The spirit of ‘76
Once there was a place on Independence Mall in Philadelphia known as the Living History Center, built for the US Bicentennial in 1976. I never visited the museum, but much later, I worked in its ruins.
When I showed up for my first day of work at WHYY in the late 1990s, the local NPR/PBS combo-affiliate station was building itself a new headquarters atop the main site of the Living History Center. While the new facilities got built, the radio side of the company remained housed in the museum’s former cafeteria. I entered the station from the back parking lot through a plywood construction tunnel. The news director greeted me in the lobby (a plywood vestibule) and brought me to a warren of rooms and studios crammed with desks, chunky computers, and reel-to-reel machines.
Rancid Chinese-takeout and cheesesteak wrappers overflowed the trash bins. Everyone bustled past one another, ripping scripts off the dot-matrix printer, rushing them to the control room for the afternoon newscast. Terry Gross’s office sat pristine and remote at the end of a narrow corridor. But even Fresh Air’s hallways were piled with tape reels in boxes. Many reels did not even have boxes, just a piece of paper with the famous interviewee’s name in Sharpie. I’d started in radio at a sleepy Iowa university station, and this was not the vision of glamor I imagined at a major-market house of broadcasting.
Soon I learned to decode the station’s chaos and even enjoy it. When we did marathon coverage of local election returns, it was all hands on deck as we worked together into the night, calling races on air and slapping high-fives in the hall.
But for every fun late night, there were a dozen dreary ones cutting tape for the morning newscast. When the station started to digitize, things got worse as software and equipment constantly crashed. There was a lot of frustration and grumbling. I had once dreamed of reporting powerful stories for the network, but we hardly even had time for mediocre features. The local news hole emptied itself daily and needed to be refilled with voices and more voices.
At the time, I blamed the newsroom’s woes on WHYY’s bosses for understaffing the place — which, of course they did. But now I better understand the cognitive dissonance baked into all production, both broadcast and podcast. It takes hours and hours of effort to produce a thing that dissolves in an instant. “For air” is not a metaphor — it is an actual description of the work. Everything we make = nothing but air.
For every three who start
I bring all this up because of a new report called The Creators: Understanding the Modern Podcast Creator Landscape. It was just released by the audio and podcasting industry group Sounds Profitable. The report’s author, audience research guru Tom Webster (podcasting’s own Paul Lazarsfeld, you might say) ran a survey of more than 5000 podcast consumers, with a focus on those who had tried making podcasts themselves. What he found is that among those who try creating, there’s also a fair amount of quitting.
“For every three who start, one stops,” his report notes. “Why aren’t more of them sticking with it?” Among the groups most likely to start, and then quit, podcasting: members of the LGBTQ community, and people over the age of 55. Among those not likely to start a podcast in the first place? Women.
I am a member of some of those demographics at least — and while I haven’t quit working in audio, you might say my decision to write online here is a form of soft quitting. Many people have asked me why I don’t make this project into a podcast. It’s because I know how hard audio production can be. Continuous Wave is a thing I can create on my own, without recording interviews or mixing audio or hang-ups about how my voice, much less my face, is faring today.
The longer I pursue this quixotic project, however, the more I realize the deeper reason why I’ve chosen the page and not some grand new ambition for audio: I don’t want to end up like Bertha Brainard.
Bertha Brainard was a foundational genius of radio programming in the US. Many of the formats she helped invent are still with us today. She started in the early 1920s at WJZ in Newark, NJ. After the station moved operations to New York, she convinced management to bring Broadway theater to the air. For listeners, she would sit offstage and describe the cast, costumes, and plot of a production — then lightly narrate a live-remote broadcast of the performance itself. She was one of the few female announcers on the radio in a major market, but she also created her own program.
When the network NBC formed and took over WJZ, Brainard became a program manager, and later head of the Program Board. She talent-scouted comedian Jack Benny, crooner Rudy Valee, and sitcom writer and actress Gertrude Berg, among many others. During auditions, she’d cover her eyes so the visual charms of performers wouldn’t cloud her judgment of who belonged on the radio. In her spare time, she created experimental shows like The Magic Key of RCA. She was able to accomplish all that she did, it seems, by making her whole life her job.
From Radio Review, Dec. 13, 1929.
A new type of producer
All the profiles of Brainard noted how hard she worked. When Woman’s Journal ran a piece on her in 1928, the author mentioned that Brainard lived across the street from NBC, and contrasted her role with that of theatrical producers:
Radio has evolved a new type of producer — one who must put on a first night not once in so many weeks or so many months, but every hour or half-hour or quarter of an hour through every day and far into the night, for radio, operating on a thirty-six hour schedule, never repeats. It is a big job, that of program maker for a great broadcasting station. And this is the job Bertha Brainard holds down.
In 1939, the New York Times revealed that Brainard commuted from a suburb so she could have a swimming pool for exercise. But who knows when she had time to use it.
She spends ten to twelve hours daily on the job, she estimates, although her time at her own desk is erratic.
“The competition for talent and new forms of presentation is one of the livest things I must keep in touch with, so I haunt the theatres, the movies, concerts and other entertainments,” she says.
“New ideas? There aren't any. I haven't heard a new idea in twelve years. After all, most of the basic themes are ancient. But there are new ideas of production, and those I must be in contact with, so I read literally hundreds of scripts weekly and interview constantly, in the search.”
Brainard was famous nationwide — as media historian Donna Halper writes — because she was one of the only high-profile, highly-paid woman executives in broadcasting. Her success and influence sprang not only from her taste, but from recognizing the purchasing power of the female audience. In her job, she juggled the demands of talent and advertisers, of network censors who wanted safe radio, and execs who wanted new, lucrative hits.
Brainard’s programming sensibility became the soul of NBC’s Blue Network, the less profitable, more culture-oriented chain of stations (including WJZ) that NBC absorbed in its earliest days. But in the early 1940s, federal regulators ruled that NBC’s double-network business was anti-competitive. So in 1943, leadership sold off the Blue Network to a Lifesavers candy mogul, who re-launched it as ABC.
Not long after, Brainard left NBC. I’m not sure whether that sale was a factor, but it couldn’t have helped. At some point in 1945 or maybe even earlier, Brainard disappeared from NBC on a leave of absence, a fact only disclosed when the network announced her retirement to the trade press in early 1946.
These announcements also noted that Brainard had married her former NBC colleague Curt Peterson. She did not have much time to enjoy that marriage, or anything else. She died of a heart attack on June 11, 1946, just shy of her 56th birthday.
When history calls
Of course, people die in all professions. People die for all sorts of reasons. But Brainard’s story hit me hard when I read it, because I recognize in her career my own generation of radio-to-podcast producers. Like many of us starting a decade or more ago, Brainard not only invented her job but many aspects of the medium. The intensity of making a whole new and popular thing can be intoxicating and all-consuming. But that intensity never lets up. It will outlast you and everything you make.
Here I want to show you the dedication page of Radio Writing, one of the first guides to audio production, and the first place I encountered Brainard’s name.
You sense in those few words such admiration for the fire she brought to a role that was both important (Radio history) and impossible (so busy making it). As we get older, that fire starts to scorch.
At least three of the people I worked with in WHYY’s newsroom are no longer alive — and they did not die of old age. I know that’s statistically meaningless, but it’s meaningful to me every time I remember that I cannot just call them up or check their doings on social media. All I have of them is a memory of the stress we shared long ago in a cramped, non-profit local newsroom, making so much stuff that was never enough.
Of course, I would jump at the chance to make my own audio history podcast, if I could hustle up the support and team it would take. The need for more support, as Tom Webster said in his webinar on the creator survey, is probably the main factor in the “creator churn” he found, though he wants to do more research on the reasons.
Let me offer one, at least for my demographic: life. At some point, people my age look around and have to weigh the demands of their calling against all the other things they know that matter. Making history is great. But then, all too soon, you become it.
