The challenge to doing local NPR talk radio

Story by Chris Graham

How do you gauge how well you’re doing if there’s nobody out there to compare yourself to?

That is the issue that the people who bring WMRA’s “Insight” to the airwaves have to face on a weekly basis.

“I think because there isn’t any other show like ours in that region trying to do anything similar that we never have a way to show that we’re doing good enough – there’s nobody to compare ourselves to in the market, so the only thing that we have to compare ourselves to is national NPR shows, and that sets the bar pretty high,” said Graham, the host of the local news-affairs program that debuted on the Harrisonburg-based NPR station in January.

“So we are constantly saying, We need to do even better. And maybe if there were other local shows that were doing OK for just a regional market, maybe the bar wouldn’t be set so high,” Graham told The Augusta Free Press.

And that is a key reason why the show airs three days a week instead of five, according to Bingay, the show’s executive producer.

“There’s more that we could do if we had more resources,” Bingay told the AFP.

“As it stands right now, we’re only three days a week. We could be five days a week – but that would, I’m convinced, require another full-time position. We’d really need two producers to do that. Tom right now acts as a producer for the show. So in essence, right now, we have two producers putting together three shows a week. To do more than that with what we have available in terms of resources right now would be to risk sacrificing quality,” Bingay said.

One view on this isssue is that if there were more locally produced programs of this nature competing with “Insight,” then it could be easier to find the resources – the money, and more importantly, the hired help – needed to get that job done.

“You could say that if there were more of this in the market, it would be supported well,” Bingay said. “The market would have more money for it. There would be more skilled labor. You would have people who if they weren’t working out in one place, they might work out in another. You wouldn’t have to look outside the market as much. So your hiring expenses go down, your searching expenses go down.

“Also, each local component would drive the quality of the next – so that you’d have the expectation that if you’re going to do this, it has to be at least this good,” Bingay said.

“That’s the subtle but strong deterrent to producing something locally – that if you don’t do it right, you damage your station. People will not only say, That’s no good, I don’t like it, but they will extend that to their opinion of the station. And anything local stands out – whether you do it well or not. So you’ve got to make sure that your quality level measures up to what you’re doing everywhere else – and yes, that means the national NPR programming that we air here every day,” Bingay said.

A day at the beach

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

“When can we go back in the river?” my niece Hannah asked me.

Or maybe it was her twin sister, Rachel.

It was one of them.

Anyway, we weren’t anywhere near a river at the time the question was posed.

Instead, we were at the beach – the wife and I had driven the twins and their older sister, Kayla, down to Virginia Beach for a day in the sand and saltwater.

It was quite the learning experience for all involved.

“Are we there yet?” was the other main query of the day – first appearing out of the thin air just east of Charlottesville, for those keeping score at home.

Then there was the incident involving the Thing That Kayla Was Convinced Was Trying To Bite Her Feet.

“It was probably just a seashell,” I tried to explain to her, going over how the undertow can create a bit of a sucking sensation that could certainly feel like something biting your feet.

“Oh, no. It was definitely a crab. Seashells don’t pinch,” she insisted, detailing her plans to stay out of the water for a while, probably around the year 2015 or so.

Speaking of things that pinch, we all turned into lobsters in short order – this despite the 60-SPF waterproof sunscreen that we picked up at the store the night before.

“Chris, your head is turning red,” Hannah said to me in a singsong.

Er, maybe it was Rachel.

I think it was Hannah, though.

Mainly because Rachel was more worried about the sand that got caught in her shorts to make fun of anybody else.

“Can I just put on my underwear and swim in the river?” she asked at one point before the missus got her to change in a nearby bathroom and went to work on the shorts with a pair of scissors.

I tried to emphasize how it wasn’t a river that we were swimming at, but an ocean – “You know what’s on the other side of that river? Africa. That would have to be one big river,” I said at one point.

I think that one finally got through. As did the point about the importance of applying and reapplying sunblock.

(My scalp got burned – through my hair. So yeah, you could say that the sun was mighty powerful that day.)

The other lesson learned …

“Everybody at the beach has tattoos,” one of the twins pointed out.

And no amount of time in the river, er, um, the ocean, could wash that fact away, either.

More on the betrayal of America: The book that wasn’t

Column by Max Friedman

On Feb. 20, The Augusta Free Press published my rant column, “The Betrayal of America,” in which I took off on the American Left, especially the Communist Party and its sympathizers, foolish liberals, the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and even the present Republican leadership of Congress and some in the White House. Read more

Are big names worth the money?

Story by Chris Graham

How does an indy promoter make his product stand out in what is becoming a hypercompetitive professional-wrestling marketplace?

Travis Bradshaw of the Smithfield-based Vanguard Championship Wrestling focues on getting his local talent over – even as he admits to being tempted to bring in former WWE and WCW stars to draw at the box office from time to time.

“We’ll occasionally bring in somebody like The Barbarian or Ricky Morton. We had Chris Candido in at one time. Tracey Smothers works for us occasionally. I have a simple philosophy – if a worker is charging for their appearance x number of dollars over what the average indy worker should make, I feel that they should draw in that dollar amount in ticket sales,” Bradshaw told Off the Top Rope.

That is a key consideration for an independent promotion like VCW, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Unlike the WWEs and ECWs and TNAs of the sports-entertainment world, Vanguard relies on the box office for the bulk of its revenues.

Paying a hero from the past top dollar to come in for one show can be cost-prohibitive in that context.

And that’s just one of the drawbacks to this kind of booking philosophy, to hear Bradshaw tell it.

“I think the big problem that you find with most of your name wrestlers is that they’re charging figures as if they were just on TV a few weeks ago,” Bradshaw said.

“You want to respect them and bring them in – and it looks good on the Internet, certainly. But it’s a bad business move, usually. You tend to just throw your money away. The majority of times we bring in what is considered a name, we don’t draw in any more people than we would have otherwise,” Bradshaw said.

And then you have to factor in the impact that it can have on your booking.

“We have a mix of some local talent and some guys that are more established. The challenge is trying to use those people properly and maintain their storylines and characters and yet still bring in new and fresh faces, which you have to do,” Bradshaw said.

“So when we bring in a big name, we do it sometimes just because we know the person or just to get a storyline over or to get one of our local guys over. It’s never in the name of ticket sales,” Bradshaw said.

“We don’t try to market it like you’ve got to come out and see this guy because if you miss him, you’re going to miss the greatest worker ever, because sadly, that isn’t the case. A lot of fans show up thinking that they’re going to see what they remember from television, and it’s nowhere near close, usually,” Bradshaw said.

The next step for women’s softball

Story by Chris Graham

Softball seemed poised to become the next big thing in women’s sports after the successful barnstorming tour of the United States Olympic team preceding the 2004 Athens Games that drew sellout crowds in 22 cities.

At least one more tour of the States could be in the offing – in 2008 preceding the Beijing Olympics – but it doesn’t appear that a similarly styled 2012 trip will be on the schedule.

The sport has been dropped from the Olympics lineup for the ‘12 Games in London – leading some in the softball know to question whether the game’s zooming popularity in the U.S. and worldwide will be able to continue into the future.

“I think it’s a big thing that softball is out of the Olympics now,” said Angela Tincher, a Virginia Tech sophomore who pitched against the U.S. national team in an exhibition game in Salem in 2004 and who compiled a 26-9 record with a glittering 1.01 earned-run average for the Hokies this spring.

“We have a pro league now, but it’s nothing anywhere close to Major League Baseball, for example – and it’s not a real great option for somebody who wants to continue in softball. So the fact that softball is out of the Olympics now is, I think, surprising. It’s something that you look to from the time you’re a kid, and now it’s not even there after the next Olympics,” Tincher said.

“I hope somehow maybe it would get appealed and that they would bring it back in because they realize how big the Olympics are to the sport,” Tincher told the “ACC Nation” radio show.

The Plant City, Fla.,-based International Softball Federation is leading the effort to get women’s softball back onto the Olympic schedule. ISF president Don Porter agrees with Tincher’s assessment that the International Olympic Committee’s decision to drop the sport from the London Games could have an impact on its long-term growth potential.

“This is disappointing to the athletes who aspire to want to be in the Olympics. That’s the sad part about it. We’ve received hundreds of e-mails from athletes about the decision taking the sport off the Olympic program. It’s very disappointing from that standpoint,” Porter told The Augusta Free Press.

Porter said the federation’s philosophy with regard to the growth of the sport at this stage is “we’re going to keep moving.”

“We’ve got more international events on the schedule. We just approved two new countries in Africa to become members of our federation. We’re up to 129 member countries now that have national federations. So it’s not as if our sport is going to go away. But this is going to make it more difficult for us to promote and develop the sport because of the impact on our funding,” Porter said.

“The Olympics are where you gain a lot of credibility and a lot of recognition for your sport,” Porter said.

Donna Lopiano, the CEO of the New York-based Women’s Sports Foundation, said Olympics visibility is one of the key factors that can contribute to the growth of an emerging sport like softball.

“There are many factors that cause the growth of a sport – one of which is having aspirational role models or an aspirational level of competition that you want to be in. And for sure, there is nothing more visible than the Olympic Games. Could that be a professional softball league? Sure – if it were as visible,” Lopiano told the AFP.

“The point is, you have to have role models at the top and media coverage at the top to drive the aspirations of children to play a sport,” Lopiano said.

“That being said, I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s a bad thing to happen for any sport to lose Olympic visibility – because less than 6.9 percent of all print and electronic media sports coverage is devoted toward women’s sports. So we have nothing comparable to the Olympic Games,” Lopiano said.

But that in itself is changing, notes JoAnne Graf, the coach of the women’s softball team at Florida State.

“The last few years, every game of the World Series has been on TV. The last two years, we’ve seen some super regionals on TV. This year, we saw regional games on TV, we saw a lot of conference games, conference-tournament games on TV,” Graf told “ACC Nation” last week.

“The game is being played all over – the youth leagues, the high-school level – and it’s just growing tremendously internationally. The disappointing thing is that the Olympics dropped it for 2012 – but hopefully they’ll add it back,” Graf said.

Softball advocates have a healthy arsenal of arguments to offer to the IOC to persuade the committee to return the sport to the Olympics lineup – the chief one among them being the IOC’s own claim that its aim is to promote gender equity, said Kevin Wamsley, a University of West Ontario professor who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Olympic Games.

“Eliminating a women’s team sport has hurt IOC credibility,” Wamsley told the AFP.

“Advocates must attack the decision on these grounds if they are to be successful. The IOC does not care if a sport suffers,” Wamsley said.

“Women’s softball must address the communities which support it and not fix itself to the tail of the Olympics. Olympic fans are far more fickle, as are the ebb and flow of Olympic politics,” Wamsley said.

That’s what Porter sees being at play here.

“It’s a political issue. It’s not so much our sport as it is politics – and the decision that was made in Torino and last year in Singapore was a political decision. It was not a sport decision,” Porter said.

“We have to live with it – and try to do what we can to regroup. And that’s what we’re doing,” Porter said.

Take off your hat

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

I wisecracked recently to a friend about how I was watching the start of a NASCAR race on TV recently when I was struck by something that I heard the public-address announcer at the race track du jour say about how the fans in attendance needed to take off their hats for the playing of the national anthem.

His response struck me even more.

“I wouldn’t think the NASCAR crowd would need to be reminded of something like that. I thought they were supposed to be so patriotic,” his response went.

“That’s what the political pundits say, anyway,” he continued.

And then it hit me, aspiring pundit that I am – he was right. The pundits do go on and on and on about Soccer Moms and NASCAR Dads, and how they influence elections in their disparate ways.

The NASCAR Dads part of the political calculus assumes that fans of traditionally Southern auto racing vote for two things – security and patriotism.

I’m still trying to figue out the Soccer Moms.

Are they internationalists because soccer is the world’s most popular sport?

(And then you have to consider that France is good at it. That has to factor in somehow.)

Or are they for education – because to figure out why slowest game that God cursed man with the ability to devise is as appealing as it seems to be to the current generation of youth, you have to be smart as a tack?

(Zzzzz …)

I’m digressing here. My focus was on the NASCAR Dads who would I have to assume would know to take their hats off when the “American Idol” flavor of the month belts out the first notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

So why the reminder from the PA announcer?

My guess is that he’s not doing it because he likes the sound of his voice – that it has to have something to do with the supposition that folks in attendance for the big race might forget if something wasn’t said.

And just to make sure that it wasn’t a peculiar habit of one track announcer, I’ve paid attention the past few weeks – and, yep, it’s part and parcel to the prerace preamble across the board.

What I’m getting at here is that this is making me rethink the conventional wisdom of the NASCAR Dad influence on American elections.

Because if you need to be reminded to take the $5 chapeau that you picked up at Wal-Mart off your noggin before the first strains of “O say, can you see,” then you’re probably not that much of a political force to be reckoned with.

And the winner is … Charlottesville-based VQR steals the show at National Magazine Awards

Story by Chris Graham

Odds are that you haven’t heard of it, so don’t feel bad.

OK, so maybe the fact that you didn’t know that one of the top magazines in the country is published in your backyard is worth at least a playful smack on the forehead.

“The attention has helped bring in actually hundreds of new subscriptions over the phone and over the Web site – people who have read about VQR in one place or another and decided to subscribe. For us, that’s exciting – because it means more readership, and that means greater impact for the writers, that there’s greater influence,” said Ted Genoways, the editor of the Charlottesville-based Virginia Quarterly Review, which took home two Ellies at the 2006 National Magazine Awards earlier this month.

The showing tied the periodical for top honors with the likes of Time, Esquire, Harper’s, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker - all of which have some multiple of VQR’s 7,000-copy quarterly circulation.

Quality writing has little to do with numbers, of course.

“What I would hope the attention that we’ve received for this means is that even if our circulation is comparatively small, that there will be greater attention paid to the pieces that we’re publishing – and that people will be aware that there’s something worth paying attention to,” Genoways told The Augusta Free Press.

Genoways, 34, took over as editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review in 2003. He arrived armed with some ideas for tweaking the approach and appearance of the magazine – but he was also careful not to want to risk messing up a good thing at the same time.

“The main thing is that I loved the mission that the journal had had since its beginning – which was not to be simply a literary magazine, but as the motto of the journal implies, to be a national journal of literature and discussion,” said Genoways of VQR, which was founded in 1925 and has featured the works of literary giants including H. L. Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Katherine Anne Porter, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren and Marianne Moore.

The discussion part was “something that I wanted to expand, and try to make that discussion as current as possible,” Genoways said. As the editor concedes, though, it can be a battle sometimes trying to cover current-events-type topics in a quarterly format in a way that is timely and relevant.

“Our idea of covering the news is, here’s something that’s just happened, we need to find a writer who can take a month to work on this, and if the timing is right, we put it through production and printing, and four months from an event to the time that it hits somebody’s mailbox is as short as we can pull off – and it’s usually more like six to nine months. So if that’s the case, we have to be careful in that way, too, that we’re not choosing subjects that by the time that four months have elapsed that no one is concerned with that topic anymore,” Genoways said.

“It’s funny – because we often have a certain amount of envy for daily reporting in that respect,” Genoways said. “Though the constant grind of it would likely be difficult, we often feel frustrated that there are issues that we would like to take on, but we think, is this still something that people will be talking about in six months? And if the answer is no, we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that there’s probably not much that we can contribute to that discussion.

“I see our role as being the occasional appearance of some more in-depth analysis to help make sense of the news that has gone on in the recent months in between issues,” Genoways said.

The finding-writers part of the job for Genoways and his staff – he has a staff of four, “and that includes me,” he notes – should be easier with the attention from the National Magazine Awards.

“For a lot of the writers that we’re working with, especially on nonfiction pieces, these are people who have a great deal of skill as writers and a great deal of enthusiasm for their subjects. And oftentimes they’re as excited to have a venue, any venue, as they are for being selected for these things – especially if we’re approaching them and say, We want to provide you space,” Genoways said.

“One of the things that we can offer that a lot of the larger magazines don’t is plenty of room for people to explore subjects. It’s unusual for some place like Time or even Newsweek to give more than maybe 2,000 words to a subject. It’s unusual for us when we commission an essay to have it be less than 5,000 words,” Genoways said.

“As a result, I think that the nonfiction pieces tend to be much more nuanced, have greater depth to them – but because they’re longer, there’s a higher standard for the quality of the prose, that if you’re going to hold a reader’s attention for that length, there’s a greater burden in terms of having to be sure that the writing is lively and engaging, and that the pieces are well paced to keep the reader from straying elsewhere,” Genoways said.

With two Ellies to point to as an indication of the quality of writing being presented, you wouldn’t think too many readers would be straying – though Genoways, significantly, is of a mindset that The Virginia Quarterly Review has to go out and prove itself all over again each and every issue.

“Ultimately, what a journal like ours hopes for is not to win awards or make money or to sell a lot of advertising – our goal is to stimulate cultural discussion, to direct discussion toward topics that we think are not being covered in the mainstream media, and really to do what we can to contribute to the larger debates that we think are important to the country and to the world,” Genoways said.

“That’s a pretty difficult goal to achieve for a magazine with such a small circulation – but hopefully these awards will make that possible, by getting attention through some of the media outlets that have readerships much larger than ours,” Genoways said.

Wall-to-wall football: Hammond reflects on storied AFL career

Story by Chris Graham

Darryl Hammond had watched a couple of Arena Football League games, but his mind was set on bigger and better things as far as his football career was concerned.

“I would check it out on ESPN every now and then. I didn’t think much of it. I never saw myself playing it,” said Hammond, an honorable mention all-Atlantic Coast Conference defensive back at the University of Virginia in 1987 – which was the year that indoor football made its debut on the professional-sports scene.

Hammond signed that spring with the NFL’s New Orleans Saints and dreamed of a career plying his trade on the sport’s ultimate stage – before reality set in.

“I got cut by (the Saints), and I went back to Virginia and got my degree. After about a year or so of sitting around and working, I kind of wanted to play football again,” Hammond told the “ACC Nation” radio show last week.

“I didn’t really have any NFL connections anymore, and I just wanted to play – so I started playing Arena football. And lo and behold, 16 years later, I’m still playing,” Hammond said.

Hammond, 39, has actually likely played his last AFL game – he is retiring at the end of the 2006 season, and he has been on injured reserve since April.

Before going on the shelf, Hammond – a wide receiver and linebacker – became the fourth player in Arena League history to catch at least 800 passes in his career with a catch earlier in the season. In 2005, Hammond became the second player in AFL history to compile 8,000 career receiving yards and 30 career interceptions and the third player to amass 600 career tackles.

Being able to play on both sides of the ball is part and parcel to the indoor game. Looking back on it, Hammond’s time at Essex High School – where he was an all-state football and basketball player – and at UVa. prepared him well in that respect.

“When I was at Virginia, my first year I did play receiver, and then my last year I played strong safety. And in high school I was a wide receiver and defensive back also. I actually saw it as my style of play being more suited to playing both ways – because you stay in the game. You never lose the flow of the game. It’s sort of like basketball – when you play basketball, you play offense, you play defense, and you get more into the flow of the game,” Hammond said.

You would think that football is football whether it is played indoors or outdoors, but Hammond said that there are subtle but important differences between the two brands of gridiron action.

“In indoor, the field is smaller, and you have different angles – the angles are a lot shorter. You have the walls – the dreaded walls. You don’t want to get run into those. Also, the kicking game is a little different – because you have the nets that catch everything,” Hammond said.

“It’s a little more physical. I never got hurt playing the regular 11-man game. I’ve broken a couple of bones playing Arena football – and over the years, it’s taken a toll on my body. Nothing major – I’ve been really, really fortunate. I haven’t had any major surgeries or anything. But it’s a tough sport,” Hammond said.

A quest called Tribe: W&M fighting NCAA over use of Native imagery

Story by Chris Graham

If Florida State can use an almost cartoonish Native American as its mascot, reasons the administration at the College of William and Mary, then what’s so bad about a logo with a couple of feathers?

“What bothers us is that the NCAA has a problem with the use of two simple feathers – while they seem to condone the use by Florida State University of not only an Indian, but an Indian with war paint on a pony and with a flaming spear. Somehow that seems to us to be disjointed,” said Bill Walker, the associate vice president for public affairs at William and Mary, which said last week it plans to appeal a ruling from the NCAA that would prohibit the school’s athletic teams from wearing the feathered logo on apparel in postseason tournaments and could bar the school from being able to host postseason athletics events. Read more

Commencement redress

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

Another year, another graduation season without me being asked to deliver a commencement address.

Alas.

And I would be so good at it, too – you know, regarding delivering advice to high-school seniors about to venture out into the world.

Which is why I’m offering this column – in the event that the reality-show star or used-car salesman or reformed glitter addict that you have speaking at your graduation this year has to bail out on you at the last minute.

Ahem … here goes.

Tap-tap-tap … is this thing on? Is this thing on?

Oh … hi. My name is Chris Graham. Wow, this has to be the shortest graduating class I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m guessing the basketball team here can’t wait for baseball season.

Bada bing.

Anyway, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. Or the last day of the first part of your life.

Either way, it’s a big day – mainly for mom and dad. Who are counting down the days until you get on with your life and get out of their hair.

For the record, we’re at 2,440 days and counting on that one – so don’t breathe too easy over there.

That’s right, kids – you can expect to be living with the folks until you hit the big two-five. And that’s if you’re lucky. It’s called underemployment - get used to it.

My first bit of advice to you – get familiar with how to cook macaroni and cheese. Because when mom gets tired of feeding your lazy arse, that kind of thing could come in handy.

That and get accustomed to eating a lot of cold cereal.

It’s not as bleak as I’m making it out to be, of course. It’s bleaker, much bleaker.

Yours is the first generation that won’t do as well as the generation preceding it. And since I’m 15 years older than you guys, I guess it’s up to me to apologize for that.

Sorry. We took all the good jobs for ourselves, and left you the ones where cleaning toilets and pushing shopping carts are key parts of the job descriptions.

This leads to my second bit of advice – do something different. You’re going to be living at home until you’re 25 anyway, right? So do something in the next seven years to get yourself ready for that big day when you finally head out into the real world and have to pay rent.

And no, chatting with friends on myspace doesn’t count there.

Be original – start your own porn page. You know, something that will make money.

I’m kidding there, of course. Don’t start a porn page. There’s no way to make money at that anymore. The market is terribly oversaturated.

But you need to figure something out – otherwise, you’re going to end up schlepping cheap foreign-made goods at Wally World or selling insurance packages that don’t pay off when you actually get in an accident the rest of your life.

And seriously, is that what you slaved away the past 13 years in this school system for?

It stinks to realize that the answer to that question is yes, doesn’t it?

I just realized that your school hired me ostensibly to feed you some line of crap about how you’re going to go out there and change the world and blah blah blah blah blah.

You know what, though? You probably will – in spite of everything that you learned in school.

I hate to sound negative about that, but really, what do you learn nowadays in school except how to take a test?

Life is about more than guessing a, b, c or d and then writing an essay – but you’ll soon figure that out.

The sad thing is that some whiz kid in India figured it out a while ago and is already petitioning the guy who was going to give you a good-paying job to get him to consider the many benefits of outsourcing.

Which leads to my third bit of advice – and it’s spelled l-o-t-t-e-r-y.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

Happy Graduation, boys and girls.

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