Round 2 Voting Begins Wed Afternoon
Hi Folks,
Very pleased to let you know that voting on round two will begin later tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon. Team PRX is finalizing some site changes to make it easy to click and vote for all ten finalists, and Adrianne is getting all the audio together.
Keep an eye and ear on the site tomorrow afternoon. The round two challenges were tough, and each finalist brings something different to the microphone.
Your task, as always, is simple - vote and tell us who you want to hear on the radio. Here's what you'll be voting on:
Each round two entry in The Public Radio Talent Quest includes three "challenges." We've edited the three together, and ask that you vote on them as 1 entry.
1) Free Association. This bit tests general creativity and improvisation abilities. We gave finalists a word or phrase, they take a deep breath, and then talked for two full minutes about something that flows out of associations with that initial word or phrase.
2) Live Read Copy. While we recorded them, we emailed the finalists some copy. After a short moment to prep, they had to read it "live." This is basic think-on-your-feet and performance testing.
3) The Billboard. In public radio almost every show has a short scripted intro that both summarizes and promotes the upcoming hour. It's exactly :59 seconds long, ending with "...but first, this news." It should make you want to hear more.
Round two voting will be open until 11:59pm ET on Tuesday, July 10th. Only seven of the current ten finalists will advance to round three.
Thanks for sticking with us, and please tell your friends to listen and vote at www.publicradioquest.com
delicious
diggI'm not sure if this was already posted somewhere, but in case you want to read along to the live copy challenge, here's what we sent the contestants:
"Our guest Jared Diamond writes cosmic history with bold strokes and unfamiliar detail. Why did European and Asian peoples get to take dominion of the world—not American Indians, with all those resources under their feet, or Africans, living in the original habitat of the human species? The answers in Jared Diamond’s celebrated book “Guns,Germs and Steel” come from an intimate knowledge of plant and animal biology, of language and culture and from close observation over the years of the last hunter-gatherers in the tropical Pacific Island of New Guinea. The answers are never as simple as Jared Diamond’s book title suggests: Why did the Spanish conquistador Pizzaro with 168 men capture and destroy the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in 1532 when Atahaullpa commanded vast wealth and 80,000 troops? Cavalry and guns are too easy an explanation: the real question is why the Spaniards had horses and gunpowder and the Incas didn’t; and the real answers go back to innovations in food production as early as the last Ice Age 13,000 years ago, long before written language much less recorded history. How did the world get to be the way it is? Jared Diamond is next, on the Public Radio Talent Quest."
>
Okay, a weeks vacation away from PRTQ (I insisted on doing it for my own sanity) and what did I do?
I *just* finished reading this "Guns, Germs, and Steel" book. What timing! It's not only a "celebrated" book, it's a Pulitzer-prize winner! I would love to interview Jared Diamond.... (and since he's a science guy, I just might have that chance).
(When Chris wrote in his blog about "Atahualpa" I thought "Nah," but here it is. Wow....)
By the way, nice job, Claire, in noticing the different spellings!
I wonder, did the contestants have Internet access during this minute? If they were at a radio station, they would have. Just checking out Wikipedia's entry on Atahualpa (listed also as Atawallpa) would've helped.
-Robert
Some recorded themselves at home or work, but most were in a radio studio at the time. I believe ready internet access was available to all (except maybe Komal, who was running down hallways between challenges).
The text was emailed to us as we performed the first challenge (the free association). We were given a timed minute to read over it, and so yes conceivably someone could have quickly wikipediaed Atahualpa. Such a deft use of the internet would certainly testify to a contestant's skills...but such a strategy could also backfire. A minute isn't all that long, and by sacrificing most of the time securing a single pronunciation the contestant might suffer when negotiating awkward sentences he didn't have as much time to preview.
Still, I do dream of being a cowboy quick-draw überhost who can rapidly google words -- as fast as they're being spoken, even. When they announce the non-intrusive brain implant which gives you neural-speed access to search engine results, I'm going to pre-order. I know, it'd kinda be like everyone was cheating, but really it'd just up our expectations, like spell-checker software has in its own quiet way.
A minute isn't too long, yes, and it is only one word... and hopefully it won't make or break anyone from the Judges' perspective.
I wonder too if the emailed text had the same line breaks as Jake posted it?
Good luck with Round 2. And thanks again for writing.
-Robert
Not sure how the copy arrived in the other contestants' inboxes, but mine had different line breaks than the one Jake posted. I'm guessing this just had to do with how one's email application designates line width (my yahoo acct defaults to 65 characters, I believe).
Mine arrived double spaced, which was kinda nice, except I had to be mindful to scroll it down my wee screen.
Mine also had the two different spellings of Atahualpa, which was at least fair, since I believe that all the contestants' had to negotiate this error. I got the pronunciation right in the first (correctly spelled) instance, but choked on the incorrectly spelled second one. I do wonder if I wouldn't have choked had the spelling been correct...but whatever, this same kind of typo could happen in a "real" live radio environment, and a good host would know how to handle it.
They'd have the phonetic pronounciation in parentheses after the word...
Deborah
Listen away at: http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/703
Clearly some people are voting already. If I click on finalists and open any one of them, there's only the round one audio. Can anyone help me out?
TIA
Deborah
Listen away at: http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/703
by either going to the home page (http://www.publicradioquest.com) and clicking on a contestant from there, or check out the list in the blog post here: http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/2473
Sorry for the confusion! It takes some time to update each part of the site, and we couldn't do it all simultaneously: soon you'll be able to hear Round 2 entries from each contestant's profile.
Eagerly awaiting. How do you define afternoon??? Over here on the East cost we are getting close to evening...
Deborah
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