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Getting back into radio
By Melodie DavisPage:
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This year, the new year feels really new. On Jan. 2 a new radio program was launched from our Third Way Media offices that will offer help and insights for families. I’m serving as producer.
Melodie Davis writes for Mennonite Media in Harrisonburg, Va.
Mennonite Weekly Review carried the news story about the program, Shaping Families. Here is the back story behind the news.
Some MWR readers remember the days of The Mennonite Hour and Heart to Heart, and later, Your Time (with Margaret Foth) and Art McPhee’s In Touch.
Thirty-five years ago (OK, so I’m getting really old) when I started working for this same agency (we both had different names then), I started by working as a secretary for The Mennonite Hour, which ran from the early 1950s until 1977.
I was also hired to help do research for *Heart to Heart. Soon I began learning to write and produce radio spots and programs.
Then my boss, Ken Weaver, asked me to produce radio spots for youth. I didn’t have a clue, but I learned on the job.
Then videos came along. So our agency began producing videos — mainly for the church at first, to raise awareness about issues in society the church needed to be discussing. They aired on a very early cable channel, VISN, which eventually supplied programming for the Hallmark Channel. We also got into print and multimedia campaigns in a big way. We helped churches produce their own ads and their own brochures to advertise themselves, and ran a couple of Mennonite ads in Newsweek and Parents.
Then e-mail and the Internet came along. We planned and launched what has grown to be a pretty big Web site, Third Way Café, which attempts to be a “public face” about Mennonites to the world.
In the early part of this decade, our agency began producing documentaries for network TV through connections we had with larger ecumenical media groups. The documentaries were exciting to work on. They aired on ABC-TV, NBC and the Hallmark Channel, among others. We dealt with forgiveness in the most difficult of circumstances — suicide, mental illness, hunger, homelessness, aging, substance addiction, re- entry into society after a prison term.
But all along the way, some Mennonites said, “Why not have a regular radio program? You have so much material to work from, and so much to say. Different perspectives to add in the media. We want a Mennonite voice on the radio.”
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