Category: Broadcast

  • Kind World

    Every now and then, I get the chance to help out a radio producer from some faraway place by being their in-person proxy for an interview. I get directions, gather up my gear, and my only job is to listen really hard while the out-of-town producer conducts an interview on the phone. I love these…

  • Mountain Tango

             To the world outside North Carolina, Asheville might seem like an odd place to find a professional tango orchestra, but it makes perfect sense to those of us who love the place for its wide-open scene for arts, culture and spiritual adventuring of all kinds. Michael Luchtan, the musical director of…

  • Undocumented drivers

    UPDATE: On Thursday, March 21 the N.C. DOT said it’s scrapping the pink-striped design. It’s been a long time since I had the pleasure of producing a story for a national radio program, so it made me really happy when my friend Leda Hartman called to ask if I’d do a story for Latino USA,…

  • On Turtle Island

    Yesterday I escaped the newsroom and the self-imposed prison of my computer and drove up the mountain to do a tape sync for the Radio Netherlands show “Earthbeat.” I love doing tape syncs for radio shows, because I generally get to meet really cool people and get paid to eavesdrop on thoughtful conversations. My assignment…

  • I Made That!

    Cookie’s doghouse is now famously enshrined within the awesome goodness that is radio show “Destination DIY”, produced by Julie Sabatier in Portland, Ore., along with the stories of a stay-at-home dad/home brewer, a woman who knitted a farm, and the DIY butchers at the Portland Meat Collective. I am crazy about this show. Here’s the…

  • In the Doghouse

    One thing really does lead to another. Last fall, John Steinberger was sitting in his back yard, idly thinking about his neighbor, Lisa. She’d just put her house on the market, and she’d just gotten a new dog. He didn’t want her to leave. Maybe, just maybe, he thought, he could do something to convince…

  • A Warmer, Happier Place

    A couple of years ago, a group of students at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, joined forces with a Buncombe County program to weatherize the homes of low-income homeowners as a way to save money — and energy. The program, Insulate!, is becoming a national model for student service on energy conservation and social action….

  • The Need to Read

      About four years ago, I was among a group of radio producers who worked on a documentary project that focused on two main questions: What is poverty? And how has poverty changed since the 1960s, when it was a subject of considerable public discourse? The series, “North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty,” aired in 2005 on…

  • Confronting the Achievement Gap

    Mount Tabor High School, in Winston-Salem, N.C., tried to close the ‘achievement gap’ by pushing more students into rigorous course work. The approach fixed some problems, but created others — more non-white students were taking advanced placement or honors courses — but their need for individual help sometimes felt overwhelming to teachers. This story aired…

  • Making a Lake

    Photographer Ted Richardson and I spent quite a few weekends one summer rambling around the Deep River, where the Randleman reservoir was about to be built.  We met dairy farmers and homeowners, renters and swimmers and lifetime dam opponents, whose conflicting feelings about the dam we tried to capture in a radio story, photographs and…