Within a few hours of composer John Cage's death last August, free-lance producer Barrett Golding, in Bozeman, Montana, was talking to an editor at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. The editor wanted to know if Golding's previously assigned September birthday tribute to Cage could be reworked as an on-air obituary.

"Fortunately," recalls Golding, "I was running uncharacteristically ahead of schedule." That Saturday, the Cage memorial became a part of All Things Considered, the network's acclaimed news magazine, which goes out to some 1.5 million listeners.

Unlike such familiar NPR staff members as Cokie Roberts, Bob Edwards, and Susan Stamberg, Golding is one of several hundred journalists who toil in relative obscurity yet are largely responsible for public radio's distinctive, award-winning sound. "I think that the work of non-station-based independent producers is frequently what listeners remember most and best about NPR," says Golding, a onetime ski bum.

"Free-lancers often provide half of what my desk puts on the air, and sometimes even more" says Larry Abramson, NPR's national desk editor. "They produce some of the most creative, daring, and unusual things we broadcast."

John Dinges, managing editor of news at NPR, says that "independents provide some of the best long-form documentary and arts programming available," citing an example Sandy Tolan's recent series on indigenous cultures in the Americas, and David Isay's inside look at prisons.

Some NPR-distributed shows, such as the weekly environmental series, Living on Earth, and the news and arts program Crossroads, are almost entirely produced by independents. Over at NPR's rival, Minneapolis-based American Public Radio (APR), independents contribute heavily to Marketplace, National Native News, and Soundprint,B among other shows.

If free-lance radio journalists are meeting with success in getting their work aired, they're having a hard time on another front -- getting decent pay for it. What's missing is money.

NPR typically pays $ 55 for each minute of air time produced by an independent. Even the best free-lancer, working on assignment, cannot expect more than $ 100 per minute for stories that rarely exceed seven minutes. A brief story can take several days to create; the network, meanwhile, expects producers to buy their own equipment, cover their own expenses, and create a finished product in their own studios. MonitorRadio, a unit of the Christian Science Publishing Society that produces several daily news programs distributed by APR, pays $ 50 per produced minute for "unlimited and perpetual rights" to audio material. APR's Marketplace, a weekday business news magazine, has a $ 45-per-minute minimum.

NPR has not approved an across-the-board acquisition payment increase in more than six years. A 1991 proposal to boost per-minute minimum rates from $ 45 to $ 75 was knocked down, and the network's producers were rebuffed in their demands for standardized kill fees.

In November, many of the 400 members of the Association of Independents in Radio came together in Fort Worth for the first national radio producers' conference in eight years. According to results of an AIR-sponsored survey released at the gathering, some of the top contributors to NPR and other public radio services are seriously considering a change in career as a direct result of the industry's meager payment rates.

AIR's survey found members' single most important organizational interest was in having their collective needs represented before public radio networks and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the quasi-governmental organization that supports public radio and television. So far, the group has stopped short of advocating unionization.

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