99% Invisible - 88- The Broadcast Clock

Episode Date: September 4, 2013

There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you literally can’t get out of your car. Inside of a driveway moment, time becomes elastic–you could … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Ready open on Roman? Open? Go. When I'm not making radio, I listen to a lot of radio. More than most people can imagine. Set it down clock for 4.30 please. My earbuds are constantly launched in my ears so that I can press play and listen to radio at any moment

that doesn't require me to talk or listen to an actual human being in the real world. Alright, well now is the moment in our show where we endorse. Manage in every site by Tori Moutia. Audio news paper for a visual world. Sure! Answer me this podcast.com The show is produced by speaking into microphones. Hello, it's Jason.

Yes. Hello, Jason. Hello. Scan by to open Julia. Whether I'm walking on secret stairs or doing the dishes, open or Car, car, car, car, car, car. Standby to open, Julia. Whether I'm walking on secret stairs or doing the dishes, open or driving the car. You're there, but you're somewhere else too. We producers aspire to create driveway moments, TM. Story's so good that listeners can't leave their car

until they're over. I think part of what makes a driveway moment is the end of that moment. When you realize what time it is, you could have been staring at a clock all along, but for a while, for once, it had no power over you. That time distortion field is when a public radio secret, awesome powers, which is why it is such a shock when those of us go from being radio listeners to radio producers, like me and my friend Julia Barton here.

The audience is hearing this. It's hard to believe he's not nervous. But this is what radio sounds like on the inside. I'm 32 seconds short of what I'm supposed to have. So what I'll do is I'll just play 15 seconds of this song. And then while I'll play the 15 seconds,... I visited NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. and sat in on the live role of all things considered. Their flagship afternoon news magazine show.

There are clocks all over the studios. Big red digital clocks. Huge round analog clocks. Special software and calculators. Time calculators. We're 60 plus 60 equals 2 0 0. Hi. Met, uh, when one in the only to play 15 seconds but you wrapped up 45 seconds or so now I have to play a long time is it okay?

Yeah, I mean, we're gonna have a choice really. Do we have enough to dead roll it? I don't think so. Monica is Stativia, directs all things considered four days a week. To me, it's the scariest job in the world. That fear is built in to the design of a program like all things considered. It's the show clock. The show has a set clock.

It's a template from which it almost never varies. Every show that broadcasts or aspires to broadcasts in the public radio system has a clock. Basically, it looks like a pie. It's round and sliced in lots of weird ways. Some of the slices are very thin. There's 59 seconds for the program opening. We call that the billboard. 14 seconds for the funding credits. A fatter slice is 5 minutes for the newscast. The biggest slices are littered A, B, C, and D, and they are the segments. That's where the stories and interviews live, and they have to fit together. One minute to close.

I remember I was very scared of the clock. Me ears, tu figurine out completely. The clock is your master for the two hours the show rolls out. Everything has to be ready. Seignants can't run long by even a second, because most of the local stations are automated to cut off the national program where the clock says they can. These times are called posts. You have to hit the post. Nothing can go wrong. But of course, things go wrong every day. Someone reads too long and interview runs too

short. You might hear the dreaded dead air or someone rushing at the post. Then listeners can hear the clock. He who can't be named in public radio. And then the spell is broken. When you look at this document, you see something very regimented and we've talked about how it is very regimented in terms of things happening at a particular second. But the goal is for people not to really know it's there. That's Greg Dixon, who also directs all things considered.

But like most show directors, he never actually looks at the diagram of the program clock. This visual representation was hard for me to reference quickly. I had a piece of paper where I lined out every single time when things started and how long they were gonna be. It was my cheat sheet and I brought it into the studio every day. And according to Greg Dixon, he brought it in much longer than he actually needed it. Until it was in Tatters, but those crypt sheets and you will find them everywhere in broadcast are a bridge to the place where the clock actually lives. You can wake up, wake us up in the middle of the night and we can be like 59, 5, 28, 12, 28, 128, like 7, 48. We know we can go down the entire hour without ever stopping because we know it, we know

it by heart and of course we had dreams about it. An NPR they're called director's dreams. You lose control. You cannot regain back control. And you have lost sense of how much time is left in the segment, how much time is left for the piece. And usually it's like the worst panic attack. And you wake up and you're sweating. And you can't believe you just get another

direct stream. I've had those where I'm on the board announcing morning edition on KALW and the sliders don't do anything and the buttons just don't look right and to rather than try anything I'm just paralyzed with fear. Oh yeah in my dream I'm doing a newscast with no copy and I just have to talk and talk and talk and talk And talk like an idiot until the clock goes down and I haven't even seen a downclock in ages No podcast there is no time scarcity no interlocking gears of local and national broadcasts and that changes Everything but we also make a version of this show that fits inside the NPR clock, the C-Signative Morning Edition to be exact.

Four minutes and 30 seconds exactly. Over by 143. So I'm gonna have to figure out a way to take all of these ideas early, some fraction of these ideas and cram them into a show that's less than five minutes. And sometimes that really, really sucks. But you'd be surprised, though, often, I actually really like the brief radio version of this program.

The first time I really internalized the difference between doing radio and doing podcasts was when people would tell me that they wanted my stories to be longer. In the entire decade of radio, I produced prior to this podcast, no editor has ever asked me to go longer. Yeah, and I was your editor Roman, and I can vouch for that. You were so mean to me.

I was so mean for 30, sucker. But podcasts have no constraints. You can be any length. The only constraint is the content. And people always tell me they wish this podcast was longer, but I think the show would suffer if it went on too long. And so maybe there's a need for a clock, even if the clock isn't strictly required.

Constraint, or maybe just restraint in this case, makes for better art. When I started thinking about the broadcast clock, as a piece of design, I wondered how it all got started in public radio. NPR came together in the late 60s and the early 70s when network news was king. And those broadcast shows, of course, had a clock. But public radio news wanted to be something different because of this guy. I'm Bill Seemoring and I was the first director of programming for NPR.

Bill Seemring and I was the first director of programming for NPR. Bill Seemring! Bill Seemring! He came up with the whole idea of all things considered, which of course everyone in the business now refers to as ATC. In the original mission statement, ATC was called a daily identifier or product. But you decided that wouldn't be a good name for the show going forward. Bill Seymourine was among the earliest designers of the public radio sound. That sound included lots of audio and voices from the world outside the studio.

And it called for a documentary style approach, even to same day news. For that, Bill designed a very open clock. We didn't have a lot of breaks throughout it, and it was this frustrated, some people, because they thought they wanted a very fixed clock. There was a clock, but it was not that tight. It was tight where we had joins with the stations, but otherwise it was not. And I think that's one of the things that made it interesting to listen to

because it wasn't predictable that way. And you let the stories, the stories were leading the length of the piece. The old ATC clock only had a few slices and a lot of open space. In there one story might be two minutes, followed by another that was 20 minutes. It was open.

It was kind of like a podcast. But his bill was saying there. Not everyone appreciated that. There was a conference two weeks after ATC rolled out and the station manager just called Bill Seemring to the carpet for his fluffy loose sounding program. And there was something else that they really didn't like. And this is a digression here, but this is a podcast. So we get to have digressions.

And of course, I got this criticism from some about women's voices and all that stuff. That on FM women's voices had the high frequencies. And you should see the meter bill when women's voices come on and that kind of thing. Really, they said women's voices were too high for FM? Yeah. That some voices would peak the meter to. Oh my God. That kind of thing. Really? They said women's voices were too high for FM? Yeah.

That some voices would peak the meter to us. Oh my God! The upshot Bill Seemreen was out of NPR a year and a half later. And in the years that followed, the NPR clock began a long process of becoming more subdivided. The women he hired, like Linda Worthheimer and Susan Stamberg are well known. Seamary went on to help turn fresh air with Terry Gross into a national program and he's the kind of the patron saint of creative open style public radio, including this program right here. But you know, being loose and open can also be its own form of pain. People often mention to me, you know, the boy,

those were the housey on days of all things considered and I was there, no they weren't. That's Neil Conan, who's done everything at NPR, including until recently, hosting the two-hour live call-in program talk of the nation. Neil Conan loves the clock. For him, it's an art form unto itself. There's these little things that if you've never done it or impossible, if you've done it forever, you don't even think about doing them. You know, how long is five seconds?

Five seconds is a long time. You can ID three guests and say goodbye in five seconds. So it's not surprising that when Neil Conan took over the talk of the nation, he added more time elements, more posts. Because it turns out you've said pretty much all you need to say about medical marijuana by the 40 and you should go on and do something else. Unfortunately, Neal Conan is doing something else now. NPR recently canceled talk of the nation after 21 years and he resigned.

Neal Conan says artificial constraints make us better. And I know this as a person who edits audio stories. We lose perspective when we're inside the story just trying to make sense of all our reporting. We can't tell what's important anymore. If we don't have any constraints, we can make boring and confusing stuff. The constraint doesn't have to be a time limit, but at least the clock forces us to have a perspective.

It says, stop right there and figure out what really matters. Of course, the clock can also limit what you say, as we'll have to do in the broadcast version of this piece, or it can create nonsense where you suddenly at the full time you didn't expect to fill. So there was a day long ago when Neil Conan was not master of the clock. When he first started at NPR in the late 70s, he had a direct this new show called Weekend All Things Considered. I was being briefed on the clock by the then director of Weekend All Things Considered.

Deborah Amos has gone on to summer and now is a reporter. And my question to her was, you mean exactly the time? And I think we ended that first show that I produced about four minutes early. I was so terrified of blowing the post. So a while ago I went to hear Deborah Ames speak. And afterwards I asked her if this story was true that Neil Conan ended his first live NPR show four minutes early.

And she said they did. And that they had to grab the longest film music they could find in the studio, which was some kind of whale song. No super design, subdivided format is telling us when to stop this story. We're just kind of winging it. But you know, people in radio are always kind of winging it. Whether you're in a studio shed like mine, where I don't even think I have a clock in this room at all except for what's on the computer, or you're in the broadcast palace in DC with clocks everywhere.

Okay, we have to do some adjustments, but they're good. Melissa, you have the line. We just hope someone out there is listening. Okay, see, disaster avoided. Yeah, she finished 45 seconds earlier. But they're not listening hard enough to hear the clock monster that haunts the dreams of anyone who's looked into its dark soul. Yeah, standby. Ready. Open. And all things Julia but hold Roman open for credits. And go. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Julia Barton, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW in San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars. Sam Greenspan, he tweets at Sam listens, even though he doesn't. Right now, on our brand new website, we have diagrams of broadcast clocks so you can say to your friends things like, I heard that during the eBlock of morning edition. Knowledge awaits at 99pi.org. All right, take it out. Let's go home. Radio Tepi-O.

From PRX. Radio Tepi-R-X