Dead Air

IN OUR CONVERSATION, Marrazzo outlines an ambitious plot to go “north of 75 percent local” on arts coverage and more than 50 percent local on news and public affairs. That sounds like a great way to assuage his critics. But the spirit of Marrazzo’s plan could be most evident in the cannibalistic efforts to repackage Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which is available in a video version On Demand from Comcast, and the TV version of Radio Times.

The production values of that show, or On Stage at Curtis, which both employ robotic cameras, recall convenience-store surveillance videos. And while their low overhead might spell success as a business, it doesn’t seem like a recipe for excellence in broadcasting. Still, Marrazzo practically urges me to follow him: In order to survive, he says, WHYY must consider itself not a broadcasting company operating a television and radio station, but “a content provider, delivering across multiple platforms.”

It’s a radical reshaping — not of the company’s mission, but of its means of delivery. And what I come away struck by isn’t only the zeal with which Marrazzo believes in his plan, but how long it will take him to execute it. Once WHYY finishes paying for all its new equipment, he says, it will have more funds to feed into programming. “I think you’ll see more local programming starting in February 2009, and within five years” — by 2012 — “you’ll see a significant increase in the amount of local programming we do.”

The plan, right now, seems to exist mostly within Marrazzo’s head. Producer Ed Cunningham, the 60-year-old Voice of ’HYY, told me in a phone interview that he hadn’t heard of it. When I asked to speak with whoever is in charge of planning for this more ambitious future, I was told by a PR staffer that ’HYY was still in the process of hiring a replacement for station manager Paul Gluck, who left in April. (Gluck declined to be interviewed for this article.) The staffer offered to connect me with chief operating officer Bruce Flamm, whom I had interviewed previously. When I pressed Flamm on the lack of local programming, he responded in three ways — by defending what the station does air, by pointing out that “television is very expensive” to produce, and by suggesting that I look at all the things WHYY does other than broadcasting.

In other words, try the fish.


KAREN HELLER says she may have  received more response to her call for an ’HYY boycott — about 250 e-mails, nearly all positive — than to anything else she ever wrote. About a week after her boycott column ran, one WHYY staffer told me, at least 32 members cancelled as a direct result.   

Some of Marrazzo’s internal critics saw Heller’s column as righteous: “There was just this brief conversation you’d have the day it came out — ‘Hey, did you see the Inquirer?’” says one staffer. “Then we’d snicker.” Others feared for their survival. “When she writes something like that,” says ’HYY acting station manager Christine Dempsey, “it doesn’t just affect Bill Marrazzo. It affects us all.”