My Bitter-Sweet Radio Experience!

by Afsaneh Hojabri

In her recent blog entry “radio works so far” posted on 12/03/09, Caroline Kunzle provided insightful reflections and raised important points, especially with regards to ethics of representations when it comes to radio production. She made a very important distinction between producing oral history interviews and producing oral history interviews for radio where one has much less control over the final presentation of the story. It is in the light of this valid observation that I would like to reflect on my first and only radio experience.

Sometime in early September, Caroline approached me and indeed urged me to undertake a radio story about Iran’s post-election events. The subject was very close to my heart so I could not resist the unique opportunity although I was behind almost everything else in my life! I invested two months of full-time work (partly because I was inexperienced), and a lot of passion into it, not to mention the time and enthusiasm of my five interviewees. Caroline on her part invested much more time, interest and patience than I ever expected to listen, edit, choose and re-edit. Eventually, we produced a half-hour documentary beautifully crafted to make one single story with a beginning and an end and lots more in between. I advertised it widely among my circles, and finally it was aired on the Monday Morning After program on December 7th - only it was aired incompletely!

The show was supposed to start at 8:30 AM., but as I anxiously watched my clock ticking 8:35, 36, I could not believe what I was hearing: Liz, the program’s host was chatting with a guest as if she was just killing time, or waiting for something to happen. It turned out she was indeed waiting – waiting for the audio file of the documentary to be delivered to her, physically. The intern who was responsible to deliver the file and “play” it was late, so the show started late, and consequently it was cut ten minutes short, with a promise that “the second part” would be aired the following week. Additionally, I am afraid she did not present it the way she was instructed to. In fact, the way she did present it only reflected she had no particular knowledge of the contents which left me wonder why on earth was she assigned to deliver and present this in the first place?! But that was not a crucial point anyhow.

The most pressing issue was that the show simply could not be cut into two parts and still carry the same message and weight. It was not designed to be aired in two segments. So, Caroline started a set of seemingly endless adventures to find a place and time to get it aired in its entirety. Meanwhile, Liz insisted the remaining part should be aired, because she had already announced that it would. And that is what happened the next Monday: the last ten minute of the story, a disjointed limb of a show that is, was aired. It sounded, even to those who had heard the first part a week ago, too short, too incomplete.

At that point I felt my show was slaughtered, regardless of when and if we could repeat it in its entirety. People who had tuned in to CKUT on Monday the 7th to listen to it had no idea it was split accidentally, and they already made much less of it because it appeared as a distasteful cliff-hanger, the way the story was cut. Moreover, that Monday coincided with the National Student Day in Iran and a lot of protest marches were taking place inside and outside Iran. I had lost the opportunity to air the piece on this extremely timely and appropriate day and that was deeply disappointing to me and many others. And the last ten minutes, sounding so meaningless, aired one week later did not help me or the show to recover really.

My only hope now was that we would succeed getting it aired in its full length and to do so before it was too late – before all the participants and all the people I had communicated with about the show forgot about it. That was accomplished, thanks again to Caroline’s hard work. The documentary was aired on the Wednesday Morning After on December 16th – not on time and not as we intended it with a proper introduction, but in full at least!!

Time and time again through this truly nerve-wracking process I have been told that these things happen with the community radio. And true, there is indeed a distinction to be made between producing oral history interviews and producing oral history interviews for radio where we do not have much control over it. Let us assume having a lesser degree of control over the broadcast procedures always translates into having a less desirable result. Would it be accurate to argue then this is a price we should be ready to pay in order to publicize our stories more publicly? I think it is to some extent, but not entirely.

Obviously the role that Caroline had to play as the mediator between the project and radio was crucial in this particular project – and it has always been judging from her previous blog entry which clearly illustrates how important it is to make an informed, ethical and professional call – when something goes wrong. However, I believe the responsibility should not fall on the shoulders of one person alone. From my brief experience of doing radio I think each story that travels from oral history department to the CKUT airwaves passes through the links of a chain, and I think each single link should play a role in ensuring the stories we want to publicize are not damaged on the way, or else we would not be doing a good job publicizing them to begin with.

Radio work is an enormous opportunity for different components of this project to voice themselves publicly. At the same time, precisely because radio is a very powerful and perhaps hard to tame medium, our radio projects must be given a lot of thought, weight, and resource. We might not be able to completely control what the CKUT does with the stories, but we might try harder to control them at our end – the project’s end. I am also not aware if the radio component of the project has its own distinct ethical guides, but near the end of this collaborative work, I really felt it should!

In the midst of frustrations about the uncontrollable events taking place at the radio station, I was also feeling confused and in the dark regarding my rights and obligations as far as the Life Stories project’s procedures were concerned. During those days, I was urged by a few of my journalist friends to submit the piece to other, more mainstream radio stations and I was ensured given the relevance of the subject the stations such as CBC, BBC or PBR might be interested in airing it. I did not know and still do not know, despite several inquiries I have made, whether I am allowed to do so? What degree of control or ownership do I have, if any over the piece I have produced in collaboration with this project? Specifically in this case, let us assume CKUT failed to ever present my piece as I intended it. Does any rule or regulation prevent me to ever launch it through other channels?

Our documentary is going to be uploaded on the project’s sites, after due modifications, with an introduction that I am not entirely happy with, but in an as-acceptable-as-possible format. I came very close to regret ever undertaking this project, but at the end I am tremendously grateful that it will be up on the web, accessible to the public. So yes, I remain grateful for the opportunity that the Life Stories has given me, not only for this radio piece, but also for providing me with a space in the Basecamp and the website to voice myself whenever I choose to. I am also deeply appreciative of the project’s good intentions, the members’ sincere collaboration and the many wonderful practices the project has accomplished. In fact, I feel too indebted to this project to be silent about what I think could be improved within radio work. Stories matter and stories of turbulent times and places matter even more; so perhaps we could think of ways to take a greater care of them, especially when they are intended for a wider radio audience.

My response to Afsaneh’s blog, by Caroline Kunzle

My experience with this documentary was bittersweet too. I was equally disappointed with the way our piece was broadcast, despite all preparations and after all of that hard work and anticipation. It was heartbreaking for me, as I had expected -- with all the work and planning and the experience I have working with CKUT -- that things could go just as we’d hoped.I knew also that this broadcast was very important to Afsaneh andhad pubicized this radio event to many people, as had I!And then when things didn’t go as planned, I was left looking for how to make the best of it. So I have a few points to add in response to Afsaneh’s very truthful and poignant piece of writing.

First, I am left with some lessons learnt: The first lesson is a bitter one: don’t trust anyone else with anything you can do yourself and never assume anyone understands your instructions unless you have spoken to them in person, directly and possibly, repeatedly. Yes, the intern was a few minutes late – part of the lateness was last-minute-ness and part of it was no fault of hers (the metro stalling) - and those few minutes meant the world for a very precisely scheduled broadcast, but this less-than-desirable result could have been avoided if I had myself ensured that the documentary was in the Monday Morning After producer’s hands. And also, yes, the intern was instructed not to give more than the title as an introduction, but the show’s host unwittingly put her on the spot and asked her questions about the piece, to which she improvised. The result? The broadcast was not the one Afsaneh had dreamed up and given directions for.

So, I trusted the intern to do her job and that trust was broken. There was anger and then communication and then, promises made to learn from the experience. I believe those promises will be held. Yes, there were many links in that chain, many hands which played a part, from the finishing of the documentary to the broadcasting. Making radio is a collaborative process; And we must bear in mind that we are working with people with different levels of experience, education and maturity. That is the nature of the project, the nature of humanity and well, we have all made mistakes. How do we turn those mistakes, and the anger about those mistakes – especially those made at someone else’s expense -- into something positive?

That’s where the second, more important lesson comes in: that the learning we do in this process is ultimately more important than the produced results. So perhaps in this case, this intern had some learning to do about the importance of paying attention to detail and to the precious nature of time. In radio, air time, is like precious drinking water, you don’t waste it, because there is barely enough to go around.

It is this idea of the preciousness of radio air time which brings me to the main point I want to make about the value and importance of community radio. Let me come to its defence. After our broadcast failed to live up to expectations, Afsaneh started asking whether we could not approach the CBC about our documentary. I first had some doubts about the ethics of this, as I know that CKUT can’t re-broadcast material that has been played on public or private radio, because they are mandated as a campus/community radio to produce alternative content (i.e. alternative to public or private), though this excludes podcasting or playing the same material on other campus/community stations.

What I wasn’t sure about was what CBC’s policy was. I suspected that they would not air something that had already played elsewhere, but since it hadn’t aired in its integrity, well, I decided it might be worth looking into. So, I did make a few enquiries into this, but …the kind of documentary we produced was very much made for community radio – the only place where any member of the community is given the freedom and resources to use the radio medium to say exactly what they want, in the way that they want to. I am fairly certain that the CBC would not have aired this documentary, such as it was. Not because it wasn’t of good quality – it was! – but because they do not work generally work this way. We would have had to work with one of their producer’s there from the start in the making of the documentary and even then, I very much doubt that they would have given us an entire half an hour. That is why community radio is also such a precious resource. It is truly the people’s radio.

When things go wrong in community radio – as they regularly do, it is also very easy to blame it, to blame the people involved, to blame the lack of resources, the faulty equipment, to blame “unprofessionalism”, but I also want to point out the fact that the very same mistakes could have occurred on public or private radio, and in fact do on a regular basis. The very fact that community radio programmers show up day after day to produce radio programs as a labour of love – with no pay or recognition – is a testament to how seriously they take it and in fact, how "professional" they are;

Case in point, it took me less than a week to find another program who was willing to broadcast the documentary again, this time in its entirety. True, once again, the broadcast was not perfect. The host failed to introduce the documentary at all. There was a small breakdown in communication, once again, as I gave all pertinent info to his collaborator and not to the actual guy hosting – something I only found out last minute and then could only use email to communicate; But the Stories of Iranian Montrealers documentary was aired in its entirety, with Afsaneh’s introduction and ending and many more people got a chance to hear it!

Here is what we need to learn from this: this is what the “community” in community radio is all about: communication and community-building. When people know each other, talk to each other, understand each other and each other's motives, that is when all of their combined energies converge and synchronize to created the desired result. So many emails, so many phone calls went into getting that documentary broadcast properly, and let me tell you – the phone calls were always more effective than the emails. And the results were by far their most effective when I was able to meet and speak with someone in person.

A partnership on paper means very little in the day-to-day operations of a community radio station. The true partnership between the Life Stories project and CKUT Radio begins when project members enter the facilities, take the trainings, and begin to meet the diversity of radio programmers working day in and day out to make alternative radio – with all of its beautiful diversity and complexity – happen. I realize it is a challenging ideal – with everyone’s busy schedules and prior commitments, but … that may be what it will take to ensure that the Life Stories radio segments always air just as they are intended to.

Life Stories project members have only to gain from becoming more integrated into this dynamic radio station. They will not only be able to tell their stories and ensure they are heard as they should be, but they may also very well end up contributing more regularly to certain programs, possibly start their own programs and definitively build important community partnerships for the long term. Perhaps this is the greatest lesson that we can learn from this less-than-perfect broadcast. In my eagerness to facilitate the telling of Afsaneh’s story, I may have missed some steps in the community-building. I will be sure to encourage the next would-be-radio-producers from the Life Stories project to get more directly involved in the workings of CKUT, so that future broadcasts will be the result of partners truly working together.