Interview with John Dankosky

Where We Live is WNPR's own local affairs call-in program. In the short time it's been on the air, host John Dankosky has already become an expert at framing universal themes with local issues in a small, but diverse state.

PRX:
What's the idea behind Where We Live?

JD:
We were looking to find ways to connect with our community more directly. There's be an awful lot of talk in public radio circle about doing things that are part of civic engagement. Instead of being a radio station that plays a bunch of NPR news programs and does news at the top of the hour, we're trying to find ways of connecting with our listeners. This all came to a head when we decided to make a move to an all news format earlier this year. It's basically run like a fairly conventionally-styled NPR talk program, and I've had a lot of input from people who have worked on "The Connection"--the late, lamented WBUR Chris Lydon show--and other talk programs.

PRX:
What was the most surprising thing doing the show that you didn't expect in its planning?

JD:

"That's a spicy meatball."

I was worried about the phone call aspect of [the show]. The surprise I found is that I expected the callers to be smart, and they've been even smarter and better informed than I thought they'd be. They really move along the conversation. On a show like this you don't want to have to carry it yourself and sometimes the guests can't either, so the callers have become very important as the show has grown up.

PRX:
How do you go about making the show for a Connecticut audience?

JD:
Connecticut's a strange little state because everyone knows each other in some form or another. Almost everything is a local story around the entire state. [In other states,] you have upstate, downstate, east and west, but in Connecticut you can cover it in about 2 hours in the car. We have to think about people who live along the Gold Coast, the expensive suburbs of New York City down in Fairfield Country. And we have to think about people who live out in the woods and live very very quiet lives in Lytchfield County and up in the quiet corner of the northeast part of the state. And there's this whole shoreline life in Connecticut that is full of a New England Yankee tradition, and we have the seat of local government in Hartford. It's a very rich state and a very poor state at the same time. The cities are very poor and the suburbs are very rich. So one of our challenges is to find different ways to get different voices on the air. Not just rich white suburban volvo-driving folks but also the stories of people who are in the cities of Bridgeport and Hartford and New Haven who aren't heard as much on the radio or other media. So our goal is to find a mix. Connecticut is not a monolithic thing.

PRX:
So how did you go about integrating PRX material into a call-in talk show?

JD:
I've used PRX [since the site's inception] and using it in Where We Live is something that came naturally. I've been using it to program a show called Essential Radio on the weekends. I began using [PRX] for Where We Live to add to the conversation whenever needed. A good example: we were going to spend one [episode] talking with students who had done a poetry project here at Hartford public high school. We knew it was going to be interesting but that it couldn't carry a whole show, so I found a number of interesting commentaries from students about graduating on PRX. I was able weave those in and help expand the show. I think it's in keeping with the idea I have for Where We Live. It's not just about Where We Live in Connecticut but it's supposed to be about a variety of different experiences. If we set the context of "here's how Connecticut high school students are dealing with moving on to the next part of their lives," wouldn't it be interesting to see how kids elsewhere are doing it.

We've also used commentaries from the This I Believe series taken off of PRX to slide into arts programs. As PRX has grown up, it's a good place for a programmer to go when you have little time and good ideas but you have to make things up on the fly. It's become this invaluable tool I can always fall back on, but I can also use it to plan ahead.

Just one more example: I found a series called "Tales of Urban Forests" on PRX and used that as a starting point for an entire hour of phone calls on that very topic. We talked to people who were reclaiming patches of land in their neighborhoods [and turning them] into gardens or open spaces. The stories on PRX I found really drove the whole hour.

© 2006, The Public Radio Exchange