It was in elementary school when Lorna White said she decided on becoming an audio engineer.
The Illinois State University alumna from Livingston County said as a child, she’d stick her head right between a set of speakers and listen.
“I would listen to the spatial spread of the audio and [ask] like, ‘How do they do this, and why is this instrument over here, and why is there over on the right, why is this on the left?’” White said.
White is the technical director of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, NPR’s weekly quiz program that will tape Thursday in Normal to help mark WGLT’s 60th anniversary, in an event that will draw thousands to ISU's Braden Auditorium. The morning before the show's taping, she met with about nine ISU School of Communication students to share how she and her production staff get ready for the show.
She said her work on Wait Wait is done as part of a small team of about a dozen staff members, including writers, producers and audio engineers. The Normal-based NPR member station WGLT is also where White’s public radio career began.
“I thought I wanted to do records, and so [WGLT] opened me up to doing more than that… to doing news, to doing classical music, to doing jazz and bluegrass, to a whole community of public radio that I didn’t know existed when I was growing up. To discover that when I was 18 was really, really cool,” White said.
White said she came to ISU as a music performance major because she wanted to be an audio engineer, but she was unsure of how to get there.
“It was obvious to my music professors I didn’t like to practice,” said White. She said Julian Dawson, a late School of Music faculty member who directed the Bloomington-Normal Symphony at the time, took her to WGLT and introduced her around.
Public radio beginnings
After filing records in WGLT's record library for three months, White said she moved into a student announcing position in the evenings, and switched into studying mass communications.
After finishing school, she said she decided she wanted to go to Washington, D.C., and apply for work at NPR.
“It took me awhile because there was no internet,” White said. “You had to walk into the lobby every day and sign in, and go to the third floor and look at the binder of jobs that they had on the desk and see if anything fit.”
Eventually a position opened up in the tape center. That’s where White said NPR duplicated tapes for its member stations for non-urgent cultural content, symphonies, and public affairs programming.
“That’s how I got my foot in the door,” she said.
White said working at WGLT was really fun.
"There were two phone lists at [WGLT] at the time — there was grownups, and there was students. Some of the grownups became some of my really great friends throughout my life,” White said. “They always like to say that they were too stupid to know that they couldn't do the things that they did."
Recording concerts by the Bloomington-Normal Symphony took White to high places inside Braden Auditorium.
“I remember sitting on the catwalk, listening to the symphony, you know, looking down on them… it was so cool, and it's amazing, because I'm afraid of heights, that I even did that,” White said.
Other production credits of hers include Ewing Manor events, station fundraising, and bluegrass performances hosted by Terry Bush as part of Alive ‘n’ Picking programming.
“It was all just so eye-opening to this farm kid from Livingston County,” White said.
Fewer worries in Wait Wait
As a technical director for Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, White said she oversees all technical aspects of the show. That ranges from tracking microphones, coordinating stage crews and keeping their road kit stocked up and maintained. Their other production kit lives full-time at the show’s homebase: the Studebaker Theater at the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
Production technology has certainly changed over 28 years of working on the show. To White, that means less problems for putting Wait Wait together.
In the beginning, White said they had to install telephone lines for listeners to call in to play the game. They installed high-quality digital lines so that they could send the audio back in real time to their Chicago studio for editing the day after it happens.
“Hotels at the time didn’t have Wi-Fi, so those ISDN lines were also used to set up computer network to get behind the NPR firewall, so that the writers could do their jobs,” White said. “That has all gone away with this newfangled technology that we have now, where Wi-Fi is practically everywhere.
“Now we have to worry about, ‘Did a forklift go through a case? Did the console power up? … Do we have enough microphones?’”
Speaking with ISU students on Thursday, White said the show uses omnidirectional DPA microphones.
“We chose these over the cardioids, which is a tighter pattern, because when you get a cardioid microphone condenser close up to somebody’s mouth and it’s not positioned perfectly, you’re going to get p-pops, you’re going to breaths, all kinds of noise you don’t want in your production,” White said. “And so, because our turnaround is so fast, we can’t sit around in front of a computer and tweak it within an inch of its life. So, we’ve got to get it right in the mix.”
White said the field of media and radio is changing almost by the day. Compared to when she started her career, she said it’s so vastly different.
“The people coming in today have to know a lot about everything,” White said, “whereas when I came in, it was all very specialized. I could focus on audio — and now it's audio, it's video, it's social media, it's everything: content, content, content.
“With the loss of federal funding for public radio, it's a lot more of how much can you do with little to no money, and it's really tough.”
She advised students focused on audio-video studies to know your theory, signal flow, cameras, lights and digital audio software. White added they should recognize that working on something for three weeks isn’t necessarily going to make it better.
“When we do Wait Wait, we tape on a Thursday night. It goes out to stations Saturday morning. We don't have a lot of time. We mix live down to two channels. There's no multi-track. It goes right into the hands of the producers. They edit it for content, and then it comes to Robert Neuhaus and myself, and we go over it for technical reasons and to make sure that it meets spec, and make a broadcast and make a podcast out of it, and do it quickly.”
She suggested students might need to focus on script writing, as well as their technical skills.
“Be confident in what you do,” White said. "Watch everybody else you work with, and pick up the best habits from them, and leave the worst ones behind."
Backstage banter
Having comedians for coworkers also comes with its unique on-the-job quirks.
White said “everybody is really funny… there isn’t anyone on the staff that does not have a terrific sense of humor.”
She said coworker pranks have included passing a walker around from person to person as staff birthdays come up.
“Doug Berman notorious for pranks," White said. "If he found out what your hotel room was on a road show, the bar tab would get charged to your room.”
Holding previous experience from working on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, White said she’s the moral compass of Wait Wait. If a joke goes a little bit too far, she said she speaks up and tries to nix it.
She said she, along with audio engineer Robert Neuhaus, have contributed a couple of jokes to the show over the years. White added host Peter Sagal isn’t the funniest man in the room, and he doesn’t try to be.
Sagal is still very busy and constantly writing, she said.
“He's a very good interviewer, and he brings out the best in people, and it's really, really amazing to watch,” said White.
