John Bracken

Over at ObamaMedia.com, I ask whether the Kucinich for President campaign is using tag spam to generation traffic to its Flickr site.

WNYC produces some great shows– On the Media and the Brian Lehrer Show chief among them. For the rest of the month, WNYC is experimenting with a new program– its first new talk show in quite awhile. The Conversation sounds similar to Chris Lydon's Radio Open Source (which WNYC airs nightly)– but with a focus on the world's capital city. Last night's show included stories on Iraq, immigration and Net Neutrality. The much-admired Daljit Dhaliwal is hosting this week. The Conversation promisess to feature "a diverse spectrum of people with an incredibly wide range of views."

You’ve probably exchanged thousands of glances with strangers on the subway, on line at the supermarket, or at your local dog run without ever saying a word. But in New York, any stranger can instantly become an acquaintance, or a new friend, when you start a conversation about the issues that matter to you.

The Conversation connects you with the people around you…

How will the show use WNYC.org? How will it use the web? Will they successfully leverage virtual communities like Flickr? What does it have in common with Chicago Public Radio's WBEW experiment? Unlike WBEW, WNYC does not have the advantage of starting with a new station– to add a show, they will necessarily disappoint a set of listeners by dropping an existing show, a reality played out in its comments page .

WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show has started a Flickr site for its new series on immigration, The Border:

we're asking you to share favorite photos that tell your immigration story. Your photos can be political or very personal, but we'd love it if you were particularly creative in the way you title and describe your images. 

Josh Andrews points out that hipster beverage of choice PBR is sponsoring NRP's All Songs Considered, "the online ghetto where NPR execs send anything that smells "hip" or "indie"….What's next, Urge Overkill on Prarie Home Companion?" (When not blogging, Josh is senior content developer for Chicago's WBEZ, where, among other things, he administers the Chicago Public Radio Flickr group, that I mentioned previously.)

Beer and public radio reminds me of my favorite Saturday morning show. No, not Car Talk, but rather Chuck Mertz's This is Hell on WNUR, brought to us by National Beer. The highlight of yesterday's show was the interview with Time Wise, "author of two new books, "White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son" (Soft Skull Press), and "Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White" (Routledge). Tim wrote the Counterpunch story "Of Immigrants and 'Real Amurkans'"
Today's the first Sunday of the month, which means that WLUW will air the Drinking & Writing Brewery Radio show tonight at 6. The show explores "the connection between creativity and alcohol."

A couple of non-beer related public radio notes:

I had my first experience with XM satellite radio flying on Air Tran last month. I was overwhelmed, flipping back and forth between the country stations America and Hank's Place, Fuego (reggaeton), and Soul Street. Thus, I can now relate to the thoughts of XM subscriber Chris at Code Intensity:

I’m finding I rarely listen to radio. It just plain sucks, so it’s almost irrelevant that it’s free. If I don’t listen to it, then the cost doesn’t matter. XM on the other hand is awesome…. keep free radio, but at least make it compelling, otherwise, free or not, it’ll be irrelevant.

My new favorite weekend Chicago show is Lotus Beat on WNUR, the perfect soundtrack for a sunny Saturday afternoon drive down Devon Ave.– or Howard St., in my case yesterday.

Finally, on Thursday, NPR received a shout-out from Instapundit for a "really nice story" on troop re-enlistments.

Two Flickr pools are collecting fotos from today's happenings: Immigration Nation and Vivir Latino, the letter started by the eponymous blog. 

I, like many others married to people who live in different time zones, resort to solo dinners of cereal, Trader Joe’s pizzas and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I also listen to a lot of public radio. For the past few months, BEZ has followed Marketplace (for my money the best daily public radio show) with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly magazine As It Happens. As I have mentioned before, I enjoyed listening in on the CBC’s reports on Canada’s winter elections as well their take on our odd country. But now that the elections are over and spring is in the air I humbly submit that it is time for BEZ to declare victory and move on. Frankly, I’ve had my fill of tales such as the one on Friday in which “an M-P from Labrador tells us how he’ll cook up the seal that he clubbed himself.” I am also no longer as amused by the whiff of northern superiority that prevails in much of their coverage.

So, as one of BEZ’s biggest fans, I take it upon myself to offer Torey Malatia and his crew suggestions on how to fill that Monday-Thursday 7 pm time slot. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Re-run Eight Forty-Eight, the BEZ-produced daily magazine show that airs at 9 am. (I’m usually listenting to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer at 9, when I can.)
• Re-run Terry Gross’ Fresh Air.
• I know its a bit Pacifica-ish, but why not try a different program each night. BEZ produces good programming– why not leverage it in prime time. Highlights culled by BEZ’s Third Coast Audience festival could air on Mondays, say. As I have noted a couple of times, BEZ, like the rest of the English language media, seemed to have missed the build up to the immigrant rights march: perhaps featuring Latino USA (currently “heard” Sunday at 5 am) on Tuesday might help make connections for the station and its audience. Why not move Ed Lifson’s Hello Beautiful, about the local art scene, into a prime time spot on Wednesday. Finally, Thursdays would be a good time to raise the profile of Sound Opinions, which I have enjoyed the few times I’ve come across it. (I know, it has a podcast.)

Meanwhile, kudos to BEZ and Joshua Andrews for using Flickr for the daily picture on its website. I like the openness to learning:

Each day, we feature a different photo on our home page. We’re a little new at using Flickr for this, so if you have any suggestions or comments about how to improve this process, let us know. Here are the submission guidelines.

- Shots that depict Chicagoland: the people, the neighborhoods, the sights
- The more recent, the better!
- Photos that don’t require captions
- Landscape orientation (i.e., horizontal)
- Pictures should be at least 440 pixels wide at 72 dpi.
- We may do a minor adjustments (contrast, brightness, color, etc.) as necessary
- In return, we offer a credit that can contain a link either to your Web site or e-mail address where folks can track you down.
You can always email us photos as well - photos@chicagopublicradio.org

Upon reading of today’s riots in Dublin, I was curious to see what sort of citizen journalism I could find. Nothing on the BBC, but I did find detailed photos at Flickr. Indy Media also has better photos than I saw at the Post.

Christina shares her story– she’s canceled plans to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight:

Today i was walkin from work to the busstop [about 30/40 minutes walk] and I got to pearse st. and was walking down it.. A guy grabs me from behind and shoves me against a wall saying in a very dublin accent ‘Get out of the fuckin way!’ so that kinda hurt, then i saw him from behind and he had a white jersey with blood all down the left of it and it wasn’t his own because he had no gash on his head.. So i get to my bus stop only to see Gardí [police] and rioters clashing….50feet away.

They had glass bottles, iron bars, homemade petrol bombs, and anything else they could get their hands on….

I was gonna be going into town tonight to celebrate being 18, but i’m going next weekend instead because the atmosphere there is awfull……

*sigh*….Today was the First time i have ever been scared in my own city…

Daragh at Dublin Metroblogging adds some reports.