EIES for the Blind
EIES, the Electronic Information and Education Service, is a radio broadcasting service for the blind in northern New Jersey. It uses 150 volunteers to read newspapers, magazines and books over a special frequency out of Seton Hall University in South Orange. Listeners as far as 25 miles away get a special radio in exchange for a small donation. They can get the news all day long in their kitchens, living rooms or bedrooms.
EIES has been doing this for 34 years and not much about the process has changed.
Volunteers read for two hours at a time, which adds up to 112 hours of broadcasting a week. They don’t read from computer screens and they don’t even skip over the weekly sales circulars. They read the paper in its entirety. So in an age where newspapers are dying, EIES has been called by some volunteers, “the last bastion” for newspapers.
A lot of the volunteer readers are older and may not be comfortable with computer screens. But that’s not the only reason EIES sticks with the paper. The newspaper layout makes it easier to read the news in some sort of order, starting with the front page and the day’s headlines. And they read it word for word. So in an age when technology has taken over, EIES looks to the past.
The EIES studio, which is in an old building down the street from Seton Hall, is a kind of tribute to the newspaper. There are stacks of them on the floor. There’s rustling and page turning and a sense that newspapers will be around, at least at EIES, for decades to come.