The Talent Quest Team of Judges
You're a judge! Don't forget that we're inviting you to vote and comment on all the Talent Quest entries to help us find the best new talent for public radio.
PRX has also assembled a top-notch team of public media pros with ears for what's new and exciting out there in audio land.
Jay Allison
- Jay Allison is one of public radio’s most celebrated producers. He is currently the host and curator of This I Believe on NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Over the last thirty years, he has produced hundreds of nationally broadcast documentaries and features for radio and television. Jay has won virtually every major industry award, including five Peabodys. He is the Founder of the acclaimed website Transom.org, which helps people tell their own stories, and of the public radio stations for Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod where he lives. Read more about Jay and check out our interview with Jay about the Talent Quest.
Julie Drizin
- What hasn’t Julie Drizin done in public radio? A public radio ‘lifer,’ she cut her radio chops at WXPN in Philadelphia and then lead Pacifica’s demanding Washington Bureau where she helped launch Democracy Now! “I survived Pacifica Radio but never got the T-shirt to prove it,” she says. Her next big thing was producing NPR’s Justice Talking, where she learned “the unsurprising lesson that conservatives tend to be nicer and better prepared than people on the left.” Most recently she produced WETA’s short-lived talk program called The Intersection until it was “drowned out by classical music, about which I know very little, but which provides a much-appreciated ballet sound track for my two dancing daughters.” Read our interview with Julie about the Talent Quest.
Maxie Jackson
- Maxie Jackson is a rising star in public media, most recently having served as Program Director for WETA in Washington DC. Jackson joined WETA in January 2005, following six years as acting general manager of WEAA 88.9 FM at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. While at WEAA, he developed programming hailed by National Public Radio (NPR) and the African American Public Radio Consortium as a model for African-American news throughout the public radio system. In addition to his work at WEAA, Jackson collaborated with Radio One to develop programming for XM Satellite Radio.
Jackson has worked as a consultant with the BBC, NPR, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the African American Public Radio Consortium and American Public Media. He serves on various public radio boards and advisory committees. Read our interview with Maxie about the Talent Quest.
Jake Shapiro
-
Jake Shapiro is Executive Director of Public Radio Exchange (PRX), a nonprofit web-based service for distribution, review, and licensing of radio programs. Prior to helping launch PRX in 2003, Jake served as Associate Director of Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where remains a Fellow. Jake has worked as a producer with The Connection, a nationally distributed call-in talk show from WBUR in Boston. He serves on the boards of the Association of Independents in Radio, Open Source Media (producers of Open Source with Christopher Lydon from PRI), the Integrated Media Association, and the Conversations Network. He is also an independent musician and composer and has recorded and performed on guitar and cello with numerous groups, most recently the Boston rock band Two Ton Shoe. Read more about Jake
Doug Mitchell
- Doug Mitchell is a 20 year veteran producer and director for NPR. He's worked for all of NPR's flagship programs and produced pieces and programs with nearly all of those well-known voices. In 1999, Doug founded the Next Generation Radio Project and continues to lead the program. The project is designed to give competitively selected college students the chance to conceive report, edit and produce their own story. The students are paired with a professional journalist, usually from public radio, and they work as a team, finishing their story in less than a week.
Since 1999, Doug and the "next gen" team have trained hundreds of college students. Doug mentors over 160 of them, knowing where they are, how to find them and what they are doing. Last year, they joined forces with PRX to bring to public radio, the stories reported, written and produced by the next generation of journalists. Check out our interview with Doug about the Talent Quest.
Julie Shapiro
- Julie Shapiro is Managing Director of the Third
Coast International Audio Festival. Before moving to Chicago, Shapiro worked at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, and while living in North Carolina produced Storylines Southeast, a public radio series about literature from that region. She was assistant director of Transmissions, an annual experimental sound and art festival from 1998-2001. Shapiro makes audio art for public presentation and can occasionally be heard on the public radio airwaves. She teaches about documentary radio at the college level and maintains a blog about sound/s at www.notetheslantoftheovals.blogspot.com. Also check out our interview with Julie about the Talent Quest.
John Barth
- When John Barth isn't listening to cool stuff from his perch as Managing Director at the Public Radio Exchange, he is boring people with stories about his days as a reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, the challenges of getting Marketplace off the ground and life at the top of the food chain at AOL where he ran the news operation. John has graded tons of papers and taught students at George Washington University, managed original content at Audible.com and struggled with maintenance requests at a truck driver training school. He knows on-air talent when he hears it, and can tell right away if you could master the gearboxes on an 18-wheeler.
Israel Smith
- It was a cheeseburger that did it. Israel "Izzi" Smith started listening to public radio when "All Things Considered" promised to reveal the best burger in America. You could hear the grill and the grease in the story. You could see the piles of napkins. Izzi wants to hear more radio like that - sounds and voices that engage all of your senses. When he's not managing national talent searches, Izzi runs a public radio marketing and programming consultancy based in the mid-west. On a good day, he helps make public radio sound more interesting. Let's make it a good day.
Jacquie Jones
- Jacquie Jones is the executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium and chairs the National Minority Consortia. Prior to assuming the leadership of NBPC, Jacquie has been an award-winning writer, director and producer of documentary films. Her credits include producer/director on the PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery. Africans in America has received numerous awards including a Peabody Award and a national Emmy. She was also senior producer of the four-part series Matters of Race, produced the feature-length documentary From Behind Close Doors: Sex in 20th Century America, which aired on Showtime, and produced, wrote and directed a series for the History Channel titled The World Before Us. Additionally, Jacquie Jones is a widely published critic of popular culture and was formerly the editor of the internationally respected journal, Black Film Review.
She holds a BA in English from Howard University and an MA in documentary filmmaking from Stanford University.
We also have a few celebrities helping to endorse the Quest.
delicious
diggI had the honour of meeting some of the members.. I've been participating on a conference where they were invited too and have been a real pleasure to talk with them.
_______________________
home alarm systems
You are not trying to make our voting decision easy. Based on talent I have to give my vote to Julie. Being a radio contest, the voice is very important and all my attention goes to John Barth. I know that all the ladies will agree with me. Even if these guys had no radio degree they are doing a great job keeping us informed and attentive.
I would have liked to be able to submit 2 different votes per contestant - one on presentation (pacing, listenability, production, clarity of diction, etc) and one on content/originality. Not being sure which it is that is being sought, I'm unclear how to vote. For instance, Glynn's segment was very catchy but I have a hard time understanding his speaking (how does it turn out??), I normally love April's presentation but I was not as wild about this particular subject matter. Guess I'll base my vote on the person's overall style - whatever that is!
You owe the people who've been checking this site a more detailed explanation of just how exactly Chuck was eliminated from this competition. When you look at the amount of activity on his account (blogs, posts, comments, replies), it just seems absurd that he was cut at this point. Also all of his entries were solid. Please explain yourselves. How many votes did he actually get? How many votes amoung the judges. Please explain for everyone who is now left in this contest.
well, this is going to sound rude, but it's apropo: you people suck for rejecting chuck, who can offer access to the real, meaningful journalism we need in "public radio" for a functioning democracy, and going instead for cultural entertainment. i'm through with "public radio" ...again. you have little to offer. enjoy yourselves in your comfy little hideaway...
ciao.
but they most likely cut Chuck to free this site from the rude comments of his fan base. Duh. That's you. Thanks for doing such a good job of making your guy look bad.
Two things:
1. Everyone has free speech and we have the right to counter. The person has a voice and can say whatever they want. Chuck's fan base was vocal, but Rebecca's fan base is silent but deadly.
2. Chuck is a great talent and can be useful in public radio, I think he has the knowledge and the guests to have a great show on public radio. The last part when he was interviewed cost him by the one simple word that rhymes with bass. If NASCAR docked drivers points for cursing in public, how would public radio docked for hosts who cursed?
Hi Tracy -
I'm cracking up that you have analogized Rebecca's fan base with a fart! Oh my god - that's funny!
Rich Meitin
www.richmeitin.com
http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/1038
Please stop by!
perhaps instead of eliminating any additional candidates at this point, you should take a recess, seek additional funding, and help each of these semi-finalists to cultivate their abilities, and offer up mentored productions (not all of the candidates are in need of mentoring) to "public" radio for consideration. this would be a good time to think on your feet, and to improvise, and i would like to encourage you to do that. while i believe that what chuck has to offer is what is most urgently needed in public media at this time, and strongly favor him among the pool of candidates, all of the candidates are focusing, at this point on relevant social, political, and cultural issues and have something to offer. surely a nation of 300 million, is in need of more than even a meager seven fresh, new, in touch, journalists and hosts. finally, it is unfortunate to see that we are still lacking among the current pool of contestants, the ethnic diversity reflecting the nation's population. glaringly absent are latino voices (among others). i've put my contact info on the site now, if you have any comments for me. take care -yv.
this reflects a general real lack of equity in ethnic representation in "public radio" programming in general. have you noticed the demographics of the united states lately?
Love the site, love the idea, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. Since I no longer work in your field, who cares? Good luck with it.
Vince
This has been so much fun just getting into this world of such talented people submitting their great two minutes of radio for us to hear and vote on--after surfing in and out of some of the forums (and participating) there seems to be a large amount of creativity pulsing from this one website. Hope we can figure out many different ways to tap into it in addition to finding the next National Public Radio talent.
Thanks for giving us all this opportunity!
Lynn Kindler, The "Idea" Coach
Please listen to my tape at http://www.publicradioquest.com/audio/user/52 and vote!!
www.sacredpathcoaching.com
i hope u likie
MY SUBMISSION
Matt Warzel
www.clevelandclowns.com
Stephanie C. Harper, PHR, CCP, CHRM
Author, Career Expert and Speaker
www.StephanieHarper.com
Recent comments
39 weeks 1 day ago
2 years 10 weeks ago
2 years 21 weeks ago
2 years 26 weeks ago
2 years 32 weeks ago