“In most of my 40 years of radio-making feature has been a wide, solid, well-bordered road – coming from the past and (with necessary repairs and improvements now and then) leading into a mere endless future. For myself, "feature" and "future" have been synonymous words. The highway called Feature had a variety of different lanes, but in general the direction was rather common sense.
Since a couple of years feature-people, more or less confused, are gathering at a crossroad with road signs in many directions. Inscriptions say: "Programs On Demand", "Interactive Formats", "User Generated Contents", "Back to the good old Factional Documentary", "Investigative Concepts", "Faction" or "Docu-Fiction", "Interactivity", "High End for Audio Freaks" etc. - lots of Stairways to Heaven - and all of them fading away in a distance, swallowed by the mist of our unknown medial future.
As an AUTHOR with a singular voice, own points of view and certain aesthetic preferences I'm asking myself : Which of those diversions will offer the best chances for my professional survival and for what I understand as "radio feature" or "extended journalism" in general ? My personal aim is to rescue the CORE of all that. Those essentials are: Single voices (First person singular) amongst the medial cacophony; the fantasy stimulating strength of sound in it's own rights - no multi-medial applications and distractions for example; radical debate–provoking positions; personal languages and elaborated text & sound-compositions.
I'm excited by new possibilities and helpful tools in the process of radio-making (which I use excessively, "being digital" since 1995). But: The medium is NOT the message. And I refuse to consider myself as an appendix of industry-steered "social" trends of communication.
Where to find a shelter for my individualistic, selfish, zeitgeist-ignoring concept?"
Helmut Kopetzky, freelancer, Germany
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