Hey everyone, Happy Friday. We're dedicating this real estate in your inbox to something delightful and nostalgic: the radio. |
We have lots of love for podcasting's early pioneers and predecessors — the giants of radio who have told stories, and developed new forms of journalism, on air for decades. And, many of you who listen to our show on your phones might not know that it is also carried on over 250 public radio stations around the country. |
So whether you're still in love with radio, or ready to rediscover it, read on, and let us know about the last time you heard The Daily on the radio. |
 | | Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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Putting The Daily on the Airwaves |
By Desiree Ibekwe and Mahima Chablani |
The Daily officially came to radio in April 2018, premiering on 16 stations. Theo Balcomb, a founder of The Daily, shared in this newsletter some context on our show's first foray onto the airwaves. Nearly two years on, our radio reach has grown to hundreds of stations around the country, so we wanted to dedicate this newsletter to some of the work our small but mighty radio crew does that you might not know about. |
Every weekday, Diana Nguyen, a producer on our team, along with Marc Georges, an editor, works to bring The Daily to the hundreds of radio stations across the country that carry the show. Their goal: cutting down the episode, whatever the length, no matter the topic, to 22 minutes, the time allotted for our show on public radio — and delivering to those stations by 3 p.m. Eastern. |
"Some days it's really easy, some days it's super hard," said Diana, who recalls the mammoth 45-50 minute episodes we published during last year's election cycle. |
Decisions about what to cut can also be heartbreaking. "Sometimes I have to cut whole sources," she added. This was the case with Abel Oleson, the vintage shirt-wearing, mustachioed bartender in "How a Small Bar Battled to Survive the Coronavirus," our episode about a California bar. |
Michael Simon Johnson, a producer who was part of the original team led by executive producer Theo Balcomb, helped make the show radio-ready in its early days. When experimenting with and setting up bulletproof processes, there was one big question they had to broach: What if news changes by the time the episode goes out to air? There were radio stations that didn't air The Daily until the evening, and a few hours for a breaking news episode can be a death knell. |
"For podcast listeners, it's fine," Michael said. "They know that the episode came out in the morning. So if you listen to it later in the day after some big event has happened, it's fine because you know you're listening to something in the past." He added, "But that's not going to fly on the radio." |
So the team has to be flexible and alert to any changes that could upend an episode. Here, Michael recalls one particularly hairy situation: |
 | | Michael Simon Johnson on the stoop of The Daily's roving Brooklyn bureau.The New York Times |
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"Back in 2018, we did an episode about how the Trump administration was going to respond to a suspected chemical attack that killed dozens of Syrian civilians. President Trump had promised retaliation, but we didn't know what that was going to look like, so the episode was speculative. It came out in the morning and started to air on the radio stations throughout the day. And then in the evening, the decision was made to send U.S. airstrikes to Syria. At the time, I was at dinner. I was monitoring the situation the whole time and I had my work computer with me because I knew I might need to work if news came out. I left dinner, went outside, used my phone as a hotspot, opened up my laptop and started chatting with Theo Balcomb and Michael Barbaro. Michael recorded an update to the episode and then I opened up our editing software, Pro Tools. I was sitting on the stoop of a random apartment building in Dumbo, Brooklyn, updating this episode and sending it out to the stations that needed it. It took maybe 15, 20 minutes. And then I went back to dinner and I was like, 'Sorry, everyone, uh, we just bombed Syria. And I had to deal with this." |
 | | Radio Garden |
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A few months ago, a link started circulating in a few of our audio-related Slack channels at The Times. It was to a website called Radio Garden, and the link revealed an interactive map that looked something like a zoomed out view of earth at night, with small lights clustered in cities around the world. Those lights represent radio stations, and spinning the map changes the sounds, enabling users to scan station signals from Albuquerque to Almaty, Kazakhstan. |
From our searching, we've discovered there are a surprising number of country music stations across Europe (including a particularly good one in Hof, Germany), which has reminded us that airwaves are still a vehicle for American soft power, as they have been for the better part of the last century. But, looking closer at the lone lights scattered across continents, you can still hear localism, alive and well, in a diversity of languages. Take a look, and in the meantime, here are two listening recommendations for stations both familiar and foreign: |
- "My lockdown had a few phases, but throughout them all, I was consistently pretty nostalgic. So when I found Arctic Outpost on radio.garden, I was ecstatic about the discovery. This AM-MW station plays early 20th-century jazz, blues, big band and vintage country — the kind of music that makes you wanna curl up under a blanket with hot coco and watch the snowfall — and it's hosted by Cal Lockwood out of Svalbard, Norway, which is apparently 'one of the world's northernmost inhabited areas.' Cozy!" — Parin Behrooz, production coordinator for narrated articles.
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- "I'm bad about taking the time to make playlists, and am mostly ambivalent about their fundamental value proposition: total listening control. I love the lack of choice that comes with radio, the serendipity of listening to songs that someone, somewhere has chosen for you (a real, actual person, not an algorithm). Radio Garden has thrown me from my work day back to my hometown — with Alice 107.7 transporting me from London to Little Rock, Arkansas, with an O'Reilly Auto Parts jingle that doesn't seem to have changed in at least a decade. I'd encourage you to find your favorite childhood station, if you can, and listen for the sounds of home." — Lauren Jackson, this newsletter's editor.
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Monday: We look at the tense and difficult diplomatic triangle between Iran, Israel and the United States. |
Tuesday: A wave of bills has been introduced across the United States that affect transgender youth. We look at the motivations behind and the impact of these measures. |
Thursday: How a recent shooting at a FedEx facility exposed the flaws in Indiana's "red flag" gun laws. |
That's it for The Daily newsletter. See you next week. |
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