“That tech show”

Back in June 2007, I got an email from Nora Young. The subject line read:

that tech show

At the time, I knew Nora had been working on a pitch for a show called Spark. I’d heard the pilots, and they sounded great. But in June 2007, when I first got Nora’s message, I had no idea that I’d end up spending the next four and a half years of my working life on “that tech show.”

Working on Spark has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my time at CBC Radio. Every day, I work alongside a small team of really talented people, making the kind of show I’d want to listen to (I mean, seriously, what other show would let me dedicate the majority of a broadcast to an in-depth look at the history of QWERTY?). I count myself very, very lucky. Sometimes people ask me what I do for living, and I tell them, “I call up smart, interesting people, talk to them, and put them on the radio.” Sure beats any other job I’ve ever had.

Which is why today is bittersweet.

Today is my last day working at Spark for at least for a year. And even though I’m leaving for a pretty awesome year-long adventure in France, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit misty-eyed. I’m going to miss it all: the story meetings, recording interviews, slicing and dicing tape in Pro Tools, and interacting with “the broader Spark community.” But more than anything, I’m going to miss Nora and the whole team who work so hard to put Spark together every week.

Spark, when it works — when it really, really nails it — is a show about what’s next. It’s a forward-looking show made by forward-looking people. So yes, I’m sad to be leaving. But at the same time, I can’t wait to hear what Spark comes up with next.

I’ll be listening.

Bake it in

According to Tony Schwartz, the key to getting things done is habit, ritual, and routine:

Most everyone I meet feels pulled in more directions than ever, expected to work longer hours, and asked to get more done, often with fewer resources. But in these same audiences, there are also, invariably, a handful of people who are getting things done, including the important stuff, and somehow still managing to have a life.

What have they figured out that the rest of their colleagues have not?

The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.

I wholeheartedly agree.

For instance, when we do pre-taped radio interviews for Spark, immediately after the interview, we record a “wrap” — a quick, 30 second web-only audio intro and extro. We tidy up the ends, then drop the audio file onto a script that encodes an MP3, adds metadata, uploads the interview to the web, and spits out a URL suitable for blogging. Because it’s part of the routine, and highly automated, putting full interviews online requires only a small amount of extra work.

In other words, it’s easy because it’s been ritualized, or (as I like to say) “baked into the process.”

Early days

What are the major consequences of internet on society and culture? Perhaps it’s too early to tell.

Clay Shirky, on last week’s episode of Spark:

If you had gone to Germany in the mid-1470s and said, let’s see what this printing press is doing, right, you would miss novels, you would miss newspapers, you would miss the rise of scientific publication, you would miss Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” you would miss the Venetian publishing industry. So many of the changes brought by the kind of abundance created by the printing press were in the second 50 years of its existence, if not the second century of its existence, that I think that over-extrapolating from current trends would leave us in the same position as if we tried to do the printing press in 1473.

And Bob Stein, on last week’s episode of On The Media:

Here’s a wonderful sort of factoid which may be helpful: The Western version of the printing press is invented in 1454. It takes 50 years for page numbers to emerge. It took humans that long to figure out that it might be useful to put numbers onto the pages.

Or, as management-types like to say, “It’s early days.”

Why your radio show should put transcripts online

Bruce Melzer on why NPR.org makes transcripts of its radio stories free online:

There are solid business reasons for making transcripts free. Sales have been dropping over the years. As people search for, discover and share content, offering free transcripts will boost the traffic to NPR.org, traffic that can be monetized with sponsorship. Finally, search engines like text. Many of our stories could not be found by the search engines because they did not have enough text. Now it will be easier for the search engines — and ultimately the users — to find and enjoy NPR’s stories.

On the Media from WYNC puts transcripts of all of its interviews online, and they’re extremely helpful. It’s something we’ve tried on Spark, and would like to do more of. And, as Julien Smith says, “the web is built around text, not sound.”

Update: My pal Rhiannon makes another excellent point:

i like when radio puts up transcripts. it’s really useful for me if i’m listening to something, say on a morning show (especially pre-coffee), and i’m like “wow! this would be great info for my/ someone else’s research!!” listening to the radio is great, but to be able to pass the info along to others (or save it for myself) who can use it at a later time is really useful from an academic’s perspective. i wish cbc did more of this all around.

Consider me zapped

I think a lot about Spark, the radio program I work on. I talk a lot about Spark, too — mostly to Liz and Nora (my co-workers), to listeners, and to other radio people.

This past weekend I attended Zap Your PRAM, a non-conference organized by Charlottetown-based silverorange and Reinvented. I was asked to give a talk loosely based on “how being involved with a radio show that tries to use the web in new and interesting ways has actually worked out.” And it was a genuinely refreshing experience. Mostly because (I think) I wasn’t talking to a group of radio people. I was talking to a group of technologists.

The format of talks at Zap lends itself to interjections, questions, spontaneous discussions, and derailments. Which was wonderful. Rather than walking in, presenting my prepared points, playing my prepared clips, and taking question at the end, the flow of comments and questions seemed to start almost immediately, smack dab in the middle of what I thought I was going to talk about.

As someone who’s used to performing off a script, it was scary. Terrifying, even. People asked questions about points I hadn’t made yet. People questioned things I take as givens. And through it all, the participants got me thinking about the work I do in ways I hadn’t thought of before. (A particularly helpful comment came from Rob Paterson, who mentioned NPR’s Bryant Park Project, Planet Money, and the difference between radio -> web and web -> radio.)

And I think that’s sort of what made Zap wonderful for me — the ecclectic mix of people with perspectives that I would probably never otherwise have access to.

Did I make all the points I wanted to make in my talk? No.

Did I properly articulate anything about how I see the relationship between public broadcasting and social media? Probably not as clearly as I would have liked.

But in the “inline discussion” during my talk, and in the various chats I had with people one-on-one afterwards, I picked up some very useful nuggets from some very smart people that may help our radio show continue to improve. Hanging around designers for a weekend’ll do that, I guess.

Between the talks, the venue (beautiful), the amazing food, and the great people I met and talked to, Zap was a great success. Congrats and thanks to Steven, Dan, and especially Peter, who not only invited me, but took me on a Sunday afternoon tour of Charlottetown after the conference was over. The Überloo was a touchless wonder. Consider me zapped.