radio Archives | Nicholas Kralev

Questioning conventional airfare wisdom

I’m tired of all the “low-fare tips” in the media — both hearing and reading about them, and giving them myself. Yes, I’m guilty of feeding the media’s hunger for quick “Top 5 tips,” and not happy about having to dumb down a very complex airfare system, which is actually more misleading than helpful.

Those of us who are trained and experienced journalists know very well how to make a specific or even technical topic accessible to a large general audience. I’ve been doing that during my entire professional career. So it’s understandable that editors and producers across the United States want to write stories or produce TV and radio segments that are easily understood by most of their audience…

Talking air travel for an hour on NPR

Air travel is one of those topics that no radio or TV show can go wrong with — it’s certain to touch a nerve with many people and provoke numerous comments and questions. That’s what happened yesterday on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, which I was on for the first time.

I always thought the reason to be invited would be to talk about foreign policy on the Friday news roundup, where Diane has three Washington journalists discussing issues from the passing week. That never happened, but a couple of weeks ago I suggested to one of the show’s producers that the summer is a good time for a program on travel…

Who thought spying on U.S. was dead?

Many people, including famous ex-KGB spies, were shocked this week that Russia is still spying on the United States. Really? Did we forget that even Washington’s allies have been known to engage in such activities?

As I said in three radio and TV interviews, the real surprise in the latest case is that those people were willing to risk so much to gain so little. It appears that they sent no classified information or any other intelligence secrets to Moscow in the decade they operated. In fact, most of the information they were tasked with collecting can be obtained in perfectly legal ways.

Brand USA falters

If you’ve traveled overseas in the past few years and watched CNN International in your hotel room or at an airport, you must have seen the commercial promoting travel to Croatia that runs several times a day.

More recently, newly independent Montenegro, another part of former Yugoslavia, has been showing off its tourist attractions on the air. It’s only natural for small countries to do that, but even Germany has promoted its tourism on National Public Radio. When was the last time you saw or heard an ad campaign aimed at foreign visitors to the United States? For many years, both government and travel industry officials assumed that Brand USA was a sufficient incentive for millions of foreigners to flock to the new world and spend even more millions of dollars here…