Put Your Money where Your M…M… Maker Is

by Sue Schardt, Executive Director of the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)

I took the helm of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, Inc., in September 2007. Actually, it’s been more like taking the reins of a wild, bucking bronco. The mandate given me by the board of directors was to find new advantages for radio producers in the diversifying and ever-expanding electronic media universe. Indeed, AIR is a 20-year old organization comprised of makers – 663 of them – from all ranks of the industry and beyond. We count among us the brightest independent public radio familiars -- David Isay, Davia Nelson and Nikka Silva (better known as the Kitchen Sisters), Jay Allison, Barrett Golding/Hearing Voices. We have the most respected “producers’ producers,” some of whose work is seldom heard on public radio airwaves today – Tom Lopez, Gary Covino, Stephen Erickson. Today’s expanding field is also infused with leading podcasters, sound artists, and bright “emerging” talent such as Sean Cole, Curtis Fox, Ann Hepperman, Kara Oehler, Jad Abumrad…to name just a few.

AIR is growing at an unprecedented rate. In the last year, we’ve expanded membership by more than 30% and, since the first of the year, we’re adding new members at a rate of three each week. Something is happening. For one thing, we’re in the midst of a new era of creative expansion. The twenty years past have brought about a fantastically successful public radio defined by the dynamic relationship between the 270 originating public radio stations, the networks – NPR, PRI, and APM – and the unique audience they reach. This model is growing more and more obsolete. The drivers of the industry – funders and system leaders – would do well to recognize, in this shifting balance, the power of individual makers. The new paradigm we are creating will be fueled and accelerated as sufficient financial resources and support are directed to exciting and talented producers – I refer to them as “bright sparks.” We must identify them, and explicitly charge them with helping to lead us forward. Let’s take a deeper look at what’s behind the current creative expansion to consider where to begin imagining, and building, a new public media paradigm.

The growth of AIR is driven principally by three trends – all with lines connecting back to the tech-stimulated creative expansiveness of these times. First, there is a rush of younger producers excited about the creative possibilities of sound and storytelling who are looking for a way into a working career in the audio/radio field. We can thank Ira Glass and This American Life for just about single-handedly inspiring this new generation and drawing them in. Secondly, while AIR has always had a diverse membership in terms of expertise, there is a blurring line between the audio creatives and the more straight ahead public radio news-feature and documentary producers who have typically comprised AIR’s membership. The membership now includes stalwarts like Barbara Bogaev, once host of Weekend America, as well as Brenda Hutchinson, whose “bell project” has her up and out at dawn and dusk each day at various places around the country and the world inviting people to clang away with her. Thirdly, station and network staff, recognizing the need for creative thinkers and makers, are more and more drawn to AIR’s unique and diverse community. By joining AIR they’re able to mingle and meet producers and audio artists of all stripes, and find juice and inspiration for their own ideas.

The unprecedented technology-driven change in media has broad impact not only on AIR and its membership, but also on the priorities of the listener and investor alike. These times inspire new thinking and movement towards letting go of current models. The February Integrated Media Conference in L.A. brought together 450 public television, radio, and on-line producers and managers who have taken up the cause of exploring and charting our new territory. Executive Director Mark Fuerst, in his closing conference remarks, talked about the importance of “forgetting,” a concept borrowed from the book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

The idea is that in order to make room for something new, one of the first things you have to do is forget…to let go of all of the lessons and experience that led you to success. Fuerst points out the inherent predicament; on one hand, there is extreme pressure to maintain the core business that is like sand shifting beneath our feet. On the other hand is the need to devise and implement a way forward in a world where outcomes are largely unknown.

What do we need to “forget,” then, in public radio? There are two sacred concepts that make a good starting point: the supremacy of content, and public service.

Let’s start first with public service. Public service is public broadcasting’s holy grail. Service defines our very reason for being. We have in public broadcasting over the years devised specific and clear audience research methods to measure and define “public service.” More measured listeners = more success at serving the public = more compelling reason to be funded, be picked up by a distributor, or to be given air-time on a broadcast outlet. The public service mantra also offers a blend of humility and make-the-world-a-better-place sensibility that’s pleasing to the dominant culture of the industry.

I know and understand service. I spent some years in a past life waiting tables, cooking in really hot kitchens, and putting drinks up on a bar. Thinking of service evokes an image of carrying a tray over to a small clutch of people in a crowded room and saying, “Would you like a spinach and feta stuffed mushroom cap?” Or going back to the guy at the end of the bar with “How ‘bout another martini?” Service is not a bad thing at all…I’m not suggesting at all that we just kick public service to the curb. But in this time of forgetting, of re-imagining everything, I wonder what it would mean to let go of public service and consider a new raison d’être mantra?

In a new vision of public radio, we can begin to discern that the greatest gift – AIR’s greatest asset as a society of makers – is not serving the listener. Our unique strategic advantage is in our ability to reach in, and actually move listeners by speaking to their hearts, their minds, and their imaginations. That is our business. I can tell you that every single one of the 30 million listeners who tune to public radio has been intellectually or emotionally moved. They can often remember exactly where and when it happened. It may have been the Greg McVicar’s feature on Bonnie Jo Hunt who sings with crickets from Hearing Voices, or Garrison Keillor reciting Linda Pastan’s The Last Uncle on Writers Almanac, or David Kestenbaum’s beautifully crafted All Things Considered feature on gyroscopes in space. And it only takes once to bring them in. Only once to call them one of our own.

I propose we envision a new world built on movement; that we understand and – each of us – set ourselves in our work to the task of moving our listeners. If only a small number of us took this up with passion and with intention, it would be revolutionary.

The next proposition in our “forgetting” exercise has to do with the business of content, and the point I’ll make here brings us back around to something I wrote earlier about the preeminence of the maker in these times. Everyone talks about content all the time…taking content on-line…creating compelling content….re-purposing content. Well, content doesn’t just bubble up from the ground. Everything we have, indeed, everything we have made since the inception of the industry came about because one single individual had a spark. They imagined something. And he or she turned around and went about making it. We short-change – or I should say, short-sight – ourselves when we settle for a conversation about content without recognizing its source.

Bob Davoli, a member of AIR's Advisory Group, is a venture capitalist. He is in the business of finding winning ideas, and he’s very good at it. He’s inspired me with his approach to choosing the companies he’ll investment in.

Imagine a stone dropped into a still pond. The stone represents the inspiration – the creative entrepreneur. The Maker. The ripples are an after-effect that, as you move out from the center, become, as Bob describes it, “a diffused echo chamber.” The focal point of each of Davoli’s decisions, and the financial support he brings to help someone realize their idea, hinges on the qualities – the smarts, the passion, the determination – of the person at the center of the ripples. Davoli says, “the intensity of innovation — the halo — really begins to wane the further you get from the innovator,” moving out with each successive ripple to investors, industry analysts, to industry press, and then out to mainstream journalists.

Every time I now hear or read “content,” I experience a short pause in my thinking. I’ve developed an awareness that “content” has become a throw-away word. When I’m done pausing and move a bit further into the thought, I understand that content is an abstraction of the deeper reality that has an individual maker inspired – at the center of all that we do. I challenge you, reader, to try this exercise. Pause every time you hear “content.” In your pause, let yourself wonder about the person who made what you’re hearing or watching or reading. What moved them to make this work? Understand that you’re experiencing the fruit of human inspiration.

If only a small fraction of you who are investing in the broadcast industry developed this simple awareness, I believe the impact would be profound. Understand the centrality of the maker, and it will influence your priorities. It will, in a small and powerful way, give you a way “in” to having true, guided effect on the changes swirling around us. We are – all of us – called, in this new reality, to seek out the brightest sparks, to support and celebrate them. Indeed, let them lead the way.

We’re in a creatively charged time. It is finite. Soon enough, the circle will come round again and we’ll be back in a phase marked with predictability, perhaps a safer time. For those of us who thrive in uncertainty, for even those who aren’t sure, it is a time to be aware. “Attention is vitality,“ Susan Sontag, a maker was she, once said. “It connects you with others. Makes you eager.”

Pause, and notice. Know inspiration, and let it be your guide.

Sue Schardt is the Executive Director of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. She launched SchardtMEDIA Strategies in 1998 to focus on independent, ideas-driven projects throughout the US and overseas. This year, Schardt celebrates her 20th anniversary of spinning free-form music on WMBR-FM in Cambridge, MA.

[Published 2008-04-29]