Woods Hole 'Is a Serious Town,' Radio Producer Says

One of the most influential forces in 21st-century public broadcasting is six-time Peabody Award winner Jay Allison, a motorcycle-riding Woods Hole father of five whose local career arc has taken him from directing summer theater here in the 1970s to founding the Cape and Islands' first public radio station, WCAI, in 2000.

Allison's nonprofit Atlantic Public Media, based in Woods Hole, has also created a string of radio projects including the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and popular series such as "This I Believe" and the Moth Radio Hour.

Last week in the WCAI studios on Water Street, Allison sat down with Patch to talk about what he does and particularly about one of his most-cherished projects, the Transom Story Workshop, which was about to graduate its latest class of producers (see "Radio Storytellers Air New Work in Woods Hole").

Patch: Who owns WCAI?
Jay Allison: I have a nonprofit organization called Atlantic Public Media that is the organization that founded WCAI and then partnered with WGBH, who now ably runs it.

Patch: What else does Atlantic Public Media do?
Jay Allison: We also have created and run a whole lot of other projects in public media like Transom, the "Moth," "This I Believe;" the Public Radio Exchange, PRX, we founded. We found things, spin them off.

Patch: How many people work for Atlantic Public Media? 
Jay Allison: Full or part time, six to 10; one of them’s in Montana, the Web guy.

Patch: You started Transom.org a few years ago. Why?
Jay Allison: Our goal with Transom is to keep the mission of public broadcasting active and interesting to a new generation, and to pass on both the tools of production and the best practices, and the purpose. I created this website to have people tell stories and get advice, and it was the first website ever to win a Peabody award and has been a great success in its very specific mandates: I mean it's not trying to attract millions of people, it's trying to attract zealots so that they'll come and change the world.   

Patch: What does that involve? 
Jay Allison: We have guests come, everyone from Studs Terkel to Ira Glass, and they write about why they do what they do — and more particularly, also, how they do what they do. And then we have nuts and bolts concrete stuff like what equipment to buy and how to use it; and then we feature new work that's at the edge of what is on public broadcasting, to try and force the boundaries wider. Then lately we started this workshop that we have here in Woods Hole, a two-month-long workshop we hold twice a year, and that's kind of our on-the-ground training.

Patch: Who takes the workshop? 
Jay Allison: People of all ages, from their 20s to their 60s, who are at a moment of transition in their lives. Almost universally, they're coming because they want they want to learn a new tool and enter a different mode. Some of them may be newspaper people wanting to work with voice; some may be people who work in nonprofits who want to learn more about the value of stories; some may be postgrads who are searching for their own identity still. We get people who are eager to tell the stories of others, to work with the raw material of life and to translate for an audience.

Patch: Where do the students stay during the two-month workshop? 
Jay Allison: We get them houses in town, and we have one house that has a lovely large dining room and we gather there for meals and for classes. This time we had Ira Glass come up and talk, and the brilliant web artist Jonathan Harris; the former White House congressional reporter and now podcaster Andrea Seabrook. All these people teach classes. 

Patch: Who are the staff instructors?
Jay Allison: The main instructor is Rob Rosenthal who is a wonderful radio teacher and really just a brilliant instructor. And Sarah Reynolds works with him, and the two of them conduct a transformative experience: The students look different when they leave than when they got here. Their faces have opened up.

Patch: Why Woods Hole?  
Jay Allison: We live here. I directed summer theater in the '70s and kind of fell in love with the place and ended up back here; and then, when I was thinking about putting down roots, or had put down roots, I realized: We don't have a public radio station here. And that made me sad so I worked hard to start one.
 
Patch: What do you love about Woods Hole? 
Jay Allison: All of our region is utterly magical with water and light. So once you get kind of entranced by that, you want to stick around. Then you want to figure out how to make sticking around possible, and so you cobble together a living and maybe you actually even invent something to do in order to stay here. Woods Hole, specifically, too, is a serious town. It's a town of laboratories and I think of
this radio station very much as a public media laboratory, and Transom certainly is a public media laboratory.

The next Transom Story Workshop for beginning audio producers will take place in Woods Hole from March 31 through May 22, 2014. To apply, complete the application at transom.org. Applications and materials are due before midnight Jan. 3, including a $40 application fee payable through Paypal. Accepted students will be expected to pay a $750 deposit on the $6,500 tuition, which does not include rent and meals.