Sad, but not unexpected news today from the BBC: The world's longest-running spoken radio program is ending, as 95-year-old cross-cultural icon Alistair Cooke is retiring after 58 years of weekly dispatches to the world from his adopted homeland. He's only giving up his marathon career on the advice of his doctors, and considering that he was propped up on pillows for his final dispatch, it appears the doctors have a valid point.
They say the U.S. and Britain have a special relationship;Alistair Cooke has been the embodiment of it for several years longer than I've been alive. Born in Britain, he became an American, and for 58 years, he sent weekly dispatches to his homeland and the world, dispatches that added up to 2,869 shows totaling to more than 717 hours of broadcasting. While we can't complain about his retirement, it is a pity indeed to lose his weekly outsider's view of the United States at a time when America and the rest of the world desperately need to understand each other better.
He didn't know his last 'Letter' would be his swansong; he just propped himself up to talk about what was going on that week, as he'd done so many times before. But it's as fitting an end to his long career as anything could be. Sit back, relax, and listen online to Alistair Cooke's final 'Letter from America'. You'll have to click on that link and then click on the words 'The Last Letter' to hear it in -- it wouldn't be fair to the BBC, or to Mr. Cooke, to link to it directly. (UPDATE: So many people from all over the world were trying to listen to Cooke's last letter yesterday that the BBC's audio server just couldn't accommodate them all. Fortunately, the Letter is also available in text form here.)
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"Second-day lede" is journalistic jargon for putting a new spin on a story for a second or subsequent news cycle. A 'lede" is the lead sentence of an article, deliberately misspelled to make it more easily recognizable as jargon. Once upon a time, news moved in daily cycles, but now it has become a constant flow of rewrites and "second-day ledes."
Second-Day Lede is also the name of this blog, where you'll find commentary on the news, and especially on the industry that cultivates, harvests, processes, packages, distributes and delivers it to us.
Who's writing this stuff?
A veteran of more news cycles than she'd care to admit, Janet Dagley Dagley entered the profession of journalism as a teenager, covering local government meetings at night for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio, becoming a full-time staff writer at 18 and later moving on to the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times (Orange County Edition). Over the years she has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and radio producer in the U.S. and Europe. Although she has won numerous awards, she lost both times major metropolitan dailies submitted her work for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, and also lost on Jeopardy! (though she did win a trip to Hawaii). Most recently, she was editor of AIRSPACE, the journal of the Association of Independents in Radio, a U.S.-based group of public-radio producers, and a member of the AIR Board of Directors. She has been blogging independently at The Dagley Dagley Daily since February, 2003.
