Note: Today, I’m publishing a piece on the public media site Transom about Norman Corwin, a radio great who came up against his network’s ban on recorded sound. Wait, a ban on recorded sound? It will take some explaining, so this the first of an occasional series on why radio chose to be live. And yes, it was a choice, as scholars explain.
First, as the cliché puts it, we are going way back in time. I thought I’d expand a paper I wrote for a course at MIT while on a Nieman Fellowship. The (very cool) class was called Anthropology of Sound. My paper is a little long, so I’m breaking it into two posts. Part one here covers my own experience with live broadcasting, then plunges into the deep waters of early radio.
On Clocks and Boats
In 2013, for the podcast 99% Invisible, I interviewed the show directors of NPR’s All Things Considered. Show directors are the people who make sure all the sonic elements — whether music, pre-recorded reporting, or live-announced introductions — fit exactly within the program clock, a precise schedule for each hour of the two-hour afternoon news magazine show.
An older schematic of the clock that NPR shares with local public radio stations.
The minutely-timed system allows national and local broadcasters to share the hour in a prescribed way (for instance, during newscasts, stations know when they can “dump out” of the network feed and do local news). Although NPR news magazines contain many pre-recorded elements, the assembly of each hour is done live, and show directors are responsible for every second. They must work like air-traffic controllers, anticipating and directing the entrance of host voices, pre-produced features and interviews, program IDs, break announcements, and musical interludes.
During my interview, the NPR show directors volunteered their anxiety dreams to me without prompting. The genre of clock-nightmare is so common at the network that it has a name: “directors’ dream.”
“You lose control. You cannot regain control, and you have lost sense of how much time is left in the segment. How much time is left for that piece and usually, it’s like, the worst panic attack. You wake up and you’re sweating, and you can’t believe that you just had another directors’ dream!”