On Air

Today was a really fun day.  I've recently started working with the radio department at Ideastream, specifically the Sound of Ideas (SOI) team.  It's nice because now that I've spent a few weeks learning how Ideastream makes money, I get to experience firsthand how some of that money is used.   For those of you who don't know, 90.3 Ideastream is Cleveland's NPR affiliate and SOI is an hour long radio show that features interviews with various people from around Cleveland on current topics.

The day started with me doing research on the topic for Thursday show, which is the military-civilian divide in America.  They have this nifty search engine that's like google on steroids, which certainly helped with the research.  Although, to be honest, even then finding information was a little tricky. 

After that, I sat in on the Sound of Ideas taping in the producers room.  It was cool, because a lot of the things they discussed today are things I researched last week.  In fact, the host, Mike McIntyre, gave me the unofficial yet totally prestigious "factoid of the year" award based on one of the fun facts I found on one of the books discussed today. 

Following the recording, I sat in on a meeting with the producers, the host, and a few other people from the studio to discuss the show's ratings.  My big contribution to that meeting was operating the calculator.  You're welcome, world .

So then, the producers actually let me write the promo for tomorrow's show.  The promo will be read on the air sometime today, and also a few times tomorrow.  I felt so incredibly nervous as I was writing it.  Luckily, the producer okayed it so I didn't have to die a premature death of writer's embarrassment.  Although the promo still has to be approved by the other producer and the host, so who knows, by the time I hear it tomorrow morning, it could in no way resemble my original submission.  C'est la vie.

The rest of the day I spent researching for a senior standout show they want to do in a few weeks and also researching the vast world of dementia and searching for potential angles SOI could take on that topic if they were to do a dementia-focused show.  Theoretically, I may be writing the pitch on that tomorrow, which would then get sent to my boss's boss.  Suffice to say, I'll be bringing my inhaler tomorrow in case the stress  gets to be more than I can handle.  Kidding…sort of.