Departments
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Week of 23 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 11 |
Feature
Article
A new source of radio activity
WBUR finds much to talk about in the Hear and Now
By Eric McHenry
The first item on today's docket: capital punishment. A half-dozen Bostonians, approached on Newbury Street, are asked how the murder of a family member might affect their stance on the death penalty. "He'd be lucky if he made it to court," one man says of the hypothetical villain, "because I'd probably kill him myself."
The discussion jumps back to the WBUR studio, where Tovia Smith has two strident local pundits on the line. Their exchange quickly becomes heated, and Smith must interrupt to keep them on topic. "Last word," she warns one as he begins his rebuttal.
The issue is national in scope, but has important implications regionally. It is significant in the Massachusetts gubernatorial race. Incumbent Paul Cellucci supports the death penalty; his opponent, Scott Harshbarger, opposes it. Tapes roll of the two candidates stating their positions during a recent debate. The crowd responds audibly to both.
This is Hear and Now.
Through a filter,
regionally
The live, hour-long program of news and culture, which
airs weekdays at noon on WBUR-FM (90.9), WBUR-AM (1240), and
WRNI-AM (1290) in Rhode Island, premiered October 5.
Produced by Jennifer Schmidt, a former senior editor for
National Public Radio's Living on Earth, it is the first
issues-oriented show launched by WBUR since The Connection
debuted in 1994. Cohosts Smith and Bruce Gellerman punctuate
in-depth analysis of timely topics with lighter,
personality-based pieces (a senior citizens' chorus that
specializes in classic rock, for example, on the same show
as the death penalty debate).
"Our format is unusual," says Smith. "We don't have too many of those wonderful reporter-produced features that fill up the bulk of the hour on Morning Edition and All Things Considered. What we do have is this live energy. The show is interview-driven."
Twenty
minutes to airtime: Hear and Now cohost Tovia Smith
(right) confers with Jennifer Schmidt (left,
foreground), the show's senior producer, and Liz
Bulkley, an editor for WBUR. Photo by Vernon Doucette
In that respect, Hear and Now more closely
resembles television's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.
"Maybe with Jeopardy thrown in," Gellerman adds. "Lehrer moves slowly. Speed is our thing, and we use it to our advantage."
Broad-cast news
Indeed. The program casts a broad net, offering weekly
or fortnightly features on finance, travel, technology, the
culinary arts, sports, and film. In a segment entitled "Your
Call," William Kahn, SMG associate professor of
organizational behavior, gives career suggestions to a
preselected listener. There's also "New England Notes," a
series of offbeat vignettes from around the region. These
regular features complement the longer, newsier items that
are the show's bread and butter. With the exception of major
national and international news developments that invite no
obvious New England angle, Gellerman says, "our filter is
regional."
"I've been pushing for this for 10 years. I made the weird career move of going from a network to a local because I wanted to do these sorts of stories," says Gellerman, a former associate producer and science reporter on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. "New England is this rich, distinct area. It's not like the South or the Midwest or the Pacific Northwest. I think the station realizes that we need to make a commitment to our listeners and to present their world."
"The Connection used to do that," says Smith, who for the past three years has been NPR's New England reporter. "Then it went national, and it can't address those regional issues anymore: issues that are up for debate on the state or local level."
The stories we want to
do
The same installment of Hear and Now that saw a thorough
treatment of the capital punishment issue included, among
other things, a segment on the efforts of Plymouth-based
Native American groups to change the way Thanksgiving is
remembered; a look at the federal government's antitrust
campaign against Microsoft and its likely local
ramifications; and a feature on "edge cities" -- the
seemingly self-contained, industry-dependent communities
that are springing up on Boston's periphery. In that piece,
Senior Reporter Steven Tripoli freely offered his own
observations and insights.
"A lot of programs call that 'Reporter's Notebook,' where you finally get the reporter's real impression of the story," says Smith. "We don't make that separation. The reporter's sense of things is integral to our stories."
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Hear and Now cohost Bruce
Gellerman: "We jump off the cliff and hope there's
a parachute." Photo by
Vernon Doucette
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"We're not taking a political point of view, but we are pushing the issues. The best thing about this show is that we finally have a chance to do the stories that we want to do," he says. "We've got this hour, and we can reformat the whole thing at the drop of a hat. Last Friday, Tovia did a 24-minute piece investigating allegations of sexual contact between women prisoners in Massachusetts. Incredible. If it weren't for Hear and Now, you never would have heard that piece, especially not on public radio."
Getting close to the
subject
Confronting volatile issues, particularly in a live
radio format, has its hazards. "We jump off the cliff and
hope there's a parachute," Gellerman says.
"People have no sense of the time pressure that we're feeling," adds Smith. "I've got Barney Frank on the phone going after some guy from the Republican National Committee, and neither of them knows that we're coming up to a break at 16 minutes past."
The show has a production team of only 10, including 2 part-time interns. Winnowing a coherent hour of material from 120 desultory person-hours of work is often a harrying, up-to-the-last-minute process. But the spontaneity Hear and Now requires, Smith and Gellerman point out, is also the source of its greatest rewards. Many times, they say, a story's most compelling voices belong to nonpundits, ordinary people whose remarks are unpolished and unexpected.
"We try to get close to the subject," says Gellerman. "We don't want experts talking to other experts. We want experts talking to the people who are being affected by the story. Tovia had a golden moment recently. A high school kid -- what was his name?"
"William," answers Smith. "We had a public policy wonk from Washington who had studied all the different antiviolence curricula in schools around the country. A regular program would just bring her on and talk to her. We put her on with a senior at Madison Park High School, and it was terrific. She would say, 'Well, this is what works: you do this and you do that.' And I said to William, 'Do you think so?' And he said, 'Well, I gotta tell you. Kids in my school are smart. They're smart at being bad.' I think reporting needs that sort of reality check."
"It's the nuance -- the voice," Gellerman says. "You don't get that in other media."
"Exactly," says Smith. "If I printed that quote, it would mean nothing. But to hear that kid say it -- that's why we're in radio."