Multimedia Reporting (Utsler)

by Casey Miles

In an old building on the outskirts of campus, two women meet every Friday afternoon. The small upstairs room they always use is sparsely furnished and decorated. A large round table with a blue top dominates the space, accompanied by two chairs; a map, a small poster and a digital clock provide the only wall decoration.

Armed only with a red pens and a stack of newspapers, the women begin working 30 minutes early. They skim through the papers, marking away, the shuffling of the newsprint interrupted by the occasional chuckle.

Eyes begin to flick toward the clock as it closes on 2 pm. Water cups are filled, and lozenges are unwrapped. The hour strikes, and their program begins with Carole Smith’s voice.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to Newspapers of Central and Western Kansas. Today, Nancy Colyer and I will be reading…”

Volunteers at Audio-Reader help offer a unique service to the blind and print-disabled in Kansas. The Audio-Reader program broadcasts readings of books, magazines and newspapers across the state. After going through a short audition, the volunteers are scheduled for a weekly reading. Carole Smith and Nancy Colyer both read “Newspapers from Central and Western Kansas” every Friday at 2 pm.

Audio-Reader is run out of the east wing of the Kansas Public Radio building on the University of Kansas campus. It will enter its 37th year of operation on October 7 – the second oldest program of its kind in the United States. It serves around 6,000 residents of Kansas and Western Missouri. The service depends heavily on volunteers, who do the vast majority of the actual reading for the station.

Jennifer Nigro, coordinator of volunteers, said that about 350 volunteers contributed their time to Audio-Reader. Most of the volunteers come from the Lawrence area; several drive in every week from Topeka or the Kansas City area. Some volunteers are even able to read from their homes.

Most volunteers come to her to help and work at Audio-Reader, Nigro said. She said that Kansas Public Radio broadcasts a lot of promotions for the Audio-Reader service, so many volunteers probably first heard about the service from KPR. Nigro also said she does a few volunteer fairs every year – her most recent was in the Kansas Union – to attract volunteers to work at the station. She also said that many volunteers learn about Audio-Reader from their “For Your Ears Only” sale – the largest sale of used audio equipment west of the Mississippi, Nigro said.

When volunteers start working at the station, Nigro said, they first have to go through an orientation session. Also, they are required to take a 100-word pronunciation test, and record a section of reading from some of Audio-Reader’s materials. In addition to reading national and local newspapers, the station offers a wide selection of books and magazines. Nigro said that volunteers and the programming manager collaborate to determine what will be read on the air.

Look at Audio-Reader's Programming Schedule:Download PDF

There are a wide variety of magazines, covering subjects from cooking to politics to pornography. Books are varied as well. Many are read by special request of the listeners. Nigro said the most volunteers read books in one hour segments, and that many volunteers could get through approximately 30 pages in an hour. Large books, then, take a long time to read: a volunteer reading Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek was going to take well over a year to read the book from cover to cover. Nigro said most of the books the volunteers read had been published within the last two years.

“Our mission is to keep people current,” she said.

When Carole Smith began working at the station around 10 years ago, she started out reading books using Telephone Reader, a service used to pre-record segments so that listeners can dial in using their telephones and listen just like they might on the radio. She said that her current program was nice because by reading with a partner, she didn’t have to read for a solid 2-hour block; instead she and Colyer alternate back and forth between reading different newspapers.

Both Smith and Colyer said they thought that sports readings were some of the most difficult to do, mostly because of the unfamiliar names they had to pronounce.

Smith said that when she started working at Audio-Reader, she came in with a lot of public speaking experience, so reading over the air came naturally for her. Colyer said that she was personally motivated to do well.

“It’s a personal best thing,” she said. “Kind of like a long-distance runner; it’s a one-on-one competition with yourself.”

Before coming to her current program, Colyer had read the Kansas City Star in the morning and had read some stort stories. She said she liked that there were so many different types of things a volunteer could read. If a volunteer got tired of reading the newspapers, they could move to a program where they read books instead. Each different thing, she said, reads a little differently – she didn't read the Star the same way she read some of her short stories.

The program that Smith and Colyer read now, “Newspapers of Central and Western Kansas,” reads newspapers as large as The Emporia Gazette to papers as small as the Clay Center Dispatch. When Smith and Colyer get there, they start by looking through the papers they are going to read, and marking the stories that they want to go through. They evenly split up the two-hour block between newspapers – each newspaper typically gets anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes of time.

When they select the stories they will read, they are most concerned about making sure the stories keep a local focus. They will read stories about what’s happening in that town, not about bigger stories – unless they have some local focus. Sometimes they try to describe pictures if they think it might help tell a story or think it might be important to the listeners.

When Smith and Colyer mark their stories, they also have to go through and mark all of the continuations of that story on different pages. Occasionally they hit snags. Their copies of the papers – sometimes a day old – may be missing the continuation pages because someone threw out some pages. This often happens when a page contains mostly ads, Smith said. She said that it makes it difficult while reading if she can’t find the continuation of a story.

“Someone is hanging at home on the end of an article,” she said, “and you’re stuck here trying to find it.”

Continuations are just one of the hurdles Smith and Colyer have to overcome every week. Pronunciation is always an issue – Colyer remembered one instance where she said “saline” (SAY-leen, like saline solution) instead of “Saline” (sa-LEEN, as in Saline County).

“I’m not a native Kansan,” Colyer said, laughing.

Smith and Colyer also said they try hard not to editorialize. They try to avoid hot-button topics unless they have a local focus. If they do read something from the Opinion page or something with a bias, they try to balance it out by reading an opposing opinion. They read the stories just as they are written, without any additions or omissions on their part.

One issue with reading smaller newspapers, they said, was the editing of the papers. Sometimes they would run into something that might trip them up while reading – a subject that doesn’t match its verb, for example, might sound awkward over the air to someone listening and might make the story harder to understand.

Both Smith and Colyer said that they liked their program because they learned a lot about Kansas through the newspapers they read. Colyer said that she could follow stories from week to week and learn more about who was involved in the stories. Smith said she thought listeners valued hearing their local news.

They also said they thought that they Audio-Reader was very important to the people it served. Smith said that at her first volunteer recognition event with Audio-Reader, she had the chance to meet one of the listeners. This woman had just gotten married, and had requested that some of the volunteers read a cookbook she had bought. She wanted to know how to cook, Smith said, and so Audio-Reader helped her make that a possibility.

“You just don’t think about things like that – about how much that can affect someone’s everyday life,” Smith said. “When I read, I try and think about who is listening and how important it might be to them.”

Colyer said she thought Audio-Reader was useful because of the wide set of programs it offered, from grocery ads to national newspapers to technology magazines.

“It’s a comprehensive set of services – not a whole lot of people use it, but for those who do, it’s very important,” she said. “It’s their eyes and ears on the world.”