Transom.org Aims to Spread Storytelling Skills

Sue Mell insists that her friend was murdered. "Jay" was found slumped over in the front seat of his car, throat cut, wallet missing. The police say it was suicide, a clear case of a man who had lost it all in the stock market and hoped to bail his family out of debt with his life insurance.

Hannah Palin's mother suffered a brain aneurysm. After months in a coma, an entirely different person awoke and took charge of her mother's body. This new woman liked sex, sang all the time and didn't worry about cleaning up. Palin had to learn how to connect with the "new" mother who had taken the old one's place.

These personal accounts -- Mell's "Girl Detectives" and Palin's "The Day My Mother's Head Exploded" -- can be heard on Transom.org, a three-year-old Web site that hopes to introduce new voices to the world of radio.

Veteran public radio producer Jay Allison conceived Transom as a forum where novices -- he calls them "citizen storytellers" -- can learn how to produce "radio" segments and have their stories heard by a wider audience. These amateurs are, in a sense, producers-in-training -- creating original audio content for distribution over the Internet.

The concept was judged so unique and Transom's execution so innovative that he will be honored with a Peabody at an awards ceremony today in New York, the first stand-alone Web site to be honored with one of electronic news media's most distinguished prizes.

Though Peabodys have gone to Internet sites in the past, "they have been given to related Web sites, ancillary portions to a radio program," said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards program. An award category for a "free-standing Web site" was created several years ago but never granted. "If we don't find anything worthy of a Peabody, we don't have it," Newcomb said. That changed in 2004.

"The design was outstanding. The content was sophisticated without being inaccessible," Newcomb said of Transom. "It provided an entry point [for beginners]. Actually put material online. You could actually listen to it as radio. It is truly outstanding, easy to make the decision."

Technology as Empowerment

Allison, the 50-something man who envisioned Transom, knows radio's strengths and pitfalls. His own work won him the Edward R. Murrow Award in 1996 and four Peabodys. But "the possibilities of community of affinity" offered by emerging technologies like the Internet became apparent to him in the 1980s, when he was a member of The Well (thewell.com), a dial-up subscription-based conferencing system launched in 1984 by Stewart Brand from his houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., now recognized as one of the world's first online communities. Allison used thewell to host a radio conference. His oldest daughter was sick at the time, and he found support and advice from members on thewell's parenting board.

Allison's interests kept him "at the intersection of public radio and the Internet." When a friend, author Bill McKibben, thought of creating a forum where new radio works and producers could surface through competition, Allison mulled it over for a while before deciding on a different model.

He envisioned "an invitational community spirit -- something that adheres to the early idea of thewell -- where you could access tools, ideas [as well as] practice. We would invite the great wise elderly and wonderful new voices to share what we know and what we do -- a baton passing back and forth."