For a few months now, I’ve been listening to the podcasts of The Bryant Park Project, a new NPR morning news show. I have mixed reactions to it–it’s a fun radio show, and interesting, but it’s not what I want from NPR in terms of a news show, and I’m extremely wary of the idea that it’s supposed to somehow replace Morning Edition. Basically, I love the feel of the show, and enjoy listening to it, but it absolutely lacks the type of insight and analysis that I depend on NPR for. I can get fun banter anywhere; there are very few places I can get the type of good solid news coverage I get with Morning Edition.
I may not be able to accept BPP as a news show, but I do think they’re doing some really great things. In particular, they’re using their blog as major supplement to the show, in some interesting ways. One great example of this is the saga of Luke Burbank (co-host of the Bryant Park Project) and Sigur Ros (offbeat Icelandic band).
Our story starts with the members of Sigur Ros coming to the BPP studios for an interview, and the interview going badly. Really badly. So badly that (as far as I can tell) none of it made it into the actual radio broadcast, but video of the whole experience was posted on the BPP blog. In the comments for that post, there’s, er, a healthy debate on the question of whether Luke or the band was to blame for the awfulness of the interview. The BPP crew encouraged this discussion, and later linked to another site conducting a poll on whether the real problem was that Luke Burbank was an idiot. (Their words, not mine!)
What really impressed me, though, was the most recent turn in the story. Today they posted a fifteen-minute video in which music journalist Jancee Dunn sits down with Luke to review the interview video and comment on what went wrong. Jancee’s conclusion seems to be that both Luke and the band were at fault, but Luke was probably a bigger part of the problem–he’s not doing the right things to draw them out, he’s too self-conscious and apologetic about asking questions, he’s trying too hard to be offbeat and not successfully managing the conversation. It’s a great mini-seminar on good interviewing practices, and it’s also kind of fun to watch, just to see Jancee wincing at particularly bad questions.
This is a beautiful example of integrated media–the blog has some life and function of its own outside of the radio show, and is used to extend the scope of the radio show into the blog community. I think this kind of thing is why I’m sticking with the Bryant Park Project despite my deep skepticism about their value as a news show.
(Unrelatedly, but while I’m posting: does anyone have any more information on this whole James Watson thing? I’d love to see a full text of what he said, to see if it’s any less bizarre and offensive when it’s in a full context.)
Posted Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 1:45 pm. Filed under: personal > writing and editing.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
The Watson quote is from an interview with The Sunday Times, and it gives a little more context:
“He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.”
So basically, no, it’s not any better when it’s in a full context. That’s unfortunate.
Susan! I posted the first of a series of reflections on the Watson thing at my newish Wordpress site (see link below). I have no idea if they’ll all go up, or if I will sensibly decide to write my seminar papers instead. (28 years old… writing seminar papers… in the Land of Eternal Youth… We should, like, hang out at the mall sometime soon, yeah? Maybe with that boy I have the crush on.)
Nope, Watson is a crackpot and has been for a while. There’s a Nature editorial–I’ll try to find it–saying pretty much that.
Tragically, Crick thinks maybe DNA came from outer space, so you can’t even take sides.