This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event, featuring a presentation by Rob Christiansen, Director of Broadcast Applications, New York Public Radio. It was recorded on April 8, 2026.
Announcer 0:00
Welcome to Engelberg Center Live!, a collection of audio from events held by the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event featuring a presentation by Rob Christiansen, Director of broadcast applications, New York Public Radio. It was recorded on April 8, 2026
Rob Christiansen 0:31
Hello, I'm I bring to you today a way of talking.
Rob Christiansen 0:39
I'm working on I've got this idea that I'm going to give you a bunch of short anecdotes that will give you the feeling of public radio and how it's archived in the way that, like a work of fiction, can give you a larger truth. This is what I'm going to present to you, a bunch of anecdotes that explain to you what's going on. May I suggest that, like you might listen to reggae music drawn out echoey. You know, differently. Then you listen to, like, short three minute pop songs, gonna give you some advice that I think is helpful for all of your life, err on the side of reggae music. So this is where we're headed. It's the 1990s I'm in school in Washington, DC. I'm learning to become an audio engineer musician. Moved to DC because they had what they called socially conscious music. There quite a scene. Moved to DC from Massachusetts. After graduating, I, you know, I was playing in bands, recording music, learning the new digital editing. This is the 90s, so it's very new. There's digital editing. I discovered that NPR is there. NPR is network, Public Radio. It's, you know, community funded, somewhat federally funded, independent journalism, source, if you're not familiar with it. The reason I get obsessed with with National Public Radio in particular is because there's a show called This American Life. It's still on. It was fantastic, pioneering journalistic show, long form, generally, like they get into a giant topic for a whole hour. Sound rich. The sound is telling the story. The long interviews are telling the story, there's something very exciting and new about this, and it's exciting to me. I realize, you know, as an audio engineer, I've got something I can be doing that isn't just like making punk rock music or whatever I can, you know, contribute to this. So I'm in Washington, DC, and you should know that NPR is a kind of a loose network the net, you know, we call it a network. It's not really a network. Washington, DC provides a bunch of content. They have a big building, but the stations in all the cities are independently owned. So I'm in, I'm in DC, luckily, so I can go there. And at the time, they had a rigorous engineering test, you know, really arcane details of, you know, new and old engineering trivia, you had to take this test. So I go in and apply for the job, fail the test. I moved to Japan, teach English for a couple years, in 2000 I moved to New York City, which I guess I'm going to pause and acknowledge it's the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. Here in New York City, I learned that there's a New York Bureau for NPR, and that's cool. I go and apply this time I passed the test. So here I am, 2001 I learn, and you're getting, you're getting little public radio insights through here. They're coming just a little bit, little bit. So yeah, I'm here in New York. I'm learning how radio is made, and it's sort of different from recording music. And I'm learning about this and I'm learning about this. I want to offer that I'm probably the last person on earth who learned how to mix a sound rich like the flagship news show is called All Things Considered. It has like, you know, ambience and like, people talking and all this stuff fading in and out. I think I'm the last person on earth who learned how to do that with three reel to reel decks. One is the like, some people talking, there's a host in the booth that you point at occasionally. There's one that has ombi You're cueing this stuff up, you're recording on the third deck, and then you're editing together the best of your performances to, like, make a piece. And then you're, well, I do this also. I've been digital editing for like, six years. But I do this because it's like, this is the way it's done at NPR, and then you're not done. You can't just, there's no internet, send the file you got a tape in your hand. There's no internet. I can't send this file to Washington, DC. I have to feed it. I have to get some telephone bridge system feed. He play that audio to somebody who's in a record Central. They called it ready to record that. That audio back then. And the person in the record Central, this is the archival bit, person record Central is always like, what's your intake number? I got to get this on the air. I've got, I'm just telling you what I've got here. What's your intake number? Nobody gave me an intake number. What am I going to do?
Rob Christiansen 5:27
So I worked there for a while. I heard about WNYC, which is the other place in town, so that's the local station in New York. WNYC is the local NPR main local NPR station. Didn't want to work there because I loved NPR, but then I found out, looking at my boss now, but you know, I found out they did some national shows, and there's something going on there. So finally, I got a call from them and started working on the media, which is a national show out of there, good enough. But what I walked into was a very, very creative space. So let me just talk about digital editing. So digital editing is, like, kind of only in our hands. From like 2000 on there, it was in the air, the idea that like sound rich you can you can hear it in the music from like, the late 90s, early 2000s you can just hear that editing was clever. You could always edit with razor blades and people, you know, Beatles were cutting up parts of their songs or whatever. But, like, editing is an art form. And you know, we had people at WNYC. Sarah fishco was a master storyteller who would just take, you know, some interview tape and some ambience, and just throw tape up in the editor and just wait for interesting moments to happen and go there that, you know, like it was, like this sort of art form of this a couple other examples in the air was this idea. Glenn Gould, classical pianist, Canadian, made a documentary in the 70s with analog tape called the idea of north, and he had to use the kind of the concept of fugal composition, four voices all playing at the same time. And they'd come and go, and there'd be moments where you could hear one more than the other, but it'd be like four voices at once, and the whole thing would just give you this idea of North. That was the name of it, the idea of north. And you can't really understand what you're hearing, but it just kind of washes kind of washes over you, and you get these sort of ideas of this lore and that kind of thing, like sound rich, like sound was exciting. Sound was the like star, and I, you know, it's radio. This is all very exciting. I want to give one other example. WNYC had a show called The Next Big Thing, which was basically art on the radio. And it's not a, this is an important distinction. It's not talking about art like this artist made this thing, and let's talk to this artist. No, it was like it was the sound, was the art. You'd have, like an interview segment. But then the next thing be like, five minutes of like a cello, where every note that cello played was like a voice that happened to be the same pitch, and it was sort of tell a story like it wasn't a show about art, it was art on the radio. The sound was the art form. Third Coast International audio festival was coming at this time. This is my argument here. This is all based on the idea that editing was so new and it was in everybody's hands, and you could make a different thing than anyone ever made before. Very exciting. It's 2003 it's so exciting that WNYC has this proposal that on Sunday nights, they're going to play just the best audio pieces they can find. It never happened, because the host was supposed to be this guy, a journalist and composer named Jad Abu Murad, and he just took it over. He just made his own thing, and it was called Radio lab. It became like the largest hit thing that WNYC has ever really done. So he made the most sound rich every episode to this day, every episode of radio lab, if you want to listen to it, just to hear audio craft at its finest. It's just, it's, it's staggering. And the early, the early episodes are, are just incredible. So he just took over. We didn't get to have a p you know, best of you didn't get to have the sun dance of audio art on Sunday nights in WNYC, because he took over. And took over the universe. So this is the truly move from tape. This is truly the born digital era. Files are everywhere. It is craziness. Nobody thought about any of this stuff. We had our high tech thing was we had fiber optic cables running to a bunch of machines. We had a SAN so any machine that could do editing, or several of the machines that could do editing had like, you know, Cranky fiber optic cables that would fail, going to all the different machines. We also had these, like, glyph drives, if you if anyone was involved with this, it was a three rack unit, 19 inch wide thing you screw into a rack. Had four bays the. You could, like, turn this key and slide in and out these drives and carry them to some other computer, and it'll be metal handle glyph drives. It's 2009 I've changed careers. I'm still in WNYC, but I've learned about databases it. I learned about it a bit, um, I run the play out system now I stopped doing production. You know, tools for journalists. It's a cool place to be.
Rob Christiansen 10:30
I will introduce the person who may be the hero in all of this story, Andy Lancet, can you? Does anybody here know Andy Lancet, okay, good, some I figured he's a longtime archivist community New York person, you know, he's a historian. Was a reporter, and he was the founder of nyprs. I'm sorry, I'm moving around a little bit. WNYC is the radio station New York Public Radio. Nypr is the umbrella organization that has several radio stations, including WQXR classical. So I'm jumping around my terminology, but Andy Lance said, is the archivist, or was the archivist? Is? Is the founder? We'll say he's the founder. So he worked a lot with municipal archives in New York, and would work with them to, like, take out huge volumes of tape, get them digitized, get them described. He he'd, you know that served both parties. He'd go on eBay and find anybody who had tapes or anything from the old WNYC, quite a important figure. He identified a lot of at risk media and made sure that that was getting digitized. So I'm learning the database system at the time, it was called do, but it was, it was a play out system for radio. They tried to put all the archival assets in there. Didn't work very well. So a company called AVP created a system called Cavafy, which is a metadata only database, so we have a media in one system and a metadata in a different system. Kind of cool. It was good, but, yeah, it's 2013 I hear that NPR has something called the library, and if you're going to put something on air, you put it in library first, and then they get it to air for you, and then this solves your kind of workflow problems, because as an archivist, you don't have to chase everybody around getting stuff. I find this idea very appealing. 2014 has to be mentioned. This American Life spun off something called Serial and it was a true crime. Hit podcast, very big. Now this is, I think, you know, podcasting had been around for whatever, eight years at this point, but that was the moment 2014 it's hard to believe it needed a moment, because podcasting is everywhere now. 2014 is actually the year that, like the word podcast became a household name. It was only like 12 years ago. It's kind of weird to think now, up till then, everything was radio. Yeah, so podcasting happened. There's a podcasting thing. There's a moment where, you know, up till this point, we're told, like we're not going to need engineers anymore. When podcasting hits 2014 there's, you know, radio lab had been, you know, up to that time, really big podcast, but serial just takes over. There's money to be made. We're told engineers won't be needed anymore up to this point. And then we're told, Oh, you need an engineer, you also need a sound designer, you also need a composer to make original music for every episode. It was amazing. What a great time to be working in audio. The files spread further. Now they're not just radio they're in being uploaded as MP threes, low res files everywhere. It's crazy. The files got very slippery. In 2015 we're about to throw out some of these old glyph drives. Somebody plunks one into a machine and realizes they found radio lab season three. It had gone missing for several years. I'm so glad this is someone else's problem. It's 2020. We get an asset management, or true asset management system. It's called, it's the orange logic cortex product through clever coding and just pure brute force. We're actually keeping up as people are producing new stuff for the first time ever, we're actually keeping up and getting it cataloged and collected. 2024 New York public radio hits financial problems. Andy Lancet retires staff staff. Two staff members are cut from full time to part time. The budget for the cortex, asset management system that I just bragged about is cut. The assets are all at risk again, but in a different way this time. Hi, I'm the new director of broadcast app. Applications and assets at New York Public Radio. Yeah, I help you get your, you know, your project started. Give you an editor to work in. I give you some space to work in, and then I help you figure out how all of that media is going to flow into an archival system for history. I think this is a good plan. I think it's going to work. I've managed to finagle the two part time positions into two full time positions now. So we're two full timers plus me.
Rob Christiansen 15:33
We were rebuilding. We're not using cortex anymore, but we're using an open source system called archipelago. We're very happy about this because it's kind of like buying the apartment. Yes, there are costs, but the landlord can't raise the rent. You are kind of in control. So we're very happy about this direction. We're reorganizing the space so that everything is bar coded and described. We want to make when somebody requests something of us, we want to make it just take us less time to go find them. The thing we're also very serious about making archipelago have everything that we're you know, everything is searchable. We want it to be self serve for the first time, and we want to become central to our organization. Have everyone know they can find what they need to make stories, do their journalism in our system. In going the other way, we're telling everybody at the organization, we're building a library. Don't throw out your work. Contribute to the library, and it's as important as doing the work in the first place. So our mission is to as any kind of corporate archive. Our mission is to preserve finished products, things that you know are obvious to the company, completed so they don't get lost. But we have another thing we're working on, and it is to collect any regional politician or public speech you know, we think we need to have our own collection. I know you can find these things on YouTube or different places, but we think it's important to have our own collection of these things, not just because, like, one day, YouTube might not be free, or things might not be there anymore, but I kind of believe that having your politicians held accountable and have the tape belonging to a journalistic organization that has some credibility, like, Yes, this is the tape, and this is really what the politician said, I think that that's going to be more and more valuable over time. So I am trying to drum up interest and support for that project, wherever I can speak about it an idea. Now, coming back to the sort of the art form question, what is the art form? The funny social media videos that we're sending out now to just make people like listen to our stories. They're kind of an art form on their own, and they're they're really slippery, they're really out there, and nobody, the minute you finish it, you're like, Okay, that's done. I'm gonna go mix coffee, you know, like nobody thinks they just made something great. We have to find the way to get that stuff too. So there's, as we catch up, there's more stuff flying in all different directions. It's 2025 the federal government cuts funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, so PBS and NPR stations are scrambling. So far, New York Public Radio's listeners have pitched in and kept us kind of where we were. It's okay for now. That's not true of all the member stations across where the big New York station not true of all the member stations around the country. It's 2026 a judge rules that an executive order cannot cancel funding for public broadcasting, but the organization that used to bring the money to the stations is gone. So not sure what that all means. Going back a little bit, in 2019 I was about to have a child with my partner, and I was a little apprehensive about like, what to name the child? What will the child need? What do I do? How do I parent? A friend of mine, who has five kids, just said, the child will come. The child will tell you who he is. The child will tell you what he needs. So similarly, here we are. We trust the collection. Will tell us what it is. We trust that the people catalog and describe that collection, we'll figure out how to make it shine, and we trust that the people who use that collection will know how to use it to tell the best stories they can tell. There's a guy in Washington who seems to have a lot of power right now. Controls a lot of the federal government, not all of it, but a lot of it. And he said just last week, I don't believe in building museums or libraries. We're all here because we do, and we shall and we will continue. And I thank you for doing that.
Announcer 20:22
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