There's nothing quite like the sensation of having your work broadcast on radio, with all those people, scattered over a city or perhaps a continent, listening at the same time. I've always loved that democratic quality of public radio. Making our productions widely accessible via broadcast remains the core activity of producers, and it is the primary value we offer to most program funders, but I have always felt it was incomplete.
Radio alone is so ephemeral.
A program you pour your heart into making, sometimes over the course of many weeks, comes and goes on the radio in a matter of minutes, or maybe an hour, if you're lucky. A listener might tune in late and miss a good chunk of the production and, of course, most people don't happen to hear it at all. So for many years I have tried to pay attention to ways of extending a program's life beyond the one-time radio transmission. In addition, the logistical headaches of order-processing, tape duplication, packaging and mailout can be enormous and for many people simply not worth the necessary effort and expense. On the other hand, non-broadcast dissemination enhances your ability to reach people and you may choose to view such distribution primarily as furthering your public education mission, not as a generator of profits, per se.