Canoeing the Mississippi on the radio

I don't spend much time "on air" in my job. I'm more comfortable calling the shots on the other side of the glass from the microphones. But the latest place-based project at Minnesota Public Radio was my idea and I took the opportunity to voice one of the stories myself.

During the week the Ken Burns documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" aired on PBS, I wanted to air stories about the National Park Service sites in Minnesota. Five days, five parks -- how perfect.

The full series is here. Three of our reporters in greater Minnesota were nice enough to be part of the project and they made three surprising stories about places I think most of our neighbors don't even realize exist in our state: Voyageurs National Park (which still has a tense relationship with its neighbors), Pipestone National Monument (which still offers a working -- and sacred -- rock quarry) and Grand Portage National Monument (which is a grand experiment in dual management -- half federal government, half Native American tribe).

Last Friday, on the last day of the series, I went into the broadcast booth to talk about my experience in Minnesota's most unusual National Park site, the Mississippi National River and Recreation area (which has virtually no land of its own, but enviable access to millions of visitors). Here's the audio:

I know this is broadcasting rather than placecasting, but there is a close relationship and the same qualities of presentation, information and surprise are key to both. But with broadcasting, it's more important to paint pictures for the audience and include sound to put them in the location. (With placecasting, of course, they're already there!) In this case, the sound of kids having a blast in the canoes is priceless.

Oh yeah...the fifth park is the St. Croix National Scenic River. We share that one with Wisconsin (kinda like Brett Favre, eh?). We didn't send a reporter there, but we had a good phone conversation with one of the rangers there.

(image from MPRNewsQ.org)

Plotting radio stories using Wayfaring.com

Here's what the last two weeks of stories from my show, All Things Considered, look like when you plunk them into a map.

Mousing over a marker displays the story's headline.  For more details, you'll have to double-click the map and see them at the host map site (Wayfaring.com).

I only placed the stories that actually happened in a location or that were about a topic that has a particular location (for example, the Target shareholders meeting is plotted on the Target Headquarters building in Minneapolis).  Stories about concepts were left off the map unless they had a scene of a specific place illustrating that concept (as any good radio story should have, given time enough to report it).

I created this map using Wayfaring.com, which is a simple do-it-yourself map-making Web site, with a clean, no-frills interface.  This takes the programming out of map mashups.  It also takes out a lot of the flexibility.  I couldn't find a way to embed hyperlinks to the stories in the descriptions, much less audio.  But it's a good start.  

Ideally a map like this on a journalism Web site would be sortable by date, topic and reporter, too.  But the most important function of a feature like this is that someone can zoom in on their community and find the journalism being done about it.  Using a map like this over many months could also help editors find gaps in their coverage of a particular region.

Translating this kind of map to be viewable on a mobile device should be the easy part.  Generating compelling content, as always, is what's so tricky.

From my real job

Here's an example of what I do every day at the office.

As a producer, my voice isn't on the radio very often, but I'm working behind the scenes to mold interviews into conversations that are easy for busy listeners to hear and remember.  Most of these are about today's news stories and we record them over the phone.  But I always love getting the chance to take our microphones out of the studio to let the listeners hear stories about a particular place.

This week it was White Bear Lake, Minnesota.  If you're from here, you know that the Walleye Fishing Opener is the unofficial start of summer in Minnesota.  The Opener was on WBL this year.  But I don't care much about fish and neither does our afternoon host, Tom Crann.  So we went to the shores of White Bear to hear about its history from the head of the town's historical society .  Turns out the lake used to be a major destination for St. Paul residents to spend a summer or a raucous weekend.

That was 100 years ago.  It has since turned into the quiet bedroom community most of our listeners think of today.  So in this interview , I wanted to give the listeners a chance to imagine the grand hotels, the noisy trains and the squeals from the amusement park that made this city much more fun back then than any fishing party could make it now.

This is place-based journalism, edited for a broad audience.  But it would have been easy to edit this 32 minute interview in a different way, so it would apply specifically to someone standing on the shore line.  "See that clump of trees straight across the water?  That's where the roller coaster used to be.  Turn around and look at the white house with the porch.  In 1890, that's where the Williams House stood.  Its glamorous summer visitors were the talk of the whole town. Meanwhile, the ground beneath your feet was the croquet yard."

There are historic photos from this time period at our show's Web site.  In a podcast, though, the photos could be part of the presentation.  You could compare what you're seeing now to the image from 100 years earlier.  I've seen some walking tours use this "slide show"technique even as the audio is playing, though I don't currently know how to pull it off.