In my most ambitious project to date for Blue Ridge Public Radio, I produced a five-part series exploring the recent phenomenon of digital art connected to cryptocurrency and the flood of artists pinning their financial hopes there. “Revolution Calling” aired daily April 25-29, 2022, during Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but we posted an extended version of each segment online all at once:
In January 2022, I launched Too Long Didn’t Listen, a podcast spotlighting great podcasts and the people who make them from NPR member stations around the country. Each episode, I focus on a different podcast and interview the hosts/producers about the concept, challenges and impact of their work. I’m producing TLDL independent of my continuing work with Blue Ridge Public Radio.
Sarah Jane Tribble is a journalist with Kaiser Health News who grew up an hour away from Fort Scott, Kan. Not even 20 years after the opening of a gleaming new hospital there, it closed. People in Fort Scott lost healthcare, workers lost jobs and Tribble saw a story. In this episode of TLDL, we talk with Tribble about her reporting for the podcast “Where it Hurts,” produced in a partnership between Kaiser Health News and St. Louis Public Radio. Anyone affected by or concerned with rural healthcare will find a lot of relevance in this seven-part series.
In August 2017, I moved to Asheville, NC, to launch the position of Arts & Culture Producer with Blue Ridge Public Radio. I cover Asheville’s fertile arts community through broadcasts, video and online written articles.
In March and April 2021, I solely produced separate hour-long programs for BPR’s “The Porch.”
Chelsea Labate
The first focused on artists of this region coping with their mental health through a year of turmoil. You’ll hear stories from several artists from this region, along with research and thoughts from psychologists both about the trope connecting artists and mood disorders and alternatives to traditional counseling.
The second posed the question: If communities benefit from the work and presence of artists, what is our collective responsibility to publicly pay for the arts? I spoke with local and national arts advocates and also with random people in public.
On July 23, 2020, I stepped outside my arts world to produce a Facebook Live public forum on the future of policing in Asheville. Blue Ridge Public Radio had never produced an event like this and, to my knowledge, neither has another public radio station in the country. A few visual glitches aside, I’m pretty proud of the content, and guests on both side of this contentious issue commented to me after the fact to express their satisfaction with how it went:
The forum lasted nearly two hours, and I edited it down to an hour for broadcast the following week over BPR’s airwaves. Despite the length, it performed really well, both in real time and in the subsequent three weeks: 4,600+ unique viewers, 450+ comments and 66 shares (all highs for Blue Ridge Public Radio content):
Here’s the story I produced in January 2020 about artist compensation in relation to the Asheville Art Museum exhibition “Appalachia Now!”
I’ll always be grateful to the Asheville Improv Collective for welcoming me with wide-open arms just after I arrived to town, in 2017. I spent 2018 as a member of AIC’s first resident troupe, Blank Slate (last video below), and since then have focused on The Aftermath, the duo I formed with Haley Bri Cohen.
Matt Peiken 