The crowd in Central Park cheered as Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC’s On the Media, proclaimed: “Not many media companies in the US can count 100 candles on their birthday cakes.”

We were at a festival at SummerStage to commemorate “WNYC’s century of survival,” as the evening’s emcee Brian Lehrer put it — survival, because for its first many decades, the station was owned and abused by the city of New York, until it finally became an independent public radio flagship in the 1990s.

The job of Gladstone and her co-host Micah Loewinger, in between trivia quizzes like “1924 or Nah?” and musical performances by Freestyle Love Supreme and Laurie Anderson, was to present a 15-minute sketch that encompassed not only the history of the station, but of radio broadcasting in the US, since the two are intertwined.  

In pre-produced short videos, the OTM crew and some colleagues at WNYC wore funny hats, adopted accents and talked into antique microphones and telephones. It was amateur theater at its best.

I was watching in the audience that evening, both stunned and delighted. Stunned because as a freelance consultant, I had researched and drafted the first version of On the Media’s script for this event. 

Delighted because Gladstone, Loewinger and their executive producer Katya Rogers had turned my baggy and overly-complicated draft into a snappy tale of technological wonder, absurdity, irony, budgetary woes, fire department PSAs, devastating news audio, and even a touch of sentiment.

This performance was only possible because of the work of WNYC’s then-Director of Archives Andy Lanset and his team, who had spent years on grant-funded projects like the NYC Municipal Archives and the New York Public Radio Archives. They preserved sound and images, and wrote about the many fascinating people that built or appeared on WNYC over the century. 

The OTM presentation starts at 24 minutes in, if you want to watch:

My only note (because my brain just has to) is that we didn’t build in enough time during the run-of-show for audience reactions. After all, thanks to our studio-sequestered lives, radio and podcast producers often have only a second-hand feeling for “the room.”

This crowd of WNYC super-fans — who lined up hours ahead of time to get into the free show — applauded, laughed, even booed (at the mention of Mayor Rudy Giuliani). They became part of the show, and I was probably only one of a few who noticed what those unanticipated moments did to the timing cues.

Still, it was an awesome experience, and a large part of why I later started this project, Continuous Wave. I’m still chasing the high of scenes like the one we created around this archival image:

In the center you see WNYC’s father figure, NYC’s Commissioner of Public Works Grover Whalen, giving a demo broadcast before the station even existed (the city rented some time on WJZ).

This photo mesmerized me when I ran across it in WNYC’s archives. 

I was mesmerized not so much by the dapper Whalen — though he sports a fine moustache — but by the two guys on either side, who present early examples of Radio Producer Face. Who knew that Producer Face has never changed?

Below is a screenshot of archivist Andy Lanset playing Whalen, with Micah Loewinger as engineer Raymond Asserson, the man who would later build WNYC’s first transmitter from second-hand parts purchased in Brazil. 

As this newsletter turns one year old, it makes me think of how WNYC had always leveraged its major anniversaries. 

On the municipal station’s 10th birthday, perhaps not coincidentally, the mayor announced that it would be allowed to remain alive. On its 20th, it got a shout-out from NBC’s “Dean of Radio Commentators,” HV Kaltenborn. On its 30th, it got a march. 

There were more observances: the 75th anniversary of FM broadcasting capabilities. A whole series of archival greatest hits on the station’s 90th.

It can create a virtuous cycle: A place that celebrates and reminds people of its continued existence is also in a better position to get grants to preserve its history. Which makes ongoing commemorations richer and more profound.

Let me be clear, however: commemorations should not be expected to boost staff morale — especially these days. Just a few weeks before its 100th anniversary celebration in Central Park, New York Public Radio announced a huge round of layoffs, the second round that year. The mood at the afterparty I attended with newsroom veterans was grim.

No, media birthdays are about something else, something existential. They plant a small flag against the force that’s been devouring electronic media (now all of media) since the beginning. That force is entropy, the constant falling apart of all our attempts at permanence.

The more I learn about American broadcasting, the more I see entropy as its twin, the dark-matter shadow of a powerful medium. Its history, just like podcasting’s today, is littered with dead brands and production houses that once thrived and are now forgotten: The Yankee Network in New England; Mutual, a cooperative radio network; DuMont Television.

And soon, we must add to the heap CBS News Radio, cancelled before it gets the chance to observe its 100th birthday. (Though it’s worth noting that radio news did not really get going at the network until the mid 1930s, as historian Michael Socolow points out.)

Past incarnations of CBS had been assiduous about throwing anniversary parties with special programming — especially the 50th and the 75th. How is the network’s 100th going to be anything but cringe?

I can’t help but think that the relative ease of CBS severing its last link to its origins has to do not only with current management, but with the network’s longer-term dereliction about preserving its past.¹

Unlike its rival network NBC, CBS never donated its audio archives to the Library of Congress or some other place that could preserve its historic recordings, scripts and internal documents.

Instead, much of what remains of the radio side of CBS history was preserved by accident, bootlegging, or a combination of both. (Murrow’s papers reside at Tufts University. The Paley Center for Media has digitized a fair amount of audio and video, but you have to visit in person and pay a membership or museum admission fee for access).

I’m not saying that CBS News Radio would now be OK if the network had behaved more like WNYC with its archives. If we’re being honest, that’s a tall order even for WNYC now. 

But the fact remains that WNYC, with its terrible odds from day one, at least made it to age 100 and counting. It knows the story of where it came from and how it got here.

So my advice, unsolicited, to the doomed staffers of CBS News Radio? Throw yourselves a 100th birthday party anyway. The bigger, the better — maybe George Clooney would kick in? 

Have a drink for Ed Murrow, light a cigar for Bill Paley, wave your arms like Norman Corwin directing a masterpiece — go for broke and re-enact the network’s inaugural broadcast of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s opera The King’s Henchman. 

That history belongs to you, not the bosses who just flew in with bodyguards. Leave them off the invite but call in the old-timers and find some funny hats.

Give entropy a day off. It feels nice.

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