Bill Virgin's Radio Beat October 9, 2008

Includes archive of Bill Virgin's columns fromJ une 2006 - March 2009

Bill Virgin's Radio Beat October 9, 2008

Postby radiofan » Thu Oct 09, 2008 12:09 pm

New public radio show competes with NPR
By BILL VIRGIN
P-I REPORTER


John Hockenberry is a National Public Radio veteran, having been one of its earliest correspondents and newscasters.

Now he finds himself in competition with NPR and its venerable morning drive-time program, building a network of public stations for the new show he co-anchors, "The Takeaway," syndicated by Public Radio International.

But Hockenberry says "The Takeaway" is not an attempt to replicate or reinvent "Morning Edition."

"We're just doing what we consider to be a live morning news show," says Hockenberry, whose show, co-anchored with Adaora Udoji, is heard locally on KSER-FM/90.7 (8-9:30 a.m.) and KXOT-FM/ 91.7 (5-7 a.m.). "The Takeaway," he says, is "live, conversationally driven," an approach that "allows us to take advantage of the instantaneousness of information sources."

"Morning Edition," by contrast, is a magazine show, he says. "It's pretty much all on tape. ... Conversations are a great medium for advancing knowledge about things, whereas sometimes packaged pieces are obsolete the moment you feed them onto the satellite. Live has a lot of advantages."

That calls for a certain amount of flexibility and nimbleness in running the four-hour show. "The work is remaining vigilant to how quickly things are changing in a news environment," says Hockenberry, whose resume also includes stints at NBC's "Dateline," MSNBC and ABC. "There's no such thing as a line-up in our show. We sort of understand what we're doing 20 minutes ahead. On a really quiet day we understand what we're doing two hours ahead. We may set a tentative agenda the afternoon before, but that could change completely by morning."

Of course, the live advantage for a New York-based show is muted on the West Coast by the time difference. Hockenberry says the show's affiliation with the BBC and the New York Times, and access to their correspondents, should give it enough of a world scope to make it relevant to Seattle. And as "The Takeaway" adds more stations on the West Coast, he'd like to see it add hours that are live to the Pacific Time Zone in the prime morning-drive slot.

Reinventing NPR and its news shows has been tried before, most recently by NPR, which launched, and then pulled the plug on, a news show aimed at a younger demographic.

"Rather than think in terms of 'we want a younger audience because that might be more attractive to underwriters or sponsors,' for us the issue is presenting a program that reflects the diversity of the community that we live in, then extrapolating that to a national program," he says. Hockenberry believes there's an enormous potential listenership beyond the traditional public radio audience that can be reached by "not trying to trap young people by being hip and cool, but trying to interest all curious people by presenting content that's stimulating." His goal, he says, is to present information "quickly but not stupidly."

Hockenberry got his start in radio journalism while a student at the music school at the University of Oregon. He started as a volunteer at a community-college station in Eugene, became fascinated with the work, and quickly moved up to the role of regional correspondent for NPR. He later moved to the Seattle area, living in Kent and filing his stories from the studios of KUOW-FM.

From Mount St. Helens to WPPSS to fights over fish, forests, dams and Indian tribes, "all that stuff was great grist for interesting national stories coming out of the region."

Another radio note:Joan Osborne's performance in downtown Seattle is presented on the "Mountain Music Lounge" at 3:15 p.m. Monday on KMTT-FM/103.7.

P-I reporter Bill Virgin can be reached at 206-448-8319 or billvirgin@seattlepi.com.

Bill Virgin's Radio Beat, Thuesdays in the Seattle P-I
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who couldn't hear the music.
User avatar
radiofan
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 13719
Joined: Sun Apr 16, 2006 2:24 pm
Location: Keremeos, BC

Return to Seattle / Washington State Radio News

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 89 guests