Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

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: