Alexander Street Press held its 20th customer appreciation breakfast January 9 at the San Diego Convention Center during the 2011 ALA Midwinter Meeting. This year the featured speaker was the dynamic Renée Montagne, cohost of National Public Radio's Morning Edition since 2004. As part of her reminiscences about the early days of NPR and its commitment to “provide news of events in a context that gives it meaning,” she noted that the first staff person hired by the network was a librarian, Carolyn Jensen, who was brought in to set up a research facility for All Things Considered in 1970, one year before the show first aired. Jensen later married NPR journalist Alex Chadwick and became an executive producer herself. Unfortunately, she died of cancer in August 2010.
Montagne recalled her days as a freelance reporter for NPR, when she was assigned such stories as the release of Nelson Mandela from a South African prison in 1990. She joked about the shoestring budget she was provided in those pre-cell-phone days: “$1,500 and I could stay as long as it lasted.” Luckily, because she stayed with friends and family, she was able to stretch the budget for seven weeks and cover many of the side stories in the townships, the underdeveloped urban areas reserved for blacks under the Apartheid government. Since there were no street signs, Montagne had to pick up one or two locals and give them a ride every few blocks or so just to figure out the directions.
She said she was “blessed” to be in South Africa at such a “stunning point in history,” and was surprised by the “culture of forgiveness and acceptance” that exists there. When Apartheid ended, blacks and even white Afrikaaners were ready to move on to a new, self-evident reality of reconciliation. The situation is different in Afghanistan, which she covered as a journalist several times, where people remember old grudges going back to the failed invasion of Alexander the Great. “Afghans have a strong sense of irony,” she said, “as a result of so many failed invasions. But even though it looks as if you have moved back into the 1500s when you go there, you have to remember that the Taliban has cell phones.”
Also on hand was a performance by actors John Getz (Blood Simple, Born on the Fourth of July, The Social Network) and John Vickery (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5) of scenes from Peter Goodchild’s The Real Dr. Strangelove, an L.A. Theatre Works production that dramatizes the collision between two atomic scientists of the 1950s, Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer. Alexander Street Press offers streaming audio of 300 L.A. Theatre Works performances in its Audio Drama collection.
Alexander Street Press President Stephen Rhind-Tutt announced at the breakfast that the company was 50% of the way toward bringing its streaming video collections to the iPad and iPhone (a delay was caused by Apple changing some of its technical specs). New video products from ASP include a launch of the complete Filmmakers Library Online collection in April, a body of interdisciplinary, issue-based documentary videos produced over the past 40 years; and World History in Video, an online collection of 1,750 global documentaries covering everything from early civilizations to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
