Lessons Learned

From Aaron...
This is a page I wanted to devote to some of the things I learned while trying to bring RadioLINK to the airwaves.

The general gist is that there's a reason why most public radio shows have a host, a producer (or two), an engineer or technical director, and maybe an associate producer as well! It's a lot of work! Trying to do ALL that stuff yourself is just not a viable business model. I was trying to work full-time at ITworld.com while also doing all those roles at RadioLINK and it nearly got me fired; I was essentially spending at least 20-30 hours a week producing RadioLINK, minimum...and I really wasn't all that thrilled with the quality of the work I was producing; it always felt rushed.

The divide between technical director and host really becomes apparent when you listen to the tapes - I'm reading about ten thousand words a minute and at many points I sound distracted as I'm trying to resolve some technical glitch while run an interview at the same time. It didn't help that WMFO's studio facilities are very primitive - getting two callers on the air at the same time was impossible.

At the time my public radio experience was limited to my time at WBUR while a student at Boston University and working full time at WBUR for a year after graduation. It definitely shows - I'm 24 years old and you know it...just listen to The Infinite Mind piece on "Multitasking" I voiced in 2005 (while 29). The improvement, I feel, is very noticeable.

Still, even though that six weeks was a ton of work, it was also a lot of fun...and I learned a tremendous amount about how to be a producer; booking guests, pre-interviewing guests, live-interviewing guests, editing scripts, writing newscasts (I wrote all the newscasts that "Daphne", the Microsoft Text-to-Speech synthesizer, would "read" after the billboard) and whatnot.