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V AROUND THE INSTITUTE
Story
First
“WE TAKE YOU around the world . . . into people’s minds.”
by Deborah Blagg
Melissa Block ’83 feigned dismay
as she began her lecture shortly after
4:00 p.m. on March 11, facing a capacity
crowd at Radcliffe Gymnasium.
Addressing an audience that normally
would have been listening to her on
their car or kitchen radios at that hour,
the veteran cohost of National Public
Radio’s All Things Considered d joked,
“There’s going to be a big dip in the ratings
for our local stations today.”
Block was introduced by the Nieman
Foundation curator Ann Marie
Lipinski, who praised the prizewinning
reporter for doing “what the best
journalists do: she steps out of the way
and puts the story ever first.” During
a tightly scripted presentation that
included reflections on the history of All
Things Considered, the growing impact
of digital media, and the increasingly
compressed daily news cycle, Block
did step out of the way several times,
sharing audio clips that conveyed both
an insider’s view of radio and a sense of
the medium’s reach and 21st-century
relevance.
From a tongue-in-cheek segment on
a day in the life of an All Things Considered
reporter to a reprise of her haunting,
on-the-scene coverage of a 2008
earthquake that killed close to 70,000
people in China’s Sichuan Province, the
audio snapshots demonstrated the range
and force of what Block later called
NPR’s “intimate mode of storytelling.”
“We take you around the world and
deep into people’s minds,” she commented.
Block said that style of reporting has
remained a constant during her nearly
three decades at the network, as has the
extent to which women’s voices have
defined NPR’s broadcasts. In the tradi-
tion of the network’s “founding moth-
DURING HER DAY at Radcliffe, NPR’s Melissa Block met with Harvard students and advised
aspiring journalists to play an instrument, learn a language, and, most important of all, listen.
ers” Susan Stamberg, Cokie Roberts,
Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer,
Block said, the new generation of “fearless
women reporters” who are covering
violent uprisings in countries such as
Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen “have
produced some of the most riveting
journalism I’ve ever heard, under extraordinarily
difficult circumstances.”
Block noted aspects of her daily work
that have changed during her NPR
tenure: unwieldy, reel-to-reel tape machines
have been replaced by tiny flash
card recorders; the network’s foreign
bureaus have grown from one in 1984 to
20 today; and communicating with farflung
correspondents is now a matter
of “a couple of clicks on a cell phone”
instead of hours of dialing and redialing
via Telex.
But progress has come at a price.
Along with the positive changes brought
by expanding coverage and evolving
technologies has come the reality of
“a news cycle in overdrive,” Block noted.
“No one waits for the evening news
to find out what’s going on.” The pitfalls
of what she termed “the headlong
rush to be first” were plainly apparent
in the immediate aftermath of the
Supreme Court’s ruling on the Afford-
able Care Act, when several major
news outlets (not NPR) misreported
that a central tenet of the law had been
struck down.
“What’s the shame in taking the time
to digest a complicated story” Block
asked. “How much credibility is lost
when you get the story exactly wrong I
would say it’s immeasurable.”
TONY RINALDO
2 radcliffe magazine Summer 2013