Ruth Seymour, who built a successful but insistently idiosyncratic Los Angeles station and Internet music source with go-it-alone intuition, announced this week she’ll retire at the end of February. She’s 74 and will have managed Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM for 32 years. Before that, she headed Pacifica’s L.A. station, KPFK. ...
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The PBS documentary The Botany of Desire, which aired Oct. 28 [2009], started “with a terrific book,” says producer/director Michael Schwarz. A long time ago. His friend Michael Pollan, author of the bestseller of the same name, sent him a manuscript in October 2000 ... Pictured: Schwarz, Pollan and their most troublesome stars: a cannabis plant.
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Ellen Rocco on NPR: 
She was angry at the network when she joined its board seven years ago.Now she wants to work with its new leaders.
Michael Couzens on LPFM: NPR should have better ways to compete than thwarting new noncom radio stations.
Craig Curtis on Arbitron's new meters: Radio seeing a new normal — lower ratings (with no guaranteed cume bump)
Pubradio will sketch workable economics, a case for funding: Having heard two prescriptions for American journalism that recommended major surgery on public broadcasting, leaders in the field most often had two responses to proposals that called for the field to shift focus to local news. ¶ Leading with a consistent “yes,” pubcasters generally endorsed the “broader vision of public service media” ...
Media business models nowadays aren’t a great fit for the model of democracy that relies on journalists and other civic busybodies to help keep the citizenry informed and the politicians accountable. ¶ Look at St. Louis, a mid-size middle-American news market. There the business model of daily newspapers is faltering for the Post-Dispatch . . . Pictured: Public TV station builds space for video editing by citizen journalists. At right above: KETC chief Galmiche.
PBS will pick up where Reading Rainbow left off, launching a new annual writing and drawing contest for children in cahoots with public TV stations around the country. Buffalo, N.Y.-based WNED, the series co-producer for 26 years, will produce and co-sponsor the new PBS Kids Go! Writers Contest.
A compromise in the long-running dispute over low-power FM stations has put more momentum behind the Local Community Radio Act of 2009, a bill that would largely remove channel-spacing rules that have blocked new LPFMs in urban areas. ¶ But NPR, speaking for its full-power member stations, added a wrinkle to its position, suggesting that the FCC reimpose the spacing rules if and when digital HD Radio becomes the dominant radio technology. ...
Michael Couzens writes: NPR should have better ways to compete than thwarting new noncom radio stations.
Local and watchdog news roles most vital, report says: A study on the future of American journalism commissioned by the Columbia University j-school sharply criticizes public broadcasting for failing to develop the local newsgathering capacity that would enable it to deliver on its mission to inform the public. ¶ “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” published last week and co-authored by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, who teaches at the University of Arizona, and Michael Schudson of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, recommends new mechanisms to support “accountability journalism” — the in-depth watchdog reporting that they believe is most essential to a functioning democracy ...
A multimedia news organization committed to public service journalism will begin producing regional coverage of the Chicago area and Illinois for The New York Times next month. ¶ WTTW, one of the few public TV stations with a longstanding tradition of producing a nightly news report, is a founding partner in the Chicago News Cooperative ...
Maybe, says CPB's inspector general: Could CPB have avoided the public collision of wills over one of the America at a Crossroads documentaries that tainted its $20 million project in 2007 about the post-9/11 world? ¶ Determining that, in effect, was the assignment that Cheryl Halpern, then chair of the CPB Board, gave more than two years ago to the corporation’s semi-autonomous inspector general, Kenneth Konz. (Pictured: a radical Islamist who issued a death sentence on a filmmaker in France swats away a camera.)
Rather than going independent, the Quad Cities’ fiscally distressed pubTV station, WQPT, will move its license to a different higher-ed institution. ¶ Now it’s expected to be licensed to four-year Western Illinois University, which recently won state capital funding to start building an expanded campus in Moline, on the Mississippi almost 100 miles north of WIU’s home campus in Macomb. ...
Knight Commission’s vision of public media: ‘More local, more inclusive, more interactive’Citing public broadcasting’s “mixed history” in providing local news and information, a blue-ribbon panel has called on the field to “move quickly toward a broader vision of public service media.” ¶ In its final report released Oct. 2 [2009], the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy envisions a public media realm that would be “more local, more inclusive and more interactive"... Bay Area, NPR Argo projects: two ways to expand local journalismPublic broadcasters announced two experiments in local news reporting, both prompted by the decline of newspapers, both nonprofit and supported by philanthropy and both designed to reach most users through the Internet, wired or wireless... |
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North to Alaska but, alas, no Hawaii: Ken Burns’s 4-year-old daughter Olivia eats her meals atop a U.S. map so she can track her father. The documentarian has been absent from his family in Walpole, N.H., more than 200 days this year — so far. Before the broadcast of his National Parks series in late September, the last time Burns had been home to sup with Olivia was Aug. 21. . . Pictured: A fan greets Burns on the street at the indie doc Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Colo., in May. (Photo: Gus Gusciora, Mountainfilm.)
Many months into the recession, pubcasting’s fiscal 2008 revenue from investments and “other” revenues had declined by $167 million from the previous year, according to CPB’s recently released annual system revenue report. ¶ The drop in “other” revenues pulled down the system’s total revenue by $73.4 million, or 2.5 percent, to $2.85 billion.
...while African American consortium recasts its midday show with newsman Tony Cox. Two daily public radio programs for African American audiences have risen from the ashes of News and Notes, a talk show that NPR cancelled in March. But acrimony over plans, funding and personalities involved in the midday programs has split the African American Public Radio Consortium ... Pictured: Dyson at left, Cox at right. (Photo: Edward Cates.)
When they come to town, these new Arbitron figures are the only ones that matter, says Craig Curtis of Southern California Public Radio.
Radio seeing a new normal — lower ratings (with no guaranteed cume bump)
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Ruth Seymour, who built a successful but insistently idiosyncratic Los Angeles station and Internet music source with go-it-alone intuition, announced this week she’ll retire at the end of February. She’s 74 and will have managed Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM for 32 years. Current's story.
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PBS is part of Google's new initiative to make millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired users. The search engine company unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to the videos, reports the New York Times. The technology captions only English, but users may take advantage of Google's automatic translation system to read in 51 languages. Initially YouTube is focusing on providing captions for educational channels such as PBS and National Geographic, and videos from universities including Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia and MIT. More will come later.
posted at 11:24 AM EST
Native Public Media and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative today released a study, "New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses." The report melds data on tech use among 120 tribes, and case studies of six successful projects. Video of the report's Washington presentation here.
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Details on most sessions at January's NETA conference are now online. The confab is at the M Resort in Henderson, Nev., about 15 miles from Sin City.
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Two pubTV films are on the short list for Documentary Feature Academy Award nominations, PBS says. Both docs, Food, Inc. on POV and Garbage Dreams on Independent Lens, will air next year. Both now advance to voting by the Documentary Branch Academy. For a full list of films moving foward, see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website. Oscar nods will be announced Feb. 2, 2010, with the 82nd annual Academy Awards show on March 7.
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Another nonprofit new media site has sprouted, this time in Florida, reports Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The online paper, 83 Degrees, is published by Detroit's Issue Media, which has created several other online pubs. It's edited by Diane Egner, former content director at Tampa NPR affiliate WUSF. Local governments, universities and corporations are funding the effort. "“If you’re watching PBS, you know there are certain underwriters for certain programs," Egner told . Each of our partners is underwriting specific issues that we cover.” The site's coverage will include the new economy, innovations, investments, the environment.
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The Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday passed the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), its version of the satellite reauthorization bill, according to Broadcasting & Cable. The bill allows satellite operators to carry out-of-market network TV station signals for viewers who don't received an adequate signal from their nearby station. It's an issue the Association of Public Television Stations has been working on for several years, much of the time spent in negotiations with the DISH Network. "APTS is pleased with the firm action taken today by the Senate Commerce Committee to end the discriminatory behavior by DISH Network against local public television stations," APTS President Larry Sidman said in a statement. APTS has reached agreements with other satellite providers to carry local pubTV stations.
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PubTV's Design Squad show was on hand to launch T-shirts into the air at last week's Education Technology Showcase on Cap Hill. The fun with T-shirts showed how engineering could be "used to solve real-world problems," reports TMCNet's Education Technology page. In attendance were Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senators Patty Murray, Jeff Bingaman, Kay Hagan and Ted Kaufman and other officials. The event, sponsored by the Education Technology Directors Association, highlighted programs funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Sesame Street's Grover now has his own app. And Grover's Number Special is the first official Sesame Street app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It includes original Sesame video and "encourages visual discrimination, counting and number recognition," according to a Sesame Workshop press release. In it, restaurant waiter Grover catches and counts ingredients to whip up a meal for an impatient customer. Users tip their device back and forth to help Grover catch the foods. "Oh, it is so much fun," Grover said in the release. "Please play my little app--the customer is getting very hungry!" It's $2.99 from from the App Store or iTunes.
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Peconic Public Broadcasting, which recently purchased WLIU pubradio (Current, Oct. 13, 2009; background, Aug. 24) from Long Island University, has won approval for the station to remain in its current studios through March 31, according to the East Hampton Press. The purchase is expected to be finalized in January so the extension provides time to find a permanent location.
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WNET.org and Brooklyn web developer Tierra Innovation Inc. promoted their WordPress CMS Toolkit at the regional WordCamp NYC last week. Their first four freely available, open-source plugins for WordPress are available online now and “lots more” are coming, says Tierra President Jamie Trowbridge. Also coming are templates for a content management system abstracted from the ones used by WNET.org to build 50 sites for its shows, stations and projects, Trowbridge tells Current. Outside of West 33rd Street, Dallas’s KERA recently used the toolkit to build a site for KXT-FM, its new sister station (“Music to the Core”), and Chicago’s WTTW created one for its coproduction with Brian Boyer, Retirement Revolution. Among the available WP plugin modules: Audio Playlist Manager, for embedding a series of clips in a website, and WPDB Profiling, which helps a site-builder find causes of undue server loads. Soon to be released are Billboard Manager, which creates a Flash slide show; prettyPhoto Gallery and two other plugins.
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Public broadcasters will be well-represented at the FTC's upcoming summit, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”, Dec. 1 and 2 in Washington. The confab will explore issues such as the economics of journalism in print and online, new business and nonprofit news models, and ways to reduce journalism costs without sacrificing quality. Panelists announced by the FTC so far (PDF) include pubcasters Joaquin Alvarado, CPB's senior veep for diversity and innovation; NPR head Vivian Schiller; Jon McTaggart, senior veep and COO, American Public Media; Alisa Miller, president and CEO, Public Radio International; and Jason Seiken, senior veep, PBS Interactive. Other participants include newsmen Rupert Murdoch and Len Downie, former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, and blogger Arianna Huffington.
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WFYI's studios in Indianapolis co-star in a new MasterCard holiday ad. David DeMumbrun, station director of production operations, told Current a scouting crew visited local commercial stations, but when they got to the state-of-the-art pubcasting studios (opened in August 2008), "they found nirvana." The spot stars Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning (hence, the filming location) and How I Met Your Mother actress Alyson Hannigan. Hannigan's part in the ad was filmed at the studio and Manning's in an Indy home. What a production day it was on Oct. 13 at WFYI: The ad's cast and crew numbered around 155. Director of photography was Russell Carpenter, who shot the big-screen Titanic. A catering bus drove in from Chicago for breakfast and lunch. The shoot went from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. "It was quite a circus that day," DeMumbrun said. "They were everywhere. They took up pretty much the whole building." Staffers were warned in advance of the disruption, which was planned for a day with no local work in the studios. Although no WFYI staffers are in the ad, they did assist the visiting crew. Overall, a pretty exciting experience, "and a way to make a little money for the station," DeMumbrun said, declining to reveal that figure, but "it was in the thousands."
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PBS last week told the FCC that pubcasters should be allowed to continue their multiplatform efforts and and that over-the-air DTV is important to that work, reports Broadcasting & Cable. It's an important argument as the FCC decides how to free up spectrum for wireless broadband. "The free and universal nature of over-the-air broadcasting enables PBS and its member stations to ensure that virtually every household has access" to content, PBS said in FCC filings and in a meeting with FCC staffers. On Nov. 3, APTS representatives also discussed pubcasting spectrum issues with the FCC's Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis.
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MontanaPBS is just $20,000 away from its $1.3 million goal for an over-the-air broadcast tower for viewers in the Great Falls area, reports the Great Falls Tribune. Currently, Great Falls may be the largest American city without an over-the-air PBS signal. Sally Newhall, co-chair of the "Tower to the People" fundraising effort, said the project has a construction deadline of the end of the year, and an October 2010 deadline to match a $75,000 Murdoch Foundation grant. "I feel really positive about it," Newhall added.
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Maxie C. Jackson will become president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters in January. He succeeds Carol Pierson, who is retiring after 12 years as head of NFCB. Jackson is now senior director, program development, for WNYC in New York, where he has worked on the launch of the morning news program The Takeaway, on program planning and audience development. He previously served as p.d. for WETA-FM in Washington and acting g.m. of WEAA in Baltimore. He is a member of the board of the Development Exchange and Eastern Region Public Media and former board member of the African American Public Radio Consortium.
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An anonymous donor is providing a $5 million challenge grant backing the Minnesota Public Radio Enterprise News Fund, a "permanent fund for significant enterprise news gathering," announced MPR President Bill Kling during MPR's Future of News Summit. The summit, convened at MPR headquarters this morning, is examining new models for local and regional news. An afternoon panel on the role of daily newspapers and online start-ups that are helping to fill gaps in local news coverage, is about to begin. Watch and participate online here.
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Kentucky's budget director warned several state last agencies Friday to plan for a possible 6 percent spending cut, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. But topping a list of those exempt from the reductions is Kentucky Educational Television. Others are public universities, K-12 schools, prosecutors, public defenders, Medicaid and mental health services. KET Executive Director Mac Wall told Current that its position on the list makes the point that if a station invests in local services such as education, its value to the community "goes up dramatically." Its EncycloMedia site for teachers and students just surpassed five million hits since 2005, Wall noted.
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Detroit Public Television is the Best-Managed Nonprofit in that city, as chosen by Crain's Detroit Business. The publication cites DPT's programming shift to five areas "critical to the region," children/education, arts/culture, energy/environment, health/safety and jobs/leadership -- while reducing its operational costs by $2.4 million. “With the way the media landscape has changed over the last few years, there's more and more of a need for a station committed to public engagement and (local) public information,” Rich Homberg, president and general manager, told the paper. The station also closed out a $22 million capital campaign and brought in more than $1 million in new funding.
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The American Society of News Editors is conducting a public discussion on news ethics in the evolving media ecosystem during its conference this week, "Journalism Ethics: Public Trust Through Public Engagement." Topics include: Differences in how citizens and journalists view journalism values; when anyone can be a publisher, what distinguishes a journalist?; and new ways of partnering with the public. Some 25 editors, scholars, students and members of the public will interact at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism starting at 10 a.m. today. Follow along on the website's streaming video, or on Twitter at hashtag #TalkEthics.
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WKNO in Memphis is up and running in its new 44,000 square foot facility, reports the Commercial-Appeal. The sleek building houses two television studios, two closed-captioning suites, three radio studios and three editing suites. It's nearly twice the size of WKNO's former home, which has been on the south campus of the University of Memphis for 30 years.
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The FCC yesterday okayed WGBH's purchase of classical WCRB 99.5 FM from from Nassau Broadcasting Partners, the Boston Globe reports today. WGBH revealed in September it was bidding to buy the Waltham, Mass., station so it could convert 89.7 FM, with a mix of NPR programs, classical, and jazz shows, to an all-news talk format. Classical music will shift to 99.5 FM. The purchase puts WGBH-FM in direct competition with Boston NPR News powerhouse WBUR.
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Ellen Goodman, a Rutgers law professor and Fellow at the Center for Social Media, submitted comments to the Federal Communications Commission on the development of a national broadband plan, according to the Center, at American University. Her thoughts reflect research the Center has been doing for its Future of Public Media project. In her comments (PDF), Goodman notes various current pubmedia activities using high-speed connections, and suggests that further progress will only happen “if public media systems become more diverse, open, networked, innovative, technologically sophisticated, and focused on a service mission to meet public needs where the market will not go.” She echoes a common drumbeat of late, that pubcasting "has not performed adequately in catalyzing and assisting in local content creation. . . . Capacity-constrained and one-way, broadcasting alone has never been capable of truly engaging diverse local populations while also networking effectively nationally with a wide array of partners."
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The Texas Tribune, an online nonprof news site based in Austin, launched Nov. 3 to cover “public policy, politics, government and other matters of statewide concern.” It received $1 million from its new chairman and co-founder, venture capitalist John Thornton, according to the Daily Texan at the University of Texas at Austin. The project will collaborate with the university on five election polls, and with the school's Center for Politics and Governance for a lecture series and student internships. Here's more about the project.
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Journalism That Matters, an organization of "media innovators and stakeholders" that nurtures discussions on the emerging modern ecosystem of public media, is hosting the confab "Reimagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest," Jan. 7-10, 2010, at the University of Washington, Seattle. It's the group's first regional workshop since its founding in 2000, following nationally focused meetings in St. Petersburg, Fla.; Philadelphia; Minneapolis; Silicon Valley; and Washington, D.C. Participants have included reporters, editors, publishers, videographers, photographers, media educators, reformers and citizen journalists; audience members are from print, broadcast, and online media, both mainstream and entrepreneurial. The group's founders are also a diverse bunch. Interested? Register here, or take a peek at who's attending here.
posted at 10:49 AM EST
The longest running multimedia public-affairs series in the nation, "Chicago Matters," is ending after 19 years, according to Chicago Tribune media reporter Phil Rosenthal. The series was a partnership among pubTV's WTTW 11, Chicago Public Radio, the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Reporter newspaper to spotlight a major regional issue each year. It's funded by the Chicago Community Trust. The group, citing the recession's toll, said in a statement that it has "redirected $2.7 million towards basic human needs" and will stop funding "Chicago Matters" at the end of 2009. Last week the Trust announced a new program, "Community News Matters," "to spur growth of new sources of quality local news." One of 12 projects funded was the Chicago News Cooperative (Current, Oct. 26, 2009), which received $50,000 of the available $500,000.
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A new strategic plan worked up at Chicago Public Radio unexpectedly went public earlier this week when it was leaked to the Chicago Reader. The three-year plan (PDF) assesses the broadcaster’s strengths and weaknesses and puts forth general goals such as “Create modular, highly useful, adaptive and relevant content” and “Build a relationship engine” — i.e., help listeners customize which content they get from the station and on what platforms.
Some of the plan’s blunter language addresses the progress, or lack thereof, of Vocalo, the ambitious web/radio hybrid that the station debuted in 2007. “As a website Vocalo must be seen as unsuccessful so far,” the report says. “Great websites exhibit a much steeper growth pattern than we have experienced — something our staff and General Manager are urgently working to address. This must be fixed urgently” (italics are the report’s).
Among reactions: In a commentary on the Reader’s site, media critic Michael Miner says the document “has caused consternation” among unnamed Chicago Public Radio staffers, who see it as weak on its commitment to journalism. And in a brief note on WBEZ’s blog, the station’s v.p. of strategic communications says, “We’re still working on the practical translation of what we’re actually going to do over the next three years.”
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As of Monday the fed's DTV converter box coupon program is over, with nearly half the 64 million coupons unredeemed, reports Broadcasting & Cable. That translates to some $1.2 billion worth of the $40 coupons unused.
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Jason Seiken, PBS senior vice president, interactive, is one of a slew of speakers at the New TeeVee Live '09, Television Reinvented confab today in San Francisco. The annual meeting delves into the future of television as it morphs into "gaming consoles, browser-enabled TVs, startup set-top boxes, network DVRs, simple cables — it’s a battle to see who can bring the flexibility and variety of online video delivery to the comfort of your couch." Seiken's presentation is "Transforming a MSM Brand," about PBS's strategy to use online video and social media to revamp and revitalize its brand. Also attending: Kevin Dando, PBS director, education and online communications; and Tim Olson, v.p. of digital media and education at KQED.
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Fred Newman, sound effects man extraordinaire on American Public Media's Prairie Home Companion, gave a demonstration of his craft Wednesday afternoon in Enid, Okla., reports the Enid News and Eagle. Newman was in town doing sound effects for The Wonderful Life of George Bailey, an adaptation of the film It's a Wonderful Life as a radio drama at Enid Symphony Hall. Newman's grandfather sparked his passion for sounds at an early age, he said. His grandfather placed a finger on Newman’s lips and told to listen to the sounds. “If the wind was blowing he would tell me to hear the whisper of the sound,” Newman told the crowd. “If the wind blew through a pine tree it would whisper, if it blew through an oak tree it would clatter and if it was a willow tree it swished.”
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For the first time, pubTV stations may broadcast the 60-minute National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony in Washington, D.C. According to partners WETA, the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, the ceremony, which takes place Dec. 3, will be available starting Dec. 4 to run throughout the holiday season. It's the 86th annual lighting. (2008 photo: National Park Service)
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The crowds are arriving for APT's Fall Marketplace, today through Saturday in Fort Myers, Fla. Lots of events, including a professional development seminar by Steve McGowan, senior vice president of research for the Discovery Channel, "Traditional Media's Future When Facing the Rise of New Media."
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California Watch, a division of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, and KQED Radio officially unveiled their editorial collaboration to bring more watchdog coverage of statewide issues to public radio airwaves. Michael Montgomery, a veteran investigative reporter formerly with American RadioWorks, will produce stories exclusively for California Report, a KQED Radio series with a weekly cume of 620,000 listeners statewide. The partners will jointly produce interactive multimedia and pool their editorial resources, including office space in the Sacramento, the state capitol, and California Watch journalists will appear regularly on other KQED programs. "Public radio is a critical distribution outlet and this opportunity to reach large numbers of public radio listeners in California fits right into our strategy of maximizing the impact of our stories by using muliple media platforms," said Robert Rosenthal, executive director of CIR.
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In an online chat with WashingtonPost.com readers, Vivian Schiller gives herself a B+ for her first 10 months as NPR president. "I've gotten a lot done, but not as much as I hope to over time!" she writes. Beyond the usual complaints about pledge drives and government subsidies for public broadcasting, chat participants complained about liberal bias on the weekly NPR news quiz Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! "Peter Sagal is the most biased personality you have on staff. He routinely takes cheap shots at the GOP, but refuses to go after Democratic figures," writes one participant. "Why do you keep Dan Schorr around?" asks another. "His analysis is reliably faulty, liberally-biased, and mean-spirited (yeah, I guess I'd feel the same way after what Nixon did to me). But still -- he really knocks down any credibility you have of being 'unbiased', especially since he is a part of the news wing, not entertainment." Chat moderator and Post media writer Paul Farhi deflected criticisms of WWDTM, but Schiller responded to the complaint about NPR's senior news analyst: "Dan Schorr is a liberal commentator. I will not deny that is true. So what do we do about that? We balance his views with those of conservative guest commentators who frequently appear on our airwaves."
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Steve Waldman, incoming special adviser to FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, said confronting the myriad troubles in the news industry will be a priority in his work. He told TV News Check (registration required) that he will study "the very worrisome and deep contraction of journalism," adding, "You have this real threat, especially to fulltime professional local journalism. ... The chairman is interested in making sure we're thinking creatively and in a coordinated way." AOL's Daily Finance Blog dubbed him "The point man for fixing the news business." There he laid what he'll be looking at: "My first assignment is really to figure out what the problem is, and to try to be as precise and kind of data-driven as possible. We certainly all have anecdotal senses of some of the big cosmic shifts going on, but what's the upshot? When you kind of net all these things out, what are the key gaps? What are the key areas that the market's not going to take care of?" Meanwhile, another agency, the Federal Trade Commission, is convening a two-day seminar, "How Will Journalism Survive the Digital Age?" on Dec. 1 and 2 in Washington. See the latest Current for a look at pubcasting's role in the future of news, and how that's playing out in one market.
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Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney was on hand at Sesame Workshop yesterday as the New York Cit
y mayor's office proclaimed Nov. 10, 2009, as Sesame Street Day, and placed a temporary street sign at 64th and Broadway across from the workshop to honor the 40-year-old show. The cast and crew were there, as well as President and CEO Gary E. Knell. The Workshop staff jammed elevators to attend, wearing bright T-shirts and party hats for the occasion, top. (Photos: Sesame Workshop). Many more photos online at Pacific Coast News. Today, above, there's cake!
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The Radio-Television News Directors Association is updating its name, according to TV News Check. Now it's the Radio Television Digital News Association. That makes the third name since the groups founding in 1946 as the National Association of Radio News Directors. "We spent quite a bit of time in board meetings over the last few years and we ran names up and down the flagpole," said President Stacey Woelfel. "Ultimately, we ended up with this letter swap in the middle of the name, which I thought was brilliant when I heard it, because it still allowed us to keep that RTNDA brand. It was an instant hit." It also recognizes the growing number of online, digital and multimedia journalists.
posted at 11:08 AM EST
Latino Public Broadcasting today announced the 16 projects chosen for funding in its 11th annual Open Call. A statement by the group notes that more than half of these programs have never been funded by Latino Public Broadcasting before, "a direct result of an extensive outreach program for independent filmmakers throughout the nation." Check out all the winning projects here.
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Caroll Spinney, who has played Big Bird since Sesame Street's inception, is captured in a rare photograph in the New Yorker, wearing just the legs of his famous yellow costume. Back in 1970, after Look magazine carried a photo of Spinney sticking his face out between the body and head, Muppets creator Jim Henson told him, “Don’t let that ever happen again. You’re either bird or you, but no in between.” As for his future as Big Bird: "I’ve done 40 years and, unless I have a bad surprise, my ultimate goal would be to play this 6-year-old bird for 50 years. Whether that’s possible, only Lord knows."
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Around 5,000 fans of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood lined up out the door and down the street from WQED in Pittsburgh to take one last look at pieces of its famous set, which are bound for storage, according to the Pittsburgh Nonpartisan Examiner. Mr. McFeely, still played by Dave Newell (now spokesperson for Rogers' production company Family Communications Inc.), spent 12 hours on Saturday and Sunday posing for photos with visitors and sharing their memories in the station's Studio A, which was officially renamed Fred Rogers Studio. Fans got an up-close look at King Friday XIII's castle, X the Owl's tree and other pieces. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette video captures the excitement. WQED rep Rosemary Martinelli said visitors came from as far away as Alaska and Korea. One special moment: Rogers' son John brought his son, Ian, born 12 days after Rogers' death in 2003. The long line was temporarily halted as the two explored the set alone. At that point, one woman told Martinelli she'd wait as long as it took and was honored to witness that touching scene.
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In case you've missed it, since Nov. 4 Google has been honoring the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street with appearances by several of the show's favorite characters on its logo (a.k.a. Google Doodles). Download high-res images here.
posted at 11:33 AM EST
A new pubradio station hit the airwaves at 7 a.m. today, according to the Dallas Morning News. KXT will play "an eclectic mix of indie rock, alt country and other styles," according to parent station KERA in Dallas. It's at 97.1 FM. KERA's Arts & Seek blog has a photo of Mary Anne Alhadeff, KERA’s c.e.o., speaking the first words on the new station. The deal for the channel may be the biggest station purchase this year (Current, June 22, 2009), with KERA spending $18 million for a reserved noncommercial channel owned by religious broadcaster Covenant Educational Media.
posted at 11:12 AM EST
Sesame Workshop has responded to the recent "tempest in a trash can" over the Sesame Street "Pox News" parody sketch, in today's PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler's column. In the bit, when Oscar talks about the Grouchy News Network, another character responds it wasn't grouchy enough and threatens to switch to Pox News--"now there's a trashy news show." Some viewers (and bloggers) were upset over what they perceived to be a slap at Fox News. But an explanation from Miranda Barry, Sesame Workshop creative e.v.p., said the bit was an "equal-opportunity parody--Oscar always tries to offend everybody!" She said the Grouch News Network (GNN) was actually a reference to CNN. One viewer responds: "The debate over the Sesame Street Pox News skit is ridiculous. A sense of humor goes a long way for both adults and children--and these bloggers seem to have lost theirs."
posted at 10:50 AM EST
Pubcasting's anniversary week continues. First PBS and Sesame Street, celebrating 40 years. And on Nov. 7, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It was enacted just 10 months after the Carnegie Commisson on Educational Television. Sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, its report, "Public Television: A Program for Action," introduced the phrase "public television." (Photo: Johnson signing the act.)
posted at 10:12 AM EST
Classical radio in the St. Louis area won’t go away if KRCU-FM gets the power increase and antenna upgrade it wants. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has been in talks since last spring to sell its Classical 99, KFUO-FM in St. Louis, to Gateway Creative Broadcasting, which has two contemporary Christian stations in the state. Music and news KRCU at Southeast State University, 100 miles south in Cape Girardeau, hopes to reach the southern St. Louis market with an improved repeater at KSEF in Farmington. The station applied Sept. 30 to the FCC to go from 9,500 watts to 20,000 watts, the university said in a statement this week.
posted at 2:31 PM EST
Lifetime Achievement Awards for Business and Financial Reporting will go to Paul Kangas of Nightly Business Report, and Linda O’Bryon, founder of that broadcast in 1979 and now chief content officer of Northern California Public Broadcasting, according to the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. In nominations announced this week, pubcasters pulled in nods for NewsHour, NOW, Frontline (four), Wide Angle, Nova scienceNOW and the PBS Vote 2008 project. A full list of the Emmy nominees here. Awards will be presented Dec. 7 in New York City.
posted at 11:11 AM EST
A panel of media experts gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School this week for a discussion that “acknowledged both the despair and the hope that journalists feel over the present state of the American news business, rocked by economic turmoil and the rise of the Internet,” according to the Harvard Gazette. One participant was Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Jones, former host of Media Matters on PBS and director of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and author of the new book, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. He said that newspapers create most of the “cumulative reporting” that underlies American journalism, and if they disappear it will create “a terrible vacuum” of information that drives the national conversation, according to the paper. Read more about pubcasting's involvement in the future of news coverage in the Nov. 9 issue of Current.
posted at 10:52 AM EST
The street running through Kiwanis Park in Charleston, Ill., will be permanently renamed Sesame Street on Sunday, according to the Daily Eastern News of Eastern Illinois University in the central-Illinois city. Mayor John Inyart will read a proclamation to kick off a day of activities hosted by pubstation WEIU and a local commercial radio station. Participants are encouraged to dress as their favorite Sesame Street characters, and have a chance to record their favorite moments from the show.
posted at 8:07 AM EST
NPR joined with the proprietor of HD Radio technology, iBiquity Digital Corp., to propose that the FCC quadruple the permitted digital FM power level. In a statement released today they agreed the plan would protect analog FM broadcasts from interference while significantly improving reception of the digital HD Radio signal — especially by receivers indoors, where the digital signal sometimes can’t penetrate.
Last fall, after other broadcasters suggested a ten-fold power boost for the digital signal, NPR field tests found the larger increase would interfere with regular FM broadcasts.
If the FCC takes NPR's and iBiquity's advice, it would authorize a blanket 6 dB increase, from 20 dBc to -14 dBc. Most stations could boost their digital signals by more than 6 dB, they calculated, laying out the option of greater increases where spacing between stations and other criteria would limit interference.
posted at 8:27 PM EST
A sculpture Fred Rogers was unveiled today in Pittsburgh as a tribute to the children's television icon. He's seated and tying his shoe, facing the city skyline, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It's titled, "Tribute to Children." The bronze piece created by sculptor Robert Berks is nearly 11 feet high and weighs more than 7,000 pounds. Berks may be best known for his bust of President Kennedy in Washington's Kennedy Center. Also, don't miss the nice audio tribute on WDUQ's news blog, from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. (Photo: Family Communications Inc.)
posted at 1:29 PM EST
The member-supported local news site MinnPost is dissecting salary numbers of Minnesota Public Radio execs. Blogger David Brauer did "a little spreadsheet crunching" of MPR's IRS 990 forms for the year ending June 2008. Bill Kling, president and CEO of Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, made $373,254 in compensation and benefits from MPR/APM, $180,000 from American Public Media Group (APMG) and $48,000 from Greenspring, MPR's for-profit arm.
posted at 1:02 PM EST
Employees at WNET in New York will have three unpaid days off between Christmas and New Year's Day, according to Crain's New York Business. Senior managers at the pubTV station will have five days of unpaid leave. Production staffers involved in daily shows will be exempt.
posted at 8:38 PM EST
PBS is picking up where Reading Rainbow left off, launching a new annual writing and drawing contest for children in cahoots with public TV stations around the country. More at Current.org.
posted at 7:50 PM EST
Now here's an unexpected question: Did Sesame Street take a poke at Fox News? That's what PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler is looking at in this week's Mailbag. In the Oct. 29 episode, Oscar the Grouch hosted the Grouch News Network, covering "all grouchy, all disgustin', all yucky" news. But another character thinks it's not grouchy enough and threatens to switch to "Pox News, now there's a trashy news show." Viewers wrote Getler to complain that the character actually said "Fox" News. "I can't really blame them," Getler writes. "When I went and watched the tape for the first time, I thought I heard 'Fox' as well, perhaps because of the association one assumes when you hear 'news' right after the word." But closed captioning revealed it was indeed Pox News.
posted at 1:42 PM EST
New York magazine is celebrating 40 years of Sesame Street with a pageful of fascinating factoids in its current issue. A few: The show was almost called 123 Avenue B. Designer Charles Rosen based the set "on an amalgam of streets in Harlem, the Bronx, the Upper West Side," according to the mag. The very first episode on Nov. 10, 1969, was sponsored by the letters W, S and E, and the numbers 2 and 3. And Big Bird is still played by Caroll Spinney, now 75 years old. In other Sesame news, don't miss the new show opening.
posted at 10:52 AM EST
Eleven fictional mini-features, each 15 minutes, created by indie filmmakers will ponder what America may look like in the future. The ITVS project, FutureStates, will run exclusively on its new website in March 2010. ITVS said in a statement that the industry will get a peek at the series at AFI's Digifest on Thursday in Los Angeles.
posted at 10:28 AM EST
WTTW-Channel 11 in Chicago doesn't have one African American reporter or anchor on staff, writes longtime Chicago media columnist Robert Feder on the WBEZ/Vocalo blog, noting the situation "seems like a throwback to some other era." Chicago Tonight, the station's public affairs program, has four white and two Hispanic staffers, he says. A WTTW spokesperson told Feder, "Because we reflect Chicago and we’re so Chicago focused, we know we’ve got to have African American talent. . . . It’s very front of our minds.” However, "given the station’s financial straits," Feder notes, "it’s not likely to happen any time soon."
posted at 2:08 PM EST
Happy birthday, Public Broadcasting Service! Yes, PBS turns 40 today. The U.S. Census Bureau took the opportunity to recognize the system and its "excellent programs and objectivity" in a short news release today. Let's hope that your station is having birthday cake. Or at least donuts.
posted at 12:12 PM EST
Colorado Public Television on Monday announced a partnership with local journalists for a news website and an investigative news show covering the state. The project, Colorado Public News, “is responsive to the reduction of significant investigative journalism that has occurred nationally and locally with the shrinkage of news staffs in print and broadcast media, including the closure of the Rocky Mountain News,” Wick Rowland, president and CEO of Colorado Public Television, said in a statement. Former Rocky Mountain News investigative reporter Ann Imse will be editor-in-chief. “Since traditional advertising isn’t funding in-depth journalism, we are choosing the PBS model of producing great journalism and asking for tax-deductible donations to fund non-profit, public journalism,” Imse said in the statement. When the project reaches its initial funding goal of $400,000, reporters will publish an in-depth or investigative report on at least one major issue weekly to post on the site and later in prime time on Channel 12. Check out its prototype website.
posted at 10:48 AM EST
A local group interested in buying the license for WXEL FM and TV in Palm Beach, Fla., has not submitted required documentation, according to owner Barry University, reports The Sun Sentinel. But the Community Broadcast Foundation of Palm Beach and Treasure Coast disagrees. "Now they've come back and say they want documentation of your funding," said Green, who told the paper that Barry officials have refused to meet with his group. "If you meet with us, you can ask us anything you want." The FCC may have to intervene, according to one source. Station ownership has been in flux for years.
posted at 9:55 AM EST
NPR released its staff composition stats after the National Association of Black Journalists questioned the network's commitment to diversity. "I couldn't agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff--particularly in management and editorial," NPR President Vivian Schiller wrote in an Oct. 29 letter to NABJ leaders. "I believe our diversity efforts are best served through transparency, so we are going to lay out the numbers for you." NPR's management pool, which NABJ expressed concern about in an earlier letter to Schiller, includes 47 staff who describe themselves as people of color; that is nearly 24 percent of 199 managers at all levels of the network. Diversity among executive management is 11.8 percent. More than 22 percent of 58 news and programming managers are people of color; 14 percent are African-American. "Another concern not addressed by NABJ or Schiller is that the only on-air African American male is Juan Williams, who is not a staff employee," writes NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard, in a recent column. "Over a year ago, NPR's management put him on contract as a news analyst." The lack of diversity within NPR management was apparent to Shepard when she joined NPR two years ago. "Since then, there have been diversity meetings, committees, surveys, and they all conclude . . . NPR must focus on diversifying its staff, especially if NPR wants to better reflect the population and continue to expand its audience."
posted at 9:54 AM EST
Ward Chamberlin, one of the founders of American pubcasting, is one of four journalists who will discuss "Saving the News" Wednesday evening at Yale University, according to the New Haven Register. Chamberlin was COO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at its inception in 1967, and helped create PBS and NPR. Others in the panel are David Greenway, former editor of the editorial and op-ed pages of the Boston Globe; Robert Kaiser, associate editor and senior correspondent at the Washington Post; and John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor.
posted at 9:44 AM EST
Voices of the Valley, a grassroots group working to create a second pubradio station in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, has encountered a setback, reports The Brownsville Herald. Betsy Price, who had been dismissed from local NPR affiliate KMBH's board (Current, March 16, 2009), says ESPN nabbed an AM station in Raymondville the group wanted to lease. "We came very close," she told the paper. "We were working with a broker to get a five-year lease with one of the stations. It was looking good until (ESPN) bought it out. What we were looking at was to partner with Texas Public Radio. We would have been broadcasting right away. It was very disappointing." The group also is planning a Web site by January 2010 with online streaming of NPR and local programming. KMBH has struggled financially for several years, and this month a CPB Inspector General's office review cited problems from accounting to lack of a community advisory board.
posted at 8:57 AM EST
Reception problems with PBS affiliate KUAC in Fairbanks, Alaska, prompted it to move from UHF Ch. 24 to VHF Ch. 9, at a cost of $1.1 million and six days off the air, according to Broadcasting & Cable. It switched in late September by undergoing rechannelization. The new Harris VHF transmitter and ERI transmission line and antenna had to be installed in a "tightly coordinated process," B&C reported, due to Alaska's brief period of mild weather. Climate is always a challenge in the state; currently, a message on the dual licensee's website explains to FM radio listeners that all that static is due to the transmitter operating at reduced power because of antenna icing. "Unfortunately, nothing can be done but wait for the weather to get colder which will cause the snow/ice to fall off of the antenna," it says.
posted at 3:09 PM EST
In case you missed it, zombie originator George Romero (the creatures were his creation in Night of the Living Dead) was a guest on the Halloween edition of NPR fave Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! He shared this interesting factoid: Romero got his start working with Fred Rogers on the Mister Rogers episode, "Let's Talk About Going to the Hospital," in which a little girl gets a tonsillectomy.
posted at 11:34 AM EST
The books that inspired Clifford the Big Red Dog on PBS, now in its ninth season, were born of desperation in 1963, according to an interview with 81-year-old author Norman Bridwell in the Seattle Times. A woman whose job it was to read unsolicited manuscripts--known as the "slush pile"--at Harper & Row, knew that publisher would not be interested in it. But she "put it in her purse without telling anyone" and took it to Scholastic, Bridwell recalled. "I was just trying to find work," he said. "I'd been out of work and had a brand new baby daughter who wasn't sleeping through the night and my mother was visiting from Indiana. It was a very tense time.... I'm so lucky. If that woman hadn't come in that day (to look at the slush pile), things would have been very different." Today there are more than 126 million "Clifford" books in print in 13 languages.
posted at 10:59 AM EST
An episode of Sid the Science Kid explaining flu shots prompted letters to the PBS ombudsman this week. Michael Getler shares them and his take on the matter in his new Mailbag column.
posted at 10:44 AM EST
KCET head programmer Bohdan Zachary shares his colleagues' Halloween decoration of this very, very lapsed station member in his latest blog entry. Spooky indeed. Zachary also reminisces about the creepiest soap opera ever, Dark Shadows, and his attempt to contact a dead grade-school classmate using a seance inspired by the gothic show. Spoiler alert: It didn't work.
posted at 11:14 AM EST
UNC-TV used PBS's Explorer branding identity (Current, June 23, 2009) to create its own new Explorer Channel, offering travel, culture, science, nature, history and outdoor programming. In announcing the channel, the station said it's in response "to a demonstrated need for diverse public television programming for adults, including daytime programming." PBS execs continue to draw attention to the Explorer concept. At this month's Round Robin in Baltimore, PBS programming head John Wilson spoke of ongoing focus the branding, as well as using it to draw in desired audiences such as the 40- to 64-year-old "femographic."
posted at 10:50 AM EST
KCTS 9 in Seattle just received a $100,000 award from the Kresge Foundation's Green Building Initiative to renovate its 23-year-old facility to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) specifications. The station was one of seven organizations chosen from among 114 nationwide. The Kresge Foundation's headquarters in Troy, Mich., is a Platinum LEED building, the highest rating of the standard (plus, it looks pretty cool).
posted at 9:34 AM EST
StoryCorps is gearing up for its second annual National Day of Listening, to be celebrated Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving. The event, an extension of the StoryCorps oral history project that has now collected personal interviews of more than 50,000 individuals, invites public radio listeners to record a meaningful conversation with a loved one and preserve it as a piece of family history. "The National Day of Listening, which coincides with Black Friday--traditionally the largest shopping day of the year--proves that simply listening to one another is the least expensive and most meaningful gift we can give," said Dave Isay, StoryCorps founder and president. To help promote this year's event, NPR personalities Dan Schorr, Juan Williams and Will Shortz will record interviews and discuss the experience on-air, and Talk of the Nation will devote its Thanksgiving Day broadcast to the Day of Listening. Local stations also are helping to spread the word. Austin's KUT will open its studios to local families during off-hours on Thanksgiving week and Atlanta's WABE will host a special event for local Girl Scouts. (Those who conduct interviews will earn badges!) StoryCorps has produced a package of promotional materials for stations, posted here.
posted at 3:49 PM EST
Debra Tica Sanchez is moving from the Association of Public Television Stations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to CPB. As of December, Sanchez will be senior vice president for education services. At APTS, Sanchez had served as v.p. of government relations. Also, CPB's Susan Zelman will be s.v.p., chief advisor and system consultant for education policy; previously she had been s.v.p. of education and children's content.
posted at 2:48 PM EST
PBS affiliate KCTS in Seattle has been busy this month, hosting two live debates between candidates for county executive and mayor. Station spokesperson Daphne Adair told Current this was the first time a wireless network was set up in the studio specifically to allow other local media to blog live from the set. NPR stations KPLU and KUOW along with the Seattle Times were partners in coverage. (Photo: In the KCTS control room during a debate, courtesy of the station.)
posted at 1:20 PM EST
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced an agency-wide initiative examining how the commission should revise its policies to ensure a "vibrant media landscape." Steven Waldman, a veteran print journalist who founded Beliefnet.com, will lead the study as a senior advisor to the chairman. Genachowski unveiled the initiative as a response to media reform recommendations developed by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. "A strong consensus has developed that we're at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn," Genachowski said in a news release. The initiative will balance the policy changes required to meet the information needs of communities with First Amendment protections for the press, he said. Beliefnet, the largest Interfaith website covering religion and providing inspiration, is owned by News Corporation. Waldman has resigned from the company and discontinued both his blog and regular online column for the Wall Street Journal.
posted at 11:42 AM EST
Blues great James Cotton stopped in to the WGBH studios Wednesday for an interview with Greater Boston's Jared Bowen, and showed off his legendary harmonica talents. Also in the Fraser Performance Center for the show was Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News. Bowen's interview and Cotton's WGBH performance will air tonight. Also tonight, the bluesman is being honored in a "Live Tribute to James Cotton" at Boston's House of Blues. (Photo: WGBH)
posted at 11:00 AM EST
The National Association of Black Journalists questions NPR commitment to diversity in this letter to Vivian Schiller, network president. The Oct. 16 firing of Greg Peppers, executive producer of newscasts, is the second dismissal of a producer of color in NPR management ranks this year. "Of the 68 members on your corporate team and behind the scenes staff, only eight are people of color," NABJ's top leaders write. "You told the National Press Club that NPR doesn't need programming for communities of color but diversity needs 'to be represented in the fabric of everything that we do.' It is NABJ's belief that actions speak much louder than your words. It is not enough to provide internships for young people or hire them into entry-level positions. Diversity must also be reflected among the managers who decide what news gets covered and who gets to cover it." Peppers, who was one of two black men in newsroom management according to NABJ, was fired and escorted out of NPR headquarters on Oct. 16, one day after NPR hosted a book signing for NABJ. Walt Swanson, an African-American journalist who was director of diversity management at NPR for six years, resigned three days later for health reasons. Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute, who reported on the departures on his blog Journalisms, has more on NPR's track record with diversity.
posted at 4:37 PM EST
Is it fair use for opponents of Maine's same-sex marriage law to excerpt an NPR news story in a political ad? NPR said "No!" and demanded that the political action committee Stand for Marriage pull the ad from television and the Internet. But lawyers for the group rejected NPR's request. The PAC's use of the "very short audio segment" is noncommercial and is protected by the First Amendment and U.S. Copyright law, attorneys wrote in an Oct. 20 letter to NPR's deputy general counsel. Last week, NPR objected publicly. "It is critical for us to protect our credibility and the trust the audience has in us," says Dana Davis Rehm, NPR senior v.p., in this TV news report. "This ad really distorts that." With the vote on Maine's same-sex marriage referendum coming up Nov. 3, there is not really much else that NPR can do, according to this report by Maine Public Broadcasting. YouTube pulled the TV spot from its website at NPR's request, but a blogger from Michigan has reposted it. "Since NPR is taxpayer financed, that is OUR content!" he writes. You can listen to the news report in question, "Massachusetts Schools Weigh Gay Topics," here. Reported by Tovia Smith and presented on All Things Considered in September 2004, the story examined how public schools would treat gay topics after passage of the Massachusetts law legalizing gay marriage.
posted at 2:34 PM EST
A new research report says combining a traditional book with video conference technology and video segments bolsters "family literacy over distances," according to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The study, funded by the Cooney Center and Nokia Research Center, looked at grandparents, parents and their children using the Storyplay concept system together. The interface enables children to initiate calls using icons on a touch screen. Then Elmo listens in, offering comments and questions when the screen is touched. The full report (PDF) is available here.
posted at 12:29 PM EST
Learn how to use audio and video tools, blogs, widgets, maps and apps to improve your station's economic coverage in today's Webinar from the National Center for Media Engagement and Public Radio International. It's a peer-to-peer workshop at 2 p.m. (Eastern) today to introduce the Knowledge Network, a CPB-funded site to assist stations with their coverage of the economy. Sign up here for the Webinar.
posted at 11:19 AM EST
Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, told a congressional subcommittee that the announcement of winning bids for the broadband stimulus program will be delayed by about a month, according to Broadcasting & Cable. "We're going to take a few more weeks here to get this right," he told members of the Senate Commerce Committee's Communications Subcommittee on Tuesday. Many pubcasters have applied for money from the broadband stimulus program (Current, Sept. 21, 2009).
posted at 10:47 AM EST
Pubradio talker Tavis Smiley's name is being dropped from one institution, but added to another. The Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs will name its new atrium after Smiley, an alum, according to the Indiana Daily Student. He recently donated $50,000 for a scholarship fund for students in that school, in Bloomington. However, Texas Southern University will strip Smiley's name from its communication school, reports the Houston Chronicle. Smiley had promised in 2004 to donate $1 million and to raise another $1 million, so the university subsequently created the Tavis Smiley School of Communication. But Smiley made one $50,000 donation in mid-2005, and brought in $250,000 from three corporate donors. Talks recently broke down after more than a year, and now the naming deal is off.
posted at 10:23 AM EST
A free saddle each month for the next year is coming from Saddle Up with Dennis Brouse. That's the pubTV series that "celebrates the storied relationship between horse and human," as it says. Your horse need a new saddle? Sign up for Brouse's email newsletter to qualify to win a custom saddle from Bronco Billy’s.
posted at 10:10 AM EST
WFUM TV in Flint, Mich., may get a new owner: Central Michigan University, according to Central Michigan Life, the university newspaper. The school's Board of Trustees on Tuesday approved a $1 million bid for the station. It's currently owned by University of Michigan and broadcasts from Bay City to metro Detroit. CMU Public Broadcasting will draft a purchase agreement and interim management agreement to take over the station as soon as possible. The station has lost money since 2005 (Current, April 27, 2009).
posted at 9:32 AM EST
A great-grandmother in Rockford, Ill., received a surprising appraisal from Antiques Roadshow and has decided to auction off her treasure: A antagonistic letter from crooner Frank Sinatra to rabble-rousing Chicago columnist Mike Royko, according to the Chicago Tribune. In the letter, Sinatra said the columnist was a "pimp," and suggested the two have a hair-pulling duel (Sinatra was upset at a Royko column that accused Ol' Blue Eyes of wearing a hairpiece). Vie Carlson purchased the letter back in 1976 for $400. At a Roadshow taping on July 11, appraiser Simeon Lipman told Carlson she might be able to get $15,000 or more for the letter, so she's selling it next spring through Freeman's Auctioneers in Philadelphia. The episode will air this coming February.
posted at 5:09 PM EST
Stephen Moss, an online marketing executive with a background in print media, is the new president and c.e.o. of National Public Media, the New York-based corporate sponsorship firm representing public radio and television. He succeeds Bob Williams, who founded NPM's predecessor company National Public Broadcasting in 1997 and served as c.e.o. after its 2007 acquisition by NPR and Boston's WGBH. Moss joins NPM from Evri, a web technology company where he served as v.p. of business development. Previously, he was v.p. of sales for Microsoft, Inc., where he launched the MSN video service and led its rollout to major advertisers. "Steve is a collaborative and proven leader with superb talents in a highly desired space--at the intersection of media and technology--a critical ingredient to our long-term success," said NPR President Vivian Schiller. PBS bought a 10 percent stake in NPM early this year.
posted at 11:14 AM EST
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, along with several partners, is sponsoring a Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age forum today and Wednesday to develop ideas for using digital media in education. Participants will develop a plan to use new technologies to "revitalize a school system that has fallen behind," according to the center. If you'd like to listen in on the Web, you may register online.
posted at 10:08 AM EST
The Media Access Group at WGBH will be creating special captioning and narrative material for several movies from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures, according to the Boston Globe. The Media Access Group provides not only closed captioning but also Descriptive Video Services, or DVS, which provides descriptive audio narration of what is happening in a film.
posted at 6:23 PM EST
Fawlty Towers -- the 1970s BBC show that still runs on 24 pubTV stations nationwide -- is now available in a DVD box set, reports Scripps Howard News Service. The three-disc "Fawlty Towers Remastered" includes all 12 episodes plus commentaries by star and Monty Python alum John Cleese. Of course this is not to be confused with Fawlty Towers Revisited, offered as a pledge special to SIP (Station Independence Program) stations back in December 2005.
posted at 7:03 PM EST
Sesame Street wants to introduce Big Bird and his friends to the Gaza Strip, according to Agence France Presse. The area is ruled by Hamas, one of two Palestinian factions. "We know that it's an extremely volatile area, but we also feel that it's really important that we take these step forward to promote self esteem for Palestinians," said Gary Knell, president of the Sesame Workshop. A Palestinian version of the series titled Sharaa Simsim is already shown in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
posted at 7:25 AM EST
The latest column from Michael Getler, PBS ombudsman, focuses on two Frontline programs: "Obama's War," which continues to draw mail after its Oct. 13 premiere, and its more recent offering, "The Warning," about "the smart, courageous but unheeded former chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born," and her attempts in the 1990s to draw attention to the potential for financial collapse.
posted at 6:02 PM EST
Rather than going independent, the Quad Cities’ fiscally distressed pubTV station, WQPT, will move its license to a different higher-ed institution. Now it’s expected to be licensed to four-year Western Illinois University, which recently won state capital funding to start building a larger campus in Moline, on the Mississippi almost 100 miles north of WIU’s home campus in Macomb. More on Current.org.
posted at 4:40 PM EST
It's safe to say this isn't your typical FCC official: Yul Kwon, winner of the reality show Survivor: Cook Islands in 2006, was appointed Wednesday as deputy chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, reports The Washington Post's Reliable Source column. The Yale law grad's wedding was covered by the TV Guide Channel, and he co-hosted Discovery Channel's "Shark Week."
posted at 12:44 PM EST
A hybrid news organization committed to public service journalism will begin producing coverage of the Chicago region next month. The Chicago News Cooperative, announced today by veteran newspaper editor James O'Shea, sealed a deal to produce coverage for Chicago editions of the New York Times twice a week. WTTW, a public TV station with a longstanding tradition of producing local news coverage, is a founding partner in the cooperative and will provide a home to the nonprofit during start-up. WBEZ, Chicago's dominant public radio station, may also join the partnership. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing major funding to CNC during start-up; business plans call for the cooperative to solicit donations from individuals and other foundations, and to earn revenues through its partnership with the Times and other potential outlets [via Romensko].
UPDATE: In a memo announcing the CNC partnership to staff, WTTW President Dan Schmidt said the station is acting as a fiscal agent for the cooperative and will not tap any of its own revenues to support it. The CNC website Chicago Scoop, which is expected to go live early next year, will post content that is "highly Chicago and Illinois-focused," Schmidt wrote. CNC staff writers and columnists will appear on WTTW broadcasts and their stories may also appear on WTTW.com.
posted at 12:22 PM EST
An editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican this week salutes community radio station KSFR-FM "for the stroke of inspiration that brings some added class" to the city’s 400th anniversary celebration. News Director Bill Dupuy and reporter Dan Gerrity wrote new words for a monumental old tune, and 28 members of the New Mexico Men’s Camerata recorded it under the baton of Kenneth Knight. Listen online and you can follow these lyrics, ending with a crescendo and sonorous plug for one particular set of call letters:
"The sounds of the city in old Santa Fe
stir echoes of history with each passing day.
Through conflict and turmoil, these 400 years,
our cultures have blended amid joy and tears.
They banded together and here they did stay,
to live as one people in old Santa Fe.
To relive our history, you need not go far.
The town finds voice on K-S-F-R!"
The station has aired it a few times.
posted at 6:50 PM EST
Arizona Public Media is offering viewers a rare event: A chance to witness two sitting Supreme Court justices talking about the Constitution. The one-hour discussion, "Principles of Constitutional and Statutory Interpretation," between Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer, will air live Monday (2:30 Eastern) on PBS World and also stream on the On Demand page at the Arizona Public Media website. Moderating will be NBC News Correspondent Pete Williams, from the Tucson Convention Center.
posted at 3:10 PM EST
Big Bird and his Sesame Street buddies are taking to the skies on Australia's largest airline, Qantas. From Dec. 1, 2009, through Nov. 30, 2010, six Sesame Street videos will be offered free to transpacific passengers.
posted at 2:58 PM EST
Choosing from 482 submissions from 82 countries, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) has selected six doc projects for funding, according to Screen Daily. The winners: 74 Square Meters (Chile) by Tiziana Panizza and Paola Castillo Iselsa; The Last White Man Standing (Kenya) by Justin Webster; The Team (Kenya) by Patrick Reed Kenyans; Teacher (Vietnam) by Leslie Wiener; This Is My Picture When I Was Dead (Jordan) by Mahmoud Al Massad; and The Rodriguez Project (South Africa) by Malik Bendjelloul.
posted at 9:45 AM EST
PRISA (Promotora de Informaciones), a 22-country Spanish language multimedia corporation, has purchased a 12 percent stake in V-me, reports Billboard magazine. That percentage should increase to a majority position in the next year. "PRISA is a perfect partner for V-me," president and CEO Carmen M. DiRienzo said in a statement. The nearly three-year-old V-me (Current, Feb. 12, 2007) is a partnership with pubTV, reaching almost 80 percent of Hispanic households in the United States.
posted at 9:31 AM EST
The Public Media Innovation Fund today announced Round Four funding. Total grants of $205,000 for economic and financial literacy projects went to KQED in San Francisco; WPSU in University Park, Penn.; Maryland Public Television; KNBA in Anchorage; Wisconsin Education Communications Board; KUEN in Salt Lake City; and North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y. Details on their project here.
posted at 10:45 AM EST
Where is the arts programming on PBS? So asks Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, on Huffington Post. He laments that arts programs are costly, and "come only from stations that can afford to create this programming, meaning those with strong fundraising operations. And far too few of the local stations do have strong fundraising operations." He favors a fundamental change for PBS: "Why can't the parent organization determine the best in American arts and fund its broadcast across the nation? And, he adds, CPB has the clout to make that happen. A PBS arts initiative was mentioned at Showcase in May (Current, May 29, 2009), which would create a weekly arts night of shows.
posted at 10:19 AM EST
NPR unveiled the first-ever Internet radio to offer an exclusive menu of NPR stations and programs. The "NPR Radio," modeled on an earlier WiFi radio by Livio that optimizes Pandora's music streaming service, allows NPR fans to switch between over-the-air broadcasts of local stations, online streams of more than 1,000 NPR outlets across the country, and on-demand content from NPR.org. More than 16,000 Internet radio stations not affiliated with NPR also are accessible on the device, offered for $199 from the NPR Shop and Livio Radio. Gadget reviews by Wired and CNET poke fun at the radio's accessibility features for the technology averse. "[I]t should pass the 'granny test' in ease of use, and it looks like a friendly radio and not a scary, virus-catching computer," Wired's reviewer writes.
posted at 10:12 AM EST
Another report on the future of American journalism takes aim at public broadcasting for failing to develop the local news gathering capacity that would enable it to deliver on its mission to inform the public.
The study, distilled over the weekend by David Carr of the New York Times, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, and Poynter's Rick Edmonds, recommends a new mechanism for supporting local journalism and calls for an overhaul in how resources are allocated within public broadcasting. Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and co-author Michael Schudson of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism collaborated on "The Reconstruction of Local Journalism," commissioned by the j-school.
After surveying the field for news chops and innovative thinking, Downie and Schudson conclude that too much of the money spent on public broadcasting is directed to maintaining local television and radio stations and not enough to independent news reporting. "Overall..., local news coverage remains underfunded, understaffed and a low priority at most public radio and television stations, whose leaders have been unable to make or uninterested in making the case for investment in local news to donors and Congress," they write.
They find exceptions at big pubcasters operating multiple outlets--San Francisco's KQED-TV/FM and Minnesota Public Radio and its California cousin KPCC in Pasadena--and with NPR's new Argo Project. But they also point to the "often dysfunctional, entrenched culture" of public TV and the recommendations of Tom Bettag, longtime producer of Nightline with Ted Koppel, whose study on creation of a Web-based public news site for public TV and radio has yet to be released by PBS.
Pubcasting's failure has as much to do with inadequate federal funding as it does with the allocation of the money that is available from the government and private donors, the co-authors say. They call for several reforms at CPB, including requirements of local news reporting by every publicly funded station. The corporation should also "increase and speed up its direct funding" for experiments in local news coverage for broadcast and Web distribution and "aggressively encourage and reward collaborations by public stations" with other nonprofits and universities.
Downie and Schudson recommend creation of a Fund for Local News, backed with FCC-collected fees on telecom users, broadcast licenses and Internet Service Providers. The fund would be modelled on those managed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, and award grants on a competitive basis in each state.
Columbia's study, which has been adapted for the new edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, is the second this month to conclude that public broadcasting is way behind the curve in adapting to the news and information needs of local communities in the digital era. In a report issued Oct. 2, a blue ribbon panel convened by the Aspen Institute and the Knight Foundation said pubcasting must "move quickly toward a broader vision of public service media," one that is "more local, more inclusive and more interactive."
posted at 10:59 AM EST
Central portion of this home page updated Nov. 20, 2009, by Current, a service of Current LLC, Takoma Park, Md.
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