All three proved key reads I returned to again and again, in a growing stack of materials. And then there was dynamo business reporter James Ledbetter’s important work from 1998 about the economics of public broadcasting, Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting. Original NPR producer Jack Mitchell’s book, Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio, offered parallel insights. Michael McCauley had written a doctoral dissertation later published in 2005 as NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio, and for it he’d interviewed dozens of people, including some who were now deceased. Then, I scoured for the historians who came before me. (Nina Totenberg had been too busy breaking stories on the justice beat to have written a book, though publishers had been clamoring for her to do so for years.) From my previous books, I’d learned how essential the “back matter” - the oft-overlooked footnotes and bibliographies - in these books could be. Down the rabbit hole I went in search of material.Īfter firing off letters to the three living founding mothers to ask them to speak with me, I amassed the books Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts had written. Now came the tough part: determining the arc of the story - as with my CNN book, I was more interested in the creation and early years, not an all-encompassing tome - and researching and writing the book. Time was of the essence in order to get the book out by spring of 2021. Luckily, the editor trusted me enough to plow in without this formality.
Publishers usually don’t buy ideas unless they’re accompanied by a detailed outline and chapter samples that take months or years to craft. What about telling the story of the founding of the network through the lens of her and her friends, the founding mothers? Yes, I said, and as I dug around a bit, I realized that NPR’s 50th anniversary was another upcoming media milestone - and one in which Cokie played a key part.
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