Boulderites organizing on-air World Party 2000

BOULDER When people in Tonga celebrate the New Year, Michael Aisner will probably be whooping and hollering right along with them.

But Aisner, director and one of three principals of World Party 2000, a radio show that will be sent to more than 100 radio stations throughout North America, might need to save his voice because he will celebrate 30 more times before the night is over.

Aisner, and principals David Rahn and John Bradley, will be working Dec. 31, 1999, from Koop Studios in Boulder, packaging two-minute radio reports from correspondents around the world in 31 time zones. Programming will start with Tonga in the South Pacific at 4 a.m. Mountain Standard Time and end in North America on the west coast at midnight Pacific Standard Time.

“Everywhere in the world at some time they’ll be celebrating the New Year,” Aisner says. “I will probably will be one of the few people on earth to have talked to someone from every time zone at midnight.”

But World Party 2000 will be different from traditional Time Square mass-style celebrations, says John Bradley, creator of World Party 2000 and co-owner of SBR Creative, a Boulder-based radio consulting firm.

“It’s right here, right now,” says Bradley. “It’s everything radio does best, and it’s only going to happen once in a lifetime.”

Correspondents will deliver news about the Millennium’s world events from, among other locations, a birthing room in Tokyo, a recording studio in Paris, an ancient temple in Nepal and from a village in Greenland accessible only by dog sled.

“We think it’s a pretty unique concept,” says Rahn, also a co-owner of SBR Creative. Bradley and Rahn, who once worked at Boulder radio station KBCO-FM, were instrumental in the radio station’s success in the early 1980s.

Aisner says it’s too early to say which radio stations will carry the broadcasts because World Party 2000 is finalizing who the sponsor will be. But Rahn adds that several radio stations have expressed interest in the programming.

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