In
a small bungalow in South Austin, Frieda Werden slides on a pair of headphones and revels in the
rhythm of the voice. She loves the power of words, the energy that comes from a
story told by a woman in South Africa one minute, a woman in South Korea the
next. Using state-of-the-art audio equipment, Werden mixes and weaves these
stories, and countless others, into tightly edited 30-minute news programs that
glide across radio airwaves in the form of WINGS — Women’s International News
Gathering Service.
The Austin-based WINGS celebrated its 10th year in May — a major feat for any
feminist news outfit, certainly for one that spent its early years struggling
in the San Francisco living room of Werden and her late partner, Katherine
Davenport, a longtime radio producer and ardent news junkie.
“It was pretty hard,” Werden recalls of those hand-to-mouth days. “But we ate
a lot of beans and I did part-time work as a tele-fundraiser for the San
Francisco Symphony. There was one point at the end of ’87 when I thought we
would have to give it up. We were just about to run out of money when we got a
major grant — $10,000 from the Skaggs Foundation — and that pulled us
through.”
After Davenport’s death from leukemia in 1992, Werden packed up WINGS and
moved back home to Austin, determined to keep their labor of love airborne. By
that time, Werden and WINGS had already become well-acquainted with the
generosity of Austin-area resident Genevieve Vaughan, the founder of the
Foundation for a Compassionate Society and arguably one of the most altruistic
donors around where common cause is concerned. Werden goes a step further by
proclaiming Vaughan “the largest single funder of alternative women’s media
projects in the world.”
Vaughan still provides substantial funding to WINGS and Werden draws a salary
from Vaughan’s Foundation for work that includes training women in radio
production. The training ground takes place at WATER — Women’s Access to
Electronic Resources (see accompanying story) — a project founded and funded
by the Foundation to groom women in the use of audio, visual, and electronic
media. After learning in WATER’s audio studio, which Werden helped design, some
women continue to ply their newfound skills as WINGS interns.
One woman under Werden’s tutelage, Lisa Hayes, proved to be a quick study and
now divides her time between both projects. “I started out going to WATER and
then everything kind of took off with WINGS,” she says. “I’d always wanted to
learn to use electronic equipment because I was interested in documentary work.
But I never had access to that kind of equipment and I just figured that, since
I didn’t have money, there would be absolutely no way for me to learn. For me,
WATER provided a way to have that access.”
To Werden, those kinds of success stories serve to reinforce the value of
women’s media and similar collectives that thrive on the “by women, about
women, for women” school of thought. That concept has its rightful place in
WINGS’ newscasts, says Werden, because the same themes of human rights, health,
labor, economics, and violence against women provide common threads for women
in all corners of the world, not just, say, the gals in Winnipeg, Manitoba, or
Lexington, Kentucky.
“The international women’s movement is constantly making news that isn’t being
covered by the mainstream media,” says Werden, who also produces the Women’s
News Hour on Austin’s cable access television. The universal appeal of
WINGS’ topics is borne out in the 130 stations in the United States and abroad
that carry the programs. Werden, by the way, cheerfully reports that men
account for half of the orders made for cassette copies of programs.
Werden’s video endeavors take her to cable access studios each Friday for a
live weekly news show, 6-7pm. With two or three guests on each week, topics
have ranged from high-tech pollution to computer keyboards and carpal tunnel
syndrome, to the mistreatment of elephants at zoos and circuses. Doing a live
show each week is not without its embarrassing production moments, but Werden
brushes off goof-ups in good humor. “That’s the thing about live shows — every
little mistake is right out there for everyone to see,” she says.
While video offers some nice visual advantages in delivering news reports,
Werden’s first love is the airwaves, for which she produces WINGS
programs using two different formats. A weekly show features a single-story,
30-minute format, while a second arrangement presents a full-fledged newscast
containing multiple stories from around the globe. The latter format is offered
only once a month because of its time-consuming nature. At any rate, the
newscasts are smooth and pithy and pleasing to the ear — evidence of producer
Werden’s editing skills and her flair for drama (Werden is a one-time
performance poet). What sets WINGS apart from National Public Radio shows is
that reporters inject very little into their stories, allowing the women being
interviewed to speak for themselves.
WINGS’ 10th anniversary newscast that aired in May, for example, gave an El
Paso woman the floor to talk about a little-heard-of emergency contraceptive
that can prevent pregnancy after sex. Another story gave us Cecile Richards,
who talked about her efforts to counter the religious right through the Texas
Freedom Network, which got its start in Richards’ living room. Then another
story examined child labor practices in India’s agricultural and textile
industries. The flip side of the anniversary program carried Gloria Steinem’s
speech on feminist family values, presented at the Austin Convention Center in
March.
To those who question why WINGS doesn’t balance its news stories with “the
other side,” Werden has a ready response: “The mainstream version is already
out there. They’ve already had their say. The women’s side of the story serves
to round out the picture of the world, and it’s constantly a revelation.”
Indeed, Werden’s endeavors in women’s history taught her that much. As the
associate curator of the Texas Women’s History Project from 1979-1981, Werden
learned that women were the primary community builders in Texas, yet their work
gained scant attention in the record books.
Werden has made certain that WINGS’ own contributions don’t fall by the
wayside in years to come. The Center for American History at the University of
Texas houses the WINGS archive. That’s not to say WINGS is anywhere close to
being history. The news service, after all, holds the distinction of outliving
the so-called women’s decade of the Eighties. Werden says three factors
contribute to WINGS’ longevity: continued station interest, continued funding
and, of course, stubbornness — all of which help feed the project’s modest but
stable budget of $30,000 each year. On the face of it, WINGS is a mighty voice
to be reckoned with. “We hold significant power,” says Werden, “to put
information out there.” n
WINGS airs locally at 5pm Tuesdays on KOOP (91.7 FM) and at noon Sundays on
KAZI (88.7 FM). The news service can also be picked up on short-wave radio, and
on the Web at
http://www.wings.org. Women’s News Hour airs on Fridays at 6pm on Cable Access
Channel 10.
This article appears in September 20 • 1996 and September 20 • 1996 (Cover).
