Station Profile: KCRW in Santa Monica

One Tape To Go, Please - But Hold the Sales Pitch

by Janet Dagley Dagley

daeggadaegga@earthlink.net

"That's why I like cassettes," she says. "CDs and DATs are too sensitive to easily withstand the motion of the treadmill."

Independent producers, she says, are essential not only to KCRW's eclectic programming mix but to public

radio in general. "Independents are the hope of

the future. You're the hope of the present as

well. You have been undervalued, under appre-

ciated, under celebrated and most of all, under

funded. And I am always appalled by that."

Seymour backed up that belief on Labor Day, when the station offered its nearly half-million listeners a reprise of the 8-hour Miles Davis Radio Project by Steve Rowland with Davis biographer Quincy Troupe, Jay Allison, and Larry Abrams, interspersed with on-air announcements that Rowland was seeking funding to complete his John Coltrane project.

"When I find a talent like Steve Rowland, I think it's incumbent upon everybody who's involved in the enterprise called public radio to stand up and say, OK, how do we make it possible for this guy to do what it is that he wants to do?" Seymour says. "This seems to me so self-evident that I am always dumbfounded by the administrative types who don't seem to get that.

They seem to think that the business we're in is about administration. The business we're in is about programming. That's it. Period. End. That's all it is. Our commercial friends in television understand that very well.

"I am not a great believer that new things get created within the enormous bureaucracy of the national networks. Not at all," she says. "I think, in fact, this is the last place I would look for fresh ideas and fresh talent. It is in the independent realm that they germinate. You just have to walk through those networks to understand why that's true. Art needs a certain environment to be nourished, and it's certainly more likely that people who are animated by the passion of the creative will often exist either as independents or in stations around the country, which are sources for that kind of vision as well. But it's very rare that they're going to be found in the gray halls of the networks.

"What the networks are open to now is ideas. If you're a good pitchman, and you can come with foundation funding, or some kind of funding, you can get through the door. It's the most insane thing I think I've ever heard of, because it really doesn't have anything to do with the success of the final program, and many times the people do not have track records in programming.

So I'm, I guess, sort of puzzled as to why this train ever left the station. And I think that's one of the biggest problems that we have. For example, when the network started [the now-defunct arts magazine program] Anthem, we immediately said to them, ‘This isn't going to work. Because the concept doesn't work. We run a very successful station that appeals to the audience you're trying to get for this program. And we can tell you why the design is not going to work, and how you could redesign it so it would.' Did anybody call us? No."

If you're offering a program or feature to KCRW, Seymour recommends keeping the sales pitch to a minimum. "I just say, send me a tape. That's about it. Include a short note, saying this is what I've done, this is what it's about, I hope it will interest you, please get back to me if you have any comments that might be helpful, that sort of thing. I do like to know what it's about. But when people call and pitch me on the phone, I say, ‘Don't, don't - just send me the cassette. I'll listen."

Seymour recalls that when she first heard what is now PRI's This American Life on cassettes that producer/host Ira Glass sent her, "I threatened Ira that I'd put on the cassettes if he didn't start sending me programs. He couldn't think of a name for the program. We had these long talks about what to call it. And I said, ‘I don't care what you call it.' In fact, I threatened at one point to list it as ‘Hamlet' in the program guide if he didn't give it a name."

Pioneering KCRW has also established a solid foothold in cyberspace at http://www.kcrw.org, offering two full-time online streams, one all-music and the other featuring the station's regular on-air programming. But Seymour says she doesn't expect the station's online presence will necessarily mean more opportunities for independents. "I'm still in the radio business," she says. "So the idea that I would present something on the web that I don't present on the air - I don't know how sympathetic I am to that idea. Why? Because if I'm really in love with something, I want to put it on the radio. I have almost half a million listeners - I don't have that equivalent on the web. So if it's something that I'm really keen about, I want to present it to the biggest audience I have, and I'll figure out how to do that."