Weird way to wake up

[Greg]

So weekday mornings when I'm going to work, I have the radio set to come on pretty early. I get out of bed around 6ish, maybe 6:15 on a sluggish day, but the radio comes on about 5:30 to start waking me up. It's set to the local NPR station because, well, otherwise there would be nothing worth setting it to without hooking up an iPod or something. I often hear very little of it anyway before another alarm starts beeping 15 minutes or so later. They play Morning Edition twice, starting at 5 and ending at 9. But in the 5:00 and the 7:00 hour they do something slightly different. Near the end of the 7:00 hour they play the regular Morning Edition people doing a business report. In that block of the 5:00 hour, though, when only a few of us are hearing it (can't figure out that decision, but I can't figure out a lot about the local NPR station) they play the Marketplace Morning Report.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, somewhere in that hazy half awake state today about 5:53am with Scott Jagow talking about whatever he was talking about (I listened again to the part where the song comes in and still can't remember), I am startled awake by...the BPP theme. Well, kinda. It was a clip of the original placeholder theme, Lex by Ratatat. I have no idea if the producers there knew the connection or not when choosing the music today. I would guess not, given how long it has been. But man that was weird.

I kinda like Jagow's 10-minute rundown when I manage to hear it. You can get him on a podcast too. The site has just been updated with today's edition, although they haven't put up the music list yet.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/episodes/show_rundown.php?show_i...

[Trey]

Whoah... are you sure you didn't hallucinate? I just finished listening to the Marketplace Morning Report, and a) Renita Jablonski, not Scott Jagow, is hosting this morning; and b) I didn't hear Lex or any other Ratatat.

[Tricia McKinney]

@Trey, click on the link in the story above and then click on "listen now." It's about 4 minutes into the 'cast. Crazy!

[Greg]

When I first looked it was still yesterday's. And they had a music list on the page. So I'm guessing at some point today they will add the music list. It's definitely in there, as Trish said, about 4 minutes in. Actually right before the song comes on it's not Scott talking but Steve Hadden(? not on the crew list) reporting about the conventions.

Maybe Trey was making a joke. :-) Bob Moon was hosting Monday and Tuesday. Renita was nowhere to be found apparently, kinda like Monday on ATC where all three regular hosts were out and Scott Simon did the thing by himself!

[Trey]

Double whoah. I'm hallucinating, I guess. That's okay, if one of us has to be hallucinating, it might as well be me, but I wish the hallucination would go away. I just queued up that link at Tricia's suggestion, and sure enough, there's Lex (though Bob Moon, not Scott Jagow, is hosting). BUT, I still have the audio stream from WNYC running, so I rewinded to 8:50. It's Renita Jablonski, not Bob Moon, and no Lex. The only repeat story is the last one on travel websites, all the other stories are different.

Either Marketplace produces a different morning report each hour or I need to see a psychiatrist.

[Greg]

Okay, Scott *wasn't* there this morning either. D'oh! I didn't listen to the part where he says that, and I wasn't awake enough earlier I suppose, just awake enough to hear the startling music. How you got a report this morning with Renita I have no idea. As you say, either they taped another later for the later hour, or WNYC played a really old one.

I would think if they do two, though, why wouldn't they give us both on the site? Although the stories I guess are self-contained so it probably doesn't matter how they are packaged with whichever host. It's probably not that much extra work. They get in a few new stories more pertinent later in the morning, and they run those, and package up different music. Heck, maybe later the web site will have the Renita version. Dunno.

[Maura]

I also wake up gradually with Morning Edition. It often gets into my head before I really wake up and makes my dreams weird(er). Like the one time when I dreamt that Ken Rudin was about 7 feet tall, wore a huge Hawaiian shirt, and had dreadlocks.

On Fridays I always wake up to Story Corps, which is a horrible experience. Almost without fail, my first thought on Friday is "why is NPR trying to make me cry"? It's always a delightful surprise when it's just a lighthearted, happy talk.

[Greg]

I think StoryCorps is played out as far as putting a clip every week onto ME. It appears this has been done for over 3 years, and if there's one thing I don't want to listen to on Fridays, that is it. Although if I do hear it and I'm not yet in the shower, I know I'm late. ;-)

In fact, your post has prompted me to send a suggestion to NPR. Fat lot it'll do.

[Greg]

I know. I thought of pointing that out as well. For some reason APM believes they can go this route and NPR doesn't. Shouldn't the stations be all over APM for going around them to get contributions? No, probably not. I think they'd rather have Marketplace on the air.


Matthew C. Scallon said:

OMG, you're right. But what really shows how bogus NPR is was that the webcast started with a pledge request. So, one public radio network, NPR, hasn't figured out how to get contributions from on-line listeners, another one, APM, has.

[Sky Bluesky]

God, I really loved that song as the theme. I always thought the new one just sounded too newsy, too ordinary. But this one was jarring and weird. And it fit the show perfectly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0VAkPjrnWM&feature=related

[Rob Paterson]

Matthew C. Scallon said:

Greg said:

I know. I thought of pointing that out as well. For some reason APM believes they can go this route and NPR doesn't. Shouldn't the stations be all over APM for going around them to get contributions? No, probably not. I think they'd rather have Marketplace on the air.

I am with you Matthew - I think it would be easy to link the 2 and the support for the station would not go down but up.

I want access on my terms!
Rob

In own mind, I compare NPR to Major League Baseball back in the '40's. Bear with me on this, I'll get to the point. Originally, MLB tried to block radio broadcast of their games, not even allowing radio reporters to report from the games, out of same convoluted fear that attendance would drop from people only listening to the game. What happened instead was that radio made people more interested in the outcomes of the games and increased attendance.

NPR doesn't want to increase web-based content for fear it will take listeners away from the terrestrial stations. I contend that, if local stations put links on their station Web sites to the webcast content, including shows which they don't broadcast themselves, that will bring more traffic to their sites and, since my local station has a "Contribute" link on its sites, revenue and listeners for their broadcast content.

Of course, I'm preaching to the choir, here. BTW, when I contributed to Marketplace's webcast, I said pretty much this same thing in the comments section, mentioning the Bryant Park Project as my example.

[Rob Paterson]

Rob Paterson said:

Matthew C. Scallon said:

Greg said:

I know. I thought of pointing that out as well. For some reason APM believes they can go this route and NPR doesn't. Shouldn't the stations be all over APM for going around them to get contributions? No, probably not. I think they'd rather have Marketplace on the air.

I am with you Matthew - I think it would be easy to link the 2 and the support for the station would not go down but up.

I want access on my terms!
Rob

In own mind, I compare NPR to Major League Baseball back in the '40's. Bear with me on this, I'll get to the point. Originally, MLB tried to block radio broadcast of their games, not even allowing radio reporters to report from the games, out of same convoluted fear that attendance would drop from people only listening to the game. What happened instead was that radio made people more interested in the outcomes of the games and increased attendance.

NPR doesn't want to increase web-based content for fear it will take listeners away from the terrestrial stations. I contend that, if local stations put links on their station Web sites to the webcast content, including shows which they don't broadcast themselves, that will bring more traffic to their sites and, since my local station has a "Contribute" link on its sites, revenue and listeners for their broadcast content.

Of course, I'm preaching to the choir, here. BTW, when I contributed to Marketplace's webcast, I said pretty much this same thing in the comments section, mentioning the Bryant Park Project as my example.

Maybe an experiment with a handful of major stations?

[Marc Naimark]

The idea of routing web content through local stations also gives an economic justification for fundraising: bandwidth costs money.

Matthew C. Scallon said:

Rob Paterson said:

Maybe an experiment with a handful of major stations?

First of all, I apologize for taking as long as I did to respond. We've had visa issues for my wife.

Secondly, I was trying to think of a comparison to the dilemma of not funding NPR directly and not alienating the local stations. The only thing I could to compare this to is the associations for small on-line businesses. An on-line business may not have much product to sell, but they can affiliate themselves with larger on-line stores. Everytime a user clicks over to the larger on-line store that the smaller vendor associates with, the smaller vendor gets a percentage of the sale.

Now, how can that relate to NPR and local stations? Suppose that my local station doesn't carry my favorite program. It can, however, put a link on its Web site which redirects to that program. Of course, before the browser redirects, the station can program in either a splash page or a pop-up window requesting a donation "to help continue providing increased programming for its on-line community," or some such message. It's easy for a local station then to keep track of which show's listeners contribute to its on-line-only content. The local station either can change its terrestial programming to include that program, based upon the on-line support or can continue to keep the program as on-line-only content but still pay the program to keep its on-line feed.

It's an idea, and certainly better than cancelling a popular program with a strong on-line community.