CBC seeks another $75 million to reinstate regional programming

Via the beta MSN search RSS feed for “cbc radio” comes the news that

A quartet of CBC executives is scheduled to appear before the Commons heritage committee Thursday morning where a recent request for millions of dollars in extra government funding to reinstate regional and local programming is expected to surface.

(Full article)

Get $10 off Radio Skills or Radio Style Guide

Late last year I ordered copies of the CBC Radio Style Guide and CBC Radio Skills books from CBCShop.ca. I finally got around to reading them over the holidays, and recommend them both.

Radio Skills goes through the process of getting a story to air, and covers interviewing, writing, vetting, and performance. The Radio Style Guide goes deeper into writing and performance, with special focus on storytelling and writing for the ear. The section on focus sentences is an excellent summation of what McKee calls the “controlling idea.”

And now, you can get these books on the cheap with this coupon code for CBCShop.ca: “Save $10 off a purchase of $15+ with coupon code kidscbc.” But do it soon, because the offer ends January 31, 2005.

Good things come to those who wait. Better things come to those who wait longer.

Or perhaps, equally appropriate, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

That’s certainly the way it feels right now. Nearly six months in the making, my internship at CBC Radio has finally been approved. I received this in my inbox yesterday afternoon, the result of my incessant pestering of Joan Melanson:

I was in yesterday, and I have some good news – the approval for your internship at CBL has gone ahead.

Joan has been absolutely wonderful – an advocate and a champion, navigating the turbulent waters of CBC bureaucracy on my behalf. After being told “maybe” for so long, then very recently “no,” she somehow managed to wrangle a “yes” out of the powers that be. Kudos to her.

Keeping track of radio content using Technorati

I’ve recently been digging Technorati (Peter describes it as “Google for weblogs“). I’ve set up a watchlist for CBC Radio, so everytime somebody blogs about our national public broadcaster, it shows up in my Bloglines.

And tonight, I learned about Technorati tags, which allow bloggers to categorize their posts. Apparently you can search by tag, so I tried to set up a watchlist for tag:radio. Presuming it works, I’ll get radio photos from Flickr, links from del.icio.us and Furl, and blog posts from Technorati, all in one feed categorized by human beings.

I like when information I want comes right to me.

Update: the watchlist I created for “tag:radio” kept coming up empty, so I emailed the folks at Technorati, and they told me that tag watchlists haven’t been implemented yet.

Their full reply, including a workaround, follows:

Dan,

This is on our “short list” for feature extensions. We hope to have it

soon.

There’s one thing you can do in the meantime: You can create a watchlist on URL for the tag, for example:

http://technorati.com/tag/radio

The limitation is that you’ll only get posts with Technorati tags in them, not blog categories. But perhaps you’ll find this useful until we get our act together :-)

Hope this helps. Thanks for your interest in what we’re doing, and for taking the time to write to us.

Adam Hertz

Vice President of Engineering

Technorati, Inc.

Technorati tags: radio, tagging

And it’s off…

Finally, after weeks of drafting, my application to become the This American Life intern for Summer 2005 has been sent. With my questionnaire complete, my references set up, and my resume polished, I walked to the post office today and XpressPosted it all to Chicago.

The whole thing amounted to nine pages. Here’s hoping they read it. And like it.

The website says “We will notify all applicants of the decision by the deadlines listed above,” which in my case, is March 1. If they decide to interview me, I guess I’ll know sooner.

I’ve got my fingers crossed.