How I learned to love public radio
I’ve been working at The Peabody Awards for a little over a year now. In that time, I’ve learned how to binge watch, how to work Wikipedia and got to meet the crew of Adventure Time at the ceremony in New York this past May. But most importantly, I learned how to love public radio.
Full disclosure, I’ve been working at WUOG, the University of Georgia’s student-run college radio station since my Freshman year. The radio station that got me interested in college radio, Georgia State’s WRAS, was taken over by Georgia Public Broadcasting in 2014. They took over half of the station’s hours, favoring NPR’s programming over Atlanta’s and Athens’ rich music scene. So for some time, I saw public radio as the enemy.
Then, when I first started working at the Peabodys, I had all this computer time on my hands. I spent hours editing posts in the backend of our website and quickly got through the list of albums I wanted to listen to. At the same time, I was reading about tons of radio shows that won throughout the Peabodys’ 75 years of existence, so I thought I would give some a shot.
Enter Radiolab.
The show has won two Peabody Awards — one in 2010 for it as a whole and one in 2014 for the episode, 60 Words, which delves into the Authorization to Use Military Force that came about after 9/11. So at the very least, I would be getting familiar with Peabody winners.
After a few days of listening, I was hooked. I ended up listening to more podcasts than music, including America’s Test Kitchen podcast and Alton Brown’s. I learned about things I couldn’t wrap my head around before — subjects I didn’t have time to sit down and read for 40 minutes about. Hearing someone else explain it to me, though, made it all digestible. I also enjoyed the feeling of human contact I got from listening to the shows, especially on days when my officemate, Connor, wasn’t working.
But it wasn’t until I started listening to one of 2014’s winners, State of the Re:Union, that I fell head over heels.
Before working here, I spent 2 years at our campus newspaper, The Red & Black, so I came from a print background — I am very familiar with the power of the written word. State of the Re:Union, however, made me feel a whole new level of connection to the story. Something about hearing a woman explain her environmental allergies community over reading about it moved me to tears at my desk. It was something I realized I tried to infuse in my writing, but could never figure out.
Simply put, it was the earnestness of the interviewees voice that just cannot be put into writing, no matter how hard we try. Voice gets lost behind the picture in film. It’s something unique to a radio format.
Furthermore, these public radio stations have the time and resources to delve into stories other outlets don’t have time to do when they have to feed the daily beast.
And it was that that made me fall in love.
