Hearty congratulations to our colleagues Trey Kay and Deb George for their Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for “The Great Textbook War,” an hour-long radio documentary they produced for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Deb is a longtime Homelands collaborator and one of the best editors in the business. The duPont-Columbia awards, whose winners were announced today, are among the most prestigious in broadcast journalism. The jury called the documentary “evenhanded, painstaking and eye-opening.”
Indigenous Groups Weigh Risks in Climate Strategy
A new post on the National Geographic blog takes a look at the climate change mitigation strategy known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) from the perspective of two indigenous groups who will be directly affected. The report was produced by our friends Ruxandra Guidi and Bear Guerra of Fonografia Collective, and includes an article, photographs, and multimedia documentaries.
The REDD program, launched by the UN in 2008, is “an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development.”
Ruxandra and Bear spent time with the Kuna and Emberá people in Panama. The Kuna worry that a REDD deal under discussion between the Panamanian government and the World Bank could limit their access to ancestral forests as rising sea levels force them to abandon the low-lying islands where most of them now live. Some Emberá, whose own forests have been ravaged by settlers and loggers, are taking part in a pilot tree-planting project that follows the REDD’s basic framework. Both groups are moving cautiously, weighing the economic, political and cultural risks against the potential rewards.
Panama is something of a test case as tropical countries around the world look to cash in on the carbon held in rainforests and other ecosystems inhabited and used by indigenous people. It’s a fascinating and important story.
George F. Johnson and the Square Deal
Please keep your ears open on Wednesday, December 1, for a story on NPR’s All Things Considered called “The Legacy of George F. Johnson and the Square Deal.” The 13-minute piece was produced by Joe Richman and Samara Freemark of Radio Diaries and Homelands’ Jonathan Miller.
George F. Johnson (1857-1948) was president and owner of the Endicott-Johnson Corporation, once the largest shoe manufacturer in the United States. The company employed as many as 24,000 people in upstate New York’s “Triple Cities” of Binghamton, Endicott and Johnson City, and supplied much of the footwear for American soldiers during both world wars.
Johnson was a leading practitioner of what came to be known as “welfare capitalism,” in which corporations provide a wide range of benefits to workers and their families (job security, low-cost housing, subsidized health care, recreation, etc.) in exchange for loyalty and labor peace. A former factory worker and socialist who bought the company with a loan from his boss, Johnson told his workers that they didn’t need unions. What he offered instead was a “square deal.” The work would be hard, but profits were shared, management jobs were filled from within, and the president’s door was always open for those with suggestions or complaints.
Some workers bristled at this arrangement, but most did not, and unions never flourished. Townsfolk loved the company-sponsored parks, carousels, sports leagues and picnics. When George F. Johnson died in 1948, tens of thousands of people came to pay their respects in one of the biggest funerals in US history. But today the company is gone and Johnson is all but forgotten outside the Triple Cities.
“The Legacy of George F. Johnson and the Square Deal” airs at the 35-minute mark of All Things Considered’s first hour (the actual time will depend on your local station’s schedule) and will be available online after that on the NPR and Radio Diaries websites.
Multimedia Series Highlights Hunger Among Seniors
Homelands producers Jonathan Miller, Sandy Tolan, Cecilia Vaisman and longtime collaborator Deborah George are teaming up with Magnum Photos on “Hungry in America,” a four-part multimedia series commissioned by AARP. The first piece, “A Little Goes a Long Way,” about efforts to increase participation by seniors in the SNAP (formerly food stamp) program in Texas, is now live on the AARP website. The story was reported by Jonathan Miller, photographed by Christopher Anderson, and produced by Magnum’s multimedia studio, Magnum In Motion.
Next up is a piece about the challenges faced by elderly people living in rural northern California, with reporting by Sandy Tolan and photos and video by Larry Towell. We’ll keep you posted as more of these stories come online.
Public Radio (and Homelands) in the Spotlight
If you have a chance, please take a look at Bill McKibben’s article about public radio in the latest New York Review of Books. He makes the case that radio, which receives no critical attention whatsoever, remains an extraordinarily important, and extraordinarily vibrant, social institution. He talks with some of our good friends and colleagues about the state of both the art and the business, and cites Homelands Productions as one of the independent groups that keeps the establishment from becoming too, well, establishmentarian. If you’re a public radio fan but still don’t know the difference between NPR, PRI, APM and PBS (hint: the last one is a TV network), the article is a helpful guide to how the system works.
McKibben devotes some paragraphs to the financial challenges facing some of public radio’s more creative enterprises. (A post by Jesse Walker on today’s Reason blog, which also mentions Homelands, suggests that indies like us might be a better investment than big networks and stations.) We may be in the midst of a radio boom, but these are precarious times. Everyone from the NPR megalith to artisanal one- and two-person shops is in search of a business model. That search is not just difficult and slow; it almost inevitably leads into ethical thickets. So much journalism is now being paid for by advocacy groups, corporate advertising departments, and foundations with political or social agendas. And so many producers, itching to dive into the world of stories, find themselves lashed to their desks, spending their days writing fundraising letters, explaining why storytelling matters.
Congratulations, Chris Brookes
Old friend Chris Brookes has won yet another award for radio documentary. The Annotated Jack, about Chris’ neighbor, a retired fisherman in St. John’s, Newfoundland, won the New York Festivals Silver World Medal for profiles. Like many of Chris’ creations, it combines music and folklore and deep local color. The piece aired on RTE (Ireland’s national radio network) last October. Please give it a listen. Warning: Heavy accents!
WORKING Project Featured on Labor Day Show
Belated Happy Labor Day! Last weekend Re:sound, the Chicago Public Radio program that showcases radio documentaries from around the world, broadcast (actually “re:broadcast”) “The Work Show,” featuring Homelands’ WORKING project. The hour, which was first heard last September, weaves interview bits with executive producer Jon Miller with excerpts from several profiles from the series. Those include a pirate in Indonesia (by Kelly McEvers), a movie director in Nigeria and a French chocolate taster in Ecuador (both by Jon), an oil worker in Canada (Chris Brookes), a lobster diver in Honduras (Claudine LoMonaco), and an express mail driver in Beijing (Sandy Tolan).
“The Work Show” was produced by Delaney Hall and hosted by Gwen Macsai. If you missed the broadcast you can still hear it online, presumably until the end of time. WORKING aired on Marketplace between 2007 and 2009 and received the 2008 Sigma Delta Chi Award for radio feature reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Migration Doc’s Timing is Sadly Apt
A story I reported from Honduras and Virginia for BBC’s domestic service, Radio 4, is being rebroadcast today in slightly edited form on the BBC World Service program “Assignment.” “Cutting the Lifeline” looks at the impact of the financial crisis on Honduran migrant workers, their families, and their communities. The 23-minute piece was produced and narrated by former NPR correspondent and old Homelands friend Vera Frankl.
The timing of the broadcast coincides with news reports describing the massacre of 72 would-be migrants in northern Mexico. Among the dead were Hondurans, Salvadorans, Ecuadorans, and others trying to reach the United States. Several hundred migrant workers now die each year along the US-Mexico border. But it’s easy to forget how harrowing the journey is for everyone who risks it. An appallingly high number of those who now live and work in the US were raped, robbed, or injured on their way here. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims of this latest horror.
Jon
