I understand that. I'm not suggesting the anchors should be comedians. The anchors are all just fine. What I'm suggesting is there should be more variety to the stories they cover, and perhaps adding more creative uses of audio to the stories. It's become very predictable, and predictable isn't a good thing. In other words, a return to what they used to be.
"Joy Czar" sounds like something out of Huxley or maybe even Orwell. It sets the teeth on edge.
As for getting back to what NPR was, I have to keep in mind that the overall ecology of news coverage is different than it was 50 years ago when NPR was first starting. As I mentioned in another thread, I was a student reporter and teaching assistant at an NPR member station at one of the largest journalism programs in the U.S. In those days, the typical NPR member station was oriented toward classical and fine-arts programming during the day and, often at night, either jazz or some form of rock programming, with the latter providing some room for student involvement. There wasn't much news coverage other than what came from NPR and possibly someone in the morning reading regional wire copy. KBIA was something of an exception: still classical daytime, jazz at night, but with a full newscast schedule and a three-hour news-and-features program every weekday morning. There was no Morning Edition then, just ATC. I think there was also hourly news during weekdays only but we didn't carry many or any of them. Fifty-year-old memories can be fuzzy: a cautionary note. I do remember our morning program; I was one of the producer/editors of it. Fortunately, we had plenty of student reporting capacity most of the time.
NPR had a notably different style compared to commercial radio, consciously so. It was positioning itself as an alternative to the way other broadcasting media were presenting news. There were also many fewer people. Susan Stamberg, Scott Simon, etc. stood out because it was a small operation. They had room to develop a distinctive style, and did so. There was also an emphasis on using audio in a way that made the audience feel as though they were on the scene of the story. That wasn't particularly new but what was new was the consistency with which they did it.
We tried to strike a middle ground between commercial imperatives and the NPR approach because, after all, we were preparing students for careers in commercial radio. There were many fewer opportunities in public radio then. After Morning Edition was established (in 1979; KBIA didn't pick it up right away), and satellite distribution utilized, there were a few more specialty programs but public radio didn't really take off until the 1990s as NPR began to have more solid funding and an improved ability to cover areas outside New York and Washington. Commercial radio news by then had mostly been killed off. Consequently there was no alternative to NPR for radio news in many areas. Thus NPR shifted its approach; it now had a broader audience to serve.
The whole business of the "Joy Czar" reminds me of something else: pressure that news organizations felt in the 1970s and 1980s to "report more good news" and not report so-called "negative" news. The meaning of "negative" usually was "stuff I don't want you to know about", which, of course, is an incentive for a good journalist to report exactly that. Often this pressure had political motivations. NPR seems to be caving a little bit here, in my opinion, or perhaps it's a bit of desperation. The organization does a lot of good work; just as with anything else, it could be improved, but this seems to be a particularly frivolous way of going about it.
