into a major national role. Since the advent of radio, the gag 
has supplanted the joke, not because of gag writers, but 
because radio is a fast hot medium that has also rationed the 
reporter’s space for stories.

     Jean Shepherd of WOR in New York regards radio as a new 
medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly. The mike 
is his pen and paper. His audience and their knowledge of the 
daily events of the world provide his characters, his scenes, and 
moods. It is his idea that, just as Montaigne was the first to 
use the page to record his reactions to the new world of printed 
books, he is the first to use radio as an essay and novel form 
for recording our common awareness of a totally new world of 
universal human participation in all human events, private or 
collective.