Utah Public Radio celebrates 50 years
Utah Public Radio turned 50 years old Tuesday, but the celebration for the golden anniversary was Thursday night at the Bullen Center.
National Public Radio Senior Correspondent Renée Montagne helped UPR celebrate by speaking at a dinner event. Utah Sen. Lyle Hillyard, members of Utah State University faculty and administration, and original employees of the campus radio station KUSU, formerly KVSC, were in attendance at the event.
“In public radio, [50 years] is very, very old indeed,” Montagne said. “I’m in awe that you would have seen the need for public radio.”
Starting a radio station in 1953 must have been a very innovative idea, Montagne said, explaining that when NPR was founded in 1970, it seemed innovative.
Montagne spoke about how times have changed for radio reporters, saying that even in 1991, when reporting on Nelson Mandela’s release from captivity, she had to use a typewriter and alligator clips to get her stories back to the United States.
“Filing the stories took longer than reporting them at that point in time,” she said. “It’d take three days for a feature story, anything you wanted to sound good, and that was only 1991.”
Today, NPR reporters covering the war in Iraq have satellite phones and computers to report their stories at a moment’s notice.
The cost of technology limited its use in the early 1990s, Montagne said, and even though the cost of tools like satellite phones is still upwards of $80,000 for a single reporter, it creates better, faster coverage of world events.
“We’ve come a long way,” she said. “These big moments when people tune in to NPR, we’ve kept our numbers.”
Events like Sept. 11, the disputed 2000 presidential election and the war in Iraq are situations where listeners tune in and rely on public radio to provide them with reliable information, Montagne said.
“It’s a testimony not to National Public Radio, but to its listeners,” she said. “There’s a very huge craving out there for this information.”
Thursday morning, Montagne participated in UPR’s Access Utah program with the station’s program director, Lee Austin. The broadcast was held live in the Eccles Conference Center, where USU students could ask questions of Montagne and her reporting experiences.
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