CURRENTS
Radio: The Rookies
Some of the best journalism coming out of WNYC, New York City’s public radio station, is being done by a bunch of rookies. Radio Rookies — the station’s three-year-old workshop program that trains inner-city teens to report on their own lives. Listen:
Jesus Gonzales: Is there a lot of gunshots going out like in the neighborhood? Because you live in the Bushwick community.
Chaos: Back in the day when I was growing up, there used to be. There was somebody getting shot every day. It calmed down, but it’s getting ready to start back up again . . .
Gonzales: You know a couple of people that sell guns?
Chaos: I sell guns.
Gonzales: You sell guns?
Chaos: Yeah, I sell guns. I sell a lot of guns.
— From “Guns,” by Jesus Gonzalez, fifteen
Janesse Nieves: Well, you can get clean and, you know, get other jobs.
Janesse’s dad: You think I’m dirty?
Janesse: No, I don’t mean . . . Okay, that’s the wrong word. I’m sorry.
Dad: The way I look? The way I dress? The shirt, the pants?
Janesse: No, no.
Dad: Eh?
Janesse: I’m talking about you doing drugs and thinking it’s okay.
Dad: What do you mean it’s okay, thinking it’s okay?
Janesse: I mean . . .
Dad: That’s how I feel.
— From “Heroin” by Janesse Nieves, seventeen
“These are stories you can’t commission out of a newsroom,” says Dean Cappello, the vice president of programming at WNYC. And the radio world is taking notice. The rookies rake in awards, sometimes in adult categories, like the Robert F. Kennedy prize for domestic radio reporting on the disadvantaged that they picked up in May, or Nieves’s second place in documentaries last fall at Third Coast, a Chicago Public Radio contest. Czerina Patel, who produces Radio Rookies, says that a number of individuals and groups have sought her advice on starting similar programs.
Radio Rookies started with a 1999 workshop in Harlem, the brainchild of Marianne McCune, who was free-lancing for WNYC at the time. McCune, now a staff reporter at the station, learned that the Columbia University journalism school radio lab was empty during vacations, and she convinced Cappello and the school to let her teach city kids — often from poor and minority neighborhoods — to express themselves through radio.
Cappello was amazed at the quality of the final product, and agreed to air five of the six completed pieces. Listeners responded, and since then there have been five other workshops, one in each borough of the city, and WNYC has broadcast twenty-two additional stories. The kids have reported on, among other things, religion, graffiti, crime, suicide, national identity, Down Syndrome, all from the intimate vantage point of their own lives.
Karla Saavedra, an eighteen-year-old Brooklynite from Mexico City, is proud of the recognition, but what really lights her eyes is describing the reaction at home. “My whole class listened together,” grins the cheery Saavedra, whose eight-minute piece, “English,” detailed her struggles to learn English after no one in her family could communicate with a 911 operator. “They say, Congratulations, you’re putting Bushwick up here.”
The program runs on about $85,000 a year from the Open Society
Institute and other grants, and overhead support from WNYC. But
the most crucial investment is the teachers’ time and effort.
Patel, McCune, and a handful of volunteers from WNYC and elsewhere
spend hours with the rookies, whom they screen for dedication
and interest from applications filed on the station’s Web
site and through community groups.
The rookies do their own interviews and recording, and they edit their own sound. Sometimes a mentor (each student is assigned one) or producer comes along for an important interview, as when Jiovan “Big Pun” Ortiz tried to ask President Bush how his policies would affect Ortiz’s family in the Bronx. The final mixing is usually done by WNYC staff.
Training a new wave of poor and minority journalists isn’t
necessarily the goal. Rather, says McCune, it’s “getting
young people to realize that things that matter to them are important
enough to communicate to other people.” A story like Janesse
Nieves’s “Heroin” resonates not only through the
dramatic confrontation with her addict father, but through her
narration: “After all that, like nothing happened, Papi told
me he wanted to buy me some cookies. But he didn’t have the
money.” Such potent lines are often distilled from conversations
with an editor, when, McCune says, “They blurt out a perfect
radio sentence, and we say, ‘Write that down!' "
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