Future-Proofing the News by Kathleen A. Hansen & Nora Paul

Author:Kathleen A. Hansen & Nora Paul [Hansen, Kathleen A. & Paul, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2016-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

A Network of Preservation Heroes

The collections of radio newscasts in various large institutions consist mostly of the national networks’ feeds. But what about local radio broadcasts? According to the LOC’s report on preservation of recorded sound, the preservation of local commercial radio presents unique challenges. Among the challenges cited are frequently changing ownership and station consolidation, and the perception that there is no revenue potential for archival content.81

One of the initiatives arising from the LOC’s 2012 National Recording Preservation Plan is the Radio Preservation Task Force. Established in 2014, it brings academics and archivists together with the common goal of preserving radio history. One of the goals of the task force is to identify audio collections nationwide. It seeks to “develop an online inventory of extant American radio archival collections, focusing on recorded sound holdings” and “to identify and save endangered collections.”82

Major collections are fairly well documented. A good portion of national network radio entertainment programming has survived. If caches of local radio material exist, however, they are not documented. And Josh Shepperd, director of the Radio Preservation Task Force, estimates that 90 percent of all local and regional radio content that had existed is gone forever.83

To meet the ambitious goal of creating a national inventory of radio collections, the task force assembled a network of research associates and archive affiliates to identify where major collections of American radio recordings are housed. One of the research associates who stepped up is Professor Michael Stamm, a political and cultural historian in Michigan State University’s Department of History.84 Volunteers were assigned regions and asked to seek out places that held collections of local radio programming, whether large or small. Stamm described the importance of the work and the methods he and this network of seekers of local recorded sound have employed:

The local stuff is what is most interesting to me in general. Radio is already the least well-preserved medium and what has been preserved is almost exclusively national network programming or serials like Amos and Andy—the stuff that was put on transcription discs and sent around the country for asynchronous broadcasting. It is the local voices that went out over the ether once and then they were never heard again. We’re lucky if we have an hour of it.85

As a media historian he wishes he could reconstruct the everyday sound that would be heard on regional radio broadcasts. “We don’t have the sound of regional voices, which was a huge part of radio into the 1950s. What I’ve heard of the various smaller and regional broadcasters is unique. It’s a whole different thing to hear someone doing the news from Texas who is from Texas.”86 The task force project’s initial idea was to compile as complete a national database as possible of the location of audio recordings, particularly those that are not digitized.

Stamm and a graduate student set out to find whatever audio recording stashes they could in Michigan. “It was basically just grunt work—a lot of cold calls, a lot of e-mailing.

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