KVMR sets internet listening record

On the first anniversary of the tragedy, "The Morning Show" featured a wealth of 9/11-related music, features and news -- including a live broadcast from the Nevada County Fairgrounds of the Music in the Mountains' performance contribution to the "Rolling Requiem" Choirs and symphonies around the globe performed Mozart's "Requiem", beginning precisely at 8:46 a.m., in commemoration of September 11th, and about 400 residents attended the live show, with many more tuning into KVMR's remote broadcast.

Although record internet listening to KVMR was already taking place during Ani DiFranco's searing poem "Self Evident", the BBC News and producer Ginger Miles' audio diary of life at Ground Zero, it was during the "Requiem" that web listening peaked at more than double the station's previous all-time high, according to KVMR "webguy" John Button. Previously, the station's most popular program on the internet was the live broadcast of the closing show of the Palms Playhouse, featuring U. Utah Phillips, in August.

Some of the other special shows that day allowed listeners to vent on Rabble Rousing, while Molly Fisk and the Tuttles hosted area writers who'd written poetry and prose about September 11th. A People's Tribune special looked at the effect the War on Terrorism has had on poor people, and the station broadcast an award-winning public affairs special from last October on those who'd disappeared at the World Trade Center.

"We wanted to do more than just commemorate September 11th," says program director Steve Baker. "We sought to celebrate peace and to honor all victims of violence."

Some of the record number of web listeners apparently searched to find a station broadcasting a Rolling Reqiuem performance, Button says. But listeners from as far away as Georgia and Massachusetts found the KVMR webcast because of still another factor -- a seven-minute nationally broadcast feature by KVMR volunteers, producer Carolyn Crane and editor/engineer Dawn Fischer and its prominent "America's Rhyme" web link on a major public radio website.

Called "Pledge," it is an audio montage of area children and teenagers reciting and commenting on the Pledge of Allegiance, dubbed by one child quoted as "America's rhyme." It was selected to be part of an unprecedented experiment in public radio, with stations choosing among 30 hours of September 11th-related programming as part of "The Collaboration: Understanding America After 9/11," a grassroots consortium of prominent radio stations and leading independent producers.

"At a network level you tend to get a group of editors who are thinking about the country as a whole and coming up with story ideas for the country as a whole," says Collaboration editorial director Michael Skoler. "There's some power in that, but there's also some extraordinary power in people who are rooted in their communities."

The first Collaboration feature cited for just that in the lead story recently in the public radio newspaper, Current, was the work of Crane and Fischer. "It's a delightfully innovative idea," says Baker, "and they pulled it off marvelously."

KVMR also broadcast other portions of the Collaboration --including an hour of personal essays by writers and artists, the "Sonic Memorial" of trade center-related audio, a KQED-FM special on citizenship in the wake of the War on Terrorism, and a Pennsylvania radio station's documentary on the burgeoning peace movement after September 11th.