Back from the annual Public Radio Program Director’s conference, this time in Philadelphia PA. We launched PRX at the PRPD three years ago in 2003, September 15th to be exact. Since then stations have licensed over 10,000 radio pieces from the site, and PRX has become a dynamic network of stations, producers, and listeners influencing public radio in ways not everyone is fully even aware of.
We hosted a celebratory party on Thursday night at a fabulous Cuban restaurant with about 20 of our favorite program directors - the creative crew who embraced PRX early on and represent the stations that are making waves in broadcast and beyond.
Some random thoughts and observations:
- Visit WXPN and the World Cafe if you ever get a chance. It’s an incredible facility. The offices look like CTU from 24 except with lava lamps at each desk and guitars on the walls. And then there’s the split-level bar and club next door, capacity 700. During the opening night event (James Hunter was the live entertainment) one veteran public radio attendee leaned over and said to me, “this is the station we were all dreamed of building when we started in those college basements 30 years ago”.
- The session I moderated on “Social Media and the role of the PD” was one of only a handful of ‘new media’ related panels at the conference. Some of our notes and prep materials are on a wiki, and if/when PRPD makes the audio available I’ll link to it. Hawk Mendenhall from KUT (with a big assist behind the scenes from Rich Dean) deserves special mention for giving a concise tour of his station’s efforts with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and various experiments in social media.
Some stations and producers are genuinely waking up to this stuff, and adopting a good experimental attitude about it. There’s still a long way to go to begin realizing the potential. I’m going to put together a new wiki page to start tracking things that are underway.
- Blogging the PRPD. John Sutton has a series of PRPD posts here. Mary McGrath weighs in on the Open Source blog here. Rolas de Aztlan, program director for KPFT has a wrap-up here. UPDATE: John Barth weighs in.
- Disturbingly informative. One highlight of the conference for me was at the tail end. After Robert Krulwich’s excellent benediction (audio to follow when PRPD posts it), I tagged along with him and Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters and we went to the Mutter Museum for an hour of gawking at grotesque things. I was feeling severely under the weather at this point, but attempted to keep up my side of an interesting conversation with Robert on the train to New York.
- Generally the PRPD feels a bit stuck in format and substance. It has to straddle several tasks at once, shoring up the basic best practices of being a program director, presenting new developments in the field, accomodating now three networks worth of program marketing and fanfare. Given NPR’s New Realities meetings and the ‘unconference’ experiments underway elsewhere, it would be helpful to break out of panel mode for some open facilitated meetings - tap into the wisdom of the crowd.
