This is my second-to-last column here as president, and I'm thinking a lot these days about some imminent changes in my professional life, and how they relate to my work with AIR, and my conversations with young producers. I have been producing radio documentaries full-time since 1987. That is 17 years of employment I expected to last maybe a year. Now I'm going to change direction.

The past 17 years have been an interesting ride. I got to do a lot of things I wanted to do, and I was unable to do a lot of other things. The things I wanted to do were to produce programs that mean something to me--actually that mean a great, great deal to me: The Miles Davis Radio Project; Carlos Santana, Music for Life; On the Road with the Roots; George Clinton, Funk Is Its Own Reward; Frank Zappa, An American Life; Tell Me How Long Trane's Been Gone; and, soon, Leonard Bernstein, An American Life.

Together, these programs chronicle my thinking--and what I've learned from the thinking of several hundred brilliant musicians I've been able to meet and interview (including Joni Mitchell, Chuck D, Art Blakey, Adolph Green, Kent Nagano, Leon Fleischer, Ian Underwood, Allan Toussaint, John Lee Hooker, Stephen Sondheim, McCoy Tyner, Alice Coltrane, Sekou Sundiata, Michael S. Harper, and a whole lot of other brilliant artists) about American music and American culture and American society: About how we use music, how we attach ourselves to music, how music trends come in cycles, about what music is, about what it isn't, about its ephemeral nature, about its permanence--about music as art, as spirit, as commodity--about racism, about economics, about sexism, about aging, about celebrity...and a lot more.

I've worked on these programs with a brilliant friend/collaborator/writer named Larry Abrams who is barely known. He took over the writing duties on the Miles Davis Radio Project when the original writer walked off with a small fortune and did no work, and Larry and I have worked together steadily since then. We've worked without editorial interference and slogged away, raising money, sharing trials and tribulations, hopes and fears and have emerged beaten up, bruised, and disappointed.

That brings us to the down side. Producing these things is not easy. The money never comes all at once. For instance, the current production on Bernstein came to a complete halt at least three times. We never gave up. There was not a question of whether or not we'd finish it--just how and when. And we had to keep revising our schedule and find other employment in the meantime. But the stress was overwhelming. The scenario and accompanying lifestyle is not something I can repeat any time soon.

Yet happy and optimistic--I can't explain it.

Part of my optimism though comes not from the work, but from making the decision to stop. The optimism is not about radio. It is about my ability to decide what to do. I've decided to take a break from radio and from radio documentary production. The projects we've done have become more complex, more expensive, and more difficult to pull off. Public radio has become more conservative than ever--not only politically, but in terms of its social agenda, and its grasp of and discussion of race and culture in American society. To top it off, radio as a medium is as marginal as it ever has been--maybe worse. So, about radio, at least as a career, I'm less than optimistic.

I enjoy talking with enthusiastic young producers, and I occasionally see bright rays of hope for radio in their being. I urge them to follow their hearts--but try to bring a sense of realism to the long-term prospects for employment. The marginality of being an independent--the tenuous nature of the lifestyle--makes it a daunting long-term prospect. That is clear to enough young people that few even consider public radio as a sane career option. This is an issue that the collective group (stations, funders, networks, and independents) needs to address.

Dolores Brandon and I have planted seeds for these discussions with executives at NPR, PRI, WFMT, the NEA, the CPB, and other important institutions. AIR's next president will have to follow through on these contacts and conversations--it is critical for the preservation of independently produced programming over the next decade. I will not be far away and will offer any advice and consulting that I can as the discussion moves forward.