Musings on the Eve of the Millennium
   Dolores Brandon Acting Operations Manager dbrandon@idt.net

It's hard to believe, but the next time I address you, the 20th C will be history! Some of you are probably counting the days, gearing up for special millennium celebrations, parties in exotic places with friends of good cheer. No doubt others are busy setting up interviews, writing scripts, gathering the "lost & found sound" of the century to be edited and mixed for broadcast before during and after the stroke of midnight that declares it all over! Many of you will be working that day. The show always goes on. Working when others are relaxing. Isn't that what many of us secretly like about radio? After all, wielding a microphone allows us a box seat at the center of at least some of life's best high and low dramas.

Assuming the immanence of a new century gives us permission to imagine change in our personal worlds, I decided to ask a cross section of AIR members-what do you hope will change in public radio come the new millennium? I posed the question thinking I'd have a little fun, encourage a few dreams and pre-millennium fantasies. Maybe the question was not well phrased. Maybe by defining the airspace, ‘public radio', independents felt they were up against an old immovable rock. Maybe they Maybe asking them to state their answers in 30 words or less didn't give them the wind speed needed to take off. Whatever . . . I was surprised at how few AIRheads responded, and how somber were the answers from those who did. The themes were the same themes we've been sounding for the last 15 years. Everyone hopes for better pay, more respect, diversity, training opportunities, more imaginative programming.

George King groans: "I don't know which is more maddening, public radio smugly pandering to the interests and aspirations of its affluent sponsors, or the patronizing notion that those of us who would challenge this model are somehow out of touch."

Asking George to describe where he's putting his creative energy, he says, "I've been working on a project called Indivisible for the Center for Documentary Studies. Its due to open as a photo/audio/web/radio exhibit next September. [Am] just back from two weeks at the Hambidge Center an artists colony where I did some work on an upcoming documentary film: Holley's Wood, about self-taught Alabama artist Lonnie Holley. In my spare time I'm working on an audio bit about death and the oboe..." Pretty eclectic, no?

The fact is most independents work across many media environments. Few of us depend on public radio for sustenance. Still AIR members tend to think of public and community radio as home, the place they come back to whenever the economics of it will allow.

Maybe the low voltage response to my question reflects a weariness with change. Maybe the rapid changes of the digital revolution have us all reeling, secretly wishing we could just slow down long enough to fully savor the basics once again.

AIRSPACE

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