Homelands Productions has been around since 1989, creating public radio features and documentaries, writing articles and books, and generally doing our artfully journalistic (journalistically artful?) bit to promote world peace and understanding. In the last few years we’ve started taking the web pretty seriously (see the links to the right). But this, dear Visitor Person, is our first foray into the blogosphere. It’s a small step for mankind, to be sure, but a good-sized leap for our little cooperative.

When I say “our little cooperative” I mean Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman, Cecilia Vaisman, and me, Jonathan Miller. As a group we’ve produced seven major series for NPR and other public radio outlets, often teaming up with other independent producers. We’ve worked in more than 40 countries and won 19 national and international awards. We all have professional lives beyond radio – Sandy (The Lemon Tree) and Alan (The World Without Us) have just written terrifically successful books, Cecilia is working on a video documentary from Cuba, and we all consult and teach.

Right now our biggest project is WORKING, a monthly series of intimate, sound-rich profiles of workers in the global economy for Marketplace, public radio’s daily show about business and economics. More than any of our previous projects, WORKING lives both on the radio and the web. As I write this, we’re rushing to finish a fancy interactive web module that will let working people around the world share and compare their work experiences. We’re calling it the “Worker Browser.” It’s hard to explain without actually looking at it. Send us a note if you want us to let you know when it’s ready.

You can find out more about who we are and what we do at our website. We’ve put up almost all the audio we’ve ever produced and installed a little player, so you can listen for hours. In a few days we should have a functioning search. I suspect it won’t be too long before we venture into the world of the podcast. Poco a poco, as they say in Spanish, we’re getting our online act together.

That’s it for now. It’s good to be here, thanks for visiting, and let’s keep in touch!

Jon

P.S. The photo at the top of the page is from the village of Quilcas, 13,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes. The two sisters are from a family of llama herders. I had just recorded their dad playing his fiddle and their mom singing and banging a drum. I handed my earbuds to one of the girls and she put one in her ear, the other in her sister’s, and they both listened to the music.