Radio Anyway: Do-it-yourself Talk Radio Show Debuts on College Station

Jan. 19, 2005

I’m not an expert; far from it. Furthermore, if you would have asked me two months ago if I could ever be a radio producer, I probably would have looked at you as if you were a straight Richard Simmons. Impossible! But you know what? Last week I finished my second radio piece, an eight-minute audio article about second chances and alternative education. It was for a show called Radio Anyway, a new, by-us and for-us, do-it-yourself program aired on WNMC 90.7 FM. And you know what else? You can do it, too.

Why radio?
So why radio? Well, have you ever heard a story done in any other medium about a local couple that eats like royalty out of a dumpster? How about overcoming one’s fear of a giant clam? Or the psychology of rites of passage told by a man battling his alter ego? No? I didn’t think so. See, mainstream media, especially radio, just isn’t very personal.
Our youngest producer, 14-year-old Emma Cook, said it perfectly: “We believe this community is richer and more colorful than the normal media is letting on. You can think of us as the relevant, real stories that the mainstream media isn’t making time or space for. And we’re doing it like no one else would dare.”
We’re edgy but retro: 21st century teen sex through the medium of the Leave it to Beaver nuclear family. This is the kind of radio that’s going to grab you, sit you down, and make you do nothing else but listen. After all, Radio Anyway isn’t brought to you by this or that corporation. This is community radio.
Plus, radio is ideal for other, more logistical reasons. Most importantly – and I have to agree with radio veteran and volunteer producer Bill Palladino on this one – “It’s got enough technology to excite you, but not enough to be an obstacle.”
To do a piece, you catch sound with a mini disc recorder, import the material into a computer and use professional audio editing software to compile it.
The learning curve is more like a wheelchair ramp incline; it took me 45 minutes of tutorial and another hour of fooling around with it on my own and I could do my first piece. Take it from Emma, a girl who, with her sister Sarah, had always dreamed of having her own radio show: “I’d never done anything like this before, and here I am doing it. We have really great people training all us newbies. The lesson here is: anyone can do this.”
Another reason radio is so great is that it’s cheap.
“Until just a few years ago, this type of program would have been just about impossible because the equipment and software was way too expensive,” says producer Linnaea Melcarek. “It’s lucky for us that now everything is consumer priced and widely available.”
There are no papers to print and distribute or hefty camera equipment to buy and lug around. (The radio format is so cheap and stealthy that one producer keeps her mini disc recorder in her purse “just in case.”)
Radio Anyway is WNMC’s first try at locally-produced, non-music programming in some time, but for poet/host Esther Posner, after completing two months, 10 themes, and more than 30 locally-produced pieces, it seems like the show wasn’t such a big risk after all.

What it takes
There are certain criteria for producing shows on Radio Anyway? Do you live in Northern Michigan? Do you have ears or know someone who does? Have you ever dreamed of being on the radio? Is it just crossing your mind? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you could be a producer for Radio Anyway.
As for myself, I never thought I would be doing radio. I had tried to get involved with Indymedia (an alternative news organization) in college, but for some reason I just couldn’t do it. I guess I felt like I wasn’t authority enough to report on anything I experienced.
But when Lou Blouin, another enthusiastic producer, told me “anyone has the authority to tell their own story,” something just clicked. Nobody’s omniscient, but the media has a way of making you feel like it is; that’s why what we’re doing is so exciting: being honest about being human and putting it on the air.
“Radio allows us to touch more people because someone listens to it and says, ‘that’s me!’”, says Palladino. And I totally believe it.
Need an example? Here’s a personal one: My parents were in the car with me when we listened to a piece Lou had done about dumpster-diving for the food show, and I asked them, half jokingly, if they wanted to try it sometime. They said yes. My 60-year-old dad even launched into his own story about how he had picked through discarded auto parts at a Ford plant in Dearborn when he was a teenager.
If you need more proof of the “that’s me!” phenomenon, listen for yourself to some archived shows on the website, Radioanyway.org, or tune into 90.7 this weekend -- Saturday at 7:30 in the morning and again on Sunday night at 5:00.
You know what it takes to make Radio Anyway? You. And you don’t have to be an expert.