? ChInuk Wawa reydiyo haws ?

[Jeffrey Kopp]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 19:13:47 -0800, Mike Cleven <ironmtn at BIGFOOT.COM>
wrote:

>What would be easier, maybe, would be to come up with syndicatable
>shorts that could either be played on demand from off the web or
>syndicated out to certain radio shows and stations who like this kind of
>thing.  

Yes, exactly.  Buried in my rambling message was a similar seed of an
idea.  I "worked" at KBOO in its very early days (as a young teenager
I was allowed to hang around the station), and I learned a lot from
my patient mentor there about the difficulties and realities of
getting a community radio station off the ground.  (With dedicated
support and much diligent work, KBOO succeeded and thrives today,
while similar efforts in other cities have failed or are failing.)
Later in high school I had the opportunity to intern at KOAP-TV (now
KOPB) for a summer.  This was a much more conventional operation to
be sure, but still one struggling (at that time) with very limited
resources.  These experiences gave me a realistic notion of how much
effort is required to get a basic but informative half-hour on the
air.

I later edited a short series of weekly radio programs during a brief
stint in college.  These were simple interviews which involved just
two workers and were relatively easy to do.  The spots were carried
by a small commercial rock station (in Roseburg, yaay!) as
public-service or news time and worked well.  But each 10-minute
program still took two to three man-hours to create.

The way the interview programs worked was quite simple:  a journalism
student took a cassette recorder and a list of questions and to an
appointment with a subject on campus and got an interview.  But I
went a bit further with it; I reviewed the tape and took careful
notes and constructed an outline.  Without altering the interview
significantly, I did some reorganizing, and the product was much more
coherent.  (I essentially retro-scripted the interview.  A cassette
transcriber is very handy.)  Just five or six judicious edits and
dropping a couple irrelevant or sidetracked minutes improved the
program a lot.

I'd suggest that something in this neighborhood (say, two or three
people making 30 minutes a month) would be a good level to shoot at
for starters.  Accumulate four or six 15-minute segments so there
will be enough to offer an air outlet to review, select and schedule.
(They could be run as a block or spread over a week or month,
whatever.)  Positive results on such a scale could likely be achieved
in short order, which would then attract both more help and (by
establishing some reputation by example) more willing subjects and
sources.  With care it can grow.  A lot.

Regards,

Jeff