Colby Magazine | Summer 2001

In the beginning, radio was like magic. A telegraph without poles. A telephone without wires.

In 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sat on a cliff in Newfoundland listening to his earphone and heard a faint pip pip pip from his other machine across the Atlantic. The Morse letter "s" signaled a new era. The world was stunned by Marconi’s 1,700-mile transmission. Alexander Graham Bell refused to believe it. But within three decades science fiction had become a daily fact, and the world was glued to the radio.

When the Depression hit America, radio provided a cheap escape from reality. The popularity of Amos ’n’ Andy, The Lone Ranger and FDR’s fireside chats soared, and the shows became fixtures of evening life.

But radio also became something more. It was on radio that FDR announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that Edward R. Murrow made his war dispatches from Europe and that Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radio became our living connection to the world.

According to some, in 1950 radio was just coming of age and was on the verge of becoming a higher art. Then, disaster hit: a hypnotic new medium, called "radiovision" by some and "television" by others, soon robbed radio of its biggest stars and most of its audience. America’s entertainment shifted from word to image; from what was being said to the person who said it. To paraphrase one critic, it went from the theater of the mind to the theater of the mindless.

To survive, radio networks began fragmenting into niche markets: news stations, talk stations, music stations, etc. By the mid-1960s, radio had lost its way.

In 1967, in response to what Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow called "the vast wasteland" of television, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was formed. Lyndon Johnson (who owned a radio station) proposed a radio component, and three years later National Public Radio was born, with an eye toward revitalizing the aural medium.

Almost immediately, NPR started attracting listeners. Shows like All Things Considered and Morning Edition pioneered the now-common news magazine format. According to radio historian Susan Douglas, NPR "revived the sort of eyewitness account pioneered by CBS in the late 1930s" and used ambient sounds to transport the listener. It was "photojournalism for the ear," in the words of co-founder William Siemering.

Since its first live broadcast, of the 1971 Senate Vietnam hearings, NPR has grown. Today, the $95-million-a-year network has 490 affiliate stations, 16 million listeners each week and almost 80 reporters across the globe. In the commuting era, it has succeeded in becoming one of the most respected news agencies in the world.

So how do you get to be part of this organization—this elite corps of reporters? It’s a question Chris Arnold gets all the time. It’s one he never knows quite how to answer.

The only one Arnold can give is how he—armed only with his English degree—got to be a national business reporter personally responsible for interpreting one of the most important periods in American business history: the rise of the Internet.

"It’s been kind of nuts to watch," he said, "because I was here right when it started, right when Netscape first happened. And you could see it build, and watch how this insane wave of irrational exuberance spread, and how everybody got caught up in it. At first it didn’t make any sense to me, or a lot of the people in the valley. A lot of the venture capitalists said, ‘I don’t know how these companies are going to make any money,’ way back in 1996 or 1997. And by 1999 the whole world had gone crazy, and it just created a reality of its own. It was an interesting kind of hundred-year-flood to watch."

It was an actual hundred-year-flood that first got Arnold in the door at NPR. After working at Colby’s WMHB, where (with an eye toward his résumé) he’d put together a news department, Arnold thought radio might be a good way to put his interest in writing together with his other interests, including radio and news.

So after graduation, he followed his girlfriend to San Francisco (they later broke up), and Arnold was temping two days a week at ahospital and running around with his tape recorder the rest—first for a local commercial station, then volunteering, stringing and freelancing for KQED, the San Francisco public radio station. When devastating floods hit northern California, he was sent to cover them. It was there that he almost blew his big chance.

"They sent me up there in a pickup truck," he remembers, "and I got in there just before they closed the road, and the NPR reporters couldn’t get in. So the NPR editor started calling me on the cell phone, saying, ‘You have to do a story for Morning Edition.’

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President's Page: President Bro Adams on the court and affirmative action.
Commencement 2001
Alumni Reunion 2001