Many in the public radio community were surprised last July to learn that the well-respected head of Chicago Public Media, Torey Malatia, left the station after a falling out with the station’s governing board. (See account in Current.)

Malatia not only presided over the home station for such national programs as This American Life (with Ira Glass) and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (with Peter Sagal), but he also presided over one of the great local public media news stations, WBEZ, and its experimental offspring, Vocalo (90.7 FM).

Malatia appeared at the Public Radio Programming Conference in Atlanta in mid-September. There, at a gathering of producers (members of AIR), he delivered a nice talk in which he calls all of us in public media “makers,” (a riff on AIR’s theme of building a community of creative content makers), but expanded on the notion — that through our innovation, we are also makers of our future.

Here is the talk. (Thanks to PRPD for posting it to SoundCloud. Photo credit: PRX)