The world has changed since Orson Welle's radio theatre and "Bells of Europe", though many of us still produce the radio feature of the Sixties (or even the Forties) just less interesting, less skilled, less powerful, with a certain non-inspiring flavour of resignation.

Revolutions once in a while just happen. They are necessary. But as soon as political or aesthetic revolutions become institutional, they grow weak and old and fat. That happened to the radio feature too (...)
Some 30 years after P. L. Braun's "Chickens" we should ask ourselves: What have we done to keep radio alive ? Which are the new and useful tools of today's radio production ? Which is the acoustic and narrational language of our time ?

Some propositions:

In general, listeners are not interested in a genre like feature as such, but in TOPICS.

Setting the stage for CONTROVERSY - the competition between different opinions - is the best method for shaping a feature.

Alfred Andersch, the German post war documentarist, wrote: "Feature occupies the wide range between news and drama" - actually it should be both: NEWS and DRAMA.

Some of us believe, that the feature of the Nineties should be faster and shorter, more like a selection of video clips. In a recent invitation to a national Features and Documentaries Conference (I don't mention the inviting radio organization) I read the following Paragraph: