This American Franchise: This American Life,public radio franchising and the cultural work of legitimating economic hybridity

This American Life as an economically hybrid media franchise

Derek Johnson (2013) defines media franchises as the production of media defined by an exchange of content ‘across multiple industrial sites and contexts of production operating in collaborative but contested ways through networked relation to one another’ (p. 7). As Johnson (2013) notes, franchised media productions often cross the boundaries between media formats, platforms, production communities, and geography. Most academic studies of media franchising have considered how different production communities tied together via licensing agreements or media conglomeration attempt to balance synergy between story worlds, creative goals, and producer agency. However, most work on media franchising focuses almost exclusively on commercial media properties. Yet, franchising is a helpful lens to make sense of the ways in which public radio enterprises in the United States, such as TAL, cross boundaries between public and commercial production cultures as it extends the content, style, and labor of its radio producers across multiple production sites to make television, films, and other products. Indeed, this history of collaboration across multiple production communities and mediums emphasizes how TAL’s textuality must be understood as the product of what Johnson (2013) terms as ‘a multiplicity of production communities dispersed in time and across space, but working in social relations to one another’ (p. 17). This multiplicity is further characterized by what Bennett and Medrado (2013) term economic hybridity, the collision of for-profit and public service production cultures. In this case, TAL’s franchising is an example of economic hybridity via its collaborations with commercial companies like Warner Brothers, DreamWorks, and IFC Films. As Johnson (2013) notes, media franchises do not just occur, but rather, they are ongoing processes that are the result of specific industrial imperatives and creative agency.

In the case of TAL, its development as a hybrid public/commercial radio franchise has been shaped by the decentralized structure and funding policies of US public media. Public radio in the United States operates in a decentralized model wherein programming decisions happen at the station level (Stavitsky, 1994). The decentralized structure of public radio encourages public radio programs such as TAL to position themselves as independent, branded entities distributed a la carte to local public radio stations, and many of TAL’s franchising extensions, such as live performances, function as branded promotional texts that attempt to bring audiences back to the central TAL radio text. Franchising is also encouraged by US public radio funding structures, whose policies are distinct from those in other countries. Unlike other countries such as the United Kingdom, where radio was not privatized until the 1960s (Nissen, 2006), US commercial radio networks predate public service broadcasting by approximately 40 years. Because of this, US’ public radio policies have always privileged the dominant commercial broadcasting system (Avery, 2007: 358). Unlike public radio programming in Europe and elsewhere, US public radio has never been granted insulated funding and is thus always at risk from government budget cuts and partisan political battles. Furthermore, public radio stations only receive a small percentage of their budgets through federal funding, approximately 15%, and must generate the majority of their budgets from corporate underwriting, grants, and listener support (Avery, 2007). This funding structure has created production conditions from the outset wherein ‘public broadcasters must chase after private support’ to meet budgetary needs (Avery, 2007: 461). TAL’s media franchising is thus the result of public radio’s economic imperatives.

TAL’s tradition of economic hybridity via extensions beyond radio into television and film dates back to 1999, when TAL’s producers first met with television executives in Los Angeles to discuss the possibilities of making a TAL TV show (Glass, 1999). A TAL TV show did not materialize until 2006; however, following these efforts, TAL brokered ‘first-look’ deals with Warner Brothers (Harris, 2002) and DreamWorks (McClintock, 2007) that would allow these studios access to develop films based on stories initially produced on the radio program. TAL later produced two seasons of a TAL television show for Showtime (Adalian, 2007), and currently has several other deals in development, including Errol Morris’ film Freezing People Is Easy, is based on the 2008 TAL episode ‘You’re as Cold as Ice’ (Internet Movie Database, 2013; Siegel, 2009). The 2012 film Sleepwalk with Me is notable as the first feature film that Chicago Public Radio has funded directly by investing US$225,000 into the film’s US$1 million production budget (Metz, 2012). And indeed, the history of Sleepwalk with Me’s production and distribution is intricately intertwined with TAL’s public radio program. It was adapted from a monologue that comedian Mike Birbiglia originally performed on TAL in 2008, and the film is also co-written and executive produced by Ira Glass. ¹ Furthermore, Sleepwalk with Me owes some of its success to the cross-promotion it received on TAL. Brian Bedol, one of Sleepwalk with Me’s producers, noted in an interview that using TAL’s built-in radio audience was a central strategy in the promotion of Sleepwalk with Me (Lang, 2012: E11). And this materialized in both the 22 and 27 July 2012 episodes of TAL’s radio show and podcast: Ira Glass began the show by appealing to listeners to call, tweet, or email cinemas to get Sleepwalk with Me exhibited in their towns. Fans contacted local movie theaters, increasing the number of theaters where IFC had initially booked the film from 35 to 125. ²

TAL also used public radio listener-appeal strategies to promote TAL’s live simulcast cinema events in 2008, 2009, and 2012. These productions beamed a live version of the radio show, adapted to a visual stage performance, to movie theaters across the country (Deggans, 2008; Lederman, 2012; The Montréal Gazette, 2009). This demonstrates TAL’s strategic use of its radio show as a textual center for a larger multiplatform TAL brand that extends across film, live simulcasts, television, merchandise, and now, with the introduction of Serial, spinoff podcasts. Pledge-drive-like appeals to TAL’s loyal public radio audience work to discursively blend the convergence of public and commercial media cultures while taking advantage of the radio program’s large fan base to advertise TAL’s non-radio products. For example, the production, promotion, and exhibition of the film Sleepwalk with Me emphasize how TAL is much more than a public radio program; rather, it is a public radio franchise. And this strategy was later replicated to promote Serial, as Ira Glass regularly encouraged his TAL listeners to subscribe to TAL’s spinoff podcast and used his radio platform to promote Serial by playing its pilot, ‘The Alibi’, on TAL’s radio show’s 537th episode on 3 October 2014, the week Serial debuted in digital podcast markets.

TAL’s collaboration with commercial media has shaped the production of its radio program in concrete ways. For instance, TAL’s current studio location in New York is the product of its franchising relationships. TAL began in 1995 as a public radio show produced at WBEZ studios in Chicago but moved its studios to New York in 2006 when it began to produce a television program for Showtime concurrently with the production of its radio program (Ladd, 2006). Critic Chris Ladd notes that, while TAL is as closely identified with Chicago as The Oprah Winfrey Show was, producer Ira Glass legitimates the studio’s move to New York by pointing to radio’s current digital production software. Glass stated,

I’ve always said that because I end up working, like, 70 or 80 hours over the course of a week, I could be on the space shuttle and it wouldn’t make a difference. Like, I happen to be in New York City, but I could be in Chicago or anywhere. (Ladd, 2006)

As Glass states, the contemporary affordances of digital radio production allows him and his staff to be anywhere. However, the position of their headquarters in New York is not just ‘anywhere’, it is a strategic location which enables them to easily collaborate with partners like Showtime, IFC Films (which distributed Sleepwalk with Me), and other commercial media companies with offices in New York.

TAL engages with commercial media to varying degrees in its collaborations with film and television producers; however, while the strategies it employs to extend its content into other mediums may be similar to those of larger companies like Marvel or Disney, it is unique from these and other commercial media because the expansion of TAL is both managed and negotiated within a public radio context. This is because, while American public radio has a history of economic hybridity and convergence with commercial media, public radio is understood as significantly different from commercial media in the national imagination.

Public broadcasting is socially constructed in the United States an alternative to commercial media (Hoynes, 1994), defined by its potential for cultural uplift and democratic citizenship (Butsch, 2010). And, in part, because of its association with public service and imagined difference from commercial media (Sherman, 2005; Stavitsky and Gleason, 1994), public radio in the United States possesses a highbrow cultural cache and is often discursively constructed as a site of intellectualism (Magee, 2011). These connotations of intellectualism, objectivity, or even authenticity as a space supposedly free from commercial influence or bias shape public radio’s cultural meanings. The high cultural habitus of public radio is valuable to radio stations appealing to individual listeners during fundraising initiatives (i.e. pledge drives) as well as when soliciting corporate sponsors for underwriting contracts. Thus, the highbrow intellectualism often articulated with public radio and its supposed separation from commercial media implicitly create an environment that encourages TAL’s producers to legitimate the economic hybridity of its media franchising. Next, I will outline how TAL’s producers, most notable Ira Glass, distinguish TAL as different from commercial media through discourses of cinematic allusion, fundraising, and outsiderism.

Legitimizing This American Life’s economic hybridity

The perception that collaborations with commercial media need to be legitimated by public radio producers is perhaps most glaring when Ira Glass makes sense of TAL’s extensions into commercial media through a narrative of fundraising. This discursive maneuver attempts to reposition TAL’s collaborations with commercial media within the logic of nonprofit media. When discussing the initial decision to license TAL material to film companies in 2002, Glass suggests that this was done to raise money for his program, saying, ‘Really, we thought it would be a way to do fundraising initially – that there would be a way that we could come to listeners less, begging for money, if we could get Hollywood to replace listener donations’ (Metz, 2012). Here, then, media licensing becomes reframed as a fundraising project done for the benefit of public radio listeners, to bother them less, and attempts to re-designate commercial media companies as entities that serve public radio. Licensing material from TAL is indeed a lucrative way to raise money, as, for instance, the six-figure first-look deal that TAL negotiated with Warner Brothers brought in funds to TAL’s production company, Chicago Public Media (Janssen, 2003). TAL received additional revenue for any projects that actually went through development into features and were released, as, for instance, the 2006 film Unaccompanied Minors, based on a 9-minute segment on the 6 January 2001 episode of TAL (Harris and Dunkley, 2003). Licensing agreements between TAL and Warner Brothers do not just cross production cultures but also mediums and redefine public radio’s relationship with commercial film producers within an economically hybrid production culture in which public and commercial media creators and content are not distinct and separate from one another.

To frame licensing as fundraising elides how this relationship replaces financial support from government and public listeners with commercial media profit. Glass has denied that there is any conflict in profiting from licensing rights to TAL’s content library, which annually produces 30 radio episodes consisting of 100–150 stories (Janssen, 2003). This is evident when Glass stated, ‘We’re a nonprofit corporation, but even a nonprofit can have a money-making business’ (Harris, 2002). While public media is often defined in terms of its difference and separation from commercial media, TAL’s discursive recuperation of collaboration with commercial media as fundraising reclaims franchising as a strategy to fund noncommercial media. But beyond reframing the funding of public radio, these statements also work to legitimate TAL’s cultural capital by defining TAL in opposition to profit-driven media. To frame these licensing deals as fundraisers, or to reiterate that TAL is a ‘nonprofit’ production, realigns TAL’s franchising agreements within the symbolic publicness of public radio, discursively attempting to reassert this is a media product uncompromised by the constraints of commercial sponsors or advertisers. Public radio’s reputation for fundraising is one element that perpetuates the imagined separation of public radio as a noncommercial space, and Ira Glass’ comparison of TAL’s licensing deals to fundraising works to re-articulate TAL’s franchising deals within cultural meanings of public service broadcasting.

Still, TAL’s relationships with companies like Showtime, Warner Brothers, and DreamWorks might seem contradictory given the discursive work Ira Glass has done to identify himself and his program with public radio. In interviews and public performances, Glass (1998) repeatedly references that he has worked in public radio since he was 19 years old, which promotes his legitimacy as a public radio broadcaster. Ira Glass again distinguishes himself as public radio producer in his 2012 worldwide tour, titled ‘Reinventing Radio: An Evening with Ira Glass’, which he performed live in theaters across the United States, Canada, and Australia. Glass described the performance in an interview by saying, ‘I stand on the stage with an iPad and recreate the show … I talk about how the show is made and why we’ve chosen to make it differently from all other programs on the airwaves’ (Ouzounian, 2012). Here, then, Glass not only references his work on public radio to separate himself from commercial radio but takes this differentiation further to say that TAL is exceptional from all other programs. And Ira Glass’ work to manage his identity as a public radio host is reinforced by his discursive construction as a public radio pioneer.

Ira Glass’ public persona is consistently framed as an innovative, revolutionary pioneer in public radio. Time Magazine named Ira Glass best radio host in the country in 2001 and credited him with ‘reinventing radio’ (Mamet, 2001). Glass has been called ‘arguably the most visionary aural documentarian in the country’ (Zuckerman, 2005: 26), ‘a cult hero in public radio … a rock star’ by NPR’s All Things Considered host Robert Siegel (Frey, 2005: D01), and ‘the king of American public radio’ for his work on TAL (Fulford, 2009: AL1). Glass and TAL are usually articulated together and distinguished from mainstream commercial radio through assertions that ‘Mr. Glass, 46, has broken a lot of the rules of radio with TAL’ (Zuckerman, 2005: 26). This innovative status is also usually associated with the show’s unique representation of ‘ordinary’ American life, and critical reviews connect the program’s distinct aesthetics to Glass’ pioneerism. This is evident in the 2004 review that reads, ‘The weekly radio program on NPR ³ is a peripatetic romp through the American psyche. [It is] conceived and hosted by the innovative radio pioneer Ira Glass’ (Blumner, 2004: 7P). Renowned radio producer Jay Allison reiterates this, calling Ira Glass ‘[the] Pied Piper of public radio … a radio hero’ because of the way that TAL champions ‘the Many Voices that public radio’s mission says it values’ (Allison, 2004). To label Ira Glass as a public radio pioneer or hero bestows on him and TAL a creative authenticity, which promotes an understanding of TAL as a brand distinct from commercial media, and its reliance on sameness via spinoffs, copies, or franchising to make profits.

Ira Glass also regularly emphasizes cinematic nature of the TAL radio show in interviews, which discursively legitimates TAL’s franchising into film and television. In an interview with Daily Variety about the deal TAL made with Warner Brothers, Glass defined his radio program in filmic terms to defend TAL’s collaboration with movie studios, saying, ‘It’s like we do little movies for radio … We’re people with a lot of stories and not much money, and they have a lot of money and need stories’ (Harris, 2002: 1). Glass reiterates almost the exact same verbiage when Showtime collaborated with TAL to produce a television show, stating in an interview, ‘We’ve always thought of our job as making little movies for radio … And as the radio show sounds like nothing else on radio, we believe the television version will be like nothing else on TV’ (Martin, 2005: 3). Within these interviews, Glass also often supports his assertion that radio episodes are like ‘little movies’ because his show uses sound and language to create characters, narratives, and scenes that tell a story in a cinematic way (Cummings, 2011: 4). This discourse of cinematic allusion attempts to reconcile TAL’s licensing and collaboration with commercial media by suggesting that the aesthetic style of this radio show is already visual. Yet, describing radio episodes of TAL as ‘little movies’ is also significant because ‘little’ evokes a harmlessness, an antithesis to blockbuster commercial films, to ‘big movies’, and implicitly references high culture institutions like art house and independent cinema. Similar to public radio, art house cinema is associated with highbrow taste culture (Bourdieu, 1984), and independent films are always understood through their opposition and difference from mainstream Hollywood cinema (Newman, 2011). Thus, to compare radio episodes to ‘little movies’, Ira Glass implicitly works to associate TAL’s extensions into film and television with the high cultural cache of independent art cinema. In this sense, to define TAL as cinematic ‘little movies’ for radio defines its economic hybridity with commercial film and television companies via symbolic opposition and difference from commercial media, even as it collaborates with companies like Warner Brothers or Showtime.

TAL’s producers are also making sense of themselves and their partnerships as outside the norms of mainstream, lowbrow media. This is clear in an interview with Ira Glass about the TAL television series, where Glass describes his wariness of the sensationalism of commercial television, stating,

When it started, we were very distrustful of Showtime, and I think they were very wary of us … It’s like two worlds colliding, right? Pay cable and public broadcasting. But it’s been a really happy thing for us. We kept waiting for the meeting where they say, ‘Okay, when do the girls take off their tops?’ But that meeting never came. (Ladd, 2006)

Glass’ (1999) depiction of himself and TAL’s producers as reluctant to adapt TAL into a TV show elides the fact that Glass and his staff had sought a television deal since 1999. Glass continues to manage a perception of himself and TAL as Hollywood outsiders when characterizing his experience making Sleepwalk with Me as that of ‘beginners having to learn their way’ (Bailey, 2013: 8). He repeats this in a question and answer session held by the Writers Guild Foundation in Beverly Hills to promote Sleepwalk with Me, emphasizing how he is accustomed to ‘working at the speed of public radio’ and how producing Sleepwalk with Me was an entirely new experience, saying, ‘It’s shocking you spend three years on something that’s this short’ (Littleton, 2012: 47). In another interview about Sleepwalk with Me, Glass explains how he is still not sure how he got roped into to making the film, saying, ‘I only did it because Mike [Birbiglia] kind of waved his arms around and said this might be fun … I don’t think I anticipated just how consuming it would be and how many years it would take’ (Merry, 2012: T03). Considering Glass’ previous relationships with Warner Brothers and DreamWorks, including his role as executive producer on all films that went into development based on TAL’s radio program, it is hard to believe that Glass is not aware of the time commitment involved in producing feature films. However, in these interviews, it is evident that Glass attempts to manage his identity and the TAL brand as separate and distinct from mainstream commercial media.

Ira Glass’ attempt to convey himself and his show as outsiders is perhaps most evident in the faux feud he had with Joss Whedon, writer and director of the 2012 blockbuster film The Avengers, who has also less famously been a contributor to TAL’s radio show. Sleepwalk with Me was released during summer 2012, at the same time as The Avengers, and Whedon made and posted an online video saying he was worried Sleepwalk with Me was a threat to The Avengers and urged fans to boycott Sleepwalk with Me in an obviously hyperbolic, unserious manner (Bodey, 2013; Whedon, 2012). Ira Glass and Mike Birbiglia responded with a video in which they promised with over-the-top bravado that Sleepwalk would gross more money domestically than The Avengers, which at the time had grossed US$1.5 billion worldwide. Glass and Birbiglia state, through clearly satirical gestures, that their goal is ‘$1.5 billion plus one’, no matter how long it takes (Lapin, 2012). This mock feud mobilizes certain cultural meanings, most notably with its comparison to a big-budget commercial film like The Avengers. To compare a low-budget independent film like Sleepwalk with Me to The Avengers highlights Sleepwalk with Me’s difference from mainstream Hollywood fare and again defines TAL’s franchising extensions through an explicit opposition to commercial media. This mock feud works discursively to reaffirm Ira Glass and Mike Birbiglia’s symbolic position as Hollywood outsiders through their work on Sleepwalk with Me. The implicit message here is that Sleepwalk with Me is not anticipated to be appealing to the masses or make very much money, unlike The Avengers, and works to grant TAL’s franchised productions highbrow credibility and the authenticity of art house cinema.

Conclusion

Despite public attempts to disavow the commercialism of economically hybrid media collaborations, the producers of TAL are shrewdly aware of the commercial value of their brand. This is evident when TAL’s lawyers sent a cease and desist notice to Siouxsie Q, a San Francisco sex worker and producer of the podcast This American Whore, threatening legal action if the program did not change its name (Lapin, 2013). Glass responded to the criticism he received for asking This American Whore to change its name by appealing for sympathy in his attempt to protect TAL’s intellectual property rights, stating,

The program is required to fight to protect its name in any medium or it risks losing its intellectual property rights, regardless of content … If you don’t take action when you hear about people knocking off your name, and get them to stop, you can lose your trademark rights. (Lapin, 2013)

Considering that TAL currently has several licensed film projects and television series in development (McNary, 2010; Marechal, 2012), as well as the production of the extremely lucrative and successful podcast spinoff Serial, this lawsuit highlights how Ira Glass and the other producers of TAL have a vested interest in protecting the proprietary nature of their trademark.

As a public radio franchise, TAL seems to be caught within a double-bind of economic hybridity. On one hand, TAL is produced in an industrial context wherein the structures of US public radio necessitate that public radio programs pursue private funds and collaborate with commercial media production companies. However, on the other hand, one of public radio’s most valuable assets in the United States is the cultural cache of publicness, which encourages TAL to discursively disavow its connection to commercialism. The need to study how the cultural cache of public radio is deployed within production cultures that are economically hybrid is doubly important as other US public radio programs attempt to find alternative sources of funding by employing commercial strategies like franchising. For instance, Radiolab has extended its radio program into a live stage show that tours nationally and created a mobile app listeners must pay for that allows users to make their own digital sound work with effects from the Radiolab show. This app is described as ‘more than just a companion to the broadcast, the app is an extension of the Radiolab experience and its spirit of exploration, possibility and play’ and functions as a branded, interactive auxiliary Radiolab product (Download the Radiolab App, 2015). As public radio programs collide with commercial production cultures to extend creative content into other platforms and create additional funding streams, more research needs to be done on the complexities of sound work and public radio production cultures, attending to their cultural significance within our current media landscape. This case study of TAL reminds us that media franchising specifically needs to account for the participation of public radio within media industries, as well as the cultural tensions and negotiations associated with economic hybridity.