I’ve loved playing around with audio and video ever since I attended a week-long workshop at Berkeley’s Journalism School many moons ago and learned how to record and edit audio and video. This week, you can hear me as a one time co-host on the Indicator from NPR’s Planet Money. This is a little different from me appearing as a guest on the show; in this piece, I translated my demographics story from a few weeks ago into audio. I recorded and edited the interviews, and wrote the script, too. You can hear me discussing the story with my friend Stacey Vanek Smith, who is actually a professional radio person, and thus sounds more alive, cheery, and clear than I do. Here’s a link, or you can find The Indicator wherever you get your podcasts.
You will probably recognize this ‘Graying of America’ as a theme I have been harping on for a few months now, but it was fun to do a radio version.
Doing this piece made me wonder what happened to the other video pieces I produced back in the days when the LA Times asked reporter to also produce videos to accompany their stories. They had a room stocked with handheld video cameras that are probably covered in dust today. I did a handful of videos, and then got in trouble with the head of video because I published a video in which a milkman said the word “boobies,” which is apparently offensive. (The story was about how rising gas prices would kill the milkman, and he was telling me a joke in which a woman asks the milkman for 5 gallons of milk because she was taking a milk bath. He asks if she wants it pasteurized, and she says, “No, just up to my boobies.” Get it?)
Lo and behold, a YouTube page exists where I must have uploaded a few of the videos I produced back then, as if I knew a future me would seek them out and have no idea which hard drive I stored them on. (They are no longer on the LA Times website because they seem to now actually have some quality control.) Here’s the page, where I uploaded videos about tourists viewing Detroit’s ruins, NYC’s smallest museum, failing bridges in Pennsylvania (how prescient!) and the construction of the new World Trade Center. Sadly, the milkman video is not there, and now the world will probably never hear that milkman tell his boobie joke ever again. Current me would say that the videos are not bad but they are not very good, either.
If you want to listen to me even more, I appeared as a guest on Stacey’s show last year to talk about my women-owned business story. I also do radio hits from time to time—I was on News Radio WTAM this morning to talk about the middle class story, but it is a painful listen because I couldn’t stop coughing because I got the flu after getting COVID and my lungs are not very happy. Only listen if you want to hear the hosts trying to ask if I am ok without being rude. If you want to know more about shorter media hits in the future, follow me on Twitter.
Here’s the Indicator episode I co-hosted once more: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/10/1097997546/the-graying-of-america