Why radio towers matter

The Washington Post ran this piece recently about the aging demographics of NPR and the fretting this is creating for those who want to keep public radio going.

A lot of the talk about adaptation has involved growing podcasts, like Serial and other listen-at-your-convenience products.

And then there's this:

"...NPR has to strike a sometimes awkward balance with its digital forays. By sending its programs directly to listeners via digital means, it risks bypassing and even competing with the stations that broadcast those shows — and supply the dollars that enable NPR to produce them in the first place... 

...The bad news, however, is that the radio part of public radio may be in slow and irreversible decline, a fate faced by newspapers, TV stations and other kinds of “legacy” media in the digital age."

This is the stuff that makes me most fretful. 

Why does broadcast radio (as opposed to digital) matter? It's cheap to access, and almost anyone in the state can get a signal. At its most basic, you just need a $15 Walkman and some batteries. Meanwhile, tons of rural areas don't have broadband internet or a good signal for those smartphone data plans. 

And unlike newspapers, there is no literacy requirement for radio. Radio is the only thing you can access while driving or doing other work, so it's time-neutral. Until we have an infrastructure that eliminates the digital divide entirely, the analog is a vital and uniquely accessible source of news, information, and even community connection.

I'm not saying NPR doesn't need to do some real work to figure out how to stay relevant to younger listeners. But it would be terrible to lose the radio waves part of radio, or see it cheapened and hollowed out and emblazoned with advertising to the point that many newspapers have been--because if people don't want to access a service, it's as good as removing it entirely.

Happy 6 Month Anniversary, My Job

One person at my workplace is attaching Lisa Frank gifs to reminders for this project that has nothing to do with Lisa Frank except that she decided the theme should be Lisa Frank. I receive e-mails something like this: "(Rainbow Vomit Tiger says) Don't forget that you should be drafting content like you said you would be this week!" "(Coked-out Space Unicorn says) Good job keeping the spreadsheet updated!"

Mysterious dull pain stewing in my "LLQ." That is the lower left quadrant, in medical abdominal pain speak.

I like speculating about what organs, exactly, are in that zone of tenderness. Perhaps my liver is protesting, belatedly, the holiday decadence. Perhaps I have been invaded by a thousand dead birds or two dozen fretful mice, or every political sadness felt in the state of Wisconsin this afternoon.

Thanks to my job, I know it's not my appendix (that's RLQ), and since it's not terrible, just weird, I can leave it for tomorrow. In my head, I am already signing in as a fake nurse and documenting the duration and intensity and characteristics (dull? sharp? throbbing? mostly not) of the sensation. If I remember right, there about two dozen adjectives we allow for describing the shape of a pain. The rest is location and intensity. It seems inadequate.

An insight into my training process. I just moved most of the stuff on the left to "done" this week, though it assumes I passed the tests and projects. A vague shrug of satisfaction.

Sunrise at this place is flabbergasting but I stand there admiring it and just can't get choked up about it because of the context. I can like this job well enough to get by, but I cannot LOVE MADLY these buildings. Dude, it's a workplace.

But if I just stand at the top of the hill and look down upon the cornfields in the distance, filmy and full of mist, and ignore everything else.

The next time I am at work at 6:30 in the morning, a time when the art (Blues Brothers replicas, Humpty-Dumpty, human-sized metal sculpture with spinning parts) looks even creepier and many of the lights have not turned on, and it is possible to feel like you have accidentally driven into the unpopulated end of the world--the next time I am at work for that, I think I am going to print out a lot of awful saccharine inspirational quotes&poems or bizarre PostSecrets or whathaveyou and leave them on other peoples' desks.

Otherwise, there's not much worth saying. I'm finally into the part of my training that involve writing, which just reminds me how much I've missed churning out words and words and words on a daily basis.

Some days I suspect my workplace is really an elaborate social engineering experiment that also happens to deal in information technology.

Like, "what would happen if we threw a bunch of academically successful nerdy young people into the equivalent of a small village, denied them soda or plastic utensils, gave them cheap healthy cafeteria food and discounted gym memberships and enough money to feel secure, but also worked them really hard and tried to instill in them this mentality of, 'if there is anything you can do for this company above and beyond your job description, you should definitely stay late and do that and also join a book club and a softball team and bring your pet in on the many weekends we want you to work."

It's very weird.

Anyway, today is a staff meeting day, meaning all 4,000 of us are going to pile into a big auditorium and feel really excited about the fact that this is the one day of the month where our CEO will let us have soda. Oh boy!

How nerdy was my workplace

Another new hire: "I was told all the buildings look like guns, and if I just think of your office as being in the handle, it's easy to find."

I: "The buildings on the new campus don't work that well, unfortunately. They're kind of horseshoe-shaped."

My officemate: "I like to think of those ones as being chromosomes."

I: "!!!"

emergency intubation, anticoagulants, CBC panel stat.

I've been weirdly anxious about the new job. All the training is putting me through means a lottttt of staring at their software, creating fake children with fake pneumonia and then running them through a hospital stay. Every now and then I take a test or have a "graded" assignment that is necessary for me to eventually begin doing full-fledged writing-about-it work.

The anxiety never crops up at work itself. Instead my sleep is bad several nights a week, and I halfawake dream about my class schedule conflicting with my meeting schedule, or long involved processes of building orders for urinalysis. I'm actually really enjoying learning how to build things in the system (user security privileges, as one really oddly fun example), but the text-based screens and infinite keystrokes of that process are also working their way into some of the strangest nonsleep.

But I was watching TV the other night and a doctor rattled off a complex chain of orders in an emergency situation and I completely understood what he was saying, so that's pretty great.

Biked halfway to work today. I think next time it might be easier to just bike all the way - leaving the former-railroad-bed bikepath for the bumpily-paved hills of Tokay was torture for my out-of-shape quads. And then I was way early for my bus out of paranoia. Google Bikes says the full ride to work would take an hour, but I am dubious.

There was a 75-year-old man who passed me on the path. He was impressive.

I will later paste this into the body of an e-mail I owe several friends

It has been busy here. I have barely been home, except mostly to sleep, since moving. Thankfully, the "hi-goodbye" phase of the summer is over. I will miss the friends who have just moved, and the ones who have just breezed through town from various distant places (Korea, Boston, Miami, etc), but it will be nice to have a night home to finally get my kitchen organized, too.

A technical writing job has fewer interesting anecdotes than a newspaper job, too, so I've had less motivation to write about work. Readers familiar with -->company<-- are already aware of the crazy art and the free tea and the lush landscaping that await employees, and it's not interesting enough to otherwise detail. The quickest route to my office involves crossing a fake stream via stepping stones. There are fake ducks along the way.

I might have some thoughts about the transition to a large company with the atmosphere of a college campus, but I'm still kind of nauseated by the contrast. Out of sadness for the newspaper industry, I mean. Though at the same time, I was proud of how well we managed with so little. I think we all were, even when it was really, honestly, far too little. At least we could say we worked that hard with no safety nets.

Extracurricular projects in the works. Exciting times.

- "air hunger" is another official medical term for "shortness of breath" or "dyspnea."

- some poems upcoming in Verse Wisconsin.

overview

It is very strange changing from a company with 8 employees in my particular office to one with 3,000+ on a multi-building campus. As with any change, there are things that are better, and things that are worse. The orientation process is really not jiving with my sense of independence, the way all my previous work has involved just jumping in and learning by doing. On the other hand, this company can't run on 4,000 completely independent employees, and I must get used to a higher degree of teamwork anyway.

Living in Madison again is surreal, like a dream. I hop on my bike and go see a friend 10 minutes after I have decided to. It's far too easy.

Post-move update

Hi, blog. How have you been? Yeah, me too.

Girl Friday's last week

This week is full of all sorts of weird cyclical symbolism and related blah. It makes sense, as I've been here about a year, so things which are annual in nature are of course repeating right now. Meetings that I'll never have to write about again about contentious budget processes that have gone full circle. Benefit concerts that got their start a year ago. My last story, Friday, is going to be about some nuns who are leaving town after decades of work at the local hospital.

It's odd. I'll have to say goodbye to co-workers at the end of it. I hate goodbyes. I'd rather disappear and then shout, "Hey, great knowing you, see you again some day," from a distance. Even with great people, goodbyes are too awkward, and generally a mess of worries that I didn't make them feel appreciated enough.

There were solemn conferences. Those in power wrote long missives. Oh, to rule the world, to be pinned to the corkwood tree, featherfeet all flailing.

I want to go to there

The PR director for the International Crane Foundation is going to South Africa for 18 months to manage a wildlife reserve as a volunteer. She knows I've been there, and we were talking about where exactly she'd be. It felt strange - beautiful - spitting out old place names I haven't said in more than a year. "Oh, by the Drakensberg?" Those are the mountains that inspired Tolkien's Misty Mountains. "The Giant's Castle? Howick? Yes, I know the place." Lesotho is close by. I miss Lesotho with an odd ferocity for a place I only spent a few days in. I question my motives for loving it - if I didn't hate the words, I would probably unthinkingly call it "remote," "exotic," or even worse, "cute." But also, "very poor," but also, "little crime, little rape, overbrimming with trust," which meant that after 6 months in Cape Town, the contrast was both astounding and welcome. At the end of our talk, A says, "My door is open, if you're ever up that way and need a place to stay."

So the rest of today I've been daydreaming about finding someone who will pay me to go back and write about efforts to save the wattled cranes amid the government's efforts to redistribute land to people who were cheated of it during apartheid. Poverty of persons versus poverty of cranepersons. Someone with more credentials may already be writing that story, though. And I think I'd probably need more than a 2-week paid vacation (which I haven't even earned yet) to do it.

My new neighbor yells at and berates his movers, and vacuums at 6:30 a.m. I think I will not be trying very hard to make friends in my remaining weeks in this apartment.

Moving out of places, any place, is exciting because it feels like I'm going on a trip somewhere amazing. Even if it's actually just old Madison. I keep stopping other things I am doing to put my books in boxes and pull nails out of the wall and fret about how much my little car can hold.

Going back to work after a long vacation is odd and sort of awkward. I always want to feel guilty about using my vacation time.

Westside-itis

I received my packet of "welcome to our company!" materials while I was in Florida. I was perusing it last night for entertainment value because it was that or unpack my duffel and finally discover whether the jam I bought survived airport baggage handling.

Bear in mind that this will be my second professional job and the first one was at a company too small to even contemplate having the kinds of problems that come with hiring literally hundreds of new people each month. So the idea of a "welcome to our company!" packet is itself foreign to my experience thus far, and just reinforces my sense that I've been accepted at a college that is also paying me. Also bear in mind that I am a Madison native, unlike, surely, a large percentage of new hires, and it's fair to prioritize when you're dealing with complete newcomers who need to meet basic needs in a strange city.

But still. It's interesting to see what information is given to each month's new crop of Madison/Verona/Fitchburg residents, and how it contrasts with what I actually love best there.

* "What to do in Madison" lists movie theaters, but not live music venues (and not the Orpheum) and none of the local theater companies. Other than that, there is State Street, the Capitol, and a link to city and county park sites.
* "Where to go" includes only the Terrace, the Overture Center, APT, and the college sports scene.
* Events and Clubs lists the farmer's market (neglecting the winter and satellite markets), Concerts on the Square, Bratfest (barf), and Hoofers. But not the county fair? All the little neighborhood festivals? At least the Miffling Street Block party was also excluded.
* Tips on parking downtown, cabs and buses. But not on bike paths.
* Grocery stores are all west-side ones, logically so, but I was hoping they'd at least mention the impending Willy St. Co-op expansion. And Trader Joe's.
* Fitness clubs (with a focus on the megaliths) and "general stores" (Target, Walmart, SuperTarget).
* And then apartment resources with a focus on apartment complexes west of Hilldale.

Anyway, I'm looking at four apartments today and maybe more on Friday, and they're all downtown and I'm pretty hopeful that I'll end up living somewhere I want to live, by things I want to live near. Like, easy distance to all the great stuff the High Noon and the Orpheum put together. And the arboretum (how can you not mention the arboretum???). And campus film offerings. Etc. Anyway, it's better for me if getting to work is a struggle (I'm aiming to combine bus and bike as much as possible) because I HAVE to go to work, so I'll make it happen. If I lived close to work, everything outside of work would be a struggle. No thanks.

Big news

Oh hey, my blog. I'm changing jobs in a month, moving from Baraboo to Madison, and entering the exciting world of health care software technical writing. My goal, somewhere down the road, is graduate school and a focus on science journalism, but this is a good move for me in the meantime. It does feel strange that I won't be "a reporter," though. It's such a part of my identity. And even though this move is completely voluntary, I will very much miss my small town newspaper.

July is going to be a bit nuts.

There was a conversation I had with an Air Force sergeant who was in town with an F-16 demo team for the annual air show, which I was writing about for the paper. We were sitting around waiting for the show to get going, and conversation strayed into fuel consumption/costs/etc. I had no idea that airplanes burned so much. Especially stunt planes (he estimated 50-70 gallons/hour) and highly maneuverable fighter jets (up to 150 gallons/hour). I mentally stagger at the carbon footprint, he stays firmly in financial territory. “It’s all money spent in the defense of freedom.”

“So is the military looking into alternative fuels at all, given worries about supply?”
“Absolutely. There’s this process involving coal…”

Trying to stay neutral as possible, I wandered tentatively into BP territory: “It’s interesting, don’t you think, the extra attention it’s bringing to energy issues?” And he dismisses. “People forget that nearly everything they own is made from petroleum. Focus on fuel is short-sighted. Unless they find a way to make glass more cheaply, we’ll be using oil for a long time.” True, but it ignores the central question of what we CAN do, and the long-term concerns (opposing, in some ways, the short-term concerns of the military) that would make it worth pursuing.

It was an interesting anthropological moment. One of those where you say, Ah, the values here are very different, but they are held together by a certain kind of logic.

I went to that same air show “for fun” the next day. I have other thoughts, maybe for later, about air shows and America, the land where we go to events that boast about “turning fuel into fun,” the land where the deafening roar of a jet engine passing you at 650 mph is “the sound of freedom.”