Everyone has heard of This American Life, but far fewer people know about Radiolab, another public radio program I've talked about here on the blog before. Well this week's New York Times Magazine has an excellent article about the show, and you should read it. Here's an excerpt:
This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what's the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.
But the other interesting thing about media these days is that it can stand perfectly still. In fact it loiters: shows don't simply spill over the airwaves and evaporate; they linger on DVRs, DVDs, various online services. Newspaper articles pile up in Web "archives." And clearly we still accept, still crave, some deeper media experience too. In experimenting with a show that produces (at most) 10 episodes a year, WNYC was specifically thinking of HBO's success in building powerful cultural franchises that ignore the mores of traditional broadcasting.
The author of the piece, Rob Walker, mentions that he heard several episodes before he realized that Radiolab is a show about science. I had the same experience -- for a while I just thought it was a bunch of fascinating stories about the world. The only problem with Radiolab is that because the show is so carefully crafted and takes so long to produce, they can only do 10 episodes a year. You can go through the archives and get a podcast at their web site.
