colleagues will be jobless, either in January or in March – the two programs end broadcast March 20th, the day before my wedding.

Thanks for the wedding gift, economy.

Too Drunk To Dream – The Magnetic Fields

And yes, I’m as relieved as anyone else to just know that Bob Garfield only gets another week to talk about election coverage.

Still, my favorite public radio piece on the results has not been the “now what?” or the “The GOP Got the Thumping We Deserve,” but instead this post, from WFMU, that reintroduced me to one of my favorite soul songs of all time, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”

The title for the best version posted is a pretty hotly contested race between the original and the Otis Redding version. But Otis – God rest his soul – could do very little wrong.

What you see above may not seem like it, but it is among the longest drives you can make. Psychologically, anyway.

Were it longer, it could take more than one day – which would be preferable, as you would be able to sleep. Instead, it takes eight hours to get from Memphis to my parents’ house in Indiana, which is just enough of the day to require you to take the whole day off work, and to plan on doing nothing once you finally arrive.

(That said, Kerry and I both worked half days on Thursday, knowing full well that we’d be obscenely exhausted upon arrival in Indiana.)

Some things I’ve noticed:

1. A drive that long is bad for podcasts. Two and a half hours is my limit for time spent as Ira Glass’ captive audience. Oddly, if I’m not driving, that time limit is doubled.
2. The Memphis-Nashville segment of the drive is the perfect amount of time to listen to Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs” and about the only way you’ll be sitting in one place long enough to take the thing in all at once.
3. Two of the four greatest radio stations in the world broadcast along the route. Memphis’ WEVL and Louisville’s WFPK  (The others being Los Angeles’ KCRW and New Jersey’s WFMU) are both fantastic listener-supported  stations that focus on music, rather than news content – all apologies to our friends who work at NPR news programs, sometimes I just want some rock.

And if, as is often the case, I get tired of my iPod on the drive, it’s often as invigorating to pop the tape adapter out of the tape deck and tune in these stations as it is to roll down the window and shout along to the Hold Steady.

Or as invigorating to pour an ice cold energy drink over my head and tear my shirt in two, but I only tried that once.

They’re all streaming online, as all radio stations worth their weight in radio waves do. Go listen.

He passes to the man, and boom goes the dynamite. (It should be noted that this video is exactly why we are both proud to be graduates of Ball State University.)

But yeah. There’ve been a lot of beers, a lot of frustrated moments while trying to figure out why candidates wouldn’t answer questions, but none of that really matters to me. Because while I was playing a drinking game while Twittering, I was in a chat room with Brooke Gladstone. Granted, the comments of participants not invited by WNYC were all moderated (we were very moderated).

Even if the chat room was over-moderated, it was cool of WNYC to have that form of open commentary.

Also, I wanted to mention that Simon Owens had mentioned to me a project he’s been working on – C-SPAN’s DebateHub.  Though C-SPAN isn’t publicly funded, and thus is sort of completely out of our range of discussion, it is the only thing that can put me to sleep faster than “Performance Today,” the daily classical music program that CAN be heard on NPR affiliate stations nationwide.

DebateHub consists of many parts, my favorite being the fact that I could have posted this during the debate – proof that Tom Brokaw didn’t let Barack Obama answer a question about alternative energy:

On his blog, Rob Paterson has at least proposed a solution.

In the new world, we work with our “audience” and with our staff. In this new world, the path to economic success is not clear. If it was we would all go there. But intuitively we all know that BPP has a lot of the new in place. What it is missing is the disconnect from the radio business model. It is not going to be picked up by a whole mass of stations – all of which are themselves reeling from the economy.

I would go public and I would ask for help from the “audience” and the staff to find a way of making this work on the web.

I would make the Bryant Park PROJECT – the community project that would unleash the collective energy of thousands of people.

I like his enthusiasm here, and he asserts that this is a solution not just for the Bryant Park Project, but for NPR – and public media – as a whole.

When he points out that every bit of public media – especially the local stations – is struggling as the nation gets used to a new economy (the web) and a new economic reality (oil-based systems are crumbling), he acknowledges that he doesn’t have the answer, but he knows who does.

By opening public media for comment and ideas, by making public media’s web reality an open-source project of sorts, not only do you get the warm fuzzies of having ‘public’ media become truly ‘public,’ but also the wisdom of crowd-sourcing working in your favor.

But perhaps the most critical question remains unanswered: how are we going to fund this?

I’ve thought for some time that direct donation to specific programs would be a brilliant idea, making more popular programs cheaper for local stations to carry.

Think of it this way: When you buy a Bob Dylan record, Columbia records still gets paid, but your money still goes to Dylan, rather than to Bruce Springsteen. When you buy a Springsteen record, the opposite happens.

But of course, the local stations couldn’t do without the direct donations they receive. So what can be done?

Reader Jaime F., in a comment on the original Forget Ferris post, had some suggestions:

Possibility one – NPR Corporate is convinced that they can’t afford to lose the BPP in terms of future funding AND a nice underwriter is found. I don’t know exactly how underwriting works, but I think it might be the only way for money to go directly to a program.

Possibility two – An NPR member station takes the BPP on in the same way that Car Talk comes from a member station and, I think, get some funding help from NPR Corporate.

Possibility three – Some other company or organization essentially re-creates the BPP under a different name, as it’s NPR’s program (unless, somehow, NPR can sell the program, and I have absolutely no idea if that’s at all possible). So either something like American Public Radio or Sirius?

I really want to hear from somebody high up in NPR about this – I want to know what kind of decisions are being made, whether they’re hearing us raise hell about this, and what of our ideas might work.

 Previous Forget Ferris (save the BPP) Project posts: Day One, Day Two.

This is fairly old news; it looks like the decision came down on June 2nd. If you’re interested in following up on the story, the blog, “Concerned Listeners of KWMU” has been following intently from the beginning.

Even though I lack the 10+ years of full-time experience the job requires, and my degree is in creative writing with a poetry focus (not in music composition like they require), what I do not lack is MOXY.

I’ve got moxy to spare, kids.

Also, I know there are people who read this Web site who are qualified, and I wanted to let you know about the opening as well. I really love Radio Lab. I’m sure they’d do better to hire anyone out of a handful of our readership than to hire me.

So go for it. I’ve got moxy to spare, and I’ll share it.

For the record, I’ve posted my cover letter after the jump.

(Also, if anyone knows of entry-level jobs in public radio that would let me telecommute, I need work! Let me know – immediately.)

Hi,

I saw your posting for the position as Radio Lab producer, and though I meet few of the position’s requirements, I could be the guy you’re looking for.

I have a bachelor of arts in English/creative writing, and though it’s not music composition, I am a musician as well–and am quite familiar with Digidesign’s ProTools, Apple’s GarageBand, and the open-source audio editing app, Audacity.

The creative writing degree also endows me with some serious chops in written communication. For instance, did you notice, in the job listing for this position, that you said “Good written communication skills is required?” I wouldn’t have let that stay. I wouldn’t have even finished typing that sentence before I corrected it.

In all sincerity, if you have doubts about my writing skills, my writing has appeared in a few places: McSweeneys.net, Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists, The Broken Plate, and Writing out of the Margins vol. 6. The McSweeney’s appearances come under my pseudonym, William Wolfe.

Under my own name, I write for and help run the geeky Public Radio fan blog, Radio-Sweethearts.com. My girlfriend and co-writer, Kerry, and I are huge fans of Radio Lab (and, owing largely to the Bryant Park Project’s use of the “Emergency Krulwich,” are considering posting a picture of Krulwich next to our fire extinguisher).

As I have just graduated from college this May, I’m still in the habit of working as hard on a project as I need to, in order to complete it on deadline. If that means I don’t see bed for two or three days, then that’s the way it needs to be, and I’ll approach that challenge as readily as possible.

I am currently based in Memphis, Tenn., and I would prefer to telecommute, if that works for you. This means my living expenses are vastly lower, and I’m physically closer to much of the country than the NYC-based staff is. Because of this, and the fact that my experience in this field is minimal, I’d need no more than $30,000 annually.

I have attached my resumé. If any opportunities arise that better suit my experience, please let me know. My love for your program is deep, and I would love to be involved in any way possible.

with warm regards,
Matthew Trisler
matthew.trisler@gmail.com
www.radio-sweethearts.com