Time Out Chicago looks at Vocalo

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: Time Out Chicago / Issue 196 : Nov 27–Dec 3, 2008 : Transition radio : Chicago Public Radio president Torey Malatia is pushing ahead with his most ambitious project yet - whether you like it or not. : By David Tamarkin : Torey Malatia bounds into the room so quickly it takes me a few minutes to realize he has a cast on his leg. : "Fell off my mom's roof," he says dismissively. But before I can ask anything else about the accident, he changes the subject to public radio. : "We're required to have an impact by law," he says. "And that means we have to connect to people's lives. And so as the population changes, we need to be right there with that population so we're relevant and meaningful, and people find that it's something that's offering them a service that's important to their daily lives. It just doesn't happen if you don't change and you let the community change." : He continues talking nonstop for several minutes, and I get the feeling he's made this exact speech about public radio's lack of creativity and diversity (both of listeners and on-air talent) before. As the president and CEO of Chicago Public Radio, he can, not surprisingly, talk at length about what he does for a living. But on the subject of how and why public radio needs to change, Malatia is uniquely vocal. In 2007, he wrote what is now referred to as "Torey's Manifesto," a 23-page pamphlet, complete with bibliography, that was published (in abridged form) in the public-media paper Current. The manifesto outlined Malatia's vision for a new brand of public radio - a young, diverse, Internet-based radio where listeners created most of the content. It would be the YouTube of public radio, in a way. Only it would never call itself public radio; in fact, it would avoid that label at all costs. Instead, it would be called Vocalo. : Malatia had been developing the idea since 2000, and shortly after he published his manifesto, Vocalo started broadcasting online and in a small corner of Northwest Indiana. (The full name of the project, ":Vocalo.org," starts with an emoticon and reads like an Internet domain, a reflection of its Web-focused intentions.) A few days before I met with Malatia in a small conference room at WBEZ, Vocalo reached another milestone: The station began broadcasting over most of Chicago's airwaves, meaning that Vocalo had, in theory at least, finally fully extended its reach. : Most of Chicago can now hear Malatia's new project on 89.5FM. And yet many listeners don't categorize what they hear as revolutionary. Of the 15 or so host-producers on the air, most are in their twenties, and almost none of them had professional radio experience before they were hired. At Vocalo, where there is a purposeful lack of structure, they are given free rein to talk about whatever they want, however they want. So to many people who hear Malatia's new radio project, it doesn't sound like groundbreaking radio. Often, it just sounds like college radio. : The day Vocalo began its Chicago-wide broadcast, I spent a couple of hours in the studio with two host-producers. Luis Antonio Perez, a 26-year-old filmmaker, sat at the audio boards; Robin Amer, a 26-year-old artist, sat to his right, her face buried in a laptop. It was eight days before the election, and a caller had just connected Barack Obama to socialism. This set the pair off - they seemed eager to keep the conversation going - but with no more calls coming in, they were running out of steam. An instrumental beat thumped behind their voices, and Perez turned off their mikes and brought the music up. : "I don't know where to go from here," he said to her. : They sat and thought for a minute, letting the music fill the space, until Amer came up with something else to say. : "Let's come back up," she told him. : There are no scripts at Vocalo. There are no shows, no newscasts and only minimal preshow planning. The style the broadcast is going for is plucked from commercial news radio, which flows from story to story and host to host with such ease the transitions are imperceptible. Unlike news radio, though, Vocalo has no set agenda for its content - topics roll in and out of the broadcast at the whim (and, sometimes, panic) of the hosts. : Seemingly in a scramble to find something to put on the air, Perez searched Vocalo's database of user-generated content, or UGC, for anything related to socialism. What he found was a piece about capitalism, which was apparently close enough, because seconds later it was on the air. UGC - stories, music and audio art listeners submit to the station, usually by phone - is what Malatia and the Vocalo team hope will become the backbone of the broadcasts. Some of it has a raw, unfiltered sound, and it can be extraordinarily engaging. But like the host-producers, many of the people producing UGC are young, and few of them - if any - are professionals. (When UGC sounds produced, with music beds and dramatic pauses, that's because somebody at Vocalo has edited it that way.) : When Vocalo was just an idea, it was impossible to guess what it would sound like; the promise, after all, was that it would sound like nothing else. But it's fair to say those in the industry didn't think it would sound like this. That's in no small part because Malatia is legendary - and that epithet isn't just hyperbole. There's the legend of him getting fired from WFMT in 1990, a harrowing incident sources tell me has made him reluctant to terminate both people and programs. There's the legend of his early years at WBEZ, when he worked hard to create a uniform sound for the station, only to wake up one morning and realize he had produced 24 hours of boredom. And there's his legendary solution to that problem, what he ultimately became most famous for - the creation of shows that push the boundaries of public radio, like This American Life, Sound Opinions and the now-defunct Schadenfreude. : Taken together, the stories about Malatia create a profile of a guy who is sensitive but tenacious. "He's very aggressive. Surprisingly aggressive," says Ira Glass, cocreator of This American Life. "In person, what he's like is he's a people pleaser, and he wants everyone to like him all the time... but in negotiations he's extremely hard-line." : Until recently, Malatia seemed to have succeeded in pushing forward while being well liked. People close to him are eager to talk about how great he is, how onboard they are with his mission. But these days, they won't go on the record, because what inevitably follows their praise is a sense of doubt about Vocalo, frustration over how much energy Malatia has expended over it and anger that he's poured so many resources into it. While Vocalo's $2 million budget is funded in part by grants (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting provided $750k in 2007, and the station recently was awarded a MacArthur grant for $1 million), the difference comes out of Chicago Public Radio's pocket. Critics point to the fact that while CPR seems to have the money to support Vocalo, it can't find the cash to replace several reporters who have recently left WBEZ. They also point to the resources WBEZ is asked to share with Vocalo - IT and technical support, as well as marketing resources. : Malatia is aware of what is being said around and about him. In fact, he says he expected the criticism. He contends the college-radio claim is a compliment. "People don't like that college radio is unfocused and done by people who are not polished," he says. "[But] polish is not a good thing, necessarily. In fact, polish is a great way to distance oneself from a listener." He's also quick to point to the early days of This American Life, when WBEZ staff had the same concerns about resources (if not the value of the product). "If we do these things right, we probably will be in territory where not everybody's going to see the light at the end of the tunnel," he says. Whether that's the talk of a misunderstood visionary or a misguided one remains to be seen - Malatia says he'll give the project until at least 2010. But Vocalo is likely to become the biggest Malatia legend either way.

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