Tuning In to Davisville: Local Voices in a Fractured Media Landscape

Where do you get your news?

Dear Friends,

I am grateful to Bill Buchanan, host of the KDRT radio show and podcast, Davisville. In our fractured media landscape, we need shows like Buchanan’s to inform local listeners about their community and, in doing so, help the population of Davis feel more inter-connected, whether to each other or to local civic leaders and thought leaders.

Recently I binge-listened to a number of Bill Buchanan interviews, including interviews with former Davis mayor Brett Lee, now President of Downtown Davis (also known as the Downtown Davis Business Association), and with Bob Dunning and Wendy Weitzel, well-known Davis Enterprise columnists who left the newspaper to find financial success and a devoted following on Substack.

I was lucky to know Bill when he was head of communications for Information and Educational Technology. In fact, about 15 years ago I served on his hiring committee. I’ve joined him for many meetings and conversations, both in person before the pandemic and then via Zoom after March of 2020. A couple years ago, we also served in the same jury pool, taking time to catch up over lunch at a Woodland Indian restaurant.

During jury selection, Bill was reading a Robert A. Caro Lyndon Johnson biography, indicative of the same abiding curiosity that informs the thoughtful questions he asks guests on his radio show (and that he has asked me during my Davisville appearances). One of the best parts of being an (paid or unpaid) journalist is that you have license to reach out to people, schedule a conversation, and then satisfy your curiosity through the asking of insistent questions.

One regrettable result of the fracturing of the media landscape, with so many of us gathering information about the topics that affect our lives from disparate (and sometimes distant) sources is that we have fewer shared experiences. I myself have been stepping back from political news over the last few months, a result from my feeling alienated from my country and the (mostly) men who run it, but I still know what’s going on. By contrast, I know some people who stay so uninformed that my every attempted conversation with them makes me feel like an mansplainer who must offer primers on the world in which we live just to have shared topics to discuss.

I hope that this widespread feeling of disconnect from national news topics would at least lead us to care deeply about our own local communities, communities that might benefit from our efforts to lead and contribute, or, in my case, distract us with a pub quiz, a poetry reading, or a local radio show. In such an environment, we (should) depend all the more on radio shows like Davisville, shrinking newspapers like The Davis Enterprise (where I have a small weekly column), and new initiatives like Wendy Weitzel’s Substack newsletter “Comings and Goings,” to which I am a paid subscriber. As playwright Arthur Miller said, “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

If you would like to support one of my efforts to contribute to the community, I invite you to make a tax-deductible donation to KDVS during its yearly April fundraiser, happening this week. My radio show, Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour, airs every Wednesday at 5 PM, and this week during that hour my impressive producer Dyson and I will attempt to raise $500 for the station. With your help, we might reach our goal!

Thanks for considering this request and for supporting local media and local reporters.

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For Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Best,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Three trivia questions from last week:

26. Science. Keratitis in inflammation of what crucial part of the human body that starts with the letter C?

27. Books and Authors. Ernest Hemingway’s first (and some say his greatest) novel has been in print since its publication in 1926. Name the novel.

28. Current Events – Names in the News. Joko Widodo’s name is not in the news, but it does deserve a place in the pub quiz. From 2014-2024, he was the 7th president of what country found in Southeast Asia and Oceania?

P.P.S. Our next Poetry Night on April 17 will feature fan favorite Julia Levine! Plan to join us at the Natsoulas Gallery!