[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

We're exactly two weeks from the final episode of The Takeaway, which will air on Friday, June 2nd. After 15 years, The Takeaway is saying farewell, but before we go, we thought it would be fun to share with all of you just exactly what it is that we do around here, because you got to understand radio is magic.

Actor 1: You're a wizard.

Actor 2: I'm a what?

Actor 1: A wizard and a thumping good one, I'd wager.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, I know that sounds hyperbolic, but seriously, sonic storytelling is a layered, complicated, and wildly interesting process, but when you are listening to the work of truly gifted sonic artists, it could be hard to discern the work because, well, it just all sounds effortless, natural, seamless. That is the magic.

Actor 3: Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Folks with genuinely kind of otherworldly capacities to slow time, to shift sound waves, to tell whole stories with just a handful of notes tend to make every single voice sound beautiful.

Speaker 2: Hi.

Speaker 3: Hey.

Speaker 4: Hello.

Speaker 5: Hi.

Speaker 6: Hello.

Speaker 7: Hey.

Speaker 8: Hey. Hey there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi. Now, of course, if you want to see a wizard at work, you have to peek behind the curtain. All right. Let's take a look and see what's back here.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sure enough, it's the Wizards of Audio.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: [unintelligible 00:02:04] a crew of aural assassins, three radio soldier of fortune.

Speaker 9: Ah, ma'am, I'm an airman.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] All right. You all are going to meet Jackie in a minute. I've said it a million times, the rest of us make Google Docs. The control room, they make radio. This is a team that has my back with corrections, copy edits, encouragement, sound design, and so much more every single morning. Let me introduce the control room dream team.

Jay Cowit: Hey, I'm Jay Cowit, the show's director and editor and sound designer.

Vince Fairchild: Hi, Vince Fairchild here. I'm the engineer.

Jackie Martin: I'm Jackie Martin, line producer for The Takeaway.

Actor 4: I've no time for the gibber-gabber.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. We're going to tell folks how you all have been making this show and how we get from Google Doc to radio and how this crew keeps itself, and let's be honest, me sane day to day. Hey, team.

Jay Cowit: Hey, Melissa.

Vince Fairchild: Hey, Melissa.

Jackie Martin: Hello.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, Jay and Vince, I want to start with you all because you have been here for the length of the show. Talk to me about working on this show for 15 years. What's changed?

Jay Cowit: Yes, Melissa, it's been 15 years. It's a lot like working on many different shows during that time. The show kind of shifted from a morning live news show to the hour-long feature show that you see today. We've had a lot of different hosts, many different crews, about 200 or so different people who have worked for this show over those years. It's been really interesting to see the evolution of the show along with the growth of everybody that's come through these halls too.

Vince Fairchild: When the show launched in 2008, we had to be in the studio at 4:00 AM because the broadcast started at 6:00 AM. That meant usually getting up at 3:00 in the morning, so we didn't or at least I did not have much of a social life then, but then some years later, the time of the broadcast changed to a little bit later in the morning, and so we got to sleep in just a little bit more, so now we get in around seven o'clock.

In the beginning, it was an all-live news show with about five or six different interviews in one hour, and it was a two-hour show. It was a very intense show back then, kind of like working I would say maybe in a submarine. I've never been in a submarine, but everybody had a specific job and you didn't stop what you were doing, you just kept going, going, going. Then as the show changed over time, it became more relaxed, more considerate show about picking topics very carefully. We didn't have to fill as much time each day. It's just a different show now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that 7:00 AM constitutes coming in later. That is wild. I do want to hit one more point though, when both of you talk about coming in, Jay, Vince, you two have been the folks coming in to the office through New York City all the way through the pandemic long before there were vaccines at a time when so many people, so many of us just felt terrified of going out and yet we were also huddled around our radios trying to listen to what was going to happen next. Can you speak on that?

Jay Cowit: Yes, I mean, it's something I think we're pretty proud of. It was a very small group of people in the building, not just for our show but for everything else that was making WNYC Radio at that time. There was probably 7 to 10 of us on any given day. It was a little like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. You just kind of dance around or whistle and nobody really said anything.

I think the group that was there, including me and Vince, were very, very proud and humbled and honored to keep things going. Exactly like you say, people rely on that for information, for companionship during those times when everybody was in their house and couldn't see people. The radio shows were still there, and our show was still there, and our show was still on every day.

Vince Fairchild: It was wild in those early days when we'd come into the city and there was no one around. I mean, on a normal day, it was jam-packed with everybody in this area that has a lot of office buildings and just the streets were empty, so little traffic. With the fear of COVID at that time, it was a little nerve-racking to be moving around in the city, but it didn't hurt to be labeled essential staff. That kind of made me feel a little better about having to be getting into the office every day.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jackie, you've been on the team three and a half years. Before COVID, you were regularly hanging in the control room with the guys, with Jay and Vince. Once COVID hit, you were able to do your role remotely, but that didn't necessarily make it easier to do the role, is that right?

Jackie Martin: Yes, I would say at first it was a lot harder to I'd say dance with the guys, because in the morning we had a little thing going where I would finish editing something and I would scream out, "Hey, this is ready." You could actually look at someone's face, tell what they needed. We could speak to each other. We actually had guests come into the studio, so it was a lot nicer. It was a lot easier to talk to them, communicate, get what we needed.

When it came to working at home, I had dogs and children and my husband. I just felt like it was harder to communicate because Slack is not great. When Jay and Vince are super slammed, they're not going to look at my Slack message and they can't always hear me because I'm not always on the board, so it was hard to communicate what I was feeling or what I needed, but we got over that, and I feel like now it's like clockwork.

Jay Cowit: You can communicate a lot with a glance in a control room. Losing that ability, it slowed us down just a tiny bit.

Jackie Martin: Just a tiny bit.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Jay, you talked about being able to communicate with a glance and the speed with which you work in the morning. I'm just going to push back here a little bit. I want the three of you all, Jay, Vince, Jackie, tell the story of a morning at The Takeaway.

Vince Fairchild: All right. 06:30, Jay gets to the studio. Jackie logs onto her remote desktop. They drink coffee, and they start looking at scripts for updates, any missing pieces, although there's not a lot of missing pieces, but they try to make sure the show sounds cohesive.

Jackie Martin: 07:00, Melissa logs in on her Comrex from North Carolina. Vince gets into the studio at this time. He checks sound, he does fading to the tops and tails of some clips, and he EQs listener calls.

[music]

Jay Cowit: 07:15, we start pre-recorded interviews with guests from all over the world, mostly on Zoom. We use Zoom because we learned how to make it sing and really quick. We don't have 15 minutes to soundcheck each guest. We got more like three minutes. We tell every single guest, and that's about 24,000 of them over the years, not to say good morning. That's because we air in all sorts of places and all sorts of different time zones.

Speaker 10: Good morning.

Speaker 11: Morning.

Speaker 12: Good morning.

Speaker 13: Shut it down.

[music]

Vince Fairchild: 07:45, while I record more interviews with Melissa, Jay will start editing the interviews recorded the day before and add music and other audio goodies. That's when he has his sound designer hat on. He puts in sound effects, sound bites, speeches, and occasionally a very obscure TV or movie reference that maybe 10 people out there will get.

Actor 5: Hey, what happened?

Jackie Martin: 08:00, we wrap pre-recorded interviews and then I cut the interviews down into slightly smaller versions. Things are moving quickly now. As I make them shorter, I clean up the guest, the host, and the overall sound all while making sure the interview stays accurate. Now we're racing the clock hardcore.

Vince Fairchild: This all runs really well unless--

Jay Cowit: Unless a few things go wrong, of course, and they do go wrong. Maybe a piece of equipment doesn't work like a computer keyboard or someone's mic. Maybe Google Docs is down where all our scripts are.

Jackie Martin: Or maybe a guest doesn't show up. Maybe they were ill or maybe they had something better to do at 7:15 AM, but hey, an interview that's even five minutes late can cause a major logjam in our system, so we often have to adapt.

Vince Fairchild: 08:15, we record our billboard, that's the top of the show. We record the final take, that's the end of the show. We check back in with each other constantly to make sure we're doing okay and that everything is moving towards some form of completion.

Jackie Martin: We curse a lot, whether good or bad things are happening.

Jay Cowit: 08:30, we call the satellite operators and let them know we are ready for broadcast. At this point, anywhere from one to five segments have been recorded, digitally edited, and finalized with music and all the bells and whistles.

Jackie Martin: 08:45, we send any rundown changes to our digital producer, Zach, to send out to the stations. We finish off segments, we tie up loose ends, and sometimes that happens as the show is beginning to air.

Vince Fairchild: 09:00, the billboard plays and the show begins.

[music]

Vince Fairchild: Once again, we've chased the deadline monster away and put on a show like we have done every morning for 15 years. This one today, it's number 3929, so happy 3929th show, Takeaway fans.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, team. Now we're going to do some CR one-on-ones. Up first, our director, Jay Cowit.

Jay Cowit: Hey, Melissa

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Jay, I just want to start a little bit with your story in radio because for you sound is a lot of different things. Right? You're also a musician, you're a composer. Tell us about you and sound.

Jay Cowit: I grew up playing music. I still play music, I make music. I started loving radio actually from sports radio, if you can believe it. Just growing up and listening to a lot of folks. There was one dude in particular in the New York area named Steve Somers, the Schmooze. He would do these long monologues and these like really operatic intros and just talk about literary references and music references. This would just be like for a random Mets game in the middle of August where they'd lose 6-2. It kind of gave me the notion that you can make radio and you can make beautiful sound design about anything, about anything at all.

It's kind of the beauty of the medium, you can just make something out of nothing. He was a real big influence. Anybody that was making something weird musically or radio was a big influence. Avant-garde music, Adult Swim cartoons on Cartoon Network, just these random sound and sonic and visual cues that kind of play into it. I'm really inspired by absurdity but also just fast-moving and things happening all over the place. Any kind of kaleidoscope like sound or visual is big for me, and that's kind of what I've always been inspired by.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Jay, I understand that you have at one point or another done every single role on this show, including very recently hosting.

Jay Cowit: Yes, the ultimate utility man.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Your primary role though is as director. I got to say, having come over from TV, I didn't know a single thing about what it meant to say that you were the director in radio, because it's a very different role than it had been in live television. Help folks understand what is it that a radio director does.

Jay Cowit: [laughs] I think really what we're trying to do is coordinate timings between you, the host or anybody that's hosting on that day, and the guest, and trying to kind of see what's coming next to make our control room process move a little bit smooth. I got to give some credit to our original director, Dylan Keefe, who's the technical director at Radiolab now and also the bass player for Marcy Playground. He was a really, really good boss.

A lot of the sound of the Takeaway even now can kind of go back to his leadership, not because sonically it's very similar to what he was doing, but I think he instilled upon me and Vince and the other folks in the control room at that time in 2008, that we could really be free with ideas. He was very big on trying something, and if it didn't work, we'd figure it out, but go for it.

I think in terms of that, ethos, it's kind of where I see on director, like trying some things, trying some things with sound, with music, being a little bit aggressive even in terms of news, even in terms of sad news or angry news. You want to be able to take that energy that the audience may or may not be feeling about a subject and get to that. I see that as my role of forming the show sound to match the energy of the topics themselves and really what the audience may be feeling too.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We talk on the show a fair bit about the fact that I'm a college professor and so I like to think of myself as a teacher even when we are making The Takeaway, but I got to say, when it comes to somebody who's doing a lot of teaching on the show backstage, that's definitely you. I mean, you are literally directing everybody from our interns to our guests, to our guest hosts. Talk to me a little bit about how you approach teaching folks how to make the radio machine.

Jay Cowit: That's my favorite part [laughs], I used to tell interns, "If you take anything away from this internship,-" and I would just tell them something new every day. It's really one of my favorite things, and one of the things I love seeing about this show is so many interns and producers that have gone on to amazing things. One of them just won a Pulitzer Award. Some of the interns are now some of the leading reporters out there in the news world. I think it's a matter of just getting people to note their own abilities. I'm not doing anything to show them something new per se.

I just kind of like getting people to see what's in themselves, whether it's talking on the mic and sounding more like themselves or whether it's writing scripts or whether it's cutting tape. I think everybody's style is important to preserve, you can find ways to get people using their own instincts, I think that's the best way to teach folks in this industry, because there's not one right or wrong way to do it. There's not one way to make radio. There's so many ways, that's the beauty of it. There's so many different things to do. I like that we can tell people to be their own person and to use their own instincts, to use their own heart to make the radio we're making.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, there may not be just one right way, but we do have a fairly distinct way here at The Takeaway. There's no doubt all of us were sad, are sad, and maybe even more than a little bit pissed off when we learned about the cancellation of the show. Even if there isn't some one right way, talk to me about the void that will be left when The Takeaway way is done.

Jay Cowit: Ah, yes, the void. Listen, Melissa, I've thought about this a lot. I think when it really comes down to it, and listen, I don't want to be overreactive here. I kind of want to be reserved in how I put this. I guess that the void that's left when we are gone is pretty much a giant voracious black hole unceasingly feasting on shows that focus on communities that need it most, that will never yield in its undying perpetual thirst for bad media that sounds like the old bad media that was here before or something like that, pretty much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hey, Jay. You good?

Jay Cowit: Yes, no, I'm all right.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Look, I feel you. I mean, one of the things I love most about the control room is that you aren't afraid to say not only to others but to each other, "Hey, look, we're doing a pretty good job this morning." Right? Like, "We did this. Oh, look, that sounds good." Yes, I think not only will we miss working together, I think we're going to miss the thing that we've been making together. What is it that you hope people will remember about The Takeaway?

Jay Cowit: Well, for starters, Melissa, I will miss working with you quite a bit. It's been really an honor and a humbling experience over the last two years to work with someone with such control over their voice and their mind and how to match the two. Honestly, it's made my directing job very easy because you have such a knowledge of how you want your voice to sound at all points. I will miss that a ton. I will miss working with so many of the people here.

I've worked with Vince for 15 years, I've worked with Jackie for three and a half. 15 years in Takeaway years is like a thousand years, so been doing this a long time. I hope what people remember about the show is what we focused on, which was people that did not have the opportunity to have a CNN town hall or their own network or their own guest spot on TV news or anything like that. We focused on communities that needed the amplification.

We focused on communities that didn't have a voice at the table, be it in public radio, be it in news in general, be it in society, people who are still fighting for that seat at the table. I think this show was unrelenting at focusing on that. Even when so much other news was everywhere, impeachment hearings, Trump all the time, I think we focused on what people were dealing with in their lives, whether it be Flint, Michigan or Gordon Plaza down south or any of these places where the people just needed their story told.

I really hope people not only remember that about our show when we're gone but focus media on that. It's so key. We're not the only ones who do it, thank God, and hopefully we're not one of the last ones. I think it's so crucial that people think about this stuff and think about real people and talk to callers and listeners and their audience and get stories from them. I hope that continues on well past us, and I hope people copy us, honestly. Imitation is a form of flattery, and I hope there are shows like ours going forward even if we're not around for the party.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I so appreciate what you said, Jay, about the things that I'm good at, but I will certainly say I had absolutely no idea anything about this particular role. I'll tell you, from the time that I got the first call to come in to guest host, I was thinking it was either about being a guest on radio, which it's not, or that it was about like hosting a TV show, which it's not.

I am just so grateful to you because with extraordinary patience and kindness, you walked me through all of the pieces of learning how to do this job, and I am so grateful. You've been an extraordinary teacher and cheerleader and friend and let's just face it, a great companion very early every single morning for years now, so I'm going to miss you.

Jay Cowit: Melissa, I will miss you so much. Thank you for letting me be a part of this ride. Hopefully we can poke some bears together sometime soon and keep making some media somewhere, but it's been an honor and thank you so much for everything you brought to us and everything you've done for this audience and for news in general. Thank you so much.

 

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