The Gift

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, who’s getting real this time!

The public radio conference took place in Denver, summer of 1997. As a mere part-time grad-student reporter at a small station, I paid my own way to get there. I remember feeling dizzy from the altitude the moment we landed. 

NPR newscaster Carl Kasell was the guest of honor. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work in radio for real, but was thrilled to see the charming man who was the voice of the national news every weekday morning.

Carl Kasell talked about journalism stuff in his keynote address, of course. But later, he offered to show us a few magic tricks. In my recollection, this happened on the last night of the conference, just prior to awards being handed out. 

There, in front of our sea of ballroom tables, the eminent newscaster began his amateur magic routine. I can’t remember what the trick was, only that it didn’t work the first time, nor the second. 

I was embarrassed on Kasell’s behalf, but the crowd remained patient and indulgent as he tried to get it right. When he finally pulled off the trick, we all burst into applause. 

I’ve told myself for years that this was the moment when I knew radio would be the right place for me. It felt so different from the somewhat stodgy, withholding world of magazine and book publishing dangled in front of us at my masters program in nonfiction writing in Iowa.

But memory is an uncertain thing. Just recently, I ran across a box of old journals and found the one I kept during this particular year. I opened it up to see if it confirmed my recollections. And got something else entirely.

I did spend half a page on the conference in Denver, but there’s nothing in there about Carl Kasell. Instead much of this notebook is devoted to another radio figure, someone that readers of this post know also was an amateur magician: Ira Glass.

Well, now that I’ve evoked the name, I guess I have to tell the story. It’s one I’ve told some people, but never written down, because I’m still ashamed of it. 

I’d disassociated the memory of it from any particular year, but my journal shows it also happened in 1997: the same summer I went to Denver, and the same summer when I was supposed to be writing my master’s thesis — but instead was roaming the land, hustling, trying to make my name, and fucking it all up.

Before we get into that, though, let me explain what brought up the Carl Kasell magic-trick memory in the first place. It came to me after I read a book called Television and the meaning of ‘live’ by University of Michigan professor emeritus Paddy Scannell. 

Despite the title, Scannell has some really good stuff on radio amidst his brain-crunching, relentlessly philosophical inquiry into what the hell broadcasting is, and what it has done to us. On page 44 he writes:

Forgive the unexploded thought bomb there, but the whole book is kind of like that. Still for me, it’s startling (and refreshing, for a change) to think about broadcasting — and by extension all media — as a gift. 

Maybe those of us on the giving end would prefer a better way to conduct business (and you can always support this project by going here). 

But as I’ve written, in the US the non-gift model of broadcast sailed away more than 100 years ago, when the radio industry rejected any type of government support. Was that generosity, or foolishness? Maybe it doesn’t matter, Scannell seems to say, because just the act of talking and performing for people you cannot see or hear? That is by definition unreciprocated, unconditional.

I like to think I was affected by some of that built-in generosity at the public media conference in Denver — by Carl Kasell’s enthusiasm for magic and our enthusiasm for him. 

Only now, having read my journal from three decades ago, I think I was just basking in the glow of my own vanity.

Earlier that summer of 1997, I had successfully pitched a piece about the radio show This American Life to Salon. The then-new Internet journal was the primary vector of my hustling at the time — they seemed to accept any pitch. 

I’d already written for Salon about bizarre Midwestern festivals, about the popularity of meteor disaster sci-fi, and more. My journal reminds me I was working on a piece about the regulation of strip-clubs in Iowa, a story I’ve long since forgotten writing.

Anyway, for this piece I went to Chicago for a couple of days to interview Ira Glass and watch his crew at work at WBEZ. 

Back then, This American Life had been in national distribution for just over a year. I’d only heard the program because it aired during the shift I did at my station: six AM on Sundays.

Despite the early hour, I was enchanted by the show. I wanted more people to know about it. 

My journal contains notes from Chicago that never made it into the published piece (but seem quite…Continuous Wavey?)

That’s all cool, and maybe would be something I would be proud of having written. Except for the sentence I’d jotted down a couple of pages earlier:

“I pitched him a story.”

I pitched the guy in his office, right after I interviewed him. My pitch was for a version of a piece I’d done in my writing program — now I figured, as a budding radio professional, I could adapt it for This American Life.

Ira said he’d consider the piece on spec.

Of course he did! This American Life was a new program, in stiff competition with all the other weekend shows that public radio stations wedged into the hours between NPR’s Weekend Edition, Car Talk and A Prairie Home Companion. For it to get picked up, something else had to get bumped off a station’s schedule. That’s why they were running at six AM on Sundays in Iowa City. 

Also, in 1997 there was no podcasting. This American Life needed all the positive attention it could get. Here I was, a person profiling Ira Glass and his show for a national outlet — a person with lots of enthusiasm, even if it did cross the line.

Did I know that pitching a story to the same person I was profiling was gross and sleazy? Clearly not. After all, when else would I get the chance to pitch Ira Glass in person? I probably thought I could impress him with my journalism prowess, despite my having done only a couple of national radio news features by that point.

But I loved Ira’s show. I thought it only natural I should go to the front of the line. 

My little feature on TAL came out in Salon on July 23rd, 1997. On August 1st, I went to the public radio conference in Denver. Some people there had read my piece, as I recall, and wanted my advice on how they too could pitch the show. 

After I returned to Iowa, I wrote a lot about avoiding the writing of my thesis. I also scribbled out what looks like notes from a story edit with Ira. 

Then on August 20, I wrote: “Well, I got burned. Ow!”

I’d thought my script for TAL was done and ready to track. I was getting ready to travel to Chicago to do just that. But then Ira called to say he had to kill the story. It just wasn’t working. 

I was incredibly upset. I cried for hours, even as I still took the bus to Chicago to see friends. I’d told everyone about this impending story. I was mortified. 

Nowhere in my journal can I find any awareness of how unethical, not to mention clueless, I’d been. That particular mortification came much later, after I became an editor myself, and it’s stayed with me as what I hope is compassion for the vulnerability and fallibility of journalists.

Maybe you’ve had a story of your own killed, or some other endeavor rejected as unworthy. Even if part of you knows it wasn’t good enough, that feeling still sucks.

In case you feel any urge to rush to my prior self’s defense, though, I do think Ira tried to work with what I brought him, despite the way it got through the door. In the end, he made the right call. 

Besides my inexperience, it just wasn’t the right kind of story for his show — nor am I, if I’m honest, the right kind of contributor. I was writing essays then, and that’s still what I do — work that’s at best two clicks away from the kind of plot- and character-driven stories that sound right on This American Life.

Although this whole incident feels both painful and self-indulgent to relate, I’m glad I documented it at the time, and I think we need to talk more about this kind of experience. It reminds me how much my professional life has been shaped, as many of ours are, by a sense of scarcity. 

Scarcity, more than kindness or any other fuzzy feeling, is the ironic underside of all the “indiscriminate availability” that Paddy Scannell attributes to modern media. 

There is so much time and space to be filled, so much work to manufacture and give to the audience on a steady basis, we hardly have anything left to invest in what he calls the “structure of care.” Even though care is what audiences and producers need most to keep this whole thing going.

Like undernourished children, everyone in my graduate program would stare through the windows of media houses where people seemed to have enough to eat, and parents (editors) who seemed to care: The New Yorker. Harper’s Magazine. The New York Times. CBS News. For me, that place was This American Life. 

In the media world, generosity and scarcity live side by side in a rather sick embrace. Scarcity has always felt like the dominant partner, and that does something to us.

But media, Paddy Scannell writes, is also just speech. On a primal level, we know speech entails risk, and that is part of the appeal when we make or consume media:

I guess I got plenty of that in 1997. Even back then, I knew I’d learned something important — if not yet exactly what.

My journal entry from that miserable day en route to Chicago ends, out of nowhere, on Vladimir Nabokov. Seems I’d been reading his early work in translation and called on his example to help me climb out of the hole I’d dug for myself.

“He had a revolution and a father murdered and several uprootings,” I wrote, free-associating. “I just have a little creative risk that failed, a little wasted time and embarrassment — and I’m very short on cash. Still, I hope I understand. I hope the gift works.”