Are you feeling change in the AIR? It isn't your imagination. MQ2 Talent Manager Ingrid Lakey, who's led the initiative from the start, is leaving us to launch something new – a baby! On July 1, Lakey goes on maternity leave, turning the reins of MQ2 over to public radio veteran Julie Drizin. Read all about it.

MQ2's Jenny Asarnow and her project "The Corner" were written up today in the Seattle Times. The project has opened its phone lines and started to gather recorded stories and messages from the corner of 23rd and Union in Seattle for broadcast on KUOW-FM and Hollow Earth Radio. You don't have to live there to call in. You can listen now to the stories that have come in so far by calling 877-723-8646.

AIR convened its annual Virtual Annual Membership meeting last week, experimenting with Elluminate, a web video/text chat/white board platform. MQ2 Talent Manager Ingrid Lakey, and producers Queena Kim and Shea Shackelford presented.

Here's an excerpt from Executive Director Sue Schardt's remarks to producers. She talked about how the crisis with the economy is hitting producers, and threatening the talent pool of public radio, and shared her optimism for the new opportunities during the "time of the maker."  We encourage you to take a minute to read the full text.

We have opportunity, as never before, to forge a new productivity, and new relationships between producers, the stations, and the networks; to bring great new diversity in the form of new producers who can lead us to places we’ve never been…places we don’t know about.

New priorities are being set at every level. There is great receptivity. People are hungry for answers.  We must – all of us – take advantage of this time by leading with our ideas. They’re eager for finding new ways of doing things.  

Another MQ2 2009 project underway:

Queena Kim's CyberFrequencies is about life on the Web. It's about how technology transforms culture. It believes that the viral world is a vital part of the information landscape and that public media should get plugged in.

At the center of the CyberFrequencies website is a news/culture podcast that excerpts audio, video, and blog content published on the Internet. Three podcasts are already up and aired on KPCC's Off-Ramp. Recently on CyberFrequencies' The Week in Web:

You've been blocked. Listen to a YouTube recording of army officials shouting down the Bangladeshi Prime Minister. The government's response? Shut down YouTube. A common response by governments under siege.

Sneak behind the Great Firewall with the editor of the China Digital Times Xiao Qiang. But can the Great Firewall last as long as the other great wall?

CyberNews - Another visit to Mexico with Mexico City blogger Daniel Hernandez for some analysis on how the media's gone hog wild with its swine flu coverage. Including mashups from the Huffington Post and sound from the Young Turk.

Listen, download, subscribe, contribute: http://www.cyberfrequencies.com.

Animata is open-source animation software for creating animations and interactive background projections for concerts, theater, dance performances--and your audio work.

It runs on multiple operating systems and it's easy to use. You simply load an image, attach a skeleton of triangles to it and voilà! See it here:

The animation can be generated in real time by linking the characters' movements to the movements of real people captured on video. This means you can make "a virtual puppet band reacting to live audio input" or "a scene of drawn characters controlled by the movement of dancers." It goes like this:

And Animata allows multi-user collaboration for collective creating and editing. AND, soon the software will be controllable by cell phone.

Try it out and send us your experiments.

This call for story ideas is from Shea and Jennifer of the MQ2 project Place + Memory. NPR's Weekend Edition aired a similar call (and you may have seen Scott Simon's tweet about it) and in return they got audience feedback on all of their platforms, more than 150 story ideas, and nearly 300 new Facebook fans. Now it's your turn.

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This is a call for ideas! We want your suggestions for our second place-story.

We all have places that have left their mark on us so clearly that just their mention brings them instantly to life and we are compelled to share our memories--places that have ceased to be, except in our memory. Think about one or two places that come to mind for you and send them to placeandmemory@bigshed.org.

Here are some categories of places to get your creative juices flowing:

-businesses (diners, bowling alleys, barber shops)
-cities and towns (razed by nature, declining industry, land re-purposed)
-schools and churches (closed, consolidated)
-neighborhoods (re-developed, gentrified, aged)
-natural environments (mountains, rivers, parks, views, beaches, islands)
-roads and bridges (country roads, state highways, ferries)
-public/private gathering places (street corners, people's homes)
-other countries (changes in governement, war, natural disaster)
-buildings and monuments (or other large public edifices like statues, stadiums, public facilities)

Because our first lost place is rural and a business, we're hoping our second profiles a lost place in an urban setting, and maybe it's not a business. That being said, a good story is a good story, so we're interested in whatever comes to your mind.

We will also be asking for your contributions on the project website when it launches next month. Many thanks for your help, and here's rabbit gravy in your eye!

placeandmemory@bigshed.org

Another look at an MQ2 project, and more mapping. While Kara Oehler is mapping the present, Shea Shackelford is mapping the past. His project is Place + Memory, a multivoice-storytelling multimedia-map of places that no longer exist, except in our memories.

Shea and his co-producer Jennifer Deer have already hit the road to create their first profile of a remembered place, this one in Alabama, and lucky for you, they've been documenting their work on the Place + Memory blog. It's not easy to talk about working on a story while trying to work on a story, says Shea, but it's worth it.

On the blog you can hear an interviewee talk about what it was like to take city friends to a country restaurant that today lives only in the minds of the people who loved it: "It's fun to be a link," he says. The Place + Memory project is a kind of link too, between the here and now and the there and then, between people and the places that made them.

The official project website will roll out by June 1, and you'll hear the first of their radio pieces on NPR a couple of weeks after that. Hold on to your hats, things are really moving now.

Here come the MQ2 grantees, whose projects launched in April, to tell you what they're up to!

Last on this blog you got a peek into Lu Olkowski's project, In Verse. This time around it's Kara Oehler, who is taking a thing you've heard a lot about--Main Street in America--and making it new, because "...the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience."

That's a McLuhan quote Kara wields in her feature article in this month's AIR newsletter. There she muses on the influences she brings to MQ2. What does it mean to let the story idea lead the technology idea? And how can a sports bar be a collaborative framework? Kara explains.

Mapping Main Street, Kara's MQ2 project with co-producer Ann Heppermann, will challenge our election-season definitions through profiles of real Main Streets near and far. MMS will connect pubradio people and not-pubradio people on an interactive website featuring lots of UGC (user-generated content--if you're not already used to it, you'd probably better get so).

We'll be sure to hear more soon from the road. Play on, Kara.

AIR's eight MQ2 producer-grantees have been set loose and are hard at work developing new ways to blend traditional broadcast with emerging digital media. It's an exciting time for AIR, and especially for the producers and their "incubators," organizations that will promote the projects on their airwaves, including NPR; KPCC-FM/American Public Media in L.A.; KUOW-FM and Hollow Earth Radio in Seattle; Youth Radio in Berkeley; and PRI's Studio 360 and WNYC Radio in New York City.

Read the press release about the projects, MQ2 Takes Public Media to the Streets, and get more details here.

Coming soon, details on all the MQ2 projects! But here now is a sneak peek at one of them.

Lu Olkowski's project will partner radio producers with poets and photographers to report news, and she's been networking it on Twitter and Facebook, where she put a call out for titles for her project. She received nearly 150 suggestions.

Her call said "We need a title that references the whole poet/reporter/photographer collaboration, not specific story ideas or locations. It's important to stay away from ideas of the working poor because we plan to continue the project in 2010 with other issues. I'm hoping for something simple. For example, Joe Richman has Radio Diaries and Dave Isay has Sound Portraits and Story Corps. I like those because they're descriptive, not goofy, and leave room for lots of different kinds of story topics under their umbrella."

Here's a little sample of the suggestions, but Lu still hasn't decided, so weigh in if you please!

View in Verse * Poet on the Road * Dithyrambs * Chapter and Verse Reporting * Newstanza * Beat Report * The Poetic Lens * Poetic Economy * The Poet's Notebook * The Poetry Times * The Poet's Press * Starry Witness * Poetigraphic * Poetography * Re:verse * This Is My Letter to the World (Dickinson)