I keep hearing that the bonds between NPR and the regional stations must evolve, and today I see that npr.org guesses that WVPE is my regional station--correct--and places a big WVPE logo and link on prime top-of-the-page real estate right next to the NPR logo on the network's home page. I guess this means that a regional station is going to need to have a website worth return visits. And that has to mean more than just syndicating national shows--it must mean regional news, say, or music, or political talk, with an emphasis on regional. It means that the regional stations are probably going to be under some pressure to publish as well as broadcast. There may be new opportunities for community media production partnerships. It should be interesting.

I took a surprising course in college from Professor Fordyce Mitchel. It was about the development of Athenian democracy. The thing that surprised me at the time from that course, which was probably in the fall semester of 1978, was Dr. Mitchel's proposal that a good number of the steps forward for ancient Athenian democracy came as reactions to power grabs. Some group or leader would see an opportunity to narrow the rights of citizens or extend the power of the few at the top, and in reaction to that, after some struggle, rights would be asserted more clearly, more broadly, and institutional structures and protections would be established or extended or made more explicit. Democracy grew not because people sat in a grove theorizing about it and admiring it but because crisis by crisis people saw that it was better than slow-or-fast-encroaching tyranny and that it had to be struggled for and extended and built explicitly into the social order by people who gave a damn and had some skills. In that sense, citizens always have their work cut out for them if they care about democracy. In Professor Mitchel's class I first began to see that admiration for voting is not a good enough understanding of democracy, important as voting is.