Going Coastal
An elegiac discussion of This American Life classics followed, peppered with outbursts. “NYC? It is such a different place,” someone moaned. “It is almost impossible that it will not change the feel of the show.” Somebody else reminisced about Friday afternoons spent shopping at Marshall Field’s, followed by a sandwich at the Berghoff and a mai tai at Trader Vic’s. “I’d be home in time for the friday night broadcast of TAL. . . . O, what a litany of loss.”
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But that’s that. “In practice,” Glass said, “we are so very much on our own path in terms of story selection that what determines what gets on the show has very little to do with geography and way more to do with what we’re interested in and who’s pitching us. For the first four or five years of our show, Sarah Vowell lived in Uptown. Then she moved to New York, and her stories sound basically the same.
The radio show’s a “dream situation,” Glass told me. “We’re fully funded forever if we want to be. The funding is an engine that drives itself. We have this massive audience–1.6 million people a week–and we have complete editorial control. There’s seven of us, and when we decide we want something on the radio we put it on the radio.” His TV audience–and this is something Glass didn’t at first understand about cable–will be a lot smaller than what he’s used to. “A show on Showtime will be seen by half a million to a million people,” he said. If he becomes famous on TV it’ll be because he was already famous on radio.
We were at war, the Senate was torn in two over who Samuel Alito was and what he believed–but the American media found massive resources to throw at a story where the truth was at stake.
