Wednesday, November 5, 2008

PROPOSAL: En Route

Hello class! Below is a proposal for the series Jim and I would like to do, centered around stories of travel in and around NYC and titled En Route. Please let us know if you'd like to get involved! I'm going to be disseminating calls for submissions around campus for the rest of the week as well.

NAME: Cambra Moniz-Edwards, Jim Briggs

CONTACT INFORMATION: 415-690-0759, camdiggidy@gmail.com, briggsjr@newschool.edu

CLASS: WNSR: Radio Lab

TITLE: En Route

HOST(S): TBA (see below)

GENRE: Feature. Because this program will be based on outside submissions, the content itself will incorporate various genres (documentary, sound art, etc.)

LENGTH: 30 minutes (incorporating a handful of submissions into each individual show).

FREQUENCY: TBA, depending on the volume and quality of submissions. We imagine this more as a miniseries than a regularly scheduled program, since, again, it will be based on outside submissions.

TOTAL NUMBER OF SHOWS: TBA

PITCH: En Route is an invitation for members of the New School community to share their stories of all kinds of travel and transit in New York City. The show will air semi-regularly and incorporate various submissions, which will encompass myriad radio genres, into half-hour shows. A regular host will introduce the program and provide necessary introductions to and explanations of the content.

THE SHOW (a longer explanation of the show):
ONE-SENTENCE PROMO! "Tell us how you got here."

This will appear on our campus call for submissions:

WNSR is pleased to announce its first themed call for submissions! Our newest series, EN ROUTE, wants to hear your stories of New York travel.
New Yorkers move. Our city thrives on transit—how does it move you? EN ROUTE wants to hear your take on any and all forms of transportation in New York. How do you get from point A to B? Who gets you there? What can transportation in the 5 boroughs teach us about our communities and our city at large?

En Route wants to both explore the diverse and entertaining ways that transit factors into our lives both as New Yorkers and members of the New School community, and to promote creativity in audio work. The program will highlight both the diversity of travel within our communities and city as a whole, as well as emphasizing a variety of New School-ers’ experiences around a common theme. Our emphasis on incorporating as many radio genres as possible both increases the potential for submissions and underscores our identity as a freeform station committed to representing our university as a whole!

TIME CLOCK: The nature of the program and our inability to predict submission lengths makes it hard to lay out any sort of time clock here. We imagine a regular host tying all the pieces together and providing context for any particular show (themes being highlighted or illustrated, for example). In this sense a good analogue to imagining the sound might be This American Life, not in the sense of Ira Glass's hosting style or verbal tics, but the idea of 3 or 4 stand-alone pieces illustrating a single idea or concept, woven together by a single host.

TARGET AUDIENCE: We would love to use this series as a way to introduce a kind of microcosm of the varying genres we feature on the station. Ideally we would be able to attract listeners who enjoy more straightforward, NPR-style news and documentary, as well as those who want to hear more abstract or artistically-motivated work. The fact that we are encouraging the New School population to participate also ups our chances of increased university listenership.

STAFFING REQUIREMENTS: Jim and I are happy to get the ball rolling once we put out our call for submissions (which, again, will go out this week), but we'd LOVE help from the class! In the long term, roles to be filled are:

1. A regular host. We can't give an idea of time commitment just yet, but I imagine the show wouldn't air more frequently than every other week, 30 minutes a show. There is time before our first production gets underway to allow for people to submit their work.

2. Producers/script writer(s). This can fall under the host's purview as well, if interests dovetail; if not, division of labor it is! This would entail listening to submissions, grouping them into appropriate "themes" and arranging them in a way to accomodate a half-hour (give or take) framework, and writing appropriate introductions to and commentary on the pieces themselves, as well as general episode intros and outros.

3. Editors. Again, people are welcome to participate on all fronts, but this is another aspect of production that will need attending to--stitching together the above pieces of the show-puzzle, bouncing to disk and submitting appropriate file formats to our submission address and/or ensuring their safe transference to the class hard drive.


And, as always, any thoughts or feedback are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Cambra

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