Lee Hill, here ...

The week is wrapping to a close, but not before we have a few more team members share their favorite Tell Me More moments.

The story of TMM producer Argin Hutchins is an interesting one in itself. In 2007, Argin made the big switch from being an NPR audio engineer to becoming a producer for the program. There's only a short list of folks around here who've done that.

Anyway, here's Argin with his most memorable Tell Me More moment:

'Tell Me More' Producer Argin Hutchins joined the program after making the switch from NPR's audio engineering group. Monika Evstatieva/NPR

Lee, looking at all of my colleagues past postings this past week I decided not to settle on a story solely based on content or emotion. Instead, I thought it would be nice to give our listeners a taste of our daily grind to produce this show.
When I first joined the program two years ago, I was surprised to find that I was joining a pretty young staff. I had been working at NPR almost three years prior and I came to expect that the shows here had a hierarchy that was loosely based on age (thinking the older you were, the more rank you had, but I am sure you had to earn the rank ... you get my point). So, needless to say, because of our youth our ideas for the program were very spontaneous.
This leads me to one of my favorite stories: a conversation with a Rock Band called The Noisettes. The reason why I decided on this is because of the back story. This was a crash production! When we came in that morning, none of us knew what we were in for when we asked a rock band to perform.
No, it's not what you think; they did not have odd requests or anything. It was purely a logistics problem -- we had only one hour to prepare for an interview that usually takes days to produce. We had to get the band into the building, set them up, do a sound check and record the interview. And keep in mind that no one on staff had ever produced a rock performance before. We feared the worst.
But the interview went well and the performance was amazing. Since it was so early in Tell Me More history, not many people might have heard the performance interview. So I invite you to listen.

Thanks, Argin. That was a crazy day.

tags:

categories: TMM Turns Two!

12:37 - May 1, 2009

What is this?

Share