radio open source

Chris Lydon and Mary McGrath are putting the band back together, re-launching “Open Source” on public radio in Boston and as a podcast and conversation platform at this site. We’re looking for a few good men and women to join the adventure. There are opportunities for both full and part-time work for a few Boston-based self-starters– “self-stahtahs” as we call them in the Hub. Some experienced is required.

Web and Social Media Producer/Community Manager

We’re looking for people who still read books and who have wide interests in the arts, ideas and politics to blog, share and promote our content and conversations as well as dig up interesting new stuff to share with our audience.

We’ll need help updating, adapting and expanding our WordPress site, producing multi-media extras for it and keeping track of analytics. We have a worldwide community that wants to be involved and engaged in ongoing conversations. With an exciting new partnership with WBUR radio in Boston, we’re looking for new ways for an expanding audience to participate across our web and broadcast platforms.

Audio Producer

How are your recording and ProTools or Hindy chops? Can you help us integrate our site with SoundCloud? We’ll have more conversations to record and edit than we can handle, so we’ll need some help getting them produced and then distributed across the web and public radio outside Boston via PRX and other services.

BizDev

No one has cracked the code for supporting and sustaining high quality on-line media, but we have some interesting elements to work with in a smart, active community and a new broadcast platform. We want to be built to last. What are the media partnerships, promotions and collaborations we haven’t unlocked yet, and what are the events, special projects and features we should be cooking up?

Interns

Yes, we’ll pay you decently, and we promise you’ll be having more busy fun at a job than you thought you could.

Want to apply?

We’d love to hear from you. Send a cover letter describing your interests and why you might like to join our merry band. Include a resumé with a reference or two and your twitter handle. We look forward to meeting you.

Please contact:

Mary McGrath

mary@radioopensource.org

Mary McGrath and Christopher Lydon have worked in public media together for nearly 20 years. They created an award-winning call-in talk show for WBUR in the 90’s called “The Connection.” They created “Open Source,” a national program and blog for public broadcasting from 2005 to 2007, which was independently produced by them and supported by the MacArthur and Schumann foundations, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and by donors. The show got credit for pioneering the use of social media in radio production and distribution.

Since 2007, Chris has hosted hundreds conversations on the Radio Open Source website which are distributed through iTunes. Back in 2003 Chris hosted the first podcast with the web innovator Dave Winer at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. The new project, Open Source with Christopher Lydon, is a co-production with WBUR radio in Boston. Chris and Mary will also be producing additional conversations and content that will be available on-line in podcast form and available for broadcast outside of Boston. A fuller description of the new project is here.

Thanks to Barry Blitt and The Atlantic

We’re putting the band back together, in a new world. With the peerless producer Mary McGrath, we’re bringing Open Source back to our first radio home, WBUR in Boston. Drawing on our roots in New England and our interest in the wider world, we’ll be doing a weekly evening program (Thursday nights at 9, rebroadcast on the weekends), re-launching radio and online conversation as challenging, as engaging, as various, as irresistible as we can make it.

Strange thing: all of us have changed in this mobile, digitized, smartphone and twitter world. Stranger still is what hasn’t changed: New England as an American capital of ideas, teaching, learning and research – of thinking! – as it has been since Emerson’s heyday in the 1830’s. The Hub today is a hive of hives – in the brain sciences, health care delivery, every kind of tech and biotech, also music, poetry, security studies, economics, in all the great branches of human exploration. President Obama had it right in his speech after the Marathon: we live in an iconic American city, and our creative and intellectual diaspora excels in every field of human endeavor all over the world. Boston’s late mayor, Kevin White called it a “small town of international significance.” Our goal, drawing on the almighty human voice and the many extensions of modern media, is to make radio talk as bracing and smart as this Global City we’re living in.

Our website, radioopensource.org, is central to our new project. We will be expanding Open Source’s online platform of podcast conversations on the widest range of solid stuff, local and global, that people talk about: books old and new, music of all kinds, culture in general, and, of course, politics. We will be sharing our podcasts with WBUR, and at the same time we’ll be counting on a growing radioopensource community, as we always have, to help shape our discussions, sharpen the questions and make connections where others haven’t even noticed the dots.

Mary, Zadie & Chris

Will you join us in this conversation? Will you help sustain it? We’re installing our first PayPal donate button on the site. In the new media landscape it takes a community as well as a public radio station to kickstart and support a mission like this one. Please give that donate button a try! And while you’re at it, sign up for our newsletter.

The sweetest discovery in the twenty years Mary and I have been working together has been that we could actually build a living chain of listeners — a pulsing coral reef of conversation on the radio and the Web. And all of us could sustain a sensibility of open-minded hunger and enthusiasm around strong call-in talk with a tuba soloist and the Tulip Lady, as well as with Eddie Palmieri and Toni Morrison. The best thing we’ve done is build that far-flung network of loyal enthusiasts. We are hugely grateful to you, and proud to have done it together. At the start of a renewed adventure, we’ll be cheered more than ever by your support and encouragement.

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

By the Way • December 4, 2013

A few good men and women

By the Way • November 18, 2013

Good news for dear friends!