Christopher Lydon, in cooperation with Public Radio International, has launched a new radio show designed to gateway to radio some of the conversations that are happening in the blogosphere, and elsewhere on the net.
The show, to be titled Open Source (and no, it’s not about software), launched May 30, in Boston on WGBH Radio 89.7, airing Monday – Thursday at 7 p.m. According to <a href="http://www.pri.org/
PublicSite/inside/text_network.html#”>the PRI press release, starting July 4, PRI will feed the program live nationwide, making it available to its 727 affiliate stations for broadcast and simulcast streaming, and offering additional feeds for stations in other time zones. Open Source will also be available for streaming via station websites.
Lydon says: “Open Source aims to begin conversations on the Web each day and invite a worldwide audience to contribute topics, guests, and information that advances understanding of issues and ideas.”
I had lunch the other day with Steve Salyer, the president of PRI, and Doug Carlston, the chairman, and it’s clear that this show is just the tip of the iceberg. Like the BBC (whose shows it distributes in the US), PRI is broadly interested in engaging with what Dan Gillmor calls “the former audience” to develop content, and engage radio in the remix culture of the internet.
For a clue to their thinking (also from the press release): ” ‘Stations carrying the program will become entry points for a worldwide community of participants,’ says Debra May Hughes, chief operating officer of Public Interactive and the person overseeing design of the Web components. ‘People log onto the Web at night the way they used to turn on the television set. We want to connect them to radio, and radio to them, while they are online.'”
I’m fascinated by the gateways that are emerging between old media and new. There are a lot of content silos, on the internet as well as off, and a lot of the most interesting things happen at the interfaces.