Entries associated with the tag "Wbez":

It arose when people came to know about the mechanism of the neuroses, which threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men. It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness.

--Sigmund Freud 

One last, very theoretical thought on :Vocalo, which is causing such a stir over in the comments to this week's Hot Type (I was surprised to find it's flown under the radar otherwise).

If fiction tells a lie to get to the truth, traditional journalism/non-fiction/etc is supposed to be truths that tell the truth. But it's more complicated than that. Journalism is a very thin veneer of a very particular concept of civilization sitting uncomfortably atop a boundlessly strange world.

Broadly speaking, journalists--and, increasingly, bloggers--sift through everything in the world to present a small, clear slice of it that people are traditionally presumed to be interested in. Metaphorically speaking, when a beat writer goes to a Sox game, he or she ignores the trivial (Carlos Quentin grounds out in the 3rd, dude spills beer on  the ground), highlights what's important or unusual within the frame of reference (Quentin hits game winning home run, dude beats up umpire), and passes on information that you may need, if you are interested in the subject generally, to act on (the game was rained out and so there'll be a doubleheader tomorrow). And so it is for politics, technology, transit, food, and so forth.

And there's nothing wrong with that, and it's a very important service to the world. People, including me, want or need to know the baseball-relevant facts of what happened at each game, and if Mark Gonzalez went off on a tangent about how a guy got drunk and punched an usher, he'd subvert the expectations of the reader, or maybe miss an important detail about how Scott Linebrink is pitching right now. Which is something I care about, at least a bit.

But if you consider a baseball game as an event, as a gathering of souls (see DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall, one of the greatest pieces of American literature, for how a lie tells the truth), that's an almost incomprehensibly small portrait of the game as a whole. Anyone who's ever been to a baseball game knows that frequently the events on the field are inconsequential at a given moment, or to a given percentage of the crowd (especially at Wrigley). Consider what you relay to your friends after a game--something quite meaningless to anyone else, such as catching a foul ball, usually takes precedence over something more generally meaningful to the audience, such as Scott Linebrink getting lit up.

In short: for all the vital use of professional journalism and its related activities, it's not necessarily true. It's like that moment in the R. Kelly trial where the defense claimed that a recording of the sex tape was exact, when in fact it had been converted from one medium to another, resulting in an inevitable loss of information. Did it look the same? We have no way of knowing, but to the human eye there's a good chance it did. Was it exact? No.

So I understand the impulse behind :Vocalo, I really do, for the same reasons I have very mixed feelings about online comment sections. On one hand, the comment sections in your typical generalist publication are a fetid backwater of banality and insanity, and who cares? On the other hand... maybe that's good? Maybe it's a necessary corrective to news and editorial, with their assumption that a non-trivial number of people care more about Obama's long-term energy policy than whether he's a secret Muslim radical?

I don't know. But it's worth considering. The idea that actual training in traditional journalism and its related fields enforces a limited view of the world is not without merit, or at least not insane. If you can't or are unwilling to listen to :Vocalo, imagine a newspaper turned upside down, where the comments and letters to the editor are on the front page. Uncharitably, imagine the inmates running the asylum.

:Vocalo might be a profound deconstruction of radio. It might be a failure that inadvertently raises profound questions for some about the medium, like the Shaggs vis a vis pop music (see also). Or it might just be a waste of money. I don't know that the verdict is in yet.

Over at :Vocalo they're discussing whether Segways are gay or not (not gay as in gay, but gay as in gay).

They're gay, the hosts* agree. (The Navy is gay, but old-school gay. Cowboys are also gay, they agree.) It's part of a segment called "Gay or not Gay." Which is new. To :Vocalo, I mean.

Michael Miner explains what's going on over there. 

*One of the hosts is gay, as in homosexual, so it's ok. 

The FASTForward Blog » Getting from Here to There - How Torey Malatia is solving the Innovator’s Dilemma

"Vocalo is the innovation frequency."

Steven Poole: Goodbye, cruel Word

"Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?"

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis - World-wise web? Finally on the horizon are computers that can reason

"Imagine, for instance, being able to ask a computer, “Where should I go on holiday?” and receiving an answer that is as suitable as anything you could have come up with yourself."

Q&A With 'The Good Rat' Author Jimmy Breslin -- New York Magazine

Backronym - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"A backronym (or bacronym or also retronym) is a phrase that is constructed "after the fact" from a previously existing word or abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym."

Proceedings of the trial against Galileo Galilei

"In document (a), you can see one of the original interrogations of Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition"

A Chat With George W. Bush’s Conscience | Health Policy | DISCOVER Magazine

A weak Russia—one that cannot sustain a labor force, restore its social safety net or rebuild decaying infrastructure—risks becoming an unstable Russia. And instability in a country with the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council poses a danger the U.S. and Western Europe can ill afford.

It doesn't involve a doctor trading drugs for sex or the traditional local flashpoint of bikers vs. SUV drivers or actors of some note filming things in nearby states, and the Tribune pretty much buried it on the homepage today, so I think it falls to me to say read this article on cities in eastern Russia and enjoy it while the Trib continues to show some commitment to National Geographic-style, analytic foreign reporting. The photography's also very good, not to mention the sidebar on the health care system.

Also worth your time: "A Job Looking for a Job" by WBEZ Englewood reporter Natalie Moore. 

I got some polite beef, via e-mail, from Vocalo staff over a recent post in which I kind of let them have it about their first few days on the air and online. Thinking about it, I'm wondering if that was unfair--not the specific criticisms, which were legit, but in criticizing it at all.

What Vocalo plans to do is develop, slowly, as a quasi-online community. A number of the Internet's biggest success stories, including such citizen-journalism sites as Talking Points Memo and Firedoglake, started modestly as blogs and evolved to the point where they were doing actual journalism. The former started as the Web side project of an established if not especially prominent political journalist named Josh Marshall and has since taken on employees and spearheaded investigations into the U.S. Attorney scandal. The latter began as a place for a Hollywood producer and a West Virginia lawyer to obsess about the Valerie Plame affair and has since become a go-to site for up-to-the-minute live blogging of the Scooter Libby trial and various hearings.

Pitchfork, possibly the most widely read indie music site on the Web, also started small. It sucked when it started. When I profiled founder Ryan Schreiber a few years ago, he mentioned that he didn't really have any idea what he was doing and wasn't a particularly good writer, but he just stuck it out because that was what he wanted to do. The reviews got longer and better and gained more readers as the years went by. It never really "broke" or "exploded"--its readership just grew steadily as the product improved.

This, it's clearer to me now, is what Vocalo wants to do. Rightly or not, however, it's much harder for established media organizations to grow a project quietly from an experiment into a full-fledged source of content. The early, bad Pitchfork didn't get buried by criticism because it was just some dude's thing, so no one cared if it sucked because no one expected it not to. Chicago Public Radio can't do that, or at least people like me haven't allowed them to. It's at least worth asking whether they should be given the same right to suck as everyone else.

It's worth pointing out that here that radio is a difficult medium for citizen journalism. Almost everyone writes; almost everyone takes pictures. That doesn't mean that anyone can be a journalist or a photographer, but it does mean that lots of people have exposure to the fundamental building blocks of those media. This means that the pool of skilled amateurs is large, and it's skilled amateurs who become "citizen journalists" and also actual professionals.

But not many people record sound for fun, and that's what radio is. If every family in America had a tape recorder and mic laying around, if every cell phone being made nowadays had a voice recorder, that might be different. But as it stands, radio is a medium that people are less likely to play around with, and thus they're much less likely to pick up the basic skills inadvertently.

Which isn't to say that dooms Vocalo, just that the burden of finding talented contributors from the general public will be greater than if they were working with text, photographs, or even video. As such, I expect that Vocalo's development will be slow, particularly by professional media standards and even by community journalism standards, and so maybe we're all going to have to be much more patient with it than we'd normally be with a mass-media venture.

When Chicago Public Radio announced that it would launch its "secret radio project," aka Vocalo, only in northwest Indiana, it seemed like a letdown. Now that it's live and streaming at vocalo.org, their "soft launch"--not only confined to Indiana and the south side, but also limited to four to five hours a day during the work week--seems more like a blessing. Because this radio station isn't ready for prime time.

(Oh no . . . they're playing Sixpence None the Richer as I'm writing this . . . the last time I heard that, it was on Muzak at Village Discount Outlet.)

Right now Vocalo combines all the qualities of amateur podcasting with the convenience of terrestrial radio--if you're outside its broadcast range, the only way to listen to it is on a live and occasionally buggy mp3 stream. None of the shows are archived in any form. The "playlist" for Darlene's Wednesday show this week reads in full: "these are the people in your neighborhood--a best of my fave interviews."

Worth noting that's a best-of for one host, who has been on the air for three hours over a couple weeks. Her name is Darlene Jackson; she's a club DJ as well as a "writer, producer, record label owner and creative director." She kicked off her best-of by talking to someone about her vacation home in Beverly Shores, Indiana, asking the sorts of questions that would be of value to a club DJ. "I can see you having crazy parties . . . do you have crazy, crazy parties there?" The answer was yes, fortunately. So, Darlene concluded, "For the longest time I wondered why Indiana was part of Chicagoland. What does Indiana have to do with Chicago? Now I know it's a great getaway."

Later in the show she had someone from the Cook County juvie read a Maya Angelou poem badly. The host who followed her, Brian, aka Brian Babylon, played the exact same recording not more than 20 minutes later, the third time I'd heard it in three days of listening.

Vocalo is deeply in thrall to the cult of the amateur. Of the station's seven hosts (half of the promised 14), one is an actual journalist (Reader contributor Dan Weissmann), one is a documentary filmmaker, and one teaches media production and literacy at Columbia. One has actually worked for radio stations. Number seven is a "clinical/community psychologist and personal coach."

And the results are exactly what you would expect, if you're the skeptical type, from a small cast of nonprofessionals. The high point thus far has been Weissmann's engaging interview with the great historian Timuel D. Black Jr. It was pretty standard public radio journalism, like an 848 bit. 

Later in the broadcast afternoon, Brian Babylon was laughing along with a song called "Why Do You Think You Are Nuts" ("why do you think you are nuts / eating cigarette butts . . . did your daddy beat you?") by a multicultural baby-boomer punk band, but he didn't catch the name of the band, despite having two different versions of the song and having seen the video.

This is a frequent problem on Vocalo, not knowing or caring to tell the listeners what they're listening to. During the previous set, Darlene played an interesting, brief interview with a Nigerian immigrant discussing the differences between African immigrants and African-Americans. She described it as "a conversation that one of my colleagues had." I went to the site to see if there was more information, but I only found the previously mentioned "playlist."

(Now they're playing another interview, with a woman who has a British accent. She's talking about cabs in between yelling at her dogs. She always has problems with Indian cab drivers. "That's a little bit from a young lady who's got drama," says Brian Babylon. Yes, but who is she? Now "your boy" Brian Babylon is signing off with the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army." His "main man" Usama is next.)

The amateurism isn't exclusive to the programs. The "Meet the Hosts" page is a good example of why you should resize pictures in an image-editing program instead of resizing them with the HTML code. Here's another example of the importance of resizing pictures. Many of the blog posts are incomprehensible or just weird. And they have to cut down on the ALL CAPS and the LOLs. I'd also recommend deleting the test blog posts. 

I could see Vocalo working if it was just their current cast of radio amateurs with some content from WBEZ pros, or if it was a group of radio veterans corralling a cast of amateur contributors from the general public, but as it stands Vocalo consists of the severely nearsighted leading the blind, and it's mostly a train wreck.

(Now they're playing audio from someone who just ate a bunch of pot brownies. He really wants to know what the score of the Red Wings game is. "Time is going by really, really, really, really slow." I'll say. Wait . . . it's apparently a cop who seized a bunch of pot and cooked it into brownies. "He hasn't been fired," Usama says. Who's the cop? Is he CPD? Is this an issue of public concern? Now they're playing jazz, so I guess not.) 

I can't help but think that the desperation for "nontraditional talent" must stem from the overwhelming success of This American Life, a program that has introduced defiantly nonradio voices like hypersqueaky Sarah Vowell to the medium. But TAL orbits around Ira Glass, a man who's been in the business since he was in college and had done practically everything that can be done on the radio before he started his masterwork.

It's not just that Glass has a gift; he's also developed the ability, over a career in the business, to make the amateur sound professional and vice versa. He makes it look easy, but radio is anything but. If Chicago Public Radio learns anything from this "soft launch," I hope it's that.

(This morning "Kiss Me" was stuck in my head. I demand a no-Sixpence pledge from Vocalo.)

PS: If you want to learn from the best, Ira Glass gave a master class to transom.org readers awhile back. It's great advice not only for people getting started in radio, but for journalists in general.

WBEZ's Secret Radio Project (the voice of northwest Indiana ) now has a name: it's ":Vocalo," according to organizers "a combination of the words 'vocal' (for voices) and 'zocalo' (a Spanish word meaning public square)."

"Vocal" (for voices). Indeed. There's nothing in the mailing about the colon, probably because the sentence would have to be amended to read ": (a marketing affectation meaning hep)."

A friend pointed out to me today that the concept behind the Secret Radio Be-In ("a creative free-for-all with no stuffy time slots," says Chicago Public Radio's Daniel Ash. "Some of the most brilliant scenes have been when there’s no programming and people are just there, coming together. . . . Take that vision and imagine a virtual space or a radio spectrum that brings that visual but the people are connecting") has been tried before by CBS affiliate KYOU in San Francisco.

Most of the current KYOU lineup is good music with a few podcasts mixed in. Offerings include the laugh-tracked monstrosity "Jazz Diaries," which promises to be "as if Garrison Keillor and Lord Buckley were hanging at a jazz lounge talking about women, music and martinis" but is more like Ken Nordine for people who listen to the Cherry Poppin' Daddies; "Mac OS Ken," the latest news from the Mac world; and "The Guy Bauer Half Hour," a loud morning-drive-like show from New Jersey. There are also professional podcasts from Paste magazine, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ben Fong-Torres, Chrysler Music Legends, and PBS's Rick Steves.

The station is probably a good indication of what the Secret Radio Project will sound like if it fails -- lots of easily programmed content (music), with podcasts of wildly varying quality. I suspect that Vocalo has a better chance, public radio being more adventurous than big-media AM chains and catering to a different audience, but it's worth remembering that creating audio content is hard because the technical barriers so high. Those interested in contributing to Vocalo should check out transom.org, a forum for amateur radio fans interested in breaking into NPR with invaluable advice and guides on the form.