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Nieman Notes
Compiled by Lois Fiore
Nieman Notes
Interactivity Creates a Different Kind of Journalism
A former newspaper editor turned radio host discovers ‘a forum, simultaneously
public and intimate, for digesting news and debating its meaning.’
By Tom Ashbrook
Just before nine o’clock on the morning
of September 11, I was turning
into the parking lot of a venture
capital firm in Westport, Connecticut
when the cell phone beeped. “Turn on
your radio,” my wife said. “A plane has
hit the World Trade Center.”
That morning, we did not set out
plans for a new media company, or for
an old one, or for anything else. Instead,
a knot of investors, entrepreneurs,
secretaries, the UPS man, and a
plumber sat transfixed around a television
set pulled onto a long boardroom
table and watched with the rest of the
world as history exploded in our faces.
So many lives were changed in those
few hours. My changes were utterly
inconsequential in any greater scheme
of things. But that morning did reshape,
yet again, my experience as a
journalist.
In the late 1990’s, after my Nieman
year, I left my editor’s job at The Boston
Globe to join the “new media” land
rush with a team of wonderful dreamers.
We launched an Internet company,
struggled up a steep learning curve,
raised $70 million, made something
cool happen, learned the new media
frontier inside and out—then watched
as bust followed boom. There was
plenty of hubris, a little madness—and
the beginnings of a profound change
in the flow of information that will play
out for years to come.
The company survives, but by September
of this year I had long stepped
out of the management of
HomePortfolio, Inc. I’d written a book
chronicling my experience in the
decade’s boom and was enjoying a
year off—writing, swimming with the
kids, and dabbling very lightly in a
completely new medium to me: radio.
Boston’s national powerhouse of a
public radio station, WBUR, had
launched a great interview and call-in
show called “The Connection,” hosted
by the inimitable Christopher Lydon.
When Chris left the station, a stream of
well-known broadcasting folk stepped
in to take the microphone while station
manager Jane Christo looked for a
new host. NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Neal
Conan, and Robert Siegel took turns.
John Donvan from ABC’s “Nightline”
sat in. Dick Gordon from the Canadian
Broadcasting System was there. Judy
Swallow from the BBC. And from the
ink-stained world of newspapering, the
Globe’s Alex Beam and, once-removed,
me. Gordon, a veteran CBC correspondent,
was tapped for the job. But for
me, just a week at the microphone had
been a revelation. This was the original
interactive mass medium, interacting
with a great national audience and
thriving on change, both social and
technological.
Four days after the attacks, WBUR
executive producer Ian Docherty called
on a Saturday afternoon. Demand for
coverage of the week’s astounding
events were pressing NPR’s resources
to the brink, he said. Would I come in
Sunday afternoon, ready to help plan
and host crisis programming that would
go on-air nationally, five hours a night,
starting Monday?
On Sunday afternoon, the station’s
top brass, producers and technical staff
gathered around a white board with
the scribbled outline of the programming.
A staff of a dozen was put on the
rush project. Public radio stations
KQED in San Francisco and WNYC in
New York mercifully picked up three
of the five hours. On Monday, September
17, WBUR’s “Special Coverage”
went live for two hours at 7 p.m.,
flowing over hundreds of local stations
in NPR’s network. It’s never stopped.
The show’s format is simple and
draws its energy from the diversity of
response to stunning events: An eightminute
debrief at the top of the hour,
digging in to the latest news from Washington,
New York, Islamabad or Kabul,
with radio or print reporters on the
scene or informed analysts looking on.
A longer interview, live, in the 40-
minute belly of each hour, going deep
with a newsmaker, scholar, artist or
commentator, and opening the phones
to listener comments and questions.
And a “radio diary” in the last five
minutes of the show, in which citizens,
filmmakers, Afghan exiles and others
have poured out their personal
thoughts and emotions in taped segments.
As host, I’m joined most nights
throughout by the show’s excellent
news analyst Jack Beatty, a senior editor
at The Atlantic Monthly.
So, crisis brings a newspaperman to
the radio mike. And here’s what I’ve
learned. Radio’s strength is its immediacy
in moving information, its tactile
power to evoke scenes and elicit re-
Nieman Reports / Winter 2001 113