This I Believe leaves NPR, but will return to pubradio
Regular appearances of the audio essays will be back after they disappear from NPR newsmags at the end of April, says This I Believe Executive Director Dan Gediman.
A sequence of the original 1950s essays introduced by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow will begin May 2 [2009] on The Bob Edwards Show on Sirius XM Satellite Radio — which is heard in a syndicated weekly version on many
pubradio stations.
Gediman’s also talking with Steve Robinson, head of Chicago’s WFMT and a fan of This I Believe, about syndicating a run of contemporary contributed essays as modules for stations to insert in their schedules.
Pubradio outlets such as Houston’s KUHF are also collecting and broadcasting audio essays by local residents following the model of This I Believe.
Gediman loved the 1950s essays that aired on CBS but couldn’t find stations programmers interested in airing them. He says they feared a second stream of such essays would create an oversupply.
But Bob Edwards, a biographer and admirer of Murrow, was a believer in Believe even before NPR ousted Edwards from Morning Edition in 2004. Edwards will add a Believe segment to his Friday show on XM Sirius with Gediman discussing and playing the 1950s pieces. The segment will repeat in Bob Edwards Weekend, the two-hour weekly version syndicated to public radio staitons, in the last segment of its first hour, according to Andy Danyo, producer of Weekend..
The complete essays have not been heard since their broadcast in the 1950s, and they will air until at least the end of March 2010, Danyo told Current.
The May 2 broadcast will describe the original This I Believe project and May 9 will feature Murrow's own essay. Listeners will also hear from Helen Keller; Marty Mann, the first woman in Alcoholics Anonymous; Texas folklorist and columnist J. Frank Dobie; a former New York governor, Herbert Lehman; and longtime NAACP leader Walter White.
Web page posted April 22, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC