What's Live Got to Do With It?

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.

If this resonates with you, leave a comment below!

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.

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.”

The reason I pitched Roman Mars a podcast episode about broadcasting was because I’d once been a local public radio announcer and newscaster, first at WSUI-AM in Iowa City, and then at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia. Although preparing and delivering a short newscast or weather report is not as stressful as assembling a live, two-hour news magazine, the constraints of the clock also took a toll on my psyche. My anxiety dream involved finding myself in the newscast booth without my copy and having to vamp live on the air for two minutes.

While at WHYY, I’d discovered that even the hour-long interview show based there, NPR’s Fresh Air, had a live element, even though most of it was pre-recorded. At 11am Eastern Time, the Fresh Air team would assemble in the studio, and host Terry Gross would live-read introductions to her own pre-taped and edited interviews. Fresh Air had a program clock, a show director, and the same mechanisms of liveness as the big news magazines.

Why would a show that is largely pre-produced still deliver programming live? I did not even think to wonder about it then, because I accepted that live broadcasting is not only the most economical way to deliver material, but is the mark of a truly professional endeavor. Plus, it could be fun! Yes, the desks in our local newsroom might be littered with scraps of magnetic tape, Chinese take-out and flakes of stress-dandruff, but when our newsroom did live election coverage, we thrilled to be the first to deliver news people wanted to hear. We gave each other high-fives in the halls outside the studio. Being live meant we were vigilant and necessary. We were using the airwaves as they were intended to be used.

(Aside here: In 1998, the critic Greil Marcus published a screed in the New York Times against NPR news-magazine hosts that stuck with me as I started my reporting job at WHYY. He called the NPR tone “deadening. There is nothing new under the sun, least of all anything we might want to raise our voices over.” By contrast, Marcus wrote, on Fresh Air, “the atmosphere is invariably intimate and open. The feeling is that anything can happen; anything might be said.” Marcus did not seem to be aware that NPR magazine hosts were introducing reports or even conducting interviews on a tight, live-to-air schedule; nor did he note that Fresh Air was mostly pre-recorded. This oversight is understandable, since we tend to associate liveness with spontaneity when in fact, as a regular practice, it requires strict consistency. Marcus interpreted the result of liveness as “boredom” and “distance.”)

The Cost of Liveness

The further away I’ve gotten from live broadcasting, the more I hear (as irritated Marcus without his knowing why) the cost it extracts. On a live broadcast ruled by a network clock, guests are sometimes cut off, or given bizarre commands to complete an answer “in the remaining few seconds we have left.” Obvious follow-up questions go unasked because — as hosts often state with regret in their voices —we’ve run out of time.” The demands of live interviews can inhibit the types of voices that get on the radio: guests who deliver smooth answers and know when to stop talking get interviewed more often; production pre-screeners at call-in shows know to avoid rambling callers, regardless of relevance, because they may not get to the point in a timely manner.

Most of all, the maintenance of the live feed, day after day, means that the program clock has to be top priority. The reporter in the field, the nightmare-ridden show director, and the local newscasters — in the end, they all have the same job: to feed the clock the correct units of timed content. The clock comes first, second and third; the listener experience is far down the list of what matters.

Podcasts are not, except in rare circumstances, live; it’s one of the main things that distinguishes them from broadcast audio. Listeners have not rejected podcasts for not being live, though many popular podcasts are going for some simulacrum of liveness — a sense of spontaneity without the clock (and without much, if any, post-production editing). It’s a weird place we’ve landed at, but I think it all goes back to an early origin point out on the high seas.

It turns out the question “why be live?” was asked from nearly the very beginning of radio. The fact that the question is so potent is a circumstance of radio’s birth amidst other communication technologies such as telegraphy, telephony and phonography. Radio, as it evolved from a point-to-point communication method to a point-to-mass communication method, underwent several identity crises and competitive struggles among stakeholders, including the US military, for technological control of the medium. While everyone was fixated on the issue of transmission, they would soon stumble upon real problem radio poses: the problem of reception.

Since 1901, when radio inventor Gugliemo Marconi claimed to have succeeded in transmitting Morse code for the letter “S” across the Atlantic, radio was considered the province of ships. People could communicate with one another at great distances via telegraph and even telephone. But ships couldn’t. A ship damaged at sea might well be a ship gone for good. Marconi’s “spark gap” transmitters sent bursts of radio waves as Morse Code on all known frequencies; these blasts could be sent from one ship and picked up by others far away, or by stations on the shore.

But Marconi machines were expensive and needed trained operators willing to be stuck in a room on a ship with a pair of headphones and loud zaps of electricity from a machine that could electrocute people if used incorrectly. Though radio was a real solution to the ancient problem of ships lost at sea, it might have taken much longer to catch on in a systematic way, had the Titanic not sunk in 1912. 

Morse-code distress calls (CQD, and the newer SOS) went out from the Titanic’s Marconi operator repeatedly. But some of the other ships within range had no operator on duty. Others downplayed the significance of the situation. The Carpathia arrived in time to save the passengers in lifeboats, but many more could have been saved had rescuers arrived earlier. Not only that, rumors abounded in the weeks after the sinking that interference from amateur radio operators made it harder to hear the Titanic’s cries for help. This doesn’t seem to have been the case, but after the disaster, people demanded better regulation of the wireless “ether.” Naval radio operators were already complaining of fake signals coming from amateurs along the coast, especially at night, impersonating commanders after eavesdropping on and decoding their communications.¹

After the disaster, the US Congress quickly passed The Radio Act of 1912. It created a system to assign Morse-code call letters and frequencies to licensed radio transmitters. The law also required a “right of way” for distress signals:

In other words, Congress was telling radio operators at the time to shut up and listen. The majority of them were still still using the technology for point-to-point communication with Morse Code. But by the early 1900s, a few people were also tweaking the technology to imprint the sound of voices and music. This was a different technology than the spark-gap, and the voices didn’t go out on all frequencies. But it was really hard still to tune into a specific signal, and interference was turning into a problem. One can imagine regulators at the Department of Commerce, which oversaw radio in US waters, getting nervous. What if distress calls were going to get drowned out by, say, someone playing their favorite foxtrot phonograph record over the airwaves?

At any rate, regulators imposed a system for all shipboard radio operators: the silent period, fixed minutes when no one could transmit messages unless they were distress calls. And as early “land stations” developed, this this system apparently also applied to them. It gets a mention in a June 1922 Scientific American piece by Austin Lescarboura titled “The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting: With the Speakers and Artists Who Are Heard But Not Seen Over the Radio-phone.” [NB: killer subtitle!]

And that, my friends, was the first live broadcast clock.

If you’ve done live broadcasting, tell us about your anxiety dreams in a comment below! Or maybe you’ve never had any. That is weird enough to warrant a comment, too.

In the next part of this series, I’ll write about the regulatory system that controlled US radio after World War, and the mystery of why it found phonograph records “annoying.”

1   The 1991 book by Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men who Made Radio covers a lot of this. Later it was adapted by Ken Burns into a documentary for PBS.