By Jason Loviglio, founding chair and associate professor of media and communication studies, UMBC

From its start half a century ago, National Public Radio heralded a new approach to the sound of radio in the United States.

NPR “would speak with many voices and many dialects,” according to “Purposes,” its founding document.

Written in 1970, this blueprint rang with emotional immediacy. NPR would go on the air for the first time a year later, on April 20, 1971.

NPR is sometimes mocked, perhaps most memorably in a 1998 “Saturday Night Live” sketch starring actor Alec Baldwin, for its staid sound production and its hosts’ carefully modulated vocal quality. But the nonprofit network’s commitment to including “many voices” hatched a small sonic revolution on the airwaves.

As a radio historian, I have written about the medium’s unique blend of intimate voices and public address. As the 50th anniversary of public radio draws near, I’m interested in NPR’s contradictory legacy of sonic innovation and monotony.

This is NPR

One of the first voices to become associated with NPR’s flagship evening news program was Susan Stamberg. Hired in 1971, she soon became the first woman to co-anchor a national nightly newscast on radio or television in U.S. history.

William Siemering, the network’s first program director and the author of “Purposes,” wanted the voice of the network to communicate curiosity rather than authority.

Stamberg, 31 when she was hired, brought youthful exuberance to the job. And, in another departure from newscasting’s baritones, with their supposedly neutral midwestern accents, Stamberg’s voice was “nasal, quizzical, and unashamedly female,” as Lisa Phillips put it. It came she said, “with a hometown – New York – and an ethnicity – Jewish.”

The decision to stick with young and relatively unproven voices came at a cost, according to Jack Mitchell, the original director of the “All Things Considered” evening newscast.

In his account of NPR’s beginnings, “Listener Supported,” Mitchell later recalled how Siemering passed up Ford Foundation funding tied to hiring the proven and respected newscaster Edward P. Morgan, a white man originally from Walla Walla, Washington. Instead, NPR stood by the less “authoritative” and more engaging voices of Stamberg and her peers, even if they sometimes sounded “less than professional.”

“Masculine, commanding” voices were “exactly how we DON’T want to sound,” Siemering told his staff, as Stamberg later recalled in “This Is NPR: The First Forty Years.”

Early feedback on Stamberg from station managers around the country wasn’t encouraging. She sounded too New York, too Jewish, too off-putting, Mitchell wrote.

Siemering hid these negative reviews from Stamberg as she found her own broadcast voice, which helped her win many prestigious awards in broadcast and digital journalism. The network regards her as one of its “founding mothers.”

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Computers Judge What Makes The Perfect Radio Voice

Women as anchors

NPR has kept speaking with many voices that would sound out of place on the air anywhere else. Many, if not most, have been female. As hosts and anchors, correspondents and reporters, women have played a key role in giving NPR its distinctive sound.

Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts brought hard-nosed journalism and inside-the-Beltway sensibility to the fledgling network in the 1970s. In the process, these white women changed what the news sounded like.

By the time Wertheimer took over as an “All Things Considered” co-anchor in 1989, it was no longer controversial to hear women deliver the news of the day.

But on network television, most of the early stints for the women who were the first to anchor daily news programs were short-lived. Barbara Walters lasted two years in the mid-1970s as an “ABC Evening News” co-anchor. Diane Sawyer co-anchored the “CBS Morning News,” from 1981 to 1984 and Katie Couric spent five years, starting in 2006, as the sole “CBS Evening News” anchor.

Curating distinctive voices “rich with the rhythms and accents of their regions” was another explicit way in which “All Things Considered” initially sought to sonically mark its difference from what had come before, according to Stamberg.

A wider range?

NPR’s commitment to many voices included those who brought regional, as well as gender, diversity to the airwaves.

Occasional commentators Baxter Black, a cowboy poet from Texas; Vertamae Grosvenor, a culinary anthropologist born in the Gullah community of North Carolina; and Kim Williams, a naturalist, checked in during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with field reports from their corners of the country. Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-American artist living in New Orleans, began to bring his thickly accented English and droll humor to NPR in 1983.

Putting these folks on air seemed to address the network’s vision of speaking in many voices and accents. The intent, Mitchell wrote, was explicitly democratic, to be “representative of the nation. That meant white, black, Hispanic, Asian and as many women as men.”

NPR’s growth led to the opening of foreign bureaus, even as print publications hemorrhaged these expensive positions. International coverage further expanded its vocal range.

Some of the women now working as the network’s anchors got their start as foreign correspondents. Doualy Xaykaothao spent years reporting from Asia and Lulu Garcia-Navarro covered Latin America and the Middle East for NPR.

Other women with nonconventional news voices, including Eleanor Beardsley in Paris, Sylvia Poggioli in Rome and Ofeabia Quist-Arcton in Dakar, are still overseas. Their signature approach to signing off with their name and locale is a sonic pleasure for many NPR fans.

Favorite @NPR pronunciations:

—Ofeibea Quist-Arcton saying “Dah-KARR.”

—Michele Kelemen saying “Wash…ing…ton.”

—Eleanor Beardsley saying “Paris” with that flat “a.”

—Sylvia Poggioli saying “Sylvia Poggioli.” https://t.co/SH4wA4CVlG

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 19, 2018

Even so, by the turn of the century, the network faced complaints about its tight control over pronunciation, cadence and accent, especially for women and people of color.

Critics denounced a sense that the voices of NPR’s female journalists sounded “alike in their sober nasal condescension,” as the writer and actor Sarah Vowell put it – hinting at a class-related critique, along with a gendered one.

NPR’s women, some of these naysayers contend, have low-pitched voices that sound too much like men and that NPR voices in general sound more like each other than everyone else. Writer Scott Sherman calls it the “NPR drone.”

Even Stamberg said in a 2010 interview that one price of NPR’s success was that listeners weren’t “hearing great voices anymore.”

Another round of criticism, this one aimed primarily at young women, identified “vocal fry,” a low creaky way of speaking, as an irritating feature of public radio voices. The critique, which came mostly from men and older folks, suggested that despite what the critics were saying, NPR’s sound was not static but evolving.

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From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?

NPR’s sonic palette and its range of voices has broadened in recent years, especially through its podcasts and on weekends – when Navarro, who is Latina, and Michel Martin, an African American woman, are two of the network’s main three news anchors.

Sam Sanders, an openly gay African American man, hosts a cultural talk show branded with his own name. Programs like “Alt.Latino” and “Radio Ambulante,” which are either in Spanish or in English punctuated with Spanish words, indicate that the network aims to serve new listeners.

As NPR looks forward to the next 50 years, its decisions over whose voices belong on the air will determine how well it lives up to its founding commitment to sound like America. And it is likely that criticism of how those voices sound will reflect dominant attitudes about who gets to speak.

*****

Jason Loviglio, Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Header image by Jonathan Velasquez on Unsplash.

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Kimberly Moffitt, American studies, appeared on WEAA-FM’s The Marc Steiner Show on Monday to discuss the Freddie Gray case, Maryland political happenings, and the recent shooting at a Planned Parenthood location in Colorado.
• Ellen Hemmerly, bwtech@UMBC, penned an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun on the city’s future as a cybersecurity hub, citing its proximity to the federal government and to defense and intelligence contractors, its preponderance of cybersecurity firms, and its potential to attract even more startups in the coming years.
• Christopher Shuman, Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, confirmed findings from NASA’s Operation IceBridge that both the north and south polar ice caps have decreased dramatically in height, saying this is “not at all surprising given what we have observed with other sensors.”
• Jason Loviglio, media & communication studies, called for more diversity in the podcasting world after attending the 2015 Podcast Movement in Texas earlier this year.

For more on these stories, and for even more UMBC updates, head to our brand-new news website!

At 5:30 a.m. every morning, Shanae Cole ‘13, Media and Communication Studies, sits down in the control room as she assists with managing cameras, news anchors, and viewers of the popular celebrity news show, TMZ. She carefully searches through all of her leads and quickly reviews the website for any last minute breaking news before going live.

Growing up, Cole was glued to her television screen watching the latest and greatest cartoons and entertainment television. She laughed along with Bart on “The Simpsons” and Stewie on “Family Guy,” immersing herself in the cartoons and taking on the role of audience member. She also remembers falling in love with the action and thrill that superheroes provided.

When the time came to start college, Cole found a home within UMBC’s Media and Communication Studies department under the mentorship of Jason Loviglio and Donald Snyder. She says she cannot emphasize enough the impact her education provided on her career. “Today we live in a world where being media literate is important,” Cole says. “Especially since the need for new technologies to make life more efficient will only continue to proliferate.”

At UMBC, Cole had exceptional opportunities to gain hands-on experience through internships with 92 Q Jams Baltimore, “Variety”, and Katalyst Films, Ashton Kutcher’s production company.

Cole had set her sights on moving to California and working in the entertainment industry, and she knew she had to persevere to find a path that would lead her to her ultimate goal. “I had high hopes of getting an internship with Warner Brothers because of DC Comics and the Looney Tunes,” says Cole. “but I was devastated when I got an email saying that they went with another candidate.”

Unwilling to accept defeat, Cole sought other opportunities to help expand her experience and strengthen her reputation within the entertainment industry. And she found her opportunity in an internship with Fox 45 and the CW Baltimore.

“The more hands on experience you have,” says Cole, “the better off you’ll be, especially in the entertainment industry.”

And that hands-on experience paid off. It was through this internship that Cole won a National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter Emmy and later a bronze medal at the National PROMAX Creative TV Marketing Awards. The award recoginzed Cole’s efforts on a promo the network aired, a promo inspired by some of Cole’s earliest TV memories — it featured a storyline based on superheroes and followed examples from “Family Guy” and “The Simpsons.”

These achievements opened doors at Warner Brothers. The dream job she thought was over resurfaced at an even greater moment in her life, and this time the position was hers for the taking. And while interning for Warner Brothers, Cole was able to launch her career at TMZ. Now, Cole says, she’s grateful to have the ability to help others chase their dreams in the entertainment industry.

The recipe for attaining your dreams? According to Cole, all you need to do is “Keep the faith, keep working hard, and great things will come.”

-Samantha Hanssen ’15

Every so often, we’ll chat with an alum about what they do and how they got there. Today we’re talking with author Adam Kurtz ‘09, Visual Arts,  about his career and new book, 1 Page At A Time.

Name: Adam Kurtz
Job Title: Studio Designer for Ad Agency
Grad year & Major: 2009, Visual Arts (Graphic Design) with a minor in art history and certificate in media & communications

Q: Can you tell me a little about yourself and your background with graphic design?

I’m originally from Toronto and moved to D.C. with my family in my teens. I came to Baltimore to attend UMBC and stayed for a few years before moving to Brooklyn. As a teen, I would build websites, teaching myself code and design as I went. It wasn’t always pretty! It was my way to connect online, create something entirely myself, and communicate my passions. I knew that was what I wanted to study, and have worked in related industries since graduation: at a film production studio, an internet marketing firm, and now, a big-name ad agency in Manhattan.

Q: What drew you to UMBC for your studies?

UMBC was recommended as a state school that had a true graphic design program. Truthfully, I was new to Maryland and didn’t do very much research. I wish I could say I came to UMBC because of its great X or amazing Y, but the truth is I came in blind. I am so lucky and grateful that UMBC turned out to be as amazing for me as it was. I could not have anticipated any of that. UMBC gave me a solid education and myriad experiences on campus, from student events and life to on-campus jobs that taught me real-world skills.

Q: Were there any particular influences in your life that contributed to your blog and book?

Everything I make is influenced by life. These are not great literary works. I’m not doing anything particularly unique. I’m complaining and oversharing just like everyone else online. The difference is that I make something out of it. I put feelings into words and words onto objects and then I hold them and never let them go. The book is a hybrid activity book, workbook, journal, and more. It’s sort of my process, the introspection, the collecting, the preserving memories and feelings for later. It’s also about fighting the overwhelming nature of the internet. Slowing down, pacing yourself, counting your way through a year, and exploring creativity every single day, so that you can “make” it through.

Q: Can you recall any UMBC professors who inspired you?

I had a lot of great professors, but I think the single most inspiring teacher I had was Laura Schraven, a coordinator in The Commons who I worked with at commonvision, the campus design and print center. I worked on projects for student groups, learned about production as well as communicating abstract ideas and concepts with people who aren’t as “design-minded.” As a mentor, Laura gave her all, far beyond basic design instruction. My book is loosely based on a calendar series that I self-publish annually, the first of which was printed and bound there. I think I honestly didn’t understand that I can literally make anything I need with the tools at hand before that experience. It was a very empowering thing to realize. When I visit campus as an alumni I always try to visit… commonvision gave me a whole lot.

Of course the Visual Arts department is wonderful as well. I loved design classes with Peggy Re, was lucky enough to have artist Laure Drogoul as a professor when she taught a few courses, and I think Sandra Abbott at the CADVC is a wonderful human being. And Jason Loviglio in the Media Studies department, who is very smart and awesome (you can quote me).

Q: You have created a strong fan base for your online blog. Can you explain the purpose of it and how it got started?

There is absolutely no purpose. My blog is entirely personal and I simply post visual scraps I make and things I like. I refer to it as my “scrapbook, soapbox, diary, and jukebox,” because that’s really all it is. It surprises me how much people like what I do, and I never expected that. It was just a way to share and it grew slowly into whatever it is today.

Q: How did you get the idea of creating the “daily creative companion” book, 1 Page At A Time?

An editor from Penguin reached out and basically said “what if you do the things you are already doing with your ‘Unsolicited Advice’ calendars, but make them a book?” and I said “okay yeah that sounds cool.” Essentially. I never sought out to make a book.

a. Why do you think it’s important for creative people to seek out constant inspiration in their daily lives?

I don’t know if I would make that statement. I think creative people already find inspiration in everything. But I also don’t like the distinction of “creative people.” That is limiting. My book is not for “creatives.” My book is for human beings, for anyone with a pulse. We’re all creative in some way, that’s maybe what makes us human at all. It’s not quite for children, it’s not quite for teens. It’s just exploring yourself and your own little world. Writing and drawing however you can. Taping scraps of things to pages, sharing content online with others who have the book using the provided hashtags…. This isn’t so much about being inspired as much as realizing that if you just do one thing every single day, it will grow from nothing into SOMETHING. I guess you could say that’s a lesson I learned myself, as I was posting scraps and watching them build, not realizing what I was making.

Q: What exactly does this book entail and what do you hope it accomplishes?

The book is a daily exercise, a quiet moment for yourself, and a diary that kicks your ass a little bit. I’m not a bully necessarily, but I do encourage you… strongly. “Drink water,” “take a nap,” “go back and do that page you skipped.” I think this could be really great for anyone who needs a little help moving along, someone who has maybe abandoned journals in the past. This is a fun, weird, silly book, but it’s not a coincidence that the title sounds a little bit like a recovery slogan. All of us internet-age cellphone brains need to chill out.

Q: What does your future look like with your website? Do you plan on writing more books?

I am still actually coming to terms with the fact that I am a published author, in multiple languages (with more on the way). It feels crazy. I really did not dream of being an author, though to others, a book seems like an obvious progression of what I’ve been doing online. I have a full-time job, and this isn’t it. I am just happy to keep making nice things, and it’s exciting that people have noticed. I’m working on a product collaboration for a pretty major brand due out next year, plus plenty more self-released items. A Kickstarter campaign for my 2015 weekly planner, which I enjoy handling personally as a year-end tradition. I’m just going to keep creating tangible feelings in my own little ways, turning pages until there aren’t any left.

 Visit Adam’s website.

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Clifford Murphy, American Studies, in The Washington Post
• George Derek Musgrove ’97, History, in The New York Times
• Laura Hussey, Political Science, in The Baltimore Sun
• Amanda Knapp, Assistant Vice Provost, in The Baltimore Sun
• Tyson King-Meadows, Africana Studies and Political Science, Co-Authors Report on Black Voter Turnout and the 2014 Midterm Elections
• President Hrabowski Highlights Effective Strategies to Support Students in The Chronicle
• Jason Loviglio, Media and Communication Studies, on BBC Radio

Read more at UMBC Insights!