It was love at first listen. I adored Pat Morrison's wit and vocabulary: she was almost an inspiration for me. Larry Mantle's Air Talk was usually just as frustrating to listen to as it was entertaining, and Fridays almost always had Film Week. Robert Seigel and Michele Norris usually guided me through most of my trip. If I was lucky, I was able to catch the tail end of Fresh Air with Terry Gross as I was driving home. But there was one show that always irked me, that never caught my interest, that I would inevitably tune out or just turn off altogether: Marketplace. It wasn't so much Kai Ryssdal, the show's host, who bothered me. It was mostly all of the doom and gloom they were spouting, the index numbers that made zero sense to me, the NASDAQ and Dow Jones numbers that were constantly falling, and mostly just all things economic that seemed, at the time, completely unimportant, trivial, and, to put it in fairly juvenile language, booooooring.
But slowly, the tune of this show began to change from (for me) uninteresting to almost apocalyptic. News was never positive. It began to worry me that the NASDAQ and Dow Jones Industrial Average were rarely up from the previous day. And Kai's almost irreverent voice and attitude were also beginning to wear on me. Little did I realize therein lies the brilliance of this show. I had started tuning in to NPR not only at the veeery beginning of the presidential primaries, but also at the onset of our current recession. Of course everything was going to be doom and gloom; our economy was tanking. It's with mild regret that I didn't pay more attention to this show, that I didn't recognize that Kai's humor was a way to soften the blow and to make this otherwise somewhat boring news digestible for the average audience member.
This post was inspired by an interview with Kai I found on MediaBistro.com, one of the media news blogs I've started following for my Media Industry Perspectives class. Here is a link to the interview, which I found fairly interesting; I especially enjoyed his answer to the following question:
Who do you see as Marketplace's main competition, and how do you think you're doing against them?If any of you out there listen to NPR (which I can't seem to find time to do any more) let me know: how is Marketplace nowadays?
Our competition comes on two levels, really. On the macro scale, we've got to deal with the same issue everyone else in journalism does -- the sheer amount of information that's out there, online, on the air and on paper -- and how to make ourselves stand out. More specifically within public radio, business and the economy is the story right now, and a lot of other programs have raised their game. I think the things that have set us apart from the beginning -- our attitude, how we go about telling the stories behind the numbers and statistics -- have really helped keep us ahead and set us apart.
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