Author: joyce

The story I did for PRI’s The World, about language and money, re-airs (with bonus material!) this week on Patrick Cox‘s podcast, The World in Words.  You can hear it here. My piece comes right after the start of the show.

In other news, my video consulting gig has finished up and I’ll be returning to radio freelance work in the new year.  Hello you lovely mix of freedom and poverty, I’m back.

Did you know that?

It’s funny how the tangents of an interview often make for the most compelling material. Like what I learned today. Listen Here Running time 18 seconds

That’s stroke specialist Dr. Mitchell Elkind of Columbia University.

Please excuse the lack of posts lately, I’ve been full-time employed for the last couple of months as senior producer/consultant at a soon-to-be-revealed video site. I can’t say much else about it yet, but here’s me on the new gig:

 

My story about an economist’s curious new findings aired Monday on PRI’s The World. It’s gotten a stronger response than any story I’ve produced so far, it seems the debate over language differences really raises some passion.

Listen Here Running time 5:35

I spent last week (Sept. 20-23) at the Public Radio Programing Conference in Baltimore. I was representing AIR as a New Voices Scholar at the conference. There were 21 of us all together, of varying ages but all within about five years of first entering the radio industry. I enjoyed making my first ever trip to Baltimore and made a number of friends I hope to stay in contact with in the coming years.

Following the conference we were asked to write a report telling the story of our passion for public. I’d like to think of it as a sort of manifesto for why I make public radio. Here it is:

Some people grow up listening to public radio like other people grow up Democrat or Catholic, it’s just part of their family’s identity. Me, I’d never even tuned in to my local NPR station until just before I started interning there. But within a few months of discovering public radio, specifically science radio, I knew it would shape the rest of my life.

In late 2008 I was finally coming to terms with the fact that I might not be cut out for my current career. In college I’d channeled my fascination with brains and behavior into a neuroscience degree. Since then I’d worked in a number of research labs. I’d performed hippocampus surgery on mice, used MRI scans to measure brain volumes of children with autism, and analyzed electrical signals coming from people’s scalps when they saw pictures of faces. On paper that might sound really interesting, and I did love talking about neuroscience research and the theories behind it. But no matter how much I liked the bigger picture behind my lab duties, for me the daily reality of the work felt repetitive, lonely, and frankly, dull. I started seeking out volunteer work in hopes of discovering something I felt more excited about. While in a training to help at a woman’s shelter, I heard a lecturer make a comment about mental illness that contradicted current research. I talked with him afterward, and surprised myself by how passionate I was to share my science knowledge. “You know what?” he told me, “You should start a neuroscience podcast.”

That suggestion really caught me off guard. I’d been ready to give up on science forever, it just didn’t seem to be working out for me. I wasn’t quite ready to follow his advice, but I credit him for first giving me the idea that maybe science wasn’t wrong for me, I just needed to go about it in a different way. A few months later I met a woman from the local community radio station. She encouraged me to attend their reporter training classes. After I’d done my training and explained my research background the news director began assigning me science features. I still remember gathering my first bit of tape, a conversation with a climate change scientist. My microphone hand shook throughout the entire interview, but I loved learning about the research he’d conducted. Better yet, a few days later I heard my story on the air and realized I’d just gotten to share that learning experience with a few hundred other people. I started spending a couple of days a week at the station, addicted to the process of fine-tuning scripts, editing cuts, and mixing my own stories. I’d never done anything before that brought with it such pride and enjoyment.

Within a six month period, producing radio went from a passing fancy to something I was determined to spend the rest of my life pursuing. I knew that to move forward I needed to break into a larger audience. I started transcribing tape for a reporter at my local NPR affiliate station to figure out what this national public radio thing was all about. She helped me land the station’s reporting internship, where I learned how to produce news and feature stories for wider broadcast. I realized that if I wanted to continue spending so much time making radio I needed to get paid for it, and that wasn’t going to happen at my intern and volunteer-saturated local radio station. So a year ago I followed a whim and moved to New York City where I started getting serious about freelancing. It’s taken more focus than I ever thought I had, but the pay-off has been the excitement of getting to work with Radiolab, PRI’s The World, Deutsche Welle Radio, and a number of NPR affiliate stations. In the past few months I’ve started to realize I really have become a “real” independent radio producer, and I’m excited for the opportunities to come.

When it comes down to it, my reasons for loving public radio are largely selfish. Contributing to it is the most personally satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Sure, at least a few days a month the downsides of the business (inconsistent paychecks, diminishing outlets for independent work, the stress of constantly being on the search for my next gig) seem to outweigh the upsides. But the rest of the time I’m ridiculously in love with what I do. I get to visit interesting people I’d never usually meet and ask them questions I’d never usually feel comfortable asking. I get to write scripts to construct stories in the way I think they should be told. I get to manipulate everyday sound clips into art. And I get to feel like I really own my journalism by having my own voice present it on the radio. But there are other reasons I value public radio beyond my personal fulfillment. Radio is the technological manifestation of humanity’s oldest mode of storytelling – people talking to other people. You can accuse NPR of leaning left, and many certainly have, but I still believe public radio is the most balanced news source available. Lastly, the most unique part of public radio to me is that it presents people in action, either reporting or verite, so that listeners can share in the journalist’s learning experience as if they were right alongside them.

The PRPD conference was just the career energy shot I needed last month. I met fellow young independent producers who reminded me I’m not the only one struggling to get in to the business and inspired me with their innovative and impassioned work. I attended seminars that presented examples of the kind of radio I’d like to strive to produce. Perhaps most wonderfully, I met independent radio veterans who assured me it is possible to make a lifelong career from this work, and gave me some of the most sound and direct professional advice I’ve yet to receive. The conference strengthened my conviction that if I continue with such confidence in my work, and diligence to pushing myself, I’m going to succeed in this business.

This last Friday I took the train from New York’s Central Station to New Haven, Connecticut. I was traveling for a story I’m working on for PRI’s The World. I interviewed Dr. Keith Chen, a behavioral economist at Yale. Dr. Chen focuses on uncovering the underlying psychological aspects of our sometimes puzzling economic behavior. My story concerns a curious correlation between our language and our savings habits.

I’ll save the details of his study for the upcoming radio story, but another interesting topic we covered was his past research in Capuchin monkeys. He conditioned the monkeys to save coins and trade them in for food treats. He was amazed by how similarly the monkeys spending and saving habits reflected those of humans, especially when it came to irrational financial behaviors. For example, researchers have found that most people care about losses about two and half times as much as they care about gains — most people won’t take a risk until the possible gain is at least two and half times greater than the possible loss. Monkey behavior showed the exact same imbalance in care for losses versus gains.

I stayed with my friend Becca, an MBA student at Yale. She gave me a lovely tour of the campus, which contains an incredible number of historic buildings. I’m always amazed by the hundreds of years of history present in East Coast architecture, the building are so much older than I’m used to seeing back on the west coast. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph those. Upon arriving home I realized the only photographic history of Yale’s grandeur I’d collected was the details of Dr. Chen’s lecture hall bathroom. See below.

My story should air on The World some time in the next month, but for this week my time will be occupied by a trip up to Baltimore. I’ll be representing AIR through their New Voices scholarship at the PRPD conference this Tuesday through Friday. I’m excited to spend the week attending lectures and getting to know more of my fellow producers!

I’ve completed another story about the Ghana biorefinery that will air soon on NHPR’s Word of Mouth.

Listen here Running time 5:19

As budget battles this last spring pointed out, public radio doesn’t appeal to everybody. You could even say it’s getting old. A recent demographics report put the average NPR on-air listener age at 50. And sure, the online listener audience leans younger, but they still have a 58% higher rate of college graduation than the typical American population. Public radio needs to reach a larger audience, not because it’s the politically correct thing to do, but because otherwise it might not survive.

The Association of Independents in Public Radio (AIR) recently asked members for “one big idea for how independent producers and stations can work together to blend broadcast and digital media tools to expand the tentacles of public radio stations into the local community.” These were my thoughts:

 

In urban America people live in cities, but identify with neighborhoods. Whether they link people by common interest, income, or immigration history, neighborhoods provide residents with a sense of belonging. Public radio stations could give nod to a wider range of identities in their local community with more neighborhood-minded coverage. Stations often excel at covering the city’s news and trend stories, but often miss out on coverage of lower-profile, but still compelling, community happenings. How to fix this problem? Think of the listener area as a collection of neighborhoods, each deserving of air time.

Here’s the idea:

1) Take advantage of the skills and locality of independent radio producers to spin intimate neighborhood stories.

While most station reporters follow news-driven beats, independent producers often seek out more documentary style pieces. This narrative-driven mentality lends itself well to finding and telling the stories hidden within under-represented neighborhoods. Possible neighborhood story subjects could include a profile of a local immigrant opening his first business in the US, or coverage of the efforts of teenagers preparing for a neighborhood’s Afro-Peruvian dance competition.

Stations typically lean towards stories from within their immediate vicinity, even though their listening audience may extend a few cities out. They can better reflect their full listener area by utilizing independent reporters with intimate knowledge of remote neighborhoods.

2) Avoid exoticism of minority voices

This step is key to the station’s credibility when covering people and events from under-represented neighborhoods. If a story comes off as a tourist guide to the “other” part of town, stations give the impression they’re not considering residents of that part of town as members of their audience. Stations need un-exoticized coverage of under-represented neighborhoods by reporters in those neighborhoods (likely independents), to prove they want to be a part of every community.

3) Encourage listenership in neighborhoods where people may not feel that public radio represents them

People like to hear about themselves. They’re more likely to listen to a public radio station if it reflects their lives. Let residents of under-represented neighborhoods know the station wants to appeal to them by coming out to events like a school play, a block party, a Little League game, or an outdoor concert. Just seeing a reporter there, and hearing a few lively sound bites from the event on the radio, assures people at the events that the station cares about them as members of their audience.

4) Map it online

Stations could add an interactive local map to their website pinning each reported story to its locale. Listeners could then click their neighborhood to link to stories covering their home turf. Besides proving to listeners that the station concerns itself with events all over the region, the map would also help to hold stations accountable to diverse geographic coverage. If a station was missing coverage from one area of town, the linked map would show an obvious hole in coverage over those neighborhoods.

Yesterday I had a story air on CKUT in Montreal, on my friend Kaitlin Prest’s show. I had done the interview this piece features back in March, under contract with Radiolab. It was part of a larger story that sadly never aired. Putting this feature together for Kaitlin’s show not only felt therapeutic after that disappointment, but also gave me the opportunity to salvage one of my favorite interviews of the past year.

Back in December 2009, Brooklyn make-up artist Jessica Jade Jacob needed a job. She had experience with sculpting movie special effects, so a friend asked her to take over her position on a special assignment. This piece follows the unexpected details of that job.

Listen here Running time 5:59 (Content Warning/Spoiler: this story is pretty PG, but it’s still a story about a sex robot)

 

 

My story aired today on Deutsche Welle Radio.

Here’s the print version:

 

 

Environmental engineer Kartik Chandran is leading me through his Columbia University lab.

Facing a tub of murky water he explains, “So basically if you look at this reactor system you have sewage coming in, you have clean water going out and then you have the bacteria which are turned into energy as well.”

“Does it still smell?” I ask.

“You can take a peek,” he assures me, “it doesn’t smell at all.”

Chandran’s work in his New York City lab space may seem innocuous. But half way across the world he’s leading an upheaval. He wants to drastically change the way Sub-Saharan Africa looks at waste water.

“In a place like Ghana,” he says, “it’s a clean slate, where we can go in with a fresh model. Where the focus is not putting in a lot of energy and cost and then just treating waste water, but actually recovering something from it.”

In Ghana’s capitol of Accra, Chandran and his team are building the first facility that turns fecal sludge, the fecal matter and urine that human beings generate, into fuel. Specifically, biodiesel.

“Biodiesel is basically a mixture of the combination of methanol and fatty acids, fats,” Chandran explains. “[The fats] come out of the fecal matter. Fecal matter inherently contains some fatty acids. We also are going to put in a process to increase biologically the production of fatty acids from fecal matter, and then convert those also to biodiesel.”

Chandran’s goal is for the new facility to produce one cubic meter of biodiesel a day. That’s enough to fuel a truck about 10,000 miles.

Chandran and his team plan to break ground in Accra by the end of the summer. They will be the first to attempt to turn fecal sludge into biodiesel. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has granted the project one point five million American Dollars in funding.

Ashley Murray is Chandran’s co-leader on the project in Accra. She’s also the founder of Waste Enterprisers. Waste Enterprisers aims to show how capitalizing on sewage can bring money to Ghana’s sanitation services.

Murray says some parts of Ghana do have modern sewage systems. But most human waste in Sub-Saharan Africa remains raw, in the form of fecal sludge.

“So [it’s] generated on site in either pit latrines or septic tanks,” Murray explains. “And then instead of being carried through a sewer system to go to a treatment plant, vacuum trucks go around and manually empty the septic tanks and then would bring them to a point of discharge.”

What’s that point of discharge usually look like?

“In Accra,” she says, “it looks like the ocean. [It’s a] massive public health and environmental hazard. It’s discharged directly onto the shore and then carried out by the waves. Definitely a detriment to the fishing industry, you certainly can’t develop any tourism along the coast, swimming in that water is a recipe for some pretty serous illness.When you get close to the site it’s just absolutely toxic. It’s like this acidic burning sensation in your nose when you get anywhere near it. Strong, just raw fresh human waste.”

Most sewage treatment plants in Ghana have failed from lack of stable funding. Murray hopes that turning fecal waste into a profitable fuel will keep the new facility solvent. Extra income will go back into other sanitation efforts.

“We will produce biodiesel and then sell that to the refinery,” Murray explains. “And then we anticipate being able to take a portion of our profits and reinvesting these back into the servicing of septic tanks and pit latrines. It’s kind of a win win, we’re cleaning up the environment, we’re getting the waste we need to produce our product, and we’re improving the accessibility of top notch sanitation services to the urban poor.”

Murray wants the facility to set a new precedent for thinking about human waste.

“We’re sort of abandoning this sort of idea of designing for disposal,” she adds, “and abandoning the idea that waste is just something you need to throw out and get as far from human populations as possible, to actually re-branding it as a resource and actually making a profit out of it, and that’s quite a revolution that we’re hoping to start.”

Back at Columbia University in New York, Chandran also sees the new facility as part of a greater ideal.

“As along as there are people on this planet,” he says, “we’ll generate ample amounts of sewage, something needs to be done. When you address sewage you address a lot of problems that face humanity today. Water quality, disease, recovery of resources, which we are doing now. So we are linking to the water cycle, to human health, the energy cycle. By looking at sewage we are addressing all of these.”

Chandran and Murray face a major roadblock to their goal of re-branding human waste. The ick factor. But Murray assures that waste-derived fuel products will undergo rigorous 3^rd party testing for safety and quality.

-Deutsche Welle Radio, Audrey Quinn, New York.