Forging a format: Advertising, attention and intimacy on the Mary Margaret McBride Program, 1941–54
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each weekday at one o’clock, American radio personality Mary Margaret McBride (1899–1976) chatted on the air with guests for 45 minutes. Her programme combined advertising, editorial content and interviews in a unique manner, and her relationship with listeners was experienced as close and personal. Building on radio scholars’ interest in the ‘intimacy’ of the medium, this article investigates the form and structure of McBride’s programme, how her listeners engaged with it, and the specific techniques and stylistic choices which contributed to these feelings of familiarity. Based on listener letters, newspaper clippings and the programme itself, this work explores the ways in which McBride and her listeners together developed an atmosphere of intimacy on her programme, notes how these relationships were deeply enmeshed in consumer culture, and suggests that McBride’s programme was a part of an emergent cultural formation, articulating novel structures of feeling which have since become dominant across media forms and have persisted over time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".