Keith David has won an Emmy for his voice-over narration of Ken Burns' The War. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presents several awards of excellence in "juried categories" before the Primetime Emmy Awards on Sept. 21. David won the award in 2005 for his narration of the PBS doc Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
posted at 11:11 AM EST
Marketing and research consultant John Sutton questions whether a CPB-backed project to recommend audience-growth strategies for public radio is on the right track. Directed by the Station Resource Group, the Grow the Audience project published an analysis of audience trends and began consulting with system leaders this summer. Sutton faults the initial work for "starting in the same place of past audience growth failures--age and ethnicity--and not with values and content."
posted at 9:39 AM EST
WGCU in Fort Myers, Florida, is the latest hybrid-format pubradio station to move classical music programming off its main broadcast service. On Sept. 8, the station launches a 24-hour all-classical HD Radio channel, primarily drawn from American Public Media's nationally syndicated service Classical 24. Its primary FM service picks up NPR's Fresh Air and the Diane Rehm Show, as well as the BBC's World Have Your Say. Syndicated jazz and other niche music programs air at night. "If you look for the audience for the kinds of program[s] we’re going to, you’ll find that audience is much greater than the classical music audience," says Kathleen Davey, g.m., in the Naples Daily News.
posted at 3:01 PM EST
Pandora, the Internet radio service that allows listeners to customize musical selections to their own tastes, is "approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," founder Tim Westergren tells the Washington Post. Under the royalty fee structure imposed on Web radio stations last year, Pandora projects that 70 percent of its total projected revenues of $25 million will go to royalty payments. The Post's TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington, an early advocate for Pandora, doesn't see the music industry backing down from their "absurd" position on webcasting royalties, and says perhaps Pandora should be sacrificed for the larger good of eventually bringing the music labels to their knees. "For now the labels want to squeeze more revenue out of Pandora and others," Arrington writes. "But when these companies start to go under and the bird in the hand disappears, they may regret their overly aggressive negotiating stance. It's time for the labels to die, and anything that cuts off another revenue stream is at least partially good."
posted at 11:15 AM EST
Leroy Sievers, TV journalist and author of NPR's My Cancer blog, died on Friday at the age of 53. Since NPR notified blog readers of his passing, more than 1050 remembrances and notes of condolence have been posted on the My Cancer page. NPR's obit and commemoration is here.
posted at 10:36 AM EST
On his blog, John Proffitt unveils the internal reorganization of Alaska Public Telecommunications, which got underway yesterday. “The primary collapse is to bring together radio and television and the web — to date just a subset of my duties — under a single manager (me),” he writes. The Anchorage-based joint licensee now comprises four divisions: streams, production, advancement and operation.
posted at 11:14 AM EST
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler questions why PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer paid little attention to John Edwards’ admission of an extramarital affair. “[T]he decision not to report the Edwards confirmation story struck me as both patronizing to people who depend on PBS for news, and journalistically mind-boggling,” Getler wrote in his weekly column. But the ombud also noted that most NewsHour viewers who wrote him on the subject favored the show’s decision not to cover the story when it first broke.
posted at 11:04 AM EST
Arbitron is gearing up to introduce its Personal People Meter ratings system in Los Angeles, and the LA Times reports on local broadcasters' reactions to the new methodology. "By and large, it's a more accurate way of monitoring how people truly do listen to the radio," Southern California Public Radio President Bill Davis tells the Times. "The overall audience is actually much larger, but time spent listening is going to be less." Arbitron reports data from its June trial run of PPM in Los Angeles here [PDF]. There's more PPM news on PRPD's website, where Arthur Cohen blogs about Arbitron's first people meter measurement of digital radio.
posted at 11:09 AM EST
PubForge, a group of veteran web programmers collaborating on open-source tools tailored to the needs of public broadcasters, is conducting a survey to determine what tools and resources programmers and producers need the most. The group's wiki already offers some applications and invites others to share expertise and collaborate on problem-solving. KJZZ webmaster John Tynan, a PubForge organizer, describes his objective for convening the group here.
posted at 10:22 AM EST