Good news on the media front

Just as we're being flooded with all that depressing news about PBS...The Connection, at least in this (former) listener's opinion, did a deep nosedive in quality when original host Christopher Lydon departed the scene. Via Dan Kennedy there's news of a new Lydon radio show, Open Source, due to premiere May 30.

MINNEAPOLIS, March 8, 2005 — Public Radio International (PRI) and Open Source Media Inc. announce plans to launch the first radio program to embrace bloggers, Web enthusiasts, and the Internet transformation of media. Open Source from PRI is a lively, hour-long, on-air conversation designed to capture “the sound of the Web” with the popular Christopher Lydon engaging callers, e-mailers, and bloggers from around the world in a range of fascinating topics. Open Source will launch Monday, May 30, in Boston on WGBH Radio 89.7, airing Monday – Thursday at 7 p.m. Starting July 4, PRI will feed the program live nationwide, making it available to its 727 affiliate stations for broadcast and simulcast streaming, and offering additional feeds for stations in other time zones.

Open Source aims to begin conversations on the Web each day and invite a worldwide audience to contribute topics, guests, and information that advances understanding of issues and ideas. Lydon says, “My ambition, with producer Mary McGrath, is to thread the seeming chaos of the Web into a coherent skein of ideas and argument. We want to launch the smartest, most various, wide-open, irresistible, and democratic conversation anyone’s ever been invited to join, in any format. The Internet transition we’re living through is a boundless opportunity. It extends the rim of the roundtable and the range of the give-and-take to the whole planet.”

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A Boston native and Yale alumnus, host Christopher Lydon is, as artist/scholar John Perry Barlow says, “a wizard at getting the brilliant to speak brilliantly.” With producer Mary McGrath, formerly the science producer at the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and The Christian Science Monitor, Lydon co-created The Connection, widely cited as the smartest, most original public radio talk show in America. He has been a distinctive voice in print, television, radio, and the blogosphere for more than 30 years. He covered city politics in the 1960s and presidential politics for The New York Times, from the Washington Bureau, in the 1970s. For nearly 15 years, he was the anchor of The Ten O’Clock News, a memorable mix of culture, politics, and interviews on WGBH-TV, public television in Boston.

This is great news. If you are interested in reading more about and from Lydon, look here and here.