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.

• Dennis Coates, Economics, in The Baltimore Sun and The Buffalo News
• Pres. Hrabowski on NPR and WYPR
• Yonathan Zohar, NPR’s Morning Edition, Father of Bluefin Tuna
• Maurice Berger, CADVC, Latest “Race Story” in The New York Times

Read more great news here!

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.

• Bambi Chapin, Sociology and Anthropology, on WYPR’s Maryland Morning
• Thomas Schaller, Political Science, in Politico Magazine and The Baltimore Sun
• Robert Provine, Psychology, in Real Simple

Find more news here!

We are proud of our alums and their constant achievements. Recently, three of UMBC’s alumni, in particular, have made it in the news and we thought you should know!

Lafayette Gilchrist ’92, Africana Studies, recently released his new solo album, titled The View From Here, which was featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

“For someone who came to piano rather late, at 17, Gilchrist has dug deep into its history… Despite his old-timey tremolos and thundering bass figures, he doesn’t really sound like the old masters; something different is going on in his timing and pile-driving left hand.”

Read more of NPR’s review of The View From Here.

Valerie Hawkins ’82, Africana Studies, received the K-12 Promotion of Education Award at the 2013 Women of Color Stem Conference. Hawkins, a teacher in the Baltimore County Public School System, has been involved in Project Lead the Way/Gateway to Technology, which offers students hands-on experiences in the STEM fields.

“One of the many goals of the Women of Color STEM Conference is to provide employers with a unique opportunity to recognize those women within their ranks who are already successful, thus sending a clear message that there is room for many others who choose to follow.” Read more.

Dr. Kaye Whitehead, ’09, language, literacy, and culture, was the keynote speaker at UMBC’s first Language, Literacy and Culture graduate student conference, called “Rethinking Intellectual Activism.” Her speech was titled, In Search of Your Magis: Taking a Moment to ReThink, ReEvaluate, and ReDiscover Intellectual Activism. Whitehead is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Loyola University, Maryland. Read more about the event here.

The Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) named its Individual Artist Award Recipients for 2014 and we’re proud to say that two UMBC alumnae were selected: Sandy Lacy ’76, psychology and Heather Moss ’07, English.

“The MSAC’s annual Individual Artist Award (IAA) recognizes the importance of artists and their works of excellence to the cultural vibrancy of Maryland. Each year, awards of $1,000, $3,000 or $6,000 go to Artists from across Maryland who are selected by a blind, out-of-state jury on the basis of artistic merit alone.” Congratulations, Sandy and Heather!

Want to know more about the MSAC and other award recipients? Find out here!

Do you have an achievement of your own to share?

Tell us about it in a class note!

We are proud of our alums and their constant achievements. Recently, four of UMBC’s alumni, in particular, have made it in the news and we thought you should know! 

Greg Cangialosi ’96, English, was recently profiled in the Baltimore Sun’s Take 10 column. The article celebrates Cangialosi’s success on the tech scene, from the 2011 sale of his company, Blue Sky Factory, to his current roles as co-founder of Betamore and CEO of MissionTix. Cangialosi had this to say about his recent success:

“In 1996, right after college [at UMBC] I was a music promoter for about two to three years. I promoted concerts and nightclubs – everything from the 8×10, Lithuanian Hall, Recher Theatre, UMBC – all that kind of stuff. It was a brutal, cutthroat business. I got burned out on it. But that’s where I [gained] my marketing chops. That’s where I learned how to hustle.”

The Sun also talked with Cangialosi about his 10 favorite things, which include his watches, a collection of awesome caps, and tickets to great concerts. Find out the rest of Cangialosi’s favorite things.

Steven Gimbel ’91, philosophy, was recently featured in the Baltimore Jewish Times about his new book, Einstein’s Jewish Science. Gimbel will present his ideas from the book and lead a discussion as part of the Odyssey Program noncredit liberal arts offerings at Johns Hopkins University on March 13 at the Homewood campus.

Gimbel had this to say of about the book:

“The big questions now are at the intersections of things, and that’s what Jews have always done. This book began talking with someone in religious studies, but I’ve collaborated with people in physics, in the chemistry department, in health sciences, economics, in our education department. Being Jewish lets you look for insight wherever it is, knowing there are other routes to it.”

Read the full article from the Baltimore Jewish Times.

Melanie Harrison ’11 Ph.D., Marine Estuarine Environ Science, recently appeared on KQED, an NPR-affiliate station in Northern California, where she discussed her upbringing and how it led to her career as an environmental scientist. Here’s a sneak peek at what she had to say:

“In those Alabama lakes, I learned to swim, bait a hook and catch catfish, bream and bass. I caught my first hook in the jaw, too, and saw my great grandmother clean and cook the fish she had caught for dinner that night. She was a great fisherwoman and gardener and my first teacher in life. She taught me the wonders of nature and the bounty it can produce, and that by doing, you can be whatever you want to be.”

Listen to Melanie’s story.

TEDx Talks recently published a talk by Andrew Sherman ’83, political science, on the importance of harvesting intangible assets. Sherman is a Partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Jones Day and a recognized international authority on the legal and strategic aspects of business growth.

In this talk, he challenges us to find ways to better use the many assets that already exist in our communities and companies. You can watch the full TEDx Talk by Sherman below:

Do you have an achievement of your own to share?
Tell us about it in a class note!

“People know what NPR sounds like,” says Vikki Valentine ’96, English. “But they don’t really know what it looks like. And on the Web, it’s what you look like that’s important.”

That’s the daily challenge for Valentine, who is a senior editor in NPR’s science division – and recipient of the 2010 UMBC Alumna of the Year Award in the Humanities. Public radio is changing at light speed; so much, in fact, that National Public Radio isn’t even National Public Radio anymore. In July, the name became simply NPR.

“The core product of NPR will always be audio storytelling,” says Valentine. “But people aren’t buying radios anymore. If you listen to NPR, you’re streaming it on your computer, you’re listening to it through your iPhone or your iPod…. NPR is trying to branch out and figure out what NPR is in that digital space.”

Valentine’s career trajectory has followed that rise in digital storytelling. UMBC professor of the practice in English Christopher Corbett helped guide her to a print journalism job with Baltimore Style after graduation. But within two years, Valentine was lured to The Baltimore Sun to work on the newspaper’s website – learning the ins and outs of the new medium on the job. “I knew nothing about the Web when I went to the Sun,” she recalls. “The only thing I had formal training in was reporting. UMBC gave me this great foundation in learning and asking questions and how to ask about things.”

A lifelong interest in science eventually took her from the Sun to Discovery magazine’s website, where she wrote daily science news. When that magazine shut down Valentine’s department after the dot.com bubble burst, she ended up at NPR. Over the last nine years, and in a variety of jobs, Valentine has helped reshape the way the organization tells its stories. In a medium that’s constantly changing, she says that flexibility and a knack for telling stories are key elements in her task.

“Most often someone comes to me with a story idea and we sit down and talk about that story and flesh it out,” she says. “Then we figure out what’s the best way to tell this story.”

One of features that Valentine has created at NPR.org is the Tiny Desk Kitchen. Inspired by the DIY spirit of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, these videos examine the science behind popular notions about food (Does honey really have healing powers? Is grass-fed beef better for you than corn-fed beef?) and cap it off with a taste test in an improvised kitchen set up in an NPR cubicle.

In 2009, she was among a team of editors to win a National Academies of Science Award for excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine. The award honored “Climate Connections,” a year-long multimedia series of stories looking at the complexities of the interplay between humans and the climate. It’s the sort of hybrid project – reported stories underscored by sound, web graphics and video – that shows the power of web journalism to unlock stories at multiple levels.

More recently, Valentine has worked with veteran storyteller Robert Krulwich on a series of science video and animation stories. For instance, a story of a group of space enthusiasts who manipulate and trade images from the Hubble and other space telescopes is accompanied by jaw-dropping images of a developing galaxy. Another story describes the crowded insect highway above our heads (around 3 billion insects strong) with a whimsical animation that visualizes the scientific details of spiders and beetles at 6,000 feet.

In September, Valentine will expand her responsibilities when she becomes the senior editor leading NPR’s environment, climate, and energy beat across all platforms.

“It’s a really fun time to be here,” Valentine says. “NPR is always saying to its staff: ‘Come up with something interesting, come up with something innovative.’ I’ve had lots of opportunities to do lots of different things, which keeps it interesting.” Whatever radio becomes, will Vikki Valentine be one of the journalists who will take it there?

“Hopefully,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to be. I’ll let you know in ten years.”

— Mark Trainer