Ed Richard at WYSO

Today I had the wonderful opportunity to meet and record an short, informal interview with Ed Richard. For those of you who don’t know, Ed Richard is one of the three Antioch College students who founded this station. He was clearly happy and excited to be back at WYSO and to talk about his experiences in the past and the future of this station, especially concerning Antioch College. He reminded me a lot of my own grandfather, the way he spoke with those around him, told stories and asked favors. I think one cannot help but be respectful, helpful and inspired by people like him.

Ed Richard and Niki Dakota in the air studio.

Now this last note might not paint me as the most intelligent of creatures, but it’s a sweet anecdote, so I’ll let go of what little dignity I have and tell it anyway. Ed was telling me to story of how WYSO came to be. It was born out of WABS, the Antioch Broadcasting System. But when it came time to register with the FCC they couldn’t use those call letters. After several different tries they chose WYSO, almost out of desperation. YSO stands for Yellow Springs, Ohio. How did I not get that before?

Behind the scenes on Kaleidoscope

Yesterday I came back to the studio after dinner to join Juliet in the air studio to help her with her show,  Kaleidoscope. Her guests this week were DJs Skratchmatic Assassin Turntable Terror Crew who mixed live on the air. It was a really great show, I loved Skratchmatic and chatting with Juliet about music and radio.

Kaleidoscope has a guest on every week which means that Juliet also engineers the sound of the show, getting the bands hooked up in the performance studio so that they can be heard on the air. Like with many things, this process also has its own quirks and Juliet is pretty sure she’s gotten the hang of them over the years. Shadowing Juliet while she got Skratchmatic set up opened up a whole other aspect of radio I hadn’t been exposed to: that of sound engineering.

I am already pretty familiar with the opposite end of the process; I often edit interviews from Excursions, so I can hear the results of the aforementioned quirks and the importance of good engineering when it comes to sound quality. When I realized the extent to which I was unfamiliar with the beginning of the process I thought, “Oh my gosh, another thing to learn!” Depending on your personality, mood and general outlook on life you can read that with any tone you like. I wont lie, it was a mix of emotion.

It started a conversation with Juliet about the wealth of opportunity here at WYSO. True, we’re not the biggest or most powerful station in the fastest town, but we do have quality. And because we are small, and the people here are of the character they are, people like me and others who wish to learn are really taken in and taught. Here I am learning every aspect of what it takes to run a public radio station, from membership to sound engineering. That experience is priceless and I am so grateful for it.

Photography with Steve Bognar

Yesterday I was shown how to use the camera bought for this station for the purposes of Reinvention Stories by Sarah and basically set free to roam the station snapping photos. There are several reasons that teaching me to take pictures is a good thing. For one, I have an assignment for school having me describe where I work and there is an option to add pictures to the essay. Another is that there aren’t very many pictures of the station since the move; Juliet and Sarah tell me it would be useful to have some available in case they are needed for the website or something. The third is origin of this project; earlier this week Juliet asked me to take pictures of the guests appearing on Excursions tomorrow.

Knowing nothing about cameras, I put the camera on automatic and walked around taking pictures. As I was passing through the kitchen I ran into Steve Bognar, award-winning documentary filmmaker and current co-producer of Reinvention Stories. He greeted me; I was holding a very fancy camera so he asked me about what I was doing. When I explained my project and my complete lack of experience he generously offered to teach me how to use the camera. Needless to say I was through the roof with excitement.

I hesitate to go through everything we talked about in detail…that would take far too long and perhaps bore you. After going through some of the basics of exposure we took pictures of Wayne (our Clarke county reporter) and Luke (the Development Director) while they worked. This gave me the chance to practice what I had learned about exposure and to learn about composition.

It would be odd to write a post about taking pictures without any pictures so I will put these pictures of Luke. The one on the on the bottom was taken on the light side of Luke, the side being directly shone on by the sun. The one above was taken with the age-old advice “go to the Dark Side.” The darker, more shadowed side has more character, has more dimension and shows more of the personality of the subject.

I’m pleased with the result and can’t wait to take more pictures. I’m off to practice now, enjoy this beautiful day!

Web posts for WYSO.org

Early on in my first weeks here at WYSO Juliet, our webmaster, showed me how to put posts up on the website. I have done a few things for the News Department, but usually the ones I will do will be for guests that Niki Dakota has on Excursions.

I guess I should explain what I’m talking about exactly. When Niki has a guest on her show she records the interview and live music the guest plays in the performance studio. Afterward Juliet (or I, or another intern) goes in, lightly edits the interview and puts it on the website with some copy.

The next couple of weeks will be busy ones for Niki because she will be having lots of guests on. She has already had four different groups on this week alone. Juliet has asked me to take care of getting all these interviews up on the web. It’s easy, simple work, but its good editing and writing practice; besides, from what I hear its quite helpful for me to help Juliet with this. And I really like being useful.

Here’s my to do list as of 3pm Thursday afternoon, in no particular order:

• Edit poetry recordings for Conrad’s Corner.
• Write the script for my Community Voices story, incl host intro.
• Put Excursions guests on website
• Finish contact information data entry for Neenah
• Follow up with Community Voices story contact (next week)
• Promos

Here we go!

I did an edit with Sarah this morning, with the tape I had ordered. After the editing suggestions from Sarah it looks like all that’s left to do is start writing my script. With the next Community Voices class in less than two weeks I’d really better get going, there’s no time to lose!

I’ll finish this short post with what is written on the white board next to my desk, “Start writing something now!”

Okay, okay, I will!

No excuses, cut the tape and start writing!

I took the penultimate interview I need for my story this morning. The very last one is dependent on a time schedule that remains beyond my control. Still, I now have enough tape to really get things going.

First, though I need to finish cutting up the tape from the interview this morning. I know that we don’t (and I probably never will) cut actual tape, but I still like how that sounds. It’s not quite editing yet; I’m just going through and piecing out different sound bites and labeling them. From there I continue to pare down until I just have the really good sounding pieces. I don’t need facts and figures from the people I interview; I need how this experience feels, what they think it will mean for their communities and families. How they think all this will turn out. I can get numbers from anywhere. What makes tape so special is what you can’t know about a person without asking them.

Once I have a set of good pieces of tape from each of the people I have interviewed I have to start putting those pieces in a semblance of an order and….begin writing! I’m half anxious, half excited to start writing. I probably mentioned this before, but writing for radio feels so different! Putting my segments (known as ‘selects’) in some kind of order will prevent the story from jumping around. It is not only the script that has to have a narrative and tell a story, the tape has to too. In a reading from Community Voices (Sound Reporting by Jonathan Kern) mentioned that some editors listen to pieces of tape in order before even hearing a script to prevent the story from simply being interconnected (but not necessarily related) good pieces of tape.

Sarah is away until Tuesday and before she left she mentioned hoping to have a listen to what I have when she gets back. I’m hoping to have the tape I want to use in the order I want as well as (maybe?) the host introduction to my piece which, as I learned at last week’s Community Voices meeting, is really important to the set up a story. But more on that later, I hope.

Have a great weekend!