By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Greg on FishbowlLA, January 2007
In late January 2007, ahead of that year’s Academy Awards, FishbowlLA ran a light Oscar-week thought experiment imagining what an ordinary person might say given the acceptance-speech limelight. The piece was a piece of FBLA-NPR-collaboration whimsy.
Then
The piece was a small example of the lighter end of FishbowlLA’s editorial register — an Oscar-week humor piece structured around the fantasy of the acceptance-speech podium.
The NPR connection placed the piece in the context of FishbowlLA’s collaborations with public radio. NPR’s Day to Day program (a partnership with Slate, produced in part out of NPR West in Culver City) was one of the shows operating at that public-radio-and-digital intersection.
Now
NPR’s Day to Day was canceled in 2009 amid the recession-era public-radio budget cuts. But the broader category of public-radio digital experimentation evolved into something far larger: the podcast era.
The podcast boom that began in earnest around 2014 substantially transformed public radio. NPR became one of the dominant forces in podcasting — Planet Money, Pop Culture Happy Hour, Code Switch, and many others built audiences far beyond what the terrestrial-radio model had reached.
The 2007 piece reads now as a small, light artifact of a specific public-radio moment — before the podcast era turned tentative digital experiments into one of the most successful reinventions in modern media.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.