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Long Island University last week agreed to sell WLIU-FM to a nonprofit set up to maintain the main public radio station on the eastern end of the island. Peconic Public Broadcasting will buy the station in Southampton from the private university for $2.425 million in cash and in-kind services....
In honor of its 40th anniversary on public TV, the famous Mister Rogers Neighborhood of Make-Believe set, including King Friday XIII’s castle, will be assembled for public viewing one last time, Nov. 6–8 [2009] at Pittsburgh’s WQED.... (Photo: WQED.)
The new series Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth from WGBH will premiere this month despite the demise of its namesake publication, Gourmet magazine, where host Ruth Reichl was editor-in-chief.
A WGBH and Harvard University partnership is turbocharging the traditional lecture series with Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? In the dozen programs on ethical decision-making, top political philosophy professor Michael Sandel (pictured) regularly hands the microphones to students for debates that become intense.... (Photo: WGBH.)
The offspring of a CPB-funded initiative for multimedia producers led public radio listeners on a cross-country journey this summer: to a Tennessee Main Street, an Alabama rabbit restaurant, a Seattle street corner and through New Orleans’ aural hustle and bustle. Listeners were invited to expand their travels by venturing online to explore the websites joined to these documentaries....
WGBH and WNET are “re-imaging and re-engineering” the PBS World documentary-oriented multicast channel, which has been picked up by only about 40 of the 170-plus public TV licensees. ¶ Stations gave a better response to Create, a how-to channel by the two big producers and American Public Television. Create is aired on 105 licensees’ multicast channels....
For a decade PBS’s website has tried to “localize” its visitors — asking where they live so it can show them local broadcast times and fundraising pitches for their hometown stations. ¶ Now it’s trying harder. Over the past year, PBS.org has increased by half the localized portion of users to 12 percent, and it will push further in coming months. . .
Most PBS stations want to get into streaming their own shows
The leadership of WNET said a federal investigation into the station’s use of federal grants totaling almost $13 million is wrapping up, and the organization is financially sound. ¶ “There was sloppiness as opposed to real wrongdoing in terms of our accounting systems, which has been addressed,” said James Tisch, chairman of the WNET 
Board, in an interview. ¶ The station has hired a new chief financial officer and created the position of executive director, financial control, to ensure compliance with federal grant rules, said Neal Shapiro, president.... (Image: One of the grants in question was National Science Foundation aid to Cyberchase.)
Pubcasters apply for stimulus grants to develop broadband: They joined more than 2,000 first-round applicants racing to pitch their broadband dreams for funding from the telecom piece of the government’s stimulus outlay. ¶ They’re volunteering for the Obama administration’s push to extend broadband access to unserved and underserved communities...
Classical music programmers are agitato tempestoso after discovering unexpected restrictions on the webcasting of symphonies. ¶ Under a new royalty agreement with the music industry, stations’ quarterly webcast reports must count each movement of a classical work as a separate track....
Public radio listeners are increasingly buying smartphones and joining social networking sites such as Facebook, expanding stations’ opportunities to serve them on those platforms, according to the second Public Radio Technology Survey conducted by the radio research firm Jacobs Media....
Among recent awards to public broadcasting: The Dickens adaptation won three more Primetime Emmys on Sept. 20, bringing its total to seven. Idaho Public Television was among the winners of Statehouse Awards from the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors. Pubcast programs won the Religion Newswriters Association awards for both radio and TV. The Public Radio Program Directors Association honored Tim Emmons with the 2009 Don Otto Award. The National Association for Black Journalists paid tribute to 13 pubcasters. And an Imagen Award went to the American Experience doc “A Class Apart.” More at Current.org/awards.
"Maybe we’re at a 1967 moment again,” says Ernest Wilson III, shortly after his election as chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on Sept. 16 [2009]. He’s making a hopeful comparison with the year when a Carnegie Commission report slid into President Johnson’s in-box in January and returned for his signature as the Public Broadcasting Act in November...
Producer Jay Allison describes The Moth Radio Hour, a five-episode pilot series offered by Public Radio Exchange, as an arranged marriage between public radio and The Moth, a nonprofit that presents storytelling evenings in New York . . . (Images from three shows courtesy of The Moth, right image © 2008 by Flash Rosenberg.)
Morning news alternative remixing its chemistry: There’s a reconstruction project under way at The Takeaway, launched in April 2008 as a live, spontaneous and different way to do drivetime news — different from Morning Edition, the most dominant show in public radio and one of the most polished.... (Pictured: Hockenberry and interim co-host Femi Oke.)
It happens so seldom, you have to ask. Few docs as substantial as The Principal Story, which airs on P.O.V. Sept. 15, are funded in full by a single angel, but this one was. The Wallace Foundation didn’t choose to cover the whole cost to make independent producers’ lives easier, though the grant did that. Wallace became sole funder on its first big media project to ... (Photo: Tresa Dunbar congratulates a new graduate of the elementary school she leads in Chicago.)
One Wednesday in September, PBS stations can invite guests to a big Central Park concert without leaving town, as public TV cranks up the buzz machine for National Parks: America’s Best Idea. It’s the first time PBS has offered a closed-circuit feed for station use only ... (Image: NASA.)
Listeners, friends and staff of Long Island’s WLIU-FM are hoping they can pull off the kind of magic trick that has saved several independent pubcasting stations in recent years. Thanks to a two-month reprieve in late August, WLIU has a little over three months, until Dec. 3, to raise about $2 million to buy its license, while hunting up new sites for its offices, studios and broadcast antenna....
Pubcasters got lower royalties, but they’re stressed over reporting rules: Now that public broadcasting has a webcasting royalty deal with the recording industry, local pubcasters are learning what it requires of them. Many are asking: Is this something we can live with? ...
Comparing the CPB-SoundExchange royalty contracts for 2005-10 and 2011-15.
On top of making five videos for permanent exhibition in the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, Albuquerque’s KNME-TV has won a $147,000 federal grant to make 15 more videos to be shared by museum-goers and TV viewers. ... (Pictured above: New Mexico plant life.)
With backing from CPB, Radio Bilingüe is beginning to develop and test programming for a new multiplatform public media outlet to launch in Los Angeles next year, though the project still has not nailed down a radio frequency.
Planting a flag for pubradio news on the Web: With the launch of its redesigned website July 27, National Public Radio announced its intention to become a contender as a provider of online news. Not that NPR execs haven’t been talking up their ambitions to strengthen the network’s online news service for months, but their revamp of NPR.org firmly plants the flag in the online news landscape.
“We were inundated by listeners asking, ‘Where’s the pet show? What have you done?’” the p.d. said. WAMU came back with Animal House.... (Pictured: Karen Munson, by Lisa McCarty.)
Ron Daugherty, 60, g.m. of KYUK-AM/FM/TV in Bethel, Alaska, died June 23 in the emergency room of Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta Regional Hospital in Bethel. ...
Congress is likely to provide $10 million to $40 million in emergency aid for financially devastated public stations in this year’s budget—the figure to be determined by an upcoming Senate floor vote and a House-Senate conference....
It wouldn’t be the first consolidation among Alaska’s public broadcasting stations, and it might not be the last. Managers of the state’s three largest stations, in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, are asking their governing bodies for a go-ahead to draw up plans for a consolidation of their efforts....
NPR and PBS plan national PublicMedia Camp Even though school will have started by then, about 300 public-media folks will get to go to camp on the weekend of Oct. 17-18 [2009] — NPR and PBS’s first national PublicMediaCamp. Plans will be announced this week, says Andy Carvin, NPR senior strategist, social media desk. It’s an “unconference,” like the deliberately unstructured BarCamps that are popular for brainstorming and spontaneous code-writing among open-source web technology activists....
NPR and six stations will compare the effectiveness of online fundraising websites in a trial expected to start next month. The so-called A/B experiment, designed to test how web users respond to different online donation pages, will direct some givers to their stations’ donation pages and send others to a new donation portal designed to offer a better user experience...
For 2011, a theater seating 2,500+: Austin City Limits is a hot commodity based on a cool brand built over 33 years on PBS. In two years it moves its entire production site downtown in the Texas capital city to a cornerstone 2,500-seat theater in a $300 million redevelopment. It’s exploring the option of a branded chain of live-music cafes, and will soon announce a partnership ... (Pictured: Nelson in the show's pilot (above left) and appearing on the show more recently with the band Asleep at the Wheel.)
Margaret Mark, a woman with a Mad Ave past, has a marketing idea for public TV, but it’s not like the labors of Coke and Pepsi attempting to give meaning to their brands of fizzy water, says Tim Bischoff, director of communications at Kentucky’s KET network. Her idea for branding public TV is to speak to the Explorer in the souls of most of its viewers. Over the past year or so, her focus groups for PBS have mined additional evidence that the core PBS audience identifies strongly with the Explorer, one of the basic personality archetypes described in the writings of early Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung....
The late French Chef Julia Child is getting a burst of extra attention with the Aug. 7 release of Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep as pubTV’s breakthrough, endearingly unpretentioius cooking teacher. ¶ So both PBS and WGBH, Child’s earliest pubTV home, are capitalizing on the movie debut with an online compilation, an in-person panel recorded for the Web, and a retrospective August pledge special... (Pictured: Child making it look casual on The French Chef. Photo by Paul Child.)
The series title means something, says arts documentarian Peter Rosen. If your film runs under the American Masters umbrella, it’s about an artist worth honoring. ¶ His film, Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes, aired in the series July 1. ¶ But Rosen would have given Garrison Keillor an admiring portrait anyway. “I’ve always thought we have a Mark Twain among us,” he says....
Seattle news/talk station KUOW is reevaluating its plans for an FM signal it’s been leasing in Tacoma, Wash., after a feasibility study revealed that prospective donors weren’t inclined to back a capital campaign to buy the station. ¶ KUOW began broadcasting its alternative news stream three years ago on KXOT, the 91.7 FM frequency held by Boulder-based Public Radio Capital. Under its five-year operating agreement, the Seattle outlet has until next July to exercise its option to buy the channel. ...
Huge rally for state’s Vietnam vets starts with producers engaged in their subject: While shooting more than 100 interviews for their Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories series, Wisconsin Public Television producers kept hearing the same comment from many of the veterans: They weren’t welcomed home after their grueling tours of duty 40 years ago in Southeast Asia. ¶ So on Saturday, May 22, 2010, they’ll finally get that “welcome home.” WPT has reserved Lambeau Field–home of the beloved Green Bay Packers, sacred ground for many Wisconsinites–for what may be the largest single outreach event in pubcasting history. ¶ Lambeau seats about 73,000 ...
DEI consultants Jay Clayton and Craig Oliver write in a commentary: Welcome to the new public radio economy. In public broadcasting, as in almost every other business, the recession is forcing managers to make very tough choices. In severe cases, such as that of public radio station WMUB at Miami University in Ohio, the licensee gets out of radio entirely. ¶ A dozen or more public radio stations, the ones most dependent on subsidized funding instead of listener-sensitive revenue, could face similar choices. This is revealed by DEI’s latest examination of the Community Financial Support Index (CFSI) ...
Public TV programmers are scratching their heads — and those of colleagues and consultants within reach — trying to understand rapidly diving (ah-OOO-ga!) audience estimates from Nielsen Media Research. Since January, public TV stations in two-thirds of metered markets have seen drops of 20 to 30 percent compared with the same period a year before, says Craig Reed, director of audience analysis for TRAC Media Services ...
When the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications announced last month that it would restructure its media outlets, Dean John Wright had already made one decision: Classical music on Gainesville’s WUFT/WJUF-FM would be cut back and possibly replaced completely by news and talk programming. ¶ Indeed, the college has now set the FM format change for Aug. 3 [2009], and Wright has asked his outside advisors to cut costs by consolidating management of its two commercial and three public stations — creating a closeness that raises red flags for some pubcasters.
Montana’s public TV network expanded its service in the state’s most populous city last month and will soon bring the first over-the-air PBS service to the third-largest market. ¶ MontanaPBS’s new over-the-air DTV station signed on June 12 in Billings, the state’s biggest city with about 100,000 people. Billings residents previously received MontanaPBS only on cable and a low-power transmitter, which is still operating. ¶ Meanwhile, the broadcaster has begun its final push to raise $1.2 million for a new station in the No. 3 city, Great Falls, where it already holds an approved construction permit.
the complex interplay of the media and law enforcement in community relations demonstrated in this photo from Duluth, Minn.? Test yourself and then reveal the explanation.
The biggest radio station purchase of the year, as of this month, was for a Dallas FM outlet that KERA plans to devote to Triple A music. ¶ KERA, which already operates a news-and-information FM station, announced June 9 that it will lay out $18 million for a reserved noncommercial channel at 91.7 MHz, KVTT, owned by religious broadcaster Covenant Educational Media. ¶ The purchase opens the door for a major audience expansion for public radio’s contemporary music-mix format. MORE
The board drops its hard line and draws a new one: ‘from now on’: In a compromise with the few pubTV stations that carry religious programming, the PBS Board voted June 16 to allow them to keep their PBS membership without dropping the shows. Member stations also can carry worship services and other clearly sectarian programs on their DTV multicast channels or other distribution platforms so long as they don’t carry the PBS name or PBS-distributed programming. MORE
His TV gala fundraiser just wasn’t in the stars for Fred Rogers ‘understudy’ Michael Kinsell imagined that his Michael’s Enchanted Neighborhood showwould replace Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on public television. Instead, Kinsell and his dream ended up on The Museum of Hoaxes website, which tracks “dubious claims and mischief of all kinds.” MORE
CPB will buy time-zone delay servers for 73 public TV stations to record PBS satellite feeds and delay them an hour, two hours or longer until broadcast time rolls around. ¶Most of the stations are in the Central and Mountain time zones, whose traditional satellite feeds, delayed from East Coast broadcast hours, were squeezed off the PBS satellite system this winter ... MORE
How do you get pubcasters to come to your annual meeting when their travel budgets were vaporized during their first round of budget cuts, months ago? The marketing experts at pubradio’s nonprofit DEI have a chance to show off their persuasive skills, intensifying promotion for DEI’s Public Radio Marketing and Development Conference, July 8–10 ... MORE
In a new biography of the legendary TV newsman Fred Friendly, media historian Ralph Engelman tells the largely forgotten story of Friendly's 1966 attempt to establish permanent funding for public TV as an alternative to the Carnegie Commission proposal. An excerpt: Preparation for the FCC submission, undertaken in secrecy, reached a frenzy in July. “In the 30 days prior to our submission,” Friendly recalled, “the 11th floor of the Ford Foundation looked more like a newsroom just before election than a philanthropic institution.” FULL EXCERPT
APTS, PBS and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association issued a statement last week to placate hundreds of angry callers to several pubTV stations whose main channels had shifted from their usual spots on cable. MORE
Planet Money grew ‘organically’ from ‘A Giant Pool of Money’A Why & how interview: Karen Everhart talks with Planet Money bloggers Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, who produced the radio doc about the bursting mortgage bubble, “A Giant Pool of Money,” aired last May, months before the implosion of the global financial system. Their broadcasts on This American Life and All Things Considered pulled a trifecta of duPont-Columbia, Polk and Peabody awards. MORE Your local network, the Tribe of
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Following a very public dustup, Frontline and correspondent T.R. Reid have parted ways. The split leaves series producers and freelance on-air correspondents examining their complex and sometimes contentious relationship. MORE
Staffers in both of NPR’s union bargaining units voted to approve last week a package of cost-cutting measures that management sought to cover budget shortfalls totaling $17 million over two years. Union and nonunion employees in all NPR divisions will take furlough days, give up holidays and waive corporate contributions toward their retirement and health-care plans. MORE
The African American Public Radio Consortium unveiled a new talk show last week to replace News and Notes, one of two midday NPR programs that succumbed to the recession last month. The Michael Eric Dyson Show premiered April 6, hosted by the prominent sociologist, author ... MORE
Will board force a choice between PBS and sectarian programs?The few public TV stations that carry religious programming are uneasily awaiting a final PBS Board decision on whether a station can air “sectarian” content and remain a member of the network. The issue affects at least five stations, with one, WLAE in New Orleans, weighing its PBS membership against a long-running broadcast of Sunday Mass. MORE For PBS pledge shows, overlap stations must pay extra or play laterThe PBS Board tweaked its rules governing one of public TV’s touchiest ongoing internal disputes March 31, stepping in as a referee between major-market stations that are full members of PBS and the smaller Program Differentiation Plan (PDP) stations in the same markets that buy part of the PBS schedule — usually with restrictions on broadcast dates. MORE |
Inside, PBS report is light on specifics; outside, NALIP seeks data to pursue change: For public TV, the dialogue about its minority representation is going public again. It’s about how Latinos, African Americans and other ethnic groups are represented on the screen — and the related matter of how well they’re represented in decision-making.On Friday, PBS President Paula Kerger will meet with leaders of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and answer questions ... MORE
"I’ve never done a historical drama, because they all end the same way — the Indians die, and I think to myself, ‘Okay, now why is that valuable history?’” says Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), director of three films in the April 2009 American Experience miniseries We Shall Remain. “It’s repeated over and over and even romanticized, almost like Greek mythology.” Eyre isn’t fond of most TV programs that tackle Native American history. ... MORE
Oregon Public Broadcasting, funded by CPB to develop a working model of the proposed American Archive of public radio and radio materials, is offering a total of $3 million in grants to stations for initial contributions to the digital repository. MORE
Third Coast International Audio Festival, which lost support from its fiscally challenged parent Chicago Public Radio this month, won’t hold its annual producers’ conference this fall but is working with other groups to hold some kind of get-together for producers. MORE
Reelchanges.org, a showcase created to raise production money online for filmmakers’ works in progress, has teamed up with Maryland Public Television to test whether “crowdfunding” will work for public TV documentaries. MORE
John Campbell is going to spring training to start filming a 13-part documentary series about the Rochester Red Wings, a AAA minor-league baseball team. Campbell, an independent producer based in town, expects to have the camera running when the team’s general manager tells each player where they’ll play ball this season — moving up to the major-league Minnesota Twins, or down to a AA minor-league team in Connecticut that feeds players to the Red Wings. MORE
The results of South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s 2009 spring pledge are a microcosm of stations across America: Radio, good, considering the economy; TV, not so good. ¶“It’s a mixed bag out here on the Plains,” said Fritz Miller, SDPB marketing director. The state network’s radio side surpassed its goals — bringing in $43,680 and signing up 102 ... MORE
Regular appearances of the audio essays will be back after they disappear from NPR newsmags at the end of April, says This I Believe Executive Director Dan Gediman. MORE
Commentary by John Dankosky of WNPR, Hartford: We tell our listeners all the time that their contributions make our high-quality journalism possible, and without their help, it could all go away. So it’s understandable that newspaper people might have been a little piqued by the NPR memo leaked this month. MORE
Executive compensation trimmed as network seeks union concessions: In a new round of budget-cutting now under way, NPR has reduced salaries and benefits for its officers and is proposing that its 565 union employees accept similar concessions. In addition, during talks initiated with its technicians’ union last week, NPR proposed new contract language that would roll back union jurisdiction over 85 jobs in the bargaining unit, according to a staff rep of the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians. MORE
Facing budget gap, PBS's public affairs program Now plans 2 months' hiatus.
Weekly cume grows to nearly 33 million, ATC reaches new peak of 13 million: NPR programming on public radio stations topped its previous audience record by reaching 27.5 million listeners a week during Arbitron’s fall 2008 survey period. The weekly cume audience for all NPR programs and newscasts, Sept. 10 to Dec. 10, beat the previous high of 26.4 million set last spring. MORE
Frank Christopher finds himself with an unusual assignment. The experienced documentary-maker produced Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, which aired on Independent Lens early in the decade, and the four-part Remaking American Medicine for public TV in 2006. Now he’s writing, directing and producing a bio of French explorer Samuel de Champlain — Dead Reckoning: Champlain in America — to be animated in 3D. MORE
All three major bond-rating firms have now downgraded the Colorado Public Radio bonds that provided $4.7 million for the network’s 2001 expansion. The reason: CPR’s 2008 decision to take on the costs of an additional FM channel for its news service when listeners shunned the AM channel it had bought. MORE
Ousted board member leads move for new radio voice in Texas borderland: A public broadcaster removed unexpectedly from the board of Catholic Church-controlled KMBH public radio and TV in Harlingen, Texas, is heading an effort to create an independent pubradio station in the Rio Grande Valley. MORE
Ken Burns will proceed with his films as planned despite General Motors’ withdrawal as a major sponsor, according to Washington’s WETA, Burns’ co-production partner. The producer and WETA knew more than a year ago that the struggling automaker would not renew its contract, which covered about 35 percent of Burns’ production budgets. MORE
CPB’s My Source public awareness initiative this month won a 2009 PRWeek Award, considered by PR insiders as the Oscars of the industry. The campaign received an Honorable Mention in the awards ceremony March 5 in New York City. MORE Pictured: Yuyi Morales learned English from Sesame Street. Now in her adopted country she writes and illustrates books for kids, she said in a My Source spot for KVIE in Sacramento, Calif.
Jagow trades host’s chair for a shot into the blogosphere After hosting Marketplace Morning Report for more than three years, Scott Jagow traded an audience of 5.3 million weekly radio listeners for a chance to make his mark on the blogosphere, where he has merely thousands of readers so far — and thousands of competitors. MORE
IMA speakers urge public radio — TV, too — to be watchdogs, locally and beyond: Pubcasting has a rare but fleeting opportunity to strengthen its online news services by expanding coverage of local communities and distributing content on multiple platforms, especially mobile ones. MORE
NPR President Vivian Schiller to NPR Board: As newspapers die, it’s pubradio’s responsibility to fill the gap in journalism MORE
National Public Lightpath advocate sees pubmedia mission in the case for faster broadband MORE
When frequent listeners go to cable news or Jon Stewart . . . ‘You’re losing your biggest fans' researcher warns’ MORE
Seven years after WGBH began its on-demand video archive of the often-stellar lectures and cultural events of the Boston area, it’s getting substantial national-level support for expansion to other cities. CPB contributed a two-year, $585,000 grant ... MORE (Pictured: popular speakers political scientist Angela Davis, architect I.M. Pei, physicist Lisa Randall.
Katy June-Friesen talks with talks with Oregon Public Broadcasting producer Ed Jahn about the invasive species documentary, which won a duPont-Columbia University Award last month. MORE
CPB: System revenue may drop $418 million in fiscal 2009 Emergency infusion: Rx for fiscal hemorrhageAPTS: It’s not a bailout, it’s disaster relief. Public television is asking Congress for a $211 million supplemental appropriation for fiscal year 2010 on top of the usual CPB funding, presenting it as disaster relief rather than another bailout. MORE
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Public radio must build audience by enhancing NPR’s newsmagazines and broadening its strategy for attracting a more diverse audience, among other recommendations that make up a forthcoming report from the CPB-backed Grow the Audience project. ... Tom Thomas of the Station Resource Group unveiled its major recommendations ... MORE
A former manager of accounting at Boston’s WGBH was arraigned Feb. 13 [2009] on charges that the two-decade employee embezzled nearly $500,000 from the station over nine years. MORE
Nine pubTV stations plan digicasting to mobile devices by year’s endBroadcasters, including nine pubTV stations and more than 50 network affiliates, will launch mobile DTV in 22 markets later this year, proponents announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last month. Viewers will pick up the signals on devices such as cell phones, laptops and in-vehicle TVs. MORE
If some level of broadband Internet hookup becomes the federal government’s next goal for universal service, will Washington help assure that there’s educational and public-interest content flowing in those big, fat pipes? Last July, Congress authorized creation of a new nonprofit to research and produce digital media content, though it’s awaiting appropriation and startup. MORE
Radio programmer Tim Emmons comments: Ten years ago I wrote an article for Current titled “Audibly absent from NPR: a program director.” By chance it appeared at the beginning of Kevin Klose’s tenure as NPR president. ... MORE
CPB will pay $1.85 million in royalty fees for the digital music streams operated by public radio stations under a long-anticipated agreement with SoundExchange, the royalty collection agent for recording labels and sound artists. MORE
Scenes from a meltdown: On CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, the always-angry host bellows about “a new effort to ram a huge Wall Street bailout through Congress and down the throats of the American people.” On Mad Money, CNBC’s hyperventilating Jim Cramer rants about an “economic Pearl Harbor” and whom to blame for it. ... Nightly Business Report that night, as the economic crisis shifted into high gear, was, as always, unruffled and well-modulated — what used to be called businesslike. MORE (Pictured: the program's New York staff relaxes after their 30th anniversary broadcast from the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Geoff Fox.)
My Father, My Brother, and Me opens with producer Dave Iverson running on a treadmill. In voiceover, he says he knew he had Parkinson’s long before his official diagnosis — when he ran, his left arm didn’t swing like the right. MORE (Pictured: Iverson's father was diagnosed with the disorder 30 years earlier.) The program airs tonight, Feb. 3, and Iverson will answer questions on Washingtonpost.com, Feb. 4.
They've got something for tots on their DTV menus: With the all-digital future arriving, if haltingly, and a bigger share of viewers likely to come through DTV multicast channels, public TV stations are reconsidering how to use their bitstream, making over their channels, and in some cases adding new services to woo audiences. The wee audience, for one. MORE
What happens when the copyright culture, based on restriction upon restriction, meets the Wild West of today’s media market and an oncoming generation with little patience with those old ways? MORE
CPB, NPR and PBS, in consultation with the Association of Public Television Stations, want President-elect Obama to include $550 million for noncommercial “public-service media” in his far larger package of spending and tax cuts to stimulate the economy and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. MORE
Is pubcasting a '‘legacy’ for a new generation to treasure? LBJ's institution considers its fit in the Obama era
CPB’s $20 million American History & Civics Initiative, slowly progressing toward classrooms, has cleared another hurdle: All seven finalists that were announced in July 2007 have presented prototypes to CPB. MORE
Three months after WNET/WLIW launched Worldfocus and KCET took over U.S. distribution of BBC World News from WLIW, many public TV stations have decided not to choose between the Brits and the Yanks. Instead, they’re airing both of the half-hour world newscasts, expanding the airtime devoted to news and public affairs. MORE
Electric Company returns, Naomi still missingNow in its sixth year, after some 24,000 oral history interviews, StoryCorps is evolving new variations for both intake and output of its intimate personal stories. The nonprofit is developing a website with social-networking features and will let subjects decide whether to put their interviews online, founder Dave Isay says. StoryCorps is also working with a future civil rights museum in Atlanta to establish a permanent booth in its new building ... MORE
There's no shortage of factors that could explain why public TV ratings have dropped 37 percent in the past decade, from 1.9 in 1998-99 to 1.2 in 2007-08. The biggest factor is a surge in audience fragmentation, says Chris Schiavone, an audience strategist who works with PBS, in a Current commentary.
The afternoon team at Chicago’s newest noncommercial radio station is on the air, talking crime and punishment. Most public radio shows would steer a conversation about the city police force along a course charted by producers well in advance and predictably typecast with expert pontificators. Not Vocalo.org. ...
Part 1: The sound
Part 2: Awaiting judgment, Vocalo gets practice
Pharma fees to Infinite Mind doctor call attention to conflict-of-interest issues: Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. MORE
The performance artists of Cyclecide build bicycles out of junked parts — including a manual lawnmower — for their bicycle rodeo. Cris Benton takes aerial photos by rigging remote-controlled cameras to handmade kites. . . . All appear on Make, a new program from Twin Cities Public Television that showcases inventors and provides how-to instruction. The show, syndicated by American Public Television, airs starting in January. MORE
To make time for talks with concerned stations, NPR has put on hold a proposed trial of online giving on NPR.org. The experiment, previously slated to begin in the spring, is one of several fundraising initiatives proposed during station talks that began this summer. MORE
Local pubcasters are failing to attract significant audiences to their online offerings, according to data collected by the Integrated Media Association and presented at the Public Television Programmers Association meeting this month. ¶ IMA’s Public Media Metrics, which tracks daily activity on 120 station sites, found that 70 percent of visitors to local station websites visit once a month or less often. MORE
NPR’s next president made one giant leap in the news business two years ago when she moved from long-form documentary production into digital media for the New York Times Co., but it wasn’t the first or the last of Vivian Schiller’s career. ¶ In the early 1980s, Schiller was living in the Soviet Union, working as a translator and guide for professional groups touring the country, when she was hired as a “fixer” for the Turner Broadcasting System.... MORE
Haarsager and Klose will take new NPR roles.
The former g.m. of KWMU-FM, dismissed by the licensee University of Missouri-St. Louis five months ago, has reached a settlement with the school. ¶ Patty Wente received $50,000 from the school, along with official recognition of her departure as a resignation, not a firing, and a letter of recommendation describing the station’s gains in audience and revenue under her 19-year management. MORE
Her assignment: recording traditional wisdom from the elder generation: When filmmaker and anthropologist Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey was 7 years old, her Native Hawaiian elders predicted she would “keep the voices of the ancestors alive.” ¶ “I just naively thought every 7-year-old goes through that conversation,” she says.... MORE
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, 160-plus program projects for future seasons on public TV.
Los Angeles producer Phillip Rodriguez is two programs deep in what he hopes will become a provocative PBS series about the country’s growing Latino population. His new Latinos ’08, an examination of Latino voting and politics, airs Oct. 8 and follows last year’s Brown Is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream, about Latinos and the American media market. MORE
WETA draws fire from Latinos, this time over Latinos '08.
Commentary by Louis Barbash: Toward the end of a campaign that sometimes seems to have devolved into a farrago of gotchas, hair-trigger umbrage and pig lipstick, it’s impossible not to wonder whatever became of issue-driven campaigns. What happened to selecting candidates for their policy positions instead of their personalities? MORE
The buzz over PBS’s decision to offer Sherry Jones’ documentary Torturing Democracy an Jan. 21 air date — well after the election and the day after the Bush administration leaves office — may get the doc near-national carriage this fall. MORE
The four-year struggle to establish WRNI in Providence, R.I., as an independent public radio service for the state crossed a long-awaited threshold last month, when its aspiring licensee announced the station’s independence from Boston’s WBUR ... MORE
A last-minute addition to public radio’s pre-election coverage was Down to the Wire, a four-hour special airing the Sunday before Election Day that pairs onetime CNN anchor Aaron Brown with former NPR national correspondent Elizabeth Arnold. MORE
Now more than ever, with the economy trembling, public TV’s underwriting salespeople believe they must play like the other sellers in the media marketplace. “We can’t live in an ivory tower,” says Suzanne Zellner, v.p. for corporate development at WGBH. “We know what we need to do to be aggressive and competitive.” MORE
What makes an underwriting deal in '08? Get your Arthur plates while you can, because the festive plates will vanish by Thanksgiving.
With the world’s financial markets stuttering to a halt, development veterans advised stations to stay the course with their fundraising activities, both on-air and off. “Do not plan to fail,” suggested Jay Clayton, a fundraising consultant with Development Exchange Inc., during a conference call “pep rally” ... MORE
PBS has begun showing off versions of public TV’s forthcoming online video player — a wide, dark screen that encourages browsing. Still images representing PBS and local stations’ programs form a horizontal parade as in Apple’s iTunes interface, on a black background reminiscent of the NBC/Fox video site, Hulu.com. HOME
As Congress worked in crisis mode to approve the Bush Administration’s $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street, legislators passed a smaller-scale bill of interest to anyone who offers music recordings on the Web. MORE
Susan Clampitt, fired as g.m. of Washington’s WAMU-FM in 2003, can proceed with a defamation suit against the licensee, American University, and the university president who fired her, an appeals court ruled Sept. 25. MORE
As Hurricane Ike swirled toward the Texas coast on Friday, Sept. 12, more than 20 staffers of HoustonPBS and KUHF-FM hunkered down in the Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting on the University of Houston campus with their dogs, cats, children and air mattresses. MORE | VIDEO TOUR Pictured: KUHF journalists watch radar image of approaching storm.
A commentary by Tom Livingston: Who will lead the major-gift duties to fulfill stations’ new aspirations? The kind of leaders needed to drive this transformation are energetic change agents, not just media organization managers. This amounts to a major challenge to our current leaders: Either grow into the new job description or get out of the way. MORE
NPR.org begins inviting visitors to join its new social media network Sept. 29, building on software licensed from Pluck Social Media to extend interactivity across the site. MORE
NPR Digital Media's new v.p., Kinsey Wilson, comes from USAToday.com and its newspaper. NPR Digital Media's editorial director, Dick Meyer, arrived earlier from CBS.com.
Sixty-three percent of public radio and TV stations responding to a recent survey by PubForge.org are using open-source software in their websites, and more are interested in starting. Ninety percent want to participate in a webinar or group discussion about doing more with open source. MORE
Cindy Browne never promised them a rose garden. In fact, the founding executive director of Iowa Public Radio repeatedly promised the network’s 50-some staffers a long passage through anger, grief and confusion, before things would get the least bit rosy. Over the past three years ... MORE
Marc Hand and Susan Harmon of Public Radio Capital look at three public radio stations that merged in Cincinnati, Iowa and Seattle/Tacoma. Combining enables them to improve service to the levels that listeners expect and many pros believe they must reach. COMMENTARY
Videos of the Sept. 1 arrests of Democracy Now! producers in St. Paul, Minn., spread chilling evidence that police were making no distinction between the protestors outside the Republican National Convention and working journalists covering their activities. Among approximately 40 reporters and other media-makers caught up in police sweeps during the convention were Nicole Salazar, a multimedia producer for the daily progressive news program, and her colleague Sharif Abdel Kouddous. MORE
PRI programmer Mike Arnold writes in a commentary: In public radio, we often enjoy mistakes as long as they are somebody else’s. When I was the chair of the Public Radio Program Directors Board, we often tried to set up conference sessions where successful people would talk about mistakes they made. The planned speakers seemed interested at first, but they usually talked more about success. MORE
It just happened in Santa Cruz, Calif., and in St. Louis and Oxford, Ohio, in August. It's happening again in Fort Myers, Fla., and, later this fall, in Portland, Ore. In these and other cities, listeners of public radio and community radio stations will be surprised to find favorite programs missing and something else in their place — even though they’ve been told in advance that change is a-comin’. MORE
Web technologist Margaret Rosas is a newcomer to public radio, but has become a big admirer—and a believer in something more. Rosas, one of the 16 winners of the Knight Foundation’s annual Knight News Challenge, is working with her local station, KUSP in Santa Cruz, Calif. . . . MORE
NBC News correspondent Martin Savidge got wind of Worldfocus, the new WLIW/ WNET international news program, through the network-news grapevine. “The idea of the program had created a buzz within the journalistic community,” he says. People were asking, “Have you heard what Neal Shapiro is doing?” MORE
More power for HD Radio, more buzz on analogAn extensive study by NPR Labs points to significant trade-offs between the audience reach of digital HD Radio and the amount of interference to analog FM. Findings will be presented at a day-long seminar Sept. 16 in Austin, Texas, preceding the NAB Radio Show. Map shows projected interference to analog WDUQ-FM, in red, if HD Radio power is increased. MORE
Grow the Audience, a CPB-funded initiative launched this summer by Station Resource Group, is devising strategies to increase public radio’s audience growth, working on a fast track to deliver recommendations to CPB in November. A major thrust is to engage minorities and other potential new listeners. Audience/fundraising consultant John Sutton has questioned the project’s initial focus on demographics and notes that public radio’s previous attempts to target specific audience groups “haven’t come close to succeeding.” Article | Project site | Sutton blog
Before the Democratic Convention hits the airwaves Aug. 25, Jim Lehrer’s nightly NewsHour sendoff — “we’ll see you online and again here Monday evening” — will mean more than it used to. For several months, Lehrer’s corps has been pondering ways to fuse its online and broadcast units and make the show’s website a more vital part of the reporting process. Article | DirectCurrent
There’s no tape documenting how loud fundraisers yelped or how much inebriation followed, but public TV stations in Maryland, Detroit and Missoui celebrated million-dollar gifts this year despite the lagging economy. MORE
In sports terms, it would be a come-from-behind victory for Mississippi Public Broadcasting, the dark horse that galloped ahead and took the purse. MPB won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards for radio network news reporting, the Radio-Television News Directors Association announced last month. MORE
NPR leads web collaboration Two initiatives led by NPR will soon offer station websites greater automated handling of editorial content and national sales of underwriting to help support those sites. Public Interactive repositioned as online utility for the systemOn the editorial side, NPR acquired Public Radio International’s Public Interactive subsidiary, a provider of specialized website systems for 170 public broadcasting clients, the companies announced July 31. MORE NPR-WGBH-owned National Public Media to sell bulk remnant space on station sitesOn the underwriting side, National Public Media, the underwriting sales agency bought by NPR and WGBH last September, will offer to find sponsors for national packages of unsold underwriting on station sites. MORE |
As Hurricane Ike swirled toward the Texas coast on Friday, Sept. 12, more than 20 staffers of HoustonPBS and KUHF-FM hunkered down in the Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting on the University of Houston campus with their dogs, cats, children and air mattresses. MORE | VIDEO TOUR Pictured: KUHF journalists watch radar image of approaching storm.
A commentary by Tom Livingston: Who will lead the major-gift duties to fulfill stations’ new aspirations? The kind of leaders needed to drive this transformation are energetic change agents, not just media organization managers. This amounts to a major challenge to our current leaders: Either grow into the new job description or get out of the way. MORE
NPR.org begins inviting visitors to join its new social media network Sept. 29, building on software licensed from Pluck Social Media to extend interactivity across the site. MORE
NPR Digital Media's new v.p., Kinsey Wilson, comes from USAToday.com and its newspaper. NPR Digital Media's editorial director, Dick Meyer, arrived earlier from CBS.com.
Sixty-three percent of public radio and TV stations responding to a recent survey by PubForge.org are using open-source software in their websites, and more are interested in starting. Ninety percent want to participate in a webinar or group discussion about doing more with open source. MORE
Cindy Browne never promised them a rose garden. In fact, the founding executive director of Iowa Public Radio repeatedly promised the network’s 50-some staffers a long passage through anger, grief and confusion, before things would get the least bit rosy. Over the past three years ... MORE
Marc Hand and Susan Harmon of Public Radio Capital look at three public radio stations that merged in Cincinnati, Iowa and Seattle/Tacoma. Combining enables them to improve service to the levels that listeners expect and many pros believe they must reach. COMMENTARY
Videos of the Sept. 1 arrests of Democracy Now! producers in St. Paul, Minn., spread chilling evidence that police were making no distinction between the protestors outside the Republican National Convention and working journalists covering their activities. Among approximately 40 reporters and other media-makers caught up in police sweeps during the convention were Nicole Salazar, a multimedia producer for the daily progressive news program, and her colleague Sharif Abdel Kouddous. MORE
PRI programmer Mike Arnold writes in a commentary: In public radio, we often enjoy mistakes as long as they are somebody else’s. When I was the chair of the Public Radio Program Directors Board, we often tried to set up conference sessions where successful people would talk about mistakes they made. The planned speakers seemed interested at first, but they usually talked more about success. MORE
It just happened in Santa Cruz, Calif., and in St. Louis and Oxford, Ohio, in August. It's happening again in Fort Myers, Fla., and, later this fall, in Portland, Ore. In these and other cities, listeners of public radio and community radio stations will be surprised to find favorite programs missing and something else in their place — even though they’ve been told in advance that change is a-comin’. MORE
Web technologist Margaret Rosas is a newcomer to public radio, but has become a big admirer—and a believer in something more. Rosas, one of the 16 winners of the Knight Foundation’s annual Knight News Challenge, is working with her local station, KUSP in Santa Cruz, Calif. . . . MORE
NBC News correspondent Martin Savidge got wind of Worldfocus, the new WLIW/ WNET international news program, through the network-news grapevine. “The idea of the program had created a buzz within the journalistic community,” he says. People were asking, “Have you heard what Neal Shapiro is doing?” MORE
More power for HD Radio, more buzz on analogAn extensive study by NPR Labs points to significant trade-offs between the audience reach of digital HD Radio and the amount of interference to analog FM. Findings will be presented at a day-long seminar Sept. 16 in Austin, Texas, preceding the NAB Radio Show. Map shows projected interference to analog WDUQ-FM, in red, if HD Radio power is increased. MORE
Grow the Audience, a CPB-funded initiative launched this summer by Station Resource Group, is devising strategies to increase public radio’s audience growth, working on a fast track to deliver recommendations to CPB in November. A major thrust is to engage minorities and other potential new listeners. Audience/fundraising consultant John Sutton has questioned the project’s initial focus on demographics and notes that public radio’s previous attempts to target specific audience groups “haven’t come close to succeeding.” Article | Project site | Sutton blog
Before the Democratic Convention hits the airwaves Aug. 25, Jim Lehrer’s nightly NewsHour sendoff — “we’ll see you online and again here Monday evening” — will mean more than it used to. For several months, Lehrer’s corps has been pondering ways to fuse its online and broadcast units and make the show’s website a more vital part of the reporting process. Article | DirectCurrent
There’s no tape documenting how loud fundraisers yelped or how much inebriation followed, but public TV stations in Maryland, Detroit and Missoui celebrated million-dollar gifts this year despite the lagging economy. MORE
In sports terms, it would be a come-from-behind victory for Mississippi Public Broadcasting, the dark horse that galloped ahead and took the purse. MPB won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards for radio network news reporting, the Radio-Television News Directors Association announced last month. MORE
NPR leads web collaborationTwo initiatives led by NPR will soon offer station websites greater automated handling of editorial content and national sales of underwriting to help support those sites. Public Interactive repositioned as online utility for the systemOn the editorial side, NPR acquired Public Radio International’s Public Interactive subsidiary, a provider of specialized website systems for 170 public broadcasting clients, the companies announced July 31. MORE NPR-WGBH-owned National Public Media to sell bulk remnant space on station sitesOn the underwriting side, National Public Media, the underwriting sales agency bought by NPR and WGBH last September, will offer to find sponsors for national packages of unsold underwriting on station sites. MORE |
One of public broadcasting’s great system builders, Jack McBride, age 82, died July 28 in Lincoln, Neb., where he managed Nebraska Educational Television for four decades. Obituary | Eulogy
The Aug. 7 farewell concert for The Police grossed just over $3 million as a fundraiser for New York’s WNET/WLIW duo, selling out the 18,222 seats in Madison Square Garden. Bill Baker, WNET president emeritus, called the benefit “phenomenally successful financially.” MORE
Crowdsourcing: Enlisted legmen, formerly known as the audienceTo hear Brian Lehrer describe it, his station’s foray into audience-based reporting began as a quest for a fresh take on an unremarkable story. When Lehrer’s popular WNYC talk show wanted to get listeners talking last summer about the preponderance of gas-guzzling SUVs and minivans on New York streets ... Pictured: mapped results from Lehrer's crowdsourced inquiry about milk prices. MORE
Public radio listeners use the Internet heavily, and the number who pursue more online relationships with their stations has grown steadily for five years, according to a review of Target Analytics data by Lewis Kennedy Associates presented at the Public Radio Development & Marketing Conference in Orlando this month. MORE
Blair Feulner, the Utah pubcaster who built KPCW in Park City as well as his reputation as a maverick dealmaker in the radio frequencies market, appears to have talked himself out of a job. MORE
"A technical fog can descend over stories like this, but it shouldn’t,” says Louisville Public Media exec Todd Mundt. Drum roll: “This is a BIG deal,” says Mundt. On July 17, NPR offered Internet tinkerers worldwide, as well as member stations, the key to its online trove of 250,000 audio reports and related text produced since 1995. Embedded above: Geoff Gaudreault's widget, connecting NPR headlines with places on an animated globe. MORE
NPR’s Bryant Park Project died as it lived last week, with producers and fans chatting,
cracking jokes and sharing peeks behind the scenes, both on its broadcast and in
the online social-media matrix that grew around the newsmagazine. MORE
The Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur, Texas, is giving a nonprofit low-power FM station four months to get its studio and offices out of City Hall after the station refused to eliminate political topics from its programs. Pictured: Stephen Mosely, founder of KSAP. (Photo: Mike Tobias, Port Arthur News.) ARTICLE or DISCUSSION
Debbie S. Jordan, v.p. of operations at Blue Ridge PBS in Roanoke, Va., and Gary L. Smith, NPR's front-desk greeter in Washington.
Former blue-chip stocks are no longer worth the paper they’re printed on. Tumbleweeds blow through abandoned department stores. A full gas tank is worth more than the remaining equity in your house. This only slightly exaggerates the economy’s plight as broad concerns about the economy deepen — with no relief in sight. MORE
Observing subprime ‘tsunami’ approaching, CPB commissions a response
In Pagedale, a blue-collar community of about 4,000 on the outskirts of St. Louis, Mayor Mary Carter gets several calls a week from residents who can’t keep up with housing payments.... MORE
3 million givers:
necessary driveNeeded first: a cultural shift in fundraising
DEI fundraising specialists Jay Clayton and Melanie Coulson make the case for 3MG: Public radio stations’ ability to provide important services to their communities depends on — more than any other factor — increasing the number of givers who support them. Three recent trends indicate this will become even more crucial as programming costs grow. MORE
NPR applauds 3MG’s listener-giver focus
Dana Davis Rehm, senior v.p., writes: The number of givers to public radio stations has been stuck at 2.5 million since 2003. Worse yet, the Station Resource Group reports that net revenue from listener contributions declined from 2005 to 2006. Do we have to settle for a flat to declining level of audience financial support? MORE
Three finalists in the Public Radio Talent Quest won CPB research-and-development grants totaling $800,000 to refine and develop pilots they conceived and hosted. Two winners, Al Letson and Glynn Washington, rose to the top from a field of more than 1,400 contestants in the Public Radio Exchange’s Web 2.0-style competition. The third, community activist Majora Carter, was recruited by a group of seasoned production execs ... MORE
Over the past decade Dallas has aggressively worked to redefine itself as a major arts center, with new world-class museums and performance centers fueled by record philanthropic donations. Now KERA, the region’s dominant pubcaster, is positioning itself to be the place arts consumers go to find out what’s showing. MORE
Hosts walk high wires, producers hold netsOrganization charts may put the producer in charge, but, hey, who really acts like the senior partner? Marketplace creator Jim Russell has some thoughts from his own and others' experience. MORE
Question: When is a map more than merely a map? Answer No. 1: On the Web, where maps increasingly serve as the front ends of databases jammed with information about places and their populations. Answer No. 2: At the third annual Beyond Broadcast Conference June 17 at American University in Washington, D.C. AU’s Center for Social Media used the metaphorical “mapping” to describe its big-tent vision of “public media" . . . MORE
Grieving former listeners of Twin Cities classical music station WCAL now say they’re several steps closer to getting it back on the air. Their tenacious listener group, Save WCAL, this month urged Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson to overturn the sale of the station by its longtime licensee, St. Olaf College, to Minnesota Public Radio, which now operates it as an eclectic contemporary music outlet called The Current. MORE
Before Bhutan's first parliamentary elections this year, WNYC Political Director Andrea Bernstein helped prep the mountain republic's journalists for their first election coverage. SHE WRITES ...
In 20 cities across the country, public TV stations are organizing Super Why! reading camps, hosting book-centric sporting events and concerts and handing out Super Why! and WordWorld DVDs at YMCAs and grocery stores as part of Raising Readers, the new face of pubTV’s Ready to Learn outreach efforts. MORE
Kentucky ETV will lose $1.8 million and up to 18 percent of its staff next year, while at least 10 other state networks suffer funding cuts of their own, as state governments share the pain of significant tax shortfalls and other effects of the country’s economic slowdown. MORE
Seeing ‘sustained’ downturn, MPR predicts staff cuts
Minnesota Public Radio last week notified employees it will reduce their number for the new fiscal year starting July 1. The network and its sister American Public Media have added more than 100 employees since 2004 — enlarging the staff from 380 to 489 — and now looks to pare the roster and to balance the budget for fiscal 2009 ... MORE
A Hollywood attorney and a Florida educator, both sizeable donors to political campaigns, and a small-city broadcast journalist who covers elections but doesn’t donate were announced May 29 as Bush administration nominees for the CPB Board. MORE
Noncommercial Triple A radio, the public radio format defined by eclectic, localized mixes of contemporary music, defies easy categorization. Yet when its colorful band of some 250 practitioners gathered in Philadelphia for the eighth annual NON-COMMvention May 29-31, the something that unites them was immediately obvious — passion for discovering new performers with that electrifying combination of chops and charisma, and for sharing those discoveries with fellow music lovers. MORE
Recipe for WETA's Your Week, in development for PBS: Take two political journals that don’t agree about much, add one social bookmarking website, an 18-year-old bedroom music producer and a hyperactive chroma key. Seed with CPB cash and stimulate with the opinions of thousands. MORE
No nerds, please: Producers devising likeably clever charactersLaunched nearly three years ago to win back little eyeballs from cable nets such as Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, the Next Generation PBS Kids initiative mapped out a plan to compete on-air and online. The kids programming team, led by Linda Simensky, senior director of children’s programming, first had to invest in shows with irresistible characters (such as Sid, at left) as well as strong core curricula. MORE See also: Current's updated Junior Pipeline of upcoming children's programs.
The former g.m. of KWMU-FM in St. Louis is defending her performance after a review of the station’s finances and management prompted her dismissal last week. Patty Wente was fired June 2 [2008], seven weeks after the University of Missouri launched a review of the station at the system’s St. Louis campus. MORE
Frontline's Chinese group profile June 17 would be first in a "longitudinal doc" series with some of the rare attributes of Michael Apted's 49 Up and kinIf you stand quite rightly in awe at Michael Apted’s 49 Up, which aired on P.O.V. last fall, you’re likely to be cheered by the news that Frontline aired June 17 the first installment in what producer Sue Williams hopes will be a long series of periodic interviews with nine diverse people in China. (Pictured: Apted's Brits in left column, Married in America couples in center, some of Williams' Chinese subjects at right.) MORE
Wasatch Public Media, a new nonprofit established just 10 weeks ago to buy KCPW-FM in Salt Lake City and keep it a pubradio news station, now has the signed contract. But the nail-biting part of the deal occurred May 27, when Wasatch submitted a $2.4 million financial package for the purchase ... MORE
With no FCC approval two years after filing, the owner and would-be buyer of WXEL-FM/TV in Florida’s Palm Beach area have given up their 2005 sale agreement, the Palm Beach Post reported. MORE
PBS will partner with thePlatform for Media Inc., a Seattle-based subsidiary of cable giant Comcast, to create a cohesive online public TV video distribution network that intermingles local and national content and multiplies overall the number of videos that pubTV offers on its websites. MORE
Organization charts may put the producer in charge, but, hey, who really acts like the senior partner? Marketplace creator Jim Russell has some thoughts from his own and others' experience. MORE
Question: When is a map more than merely a map? Answer No. 1: On the Web, where maps increasingly serve as the front ends of databases jammed with information about places and their populations. Answer No. 2: At the third annual Beyond Broadcast Conference June 17 at American University in Washington, D.C. AU’s Center for Social Media used the metaphorical “mapping” to describe its big-tent vision of “public media" . . . MORE
Grieving former listeners of Twin Cities classical music station WCAL now say they’re several steps closer to getting it back on the air. Their tenacious listener group, Save WCAL, this month urged Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson to overturn the sale of the station by its longtime licensee, St. Olaf College, to Minnesota Public Radio, which now operates it as an eclectic contemporary music outlet called The Current. MORE
Before Bhutan's first parliamentary elections this year, WNYC Political Director Andrea Bernstein helped prep the mountain republic's journalists for their first election coverage. SHE WRITES ...
In 20 cities across the country, public TV stations are organizing Super Why! reading camps, hosting book-centric sporting events and concerts and handing out Super Why! and WordWorld DVDs at YMCAs and grocery stores as part of Raising Readers, the new face of pubTV’s Ready to Learn outreach efforts. MORE
Kentucky ETV will lose $1.8 million and up to 18 percent of its staff next year, while at least 10 other state networks suffer funding cuts of their own, as state governments share the pain of significant tax shortfalls and other effects of the country’s economic slowdown. MORE
Seeing ‘sustained’ downturn, MPR predicts staff cuts
Minnesota Public Radio last week notified employees it will reduce their number for the new fiscal year starting July 1. The network and its sister American Public Media have added more than 100 employees since 2004 — enlarging the staff from 380 to 489 — and now looks to pare the roster and to balance the budget for fiscal 2009 ... MORE
A Hollywood attorney and a Florida educator, both sizeable donors to political campaigns, and a small-city broadcast journalist who covers elections but doesn’t donate were announced May 29 as Bush administration nominees for the CPB Board. MORE
Noncommercial Triple A radio, the public radio format defined by eclectic, localized mixes of contemporary music, defies easy categorization. Yet when its colorful band of some 250 practitioners gathered in Philadelphia for the eighth annual NON-COMMvention May 29-31, the something that unites them was immediately obvious — passion for discovering new performers with that electrifying combination of chops and charisma, and for sharing those discoveries with fellow music lovers. MORE
Recipe for WETA's Your Week, in development for PBS: Take two political journals that don’t agree about much, add one social bookmarking website, an 18-year-old bedroom music producer and a hyperactive chroma key. Seed with CPB cash and stimulate with the opinions of thousands. MORE
No nerds, please: Producers devising likeably clever charactersLaunched nearly three years ago to win back little eyeballs from cable nets such as Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, the Next Generation PBS Kids initiative mapped out a plan to compete on-air and online. The kids programming team, led by Linda Simensky, senior director of children’s programming, first had to invest in shows with irresistible characters (such as Sid, at left) as well as strong core curricula. MORE See also: Current's updated Junior Pipeline of upcoming children's programs.
The former g.m. of KWMU-FM in St. Louis is defending her performance after a review of the station’s finances and management prompted her dismissal last week. Patty Wente was fired June 2 [2008], seven weeks after the University of Missouri launched a review of the station at the system’s St. Louis campus. MORE
Frontline's Chinese group profile June 17 would be first in a "longitudinal doc" series with some of the rare attributes of Michael Apted's 49 Up and kinIf you stand quite rightly in awe at Michael Apted’s 49 Up, which aired on P.O.V. last fall, you’re likely to be cheered by the news that Frontline aired June 17 the first installment in what producer Sue Williams hopes will be a long series of periodic interviews with nine diverse people in China. (Pictured: Apted's Brits in left column, Married in America couples in center, some of Williams' Chinese subjects at right.) MORE
Wasatch Public Media, a new nonprofit established just 10 weeks ago to buy KCPW-FM in Salt Lake City and keep it a pubradio news station, now has the signed contract. But the nail-biting part of the deal occurred May 27, when Wasatch submitted a $2.4 million financial package for the purchase ... MORE
With no FCC approval two years after filing, the owner and would-be buyer of WXEL-FM/TV in Florida’s Palm Beach area have given up their 2005 sale agreement, the Palm Beach Post reported. MORE
PBS will partner with thePlatform for Media Inc., a Seattle-based subsidiary of cable giant Comcast, to create a cohesive online public TV video distribution network that intermingles local and national content and multiplies overall the number of videos that pubTV offers on its websites. MORE
This American Life and its network, PRI, say they’re pleased with the audience of about 30,000 fans for the program’s May 1 live, high-def video broadcast to the National CineMedia satellite network of 330 movie theaters around the country, says program spokesman Seth Lind. MORE
Public broadcasters have devoted millions of dollars and plenty of angst to prepare for digital broadcasts that will put more channels and HD pictures on big living-room screens. But another DTV transition that’s even more exciting to some pubTV vets is arriving in viewers’ pockets. (Pictured above: LG Electronics President Woo Paik introduces a handheld mobile DTV receiver.) MORE
NPR Mobile: If you missed the news, please press 1
NPR and about 30 partner stations are working to make sure listeners can carry pubradio in their pockets — or on belt clips, for the less fashion-conscious — no matter whether they have web-capable cell phones. NPR Mobile Web and Voice, launched last summer with 10 participating stations, was to welcome its third batch of partner stations May 1. MORE
With a budget shortfall of several million dollars, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is experiencing its tightest financial times ever. Last year the program lost a major corporate sponsor, Archer Daniels Midland, and has had difficulty finding new sponsorship. MORE
Fair Game succumbs to complications of weak carriageFair Game with Faith Salie, Public Radio International’s bid to win young viewers with a smart and sassy nightly talk show, ends Friday, May 30. Only 25 pubradio stations are carrying it, 17 months after its debut. Pictured at right: the host. MORE
Public radio station execs are showing renewed interest in an idea that pubcasting’s new-media advocates began promoting years ago: Why not create a mega-website for news that offers a more comprehensive, competitive array of reports from stations as well as national networks? MORE
The overwhelming majority of full-power TV stations are prepared for the digital TV transition, but 11 percent expect to lose an average of 23,000 viewers after they turn off their analog signals, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in May. MORE
Advocates for full-power pubradio stations and their low-power FM cousins, both fearing encroaching signals, are at odds again over FCC proposals to allocate more frequencies for LPFM, whose extent and prerogatives have been debated since the commission authorized the new class of noncommercial stations in 2000. MORE
The BBC has signed a new distributor for the nightly half-hour BBC World News newscast for public TV stations — KCET in Los Angeles. New York’s WLIW, which has syndicated the show for nearly 10 years, will produce a new evening newscast for pubTV. (Pictured: Katya Adler, reports for BBC from Gaza Strip.) MORE
Newsroom execs in pubcasting — and elsewhere — are revising booking policies and looking again at archived programs since learning that the Bush administration had groomed sympathetic military analysts to assess its war performance on news broadcasts. MORE
Techies at Frontline and the NewsHour have developed a new public-affairs video player and content management system that is the first to seamlessly serve up multiple strands of PBS national programming and 
stations’ local video offerings, all in a single online tool. MORE
What does it cost to put streaming video on one screen? MORE
"I’ve never done a historical drama, because they all end the same way — the Indians die, and I think to myself, ‘Okay, now why is that valuable history?’” says Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), director of three episodes in the miniseries We Shall Remain. “It’s repeated over and over and even romanticized, almost like Greek mythology.” The biggest-ever project for American Experience will air in April 2009. (Pictured: actor Michael Greyeyes as the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. Photo: Larry Gus.) MORE
Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown returns to broadcast journalism with two pubcasting programs — a pilot for a weekend public radio series produced this month by KJZZ in Phoenix and the upcoming season of Wide Angle, PBS’s international documentary series. MORE
The first thing that should be said about the recent PBS series Carrier is that it is very good. The second thing is that its advance publicity is only partially accurate. The series shot aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz is not “Top Gun as Frederick Wiseman would have directed it." (Pictured above: crew members of the U.S.S. Nimitz, featured in the series.) MORE
NPR and about 30 partner stations are working to make sure listeners can carry pubradio in their pockets — or on belt clips, for the less fashion-conscious — no matter whether they have web-capable cell phones. NPR Mobile Web and Voice, launched last summer with 10 participating stations, expected to welcome its third batch of partner stations May 1. MORE
Pittsburgh’s WQED is helping the government of Bermuda develop its first noncommercial TV station under a $200,000 contract publicized. Premier Ewart F. Brown said he wants CITV to make local programs to fill a media void for his constituents, who are “being fed a steady diet of programming from outside Bermuda.” MORE
From the everyday storytellers of StoryCorps to the amateur pitchmen and women currently being recruited for CPB’s My Source campaign, public broadcasters increasingly rely on their audience to contribute content as well as funding. Likewise, public broadcasting's new election 2008 projects will tap average Joes and Janes to outline their hopes and concerns for the nation. MORE
Earlier story: A small-town Utah public-radio outfit that expanded into Salt Lake City thanks to its founders’ deal-making acumen — and stirred controversy over their compensation — decided to sell two stations serving Salt Lake City. MORE
At least in theory, the tradeoffs for some stations aren’t pretty. With Option A, you risk losing CPB aid in the five or six figures. With Option B, you lose a bunch of your old friends. MORE
Days before beginning its spring pledge drive, pubTV station WNIT in Elkhart, Ind., lost one of two klystron tubes in its analog transmitter, leaving the station with roughly 20 percent of its broadcast power and a snowy picture as it prepared to plead its case to viewers. The worst was still to come. MORE
The new morning drivetime show originating from New York’s WNYC, The Takeaway with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji, debuted April 28 — initially on WNYC and several other stations stations. CPB announced a $1.5 million grant to the project. MORE
In Current's new Why & How feature, Associate Editor Katy June-Friesen talks with the producer of Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? MORE
A fast-moving, half-hour pilot for an international news program called Global Watch was on the PBS schedule April 9. The project, assigned to KCET and KQED in 2006, during Pat Mitchell’s time as PBS president, surfaces from the Los Angeles station after changes of conception and producer. MORE
CPB screened My Source testimonials to the value of public broadcasting from Jimmy Carter, Kevin Bacon and sundry other celebrities, but the enthusiasm of some unknown fans may mean the most. MORE
Stern lost support in his tryout as No. 1 at NPRDespite Ken Stern's achievements as chief executive officer at the network, his leadership style didn’t engender trust. There was no single reason why the NPR Board ended Stern’s 18-month run as c.e.o. — or at least none that any participant in the decision would describe publicly after the executive's abrupt exit March 6. MORE Stern’s latest credit: completing the search for NPR’s future home |
Some 7,500 teachers from the New York City region sat back (and mostly stopped talking) March 7 and 8 as they soaked in two days of high-wattage inspiration, teaching tips and varied pitches for educational reform. MORE
WTVP, the pubTV station in Peoria, Ill., didn’t know how many friends it had. Seventy to 75 percent of Save Our Station contributors, who indeed rescued the station from being forced into receivership, could not be identified as present or former members, says Chet Tomczyk, g.m. MORE
Language aside, the schedule is designed for a target audience much like PBS's, though younger, execs say. Since launch in March, the channel has won multicast slots on more than two-dozen pubTV stations, reaching more than a third of the country.
EDCAR: PBS and stations try cooperation to create a 'mother ship' for school mediaWhen pubTV and CPB gave up on creating a national online video library for school use, a handful of stations pulled together their own state and national portals. Now, with new leadership from PBS, they're testing whether they can link those portals, creating a service (working title "EDCAR") that any pubTV station can join.
Pictured: Maryland Public Television shows off its Thinkport service at a conference. (Photo: MPT.)
Some listeners didn't like Marc Steiner's talk show or his politics, but his fans are raising a ruckus over his dismissal. Among them: Steiner's successor, who called it "sad and infuriating."
With 20 to 50 percent of the public still uninformed about the analog cutoff next February, station leaders are working to clue in their viewers. In North Carolina, technicians expect to make a lot of house calls. In Oregon, a membership director says the situation calls for nothing less than an intensive, year-long outreach campaign.
Public TV's betting that high-def can do it, as PBS begins converting its primetime sked into 1080-line video by October '08. For now, most of primetime will be up-converted standard video, but producers have been shooting more HD, too — perhaps 20 percent of PBS general-audience programs this year. In December, the NewsHour switched to HD and built new studio sets (pictured above) that can withstand closer inspection.
Staffers and volunteers at the Austin, Texas, community station are still trying to comprehend why a former colleague would try to burn down the station over such a squabble.
Producers sketch 150+ national programs coming to public TV in Current's annual survey
For Carrier, producers were embedded six months on the USS Nimitz (hangar deck pictured above) |
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... when the FCC invites application for a few remaining full-power FM licenses. Like that one in Lake Placid, for instance. Aggression, defense and public radio in the world of spectrum scarcity!
WNET and KQED accept Mike Homer's offer of a free license for Kontiki, the system that the BBC bought for on-demand delivery.
The big satellite-to-home broadcaster will soon carry the local HD signals of the largest public TV stations in the markets it serves.
The Navy was reluctant to say there was a collision, but it appeared that one of its big Sea Dragon helicopters hit the 971-foot tower of KEDT-FM/TV, crashed and burned Jan. 16. Three bodies were found and a fourth crew member was sent to a hospital; he was reported in fair condition three days later. The TV signal was knocked off the air temporarily.
Indie rock, hip-hop, electronica —it’s all fair game for pubradio’s mixmasters of cool. Their creative musical combinations lie outside pubradio’s traditional jazz/classical territories to give educated, curious listeners a hip, artful version of what they get from NPR News: culturally rewarding fare they won’t find on commercial radio.
Donors respond not only to what pubTV does for their families but also to what it does for their communities, a PBS study indicates. Look for new on-air spots and messaging materials from PBS in March. Earlier TRAC Media Services research indicated ongoing members tend to hold "a catechism of beliefs" about the value of the service.
No need to wait for the space age to come, says Marcia Brooks of WGBH. The somewhat geeky volunteers behind public broadcasting's PB Core project are now offering producers and stations a free kit (including a fully functional database) for FAST FAST FAST searching and sharing of digital audio, video and the rest.
What are the sounds that add up to the listening experience that classical music fans love? Tests of 300 llisteners commissioned by Public Radio Program Directors suggest both serious and casual listeners prefer bright, singable, uplifting music, researcher Peter Dominowski reports. But Wes Horner, a prominent music producer, says if pubradio just obsesses over which CDs it should spin, it will miss greater opportunities suggested by its success in news. With some stations switching to news formats, music programming advocate David Duff finds himself arguing the case to continue broadcasting music's greatest achievements.
The problem is that PBS primetime production has lost 40 percent of its corporate underwriting within a few years, writes Steve Bass, president of Oregon Public Broadcasting in a Current commentary. Underwriters need to be given alternatives to full-season sponsorship, he suggests, and the system must consider empowering a national unit to raise the money rather than counting on producers to do it.
The newly formed group circulated what it called a "brown paper" urging aid to Latino pubradio stations and national programming. CPB meanwhile is seeking a grantee to develop and pilot a Latino radio service in Los Angeles.
New to the land of salt water taffy, the pubradio manager in Ocean City, Md., soon discovered that repeaters from D.C. and Baltimore were also coming to town, bringing some of the strongest programs his station already carries. He asked for help from NPR.
The relaunched NPR Music, at www.npr.org/music, overcomes the linear nature of radio, lets listeners poke around, sample genres and artists they love or hardly know at all, and collect playlists of music they missed on the air. Though it's online and not on-air, other stations were soon rapping on the door to join in the project.
CPB has allocated $14 million to the PBS Kids Go! project over the next 3 years. Arthur, Cyberchase, Wordgirl and other programs for the age group will remain on public TV's main broadcast channel as well.
Those dozens of local docs on the WWII years may be essential, evergreen history for their communities, but the ones that got the audience boost often benefited from careful scheduling. Online and on-air, stations helped thousands tell how it was in wartime.
But a third round of surveys of viewer awareness, attitudes and usage will continue, the corporation said. CPB posted an RFP for a senior analyst to lead this research.
An estimated 90 percent of the 3,630 noncommercial FM applications filed at the FCC last year face conflicts with other applicants' plans. Easier cases (including these 270) get to take the fast lane. Community nonprofits expected this would be the last chance they'd have to get full-power FM frequencies.
By enacting the Public Broadcasting Act on Nov. 7, 1967, it gave official recognition to "public broadcasting," expanding on the mandate of "educational" TV and radio and allotting the first federal aid for operations (having begun helping with equipment costs five years earlier). Here's a PDF excerpt from Current's History of Public Broadcasting that tells how the idea rather quickly led to legislation and the creation of CPB
A new online service, PBS Kids Play, will let kids learn alongside such pubTV characters as Curious George and the Berenstain Bears for $9.95 a month, starting in January. But their parents can have "fun" now with an environmental game from American Public Media — if they enjoy learning that their lifestyles are a total drag on the planet. "Serious games" such as this spring's World Without Oil from ITVS may be trendy, but advocates say they're also a highly effective way to reach and teach young folk. Most of CPB's seven grants for history and civics learning materials include computer-based games or simulations.
Duquesne, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, rejected Planned Parenthood underwriting of its pubradio station, WDUQ-FM, even though the money was going to the station alone and the credits didn't mention abortion. Planned Parenthood responded by rallying opinion against the station as well the school, even though WDUQ did not make the decision.
Over the next three years, a $19 million indie doc exchange project will bring nearly 100 international films to pubTV and cable channels and export American docs to viewers in Malawi, Peru and other far-flung locales. Pictured: One of the first imports: the Chinese film Please Vote for Me, which will air Oct. 23 on Independent Lens.
Execs cite advantages of purchasing the private rep firm National Public Broadcasting and combining its sales effort with NPR's. Sales of national pubTV sponsorships will remain separate under present plans. A PBS study meanwhile has enumerated the best practices in sale of local underwriting.
For many pubradio stations trying to establish digital HD Radio service, it's the additional multicast channels that listeners can hear only if they buy HD Radio receivers, usually program formats (and languages) not otherwise available on the local air.
Albuquerque's public TV station is under fire because its public affairs program appeared to favor a solution that puts it smack in the middle of one of the West's water wars — with production funding from a state agency that's definitely not neutral.
With the lighting of a digital mural on its sprawling new building this week, the Boston institution formally declares that it's home. In a Current Q&A, outgoing WGBH President Henry Becton reflects on the future of public media, the station's corporate culture and some odd factors that brought him there 37 years ago. Jon Abbott succeeds Becton as president Oct. 2.
The network's new-media budget is expected to rise 43 percent over the coming fiscal year after growing 37 percent a year this year and last. While news dominates its web efforts, NPR also plans a multigenre site about music to launch at the end of October.
And producers working with PBS exec Linda Simensky are infusing the schedule with wit to keep kids tuned in. Beyond the five new series starting this fall, the children's pipeline has a dozen additional series debuting this year or next or in development, and many show a clear curricular purpose. But how many will help pubTV win back the share of little viewers who've gone to new cable competitors? 
On PBS's team, the most successful at attracting viewers is Curious George, in its second season, outfitted with stories that teach math, science and engineering concepts.
The three chosen by Launch Production Inc., a team of prominent pubradio producers, have bigger names [news release] — Majora Carter, South Bronx rebirth leader; Mark Bittman, cooking columnist and best-selling author; and Julia Sweeney, monologuist and former Saturday Night Live sketch artist. Three others were tested for hostiness, surviving four rounds of PRX's online Talent Quest contest [online announcement] — Al Letson, poetry slam vet and Jacksonville teacher; Rebecca Watson, Brookline, Mass., blogger who favors fact-based science; and Glynn Washington, who runs a UC Berkeley mentoring program for young entrepreneurs.
CPB confirms that it's talking with PBS about backing a broadband Internet version of PBS KIds Go!, a game-heavy educational service for kids in grade school. CPB's budget earmarks $15.4 million for Kids Go! over three years. PubTV nixed a broadcast version of the channel last year when too few stations indicated interest. Also in CPB's budget: $18.7 million over three years for math/science multimedia for schools.
For a December special, Chicago's WTTW wired the cliff-top Israeli desert fortress Masada (above) for HDTV production and shot a concert with Israeli singer-guitarist David Broza at sunrise. Then for March pledging, Egyptian-born pop diva Chantal Chamandy will perform in front of the Sphinx and the pyramids, accompanied by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra [news release]. Executive Program Services is the U.S. distributor. Pictured: the sun rises over the Dead Sea as Broza, Shawn Colvin and Jackson Browne perform.
Since CPB began funding several advocates for ethnic minority programming more than 25 years ago, the National Black Programming Consortium and the others have mostly worked to help producers get their programs broadcast on public TV. But in August, NBPC launched its own direct channel to the public through a web showcase, www.blackpublicmedia.org. The site starts with four short previews of documentaries but later will feature full films, including some exclusive to the site.
To start defining the scope and priorities of public broadcasting's ambitious but unshaped American Archive proposal, CPB is hiring an initiative manager (RFP). Archive advocates have been moving on two fronts:
access rights (a number of stations are backing a nascent APTS campaign to amend copyright law), and
program preservation (urging stations and producers to scope out their own preservation tasks). APTS President John Lawson discussed the American Archive notion early this year.
An animated spinoff of public radio's Car Talk will debut next summer on PBS, after six years of work by veteran TV producer Howard Grossman.
The WGBH documentary series aims to rebuild its website, deepening the content offered, improving accessibility and sharing a video player with the NewsHour. Meanwhile, the Boston station has relaunched another web initiative, WGBH Lab, to develop a two-way flow of material — expanded rights-cleared clips for video artists to use and opportunities to show their work online, on WGBH and even on P.O.V.
— potentially doubling the number of Native stations on reservations. It's a good fit with the channels that the FCC has left, which tend to be in rural areas. For five days in October, the commission will accept applications for noncommercial channels for the first time in more than seven years.
Engineers investigating the collapse of public broadcasting towers in Spokane, Wash., and Plattsburgh, N.Y., last winter suggest a thing or two, Technology Editor Anne Rawland Gabriel reports. Stations individually can minimize the risk by taking certain precautions, and licensee execs say stations can work together to help the cause. Pictured: A study indicated that 200 tons of ice helped bring down the Plattsburgh tower. (Image from animation by Mountain Lake PBS.)
As in public broadcasting is "my source for connecting with my neighbors" or "my source for goosebumps." That's what CPB told PRDMC attendees in the most detailed presentation so far about its Public Awareness Initiative. CPB brings back a former CPB Board chair, Sheila Tate, as consultant on the customizable campaign.
As part of a coordinated national Day of Silence, KCRW, WXPN, RadioMilwaukee and some other webcasting stations turned off their music streams to publicize their opposition to new copyright royalties that take effect in July. Observers say the next objective for the music industry is added royalties on radio broadcasting.
Nova and Tufts University recruited 13 New Englanders to train for the Boston Marathon. And train they did, and run they did. Like Nova's producers, the team went to great lengths to demonstrate what the human body can do.
Black Hawk College says it wants to help a nonprofit keep WQPT on the air in the Quad Cities, but it also wants some money. Educational institutions have been feeling economic incentives to divorce their stations — the push of cost reduction and the pull of potentially large sale prices.
Vision-impaired listeners and the radio reading services that broadcast to them see a good fit in digital HD Radio's conditional access feature recently demoed in Tampa.
The experiment with an online "alternate reality game," funded by CPB and presented by ITVS, is a serious game that relies on human creativity, rather than virtual intelligence, to describe a disastrous oil shock. More than 1,700 players signed on to the game, which officially ended June 1 but will be archived online.
In a Q&A, PBS Chief Content Officer John Boland talks with Current about plans to shift the network's main digital channel to high-definition in 2008, the selection of Wired Science from among three pilots, the advent of the multicast all-documentary channel PBS World and PBS's online strategies for on-demand programming and the proposed interactive social network PBS Engage. For on-demand streaming, the network is developing a broadband video player.
A multiyear, from-the-ground-up rethinking at Chicago Public Radio will culminate in June with the launch of :Vocalo, a new website/station combo that retains a variation on its public-service mission but few of its other trappings. Not even including the name "public radio." In a commentary, station President Torey Malatia describes the rethinking and the humbling criticism he heard from focus groups. Pictured above: the first seven new hires for the station.
As intended, America at a Crossroads brought controversy about vital national issues to the PBS schedule in April, though an unrelated doc by Bill Moyers extended the range of views several days later with his take on media complicity in mistakes of the the Iraq War. The first 11 films from the CPB-funded project were hosted and endorsed by no less a fastidious journalistic balancer than Robert MacNeil. (Current editors watched and summarized the films.) Another of the Crossroads films, Frank Gaffney's Islam vs. Islamists, whose rejection by PBS made it a right-wing cause célèbre, was picked up for distribution by Oregon Public Broadcasting May 23 [news release PDF], leaving the broadcast question for stations to decide.
The droll English performer and writer, a repeat visitor to public TV over the years, courtesy of the BBC, returned with his personal video essay favoring atheism, A Brief History of Disbelief. Even without PBS involvement, the series will be carried by stations reaching nearly 97 percent of U.S. households, and Miller got a boost from an interview on Bill Moyers' Journal May 4. Traditionalists have begun hammering pubTV for airing the show, a decision that reveals its "bias against Christianity," a Family Research Council spokesman told Brent Bozell's CNSNews.com. The American Humanist Association, a funder of the U.S. broadcast, greeted the series with a positive news release. (Pictured: Miller without a touch of bronzer.)
Reviews in the Utah capital's dailies credit producer Helen Whitney for a balanced doc on the history of the Mormon Church, which aired April 30 and 31. In the Deseret Morning News, Scott D. Pierce writes that the four-hour series turns out to be neither a missionary tool for the church nor a diatribe against it. Vince Horiuchi in the Salt Lake Tribune says Whitney "combed through rapture and rants about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to get to the simple truths." While the faithful might prefer to skip Whitney's sections on some matters, such as breakaway bigamists and the still-controversial 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre of non-Mormons in Utah, she focused on the Mormons' long-term gravitation toward the American mainstream and spends airtime on the extraordinary depth of faith demonstrated by many of the church's followers.
It was a bad period for public stations' broadcast towers. The one at Mountain Lake PBS in Plattsburgh, N.Y., collapsed, hitting the transmitter enclosure. Then one-third of a Spokane tower snapped off. And three workers fell to their deaths from an Iowa tower. In spring 2007, pubTV and radio engineers attending the NAB convention in Las Vegas scheduled a joint meeting on preparedness and recovery from a variety of bad news—computer attacks, storms and worse.
...somebody has to ask the unpopular questions, writes radio producer David Freudberg in a Current commentary. That can be the reporter on the new peace beat, he says, proposing a structural fix for journalism in wartime. New Mexico public radio journalist Bill Dupuy suggested another remedy for lapdog reporting: don't air info from anonymous sources.
In the run toward digital multicasts, pubTV is up to a trot
With the Spanish-language channel, V-me, recently joining other local and national channels for public TV's digital multicasts, the program supply is forcing stations to make hard choices in alloting DTV bitstreams, writes tech-watcher David Liroff. There's less high-def than in network TV, but ironically the PBS HD Channel's synthetic HD often hogs more channel space than the real thing, says engineer David Felland. Meanwhile, APTS finds that most viewers are clueless that analog TV sets will stop working in less than two years.
So says Cheryl Cedar Face, pictured at left with Pine Ridge High School classmates and teacher, who are making segments with South Dakota Public Radio to round out the view into the Lakota reservation.
Executives of NPR and other pubradio organizations met in February 2007 to consider creating a national "back-end" infrastructure for storage, distribution and underwriting sales serving new-media outlets, both known and as-yet unheard of. A task force advocating a Digital Distribution Consortium described the plan in an overview report (PDF)..
Public TV's Washington reps plan to seek funding for digitizing, preserving, cataloguing and clearing rights for key pubTV programs so that they don't disppear from public view as Eyes on the Prize did, according to John Lawson, then president of APTS, in a 2007 Current Q&A. But first APTS had to oppose more than $140 million in cutbacks proposed by the Bush administration.
Avowed rap fan Byron Hurt may have cred enough to critique the sexist bitch-and-ho school of hip-hop. His film Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes debuted in 2007 on PBS.
The scene: Capitol Hill on a February afternoon The players: a visiting station manager and a loquacious congressional aide. Denver public broadcaster Wick Rowland constructs a dialogue of exceptional candor.
Increasingly, stations and other producers are putting video, audio and the rest into massive hard drives that replace backup cartridges as well as storerooms of tape cassettes.
Classical Public Radio Network director Scott Henderson tells how the music service mobilized to systematically interview music-makers and other music professionals to add their voices to its on-air stream.
New York's WNET hired a new president in January 2007, little more than a month after Boston's WGBH. Former NBC News President and longtime news producer Neal Shapiro assumed the job in New York in February 2008, succeeding Bill Baker, who retained the CEO title a year longer. In a similar transition in Boston, Jon Abbott succeeded Henry Becton.
The new weekday drivetime show, known at the network as "Zach," will be invented in New York, outside kibitzing range of the Washington staff. It is part of NPR's effort to help public radio meet a new audience goal: increasing average tune-ins to 7.8 a week.
CPB backed StoryCorps' Griot initiative, fielding a third recording booth on wheels to visit black communities in eight cities. The project has recorded nearly 10,000 oral histories of Americans and aims for 250,000 before decade's end.
CPB will give catchup aid to 10 pubradio stations that are at risk of falling below revised eligibility standards. The federal aid dispenser slightly tightened the grantee criteria while ending a freeze that had kept some financially healthier stations from getting Community Service Grants.
So far as many Nielsen ratings are concerned, anyway. With encoders installed in only about 10 percent of public TV transmitters, CPB plans to offer subsidies to close the gap.
Content chief John Boland said the discussion and analysis site will launch early in 2007. A name and more details will be announced in December. Boland joined PBS in 2006 from KQED in San Francisco.
Many of the little FM modulators used to play iPods and satellite radios through car stereo systems are so overpowered, NPR says, that they interfere with reception in other cars. The network asked the FCC to impose a moratorium on their sale.
"You just feel good about life and this country when you hear it," says Ira Glass, talking about Radio Lab, an occasional science series from WNYC that amounts to a dense symphony of talk, sound and music produced by Jad Abumrad and co-hosted by an earlier radio prodigy, Robert Krulwich (pictured with coffee). For Krulwich, there's often joy in making radio, too, along with loneliness and occasional regrets. "It doesn't get any easier," he warns fellow producers, "it doesn't get more predictable."
Newsrooms at three universities contribute to the new nonprofit network. Music hookups will follow.
11 Central Ave., a new module airing weekly on Chicago Public Radio, tries to distill the Zeitgeist into four minutes of dialogue among an extended family in Anytown, U.S.A. The feature also aims to give radio theater a new chance at reaching a bigger audience.
Peter Gelb, a TV producer and recording exec who now heads the Metropolitan Opera, is adding many new-media ways to hear and see the Met, with 21st-century stagings. In a Current Q&A he says he's striving to maintain traditional musical standards and reproduce the live in-theater experience.
No Hollywood ending for Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison Most critics admire the wreckage and triumphs to come in the final gripping installment of Prime Suspect, but there's dissent from the writer who created the obsessive detective. Pictured: Helen Mirren as Tennison—trapped, as usual.
By adopting a standard radio industry method for estimating pubradio's weekly cumulative audience, NPR is overstating its cume by 3 to 4 million listeners, according to outside audience researchers. They don't dispute, however, that pubradio's cume has grown slightly in the past year, though its average audience slipped for the third straight year, falling to its 2002 level.
...when the producers' parents began pestering them for downloads. TAL zoomed to the top of Apple's iTunes podcast list, and remains at No. 2 on Nov. 20. The show from Chicago Public Radio had always offered free streaming but charged $3.95 for downloads. Now it's free for a week, 95 cents thereafter.
A white paper, which recommends initial free release on as many digital platforms as possible, will be discussed at public TV round robin meetings this fall. However, so far pubTV leaders are giving only mixed support for "open content" — the more expensive step of releasing material with no copyright restrictions, allowing it to be reused freely by viewers.
It was the latest turn of events in what may be a long war over the Orange County channel. The question wasn't resolved in 2003 when a state community college district sold KOCE to a nonprofit pubcasting group; a California appeals court declared the sale invalid in June. With pubcasters competing for the channel with a large religious broadcasting chain, the legal issue is back in the hands of a lower court.
Findings from recent focus groups, as reported at the Public Radio Program Directors Conference in September, provide further evidence that locally produced news/talk often disappoints listeners. Its lower ratings and higher costs, compared with those of programming bought from national producers, paralyze decision-making at some stations that should beef up their local news coverage, comments San Diego news director Michael Marcotte. But other stations have dived into local news because, for one thing, it's something listeners can't get from Internet and satellite radio. 
That strategic distinction will be all the more important, says Denver broadcaster Jim Paluzzi (pictured at right), as people increasingly buy cell phones that receive every radio station on the Internet. (Pictured at top: Dave Berns of KNPR, Las Vegas, and Brian Lehrer of WNYC, New York. Itty bitty inset: Colorado Public Radio's Paluzzi with smartphone.)
Comedy writer Warren Bell, whose off-air humor is merrily partisan, didn't get a Senate hearing for appointment to the CPB Board, but the two other White House nominees for board vacancies moved toward confirmation.
With public relations professional Pat Harrison as its president, CPB is preparing a major public awareness campaign. In the meantime it's given a short-term renewal for its backing of the Wisconsin-based National Center for Outreach for public TV.
With kids who wowed a growing public radio audience, prompting the TV spinoff announced this week. Taping for the new PBS series begins Sept. 26 at the legendary auditorium.
Owners of the ultra-genial PBS dinosaur character say they're trying to maintain his reputation with kids by squelching trash-talking websites. Defenders of the parodies see intimidation and are making a federal case of it.
Many radio shows treat their websites as afterthoughts, but public radio's Open Source stakes its production model — and its reputation — on feedback from a lively community of bloggers and other netizens gathered through its site. The talk show hosted by Christopher Lydon demonstrates one approach to interactivity and audience-generated content, which some media innovators regard as the new hallmark of public media.
With 370 episodes in the can, the Los Angeles station is offering national runs of sister series A Place of Our Own and Los Ninos en Su Casa. The shows, which won a Peabody this spring, are designed to "teach the teacher" —informal daycare providers including parents, neighbors and daycare providers. Pictured: The shows feature children's activities in roll-in segments. Meanwhile, KCET has partnered with San Francisco's KQED to develop a new nightly world newscast and other public affairs material for PBS's World multicast channel.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it will fund purchase of equipment to bring all stations into pubTV's Digital Emergency Alert System, which will relay homeland security announcements to the public. Meanwhile, stations in Rochester, Las Vegas and elsewhere are working with local public safety agencies to develop local emergency nets. In New York, WNET proposes employing underused microwave channels (formerly known as ITFS) that are being converted for two-way usage.
Hard to sustain, based on the experience of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, which shut down this summer after operating 30 for years. Nearly two decades ago, AIVF leaders helped push for legislation guaranteeing some CPB aid to independent productions.
FAIR, the progressive media watchdog, says it's the latter, releasing a new head count of sources on the PBS news program, that shows Republicans outnumbering Democrats two-to-one, men outnumbering women four-to-one and whites appearing as 85 percent of U.S. sources in a six-month sampling. NewsHour's Linda Winslow replies: "... we're a news program, and that's who makes news."
By going for a consistent sound and favoring the academic elite, public broadcasting limits its minority audience, says Tavis Smiley.In a Current commentary, the talk host says pubcasting "can do more to get out of its comfort zone and welcome new people to the club."
Even with that precaution requested by PBS, however, numerous pubTV stations delayed broadcast of David Grubin's Marie Antoinette bio for hours, days or weeks. Attempts to restrict or end the FCC's indecency crackdown are focusing on the courts.
An updated resource for readers with recent remarks by Lehrer, Mitchell, Moyers, Barksdale, Aufderheide/McAfee
Multiplayer games, immersive environments and other playful approaches can breathe life into topics such as history, biology and literature, pubcasters are discovering. One advocate has even proposed a Corporation for Public Gaming. The Infinite Mind, a public radio program, already dived in by staking out prime real estate in the virtual world of Second Life. And Oregon Public Broadcasting is helping tourists navigate the real world with a cell-phone-based tour of a fur-trading outpost.
The network's tough mindset as a dominant competitor inside public radio is "no longer appropriate," NPR declares in the latest step in its New Realities planning, a "blueprint" for pubradio's evolution in a new-media marketplace. The network will create a "news network of the future" based on more interaction among station and national newsrooms and listeners, an idea that NPR news veep Bill Marimow discusses in a Current Q&A. Another element of the blueprint, a centralized digital infrastructure, is also under development.
In a Current Q&A about their recent Audience 2010 studies, audience researchers George Bailey and David Giovannoni say each station losing audience (more than half of them last year) needs to ask whether its programming competes well for the attention of its own cume audience.
The big phone company joined APTS and PBS announcing an agreement for carriage of public TV's digital signals that's more complete than pubTV's 2005 pact with major cable operators.
Kenneth Konz, the i.g., reported to Congress June 9 on its internal reforms [text in PDF] since last year’s Kenneth Tomlinson affair. “We are encouraged that [CPB leaders] have taken such a comprehensive approach, often exceeding the scope of our recommendations, to evaluate major CPB processes,” Konz wrote in his evaluation of the efforts. The CPB Board has been strengthening checks and balances to prevent an unauthorized initiative by an individual staffer or board member.
Fans and the producers of PBS's Friday-night public affairs program Now, joined by the network's ombudsman, are asking that the public affairs show be expanded back to an hour's length. PBS says it's checking with the stations.
NPR no longer requires a sign-off from a technician when a journalist has mixed audio. Union technicians, who had been deadlocked with management last winter, accepted the new work rules in May in exchange for pay increases and the network's pledge limiting layoffs. In 2002, NABET's contract with NPR had already ceded some audio production tasks that were reserved for technicians during the analog age.
More than half of CPB-funded public radio stations have converted to HD Radio broadcasting or are in the process of doing so. Yet the audience for digital services remains small due to the low number and high cost of HD receivers. Meanwhile, NPR and Harris Corp. are developing new and enhanced HD services for sight- and hearing-impaired audiences.
| Text of Bill Moyers' speech to the PBS Showcase Conference in May |
MPR's Michael Skoler describes Public Insight Journalism, developed over the past three years to help reporters tap what the public knows. MPR plans to offer the database/Internet system to other media, starting with a handful of pubradio newsrooms.
Opinions are mixed, naturally, but leaders interested in a cooperative venture have been talking about developing a cost-saving "back end" infrastructure shared by hundreds of pubradio stations as their unseen foundation for delivering audio files and other media on the Web. The idea is one of the most likely topics for discussion at an NPR conference May 1 and 2 that concludes a series of New Realities seminars held by the network around the country. Excitement at the IMA new media conference in February centered on a shared back end. IMA Executive Director Mark Fuerst had proposed that the stations go further, sharing also some of the work for maintaining the "front end" that web visitors see.
The Smithsonian Board of Regents affirmed its support for the museum's controversial video programming partnership with Showtime. The regents replied May 9 to House appropriators who questioned the appropriateness of the deal and slapped the Smithsonian with a cut in its appropriation.
Public broadcasters can't do as much to help the city as they'd like, much less accomplish what the stations themselves need, Karen Everhart reports from the wrecked city, eight months after the floods. Pictured: WYES President Randy Feldman standing where the station's reception room and offices used to be.
Which one thinks hosting a national show is almost as good as waterskiing? Who addresses his/her spouse by the French word for little pickle? Name three whose fathers were accountants! Former pubradio reporter Lisa Phillips has answers to these and more substantial questions in a new book, Public Radio: Behind the Voices.
Next winter WGBH aims to begin moving into its new quarters now taking shape beside a Boston freeway, and Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media has already moved into a new wing of its home in downtown St. Paul. In the D.C. area, PBS moved to a new home next to National Airport, and in New York, WNYC said it will move out of the municipal building, severing a physical connection remaining after the station bought its independence from the city government. Check the webcams for construction progress in Boston and in Harrisburg, Pa., where WITF is erecting a new building.
Or so you might think after seeing Mark Lewis' Emmy-winning "Natural History of the Chicken" in 2001 or his pair of lightly humorous "Standard of Perfection" docs(on cat-fanciers and cattle-lovers) that aired on public TV in April.
PBS plans to launch two packaged channels that stations can air with their digital multicasting capability: PBS Kids Go!, for school-age children, and World, a service with documentaries and public affairs. New York's WNET said it aims to offer another new multicast channel largely in Spanish starting late this year.
Surveys and a report for CPB reveal gaps in how the two groups perceive one another, though indies aren't all alike in that respect or others. More on the indie world. 
With enviable success at winning Emmys but no such luck with funding, the longtime PBS Kids series will be revamped, says a former PBS executive now working for the new co-owner, the operator of Sylvan Learning Centers.
The FCC has assessed a $15,000 fine on a small northern California pubTV station, KCSM, for airing colorful language in an episode of The Blues in 2004 — naughty words of four, eight, 10, 12 and 13 letters in length broadcast in the commission's child-friendly "safe harbor" before 10 p.m.
Three former employees of the University of Michigan's radio operation in Ann Arbor have been charged with embezzling from the university. Without naming names, UM says it lost revenues through in-kind deals that did not benefit it.
Florida has okayed the sale of financially weak WXEL-FM/TV to a nonprofit group controlled by the big New York licensee. Six years ago, Minnesota Public Radio got the okay to take over operation of an underperforming Los Angeles-area station, KPCC, on a long-term lease.
Public TV has dealt with controversial docs in the past by adding follow-up panel discussions, but in the case of The Armenian Genocide some insist the subject is not debatable.
To give stations "absolute say" in decisions of the PBS Board, the Task Force for More Effective Governance recommended that general managers be appointed to 16 of 27 seats on the board. The change would reduce the number of lay leaders who are elected to bring outside expertise and political clout to PBS leadership. The task force's draft report also proposes several sunshine recommendations that would make the board's decision-making more transparent.
And maybe for your cell phone someday. Public broadcasters are joining the rush to package video for portable viewing. Pictured: webmaster Jason Georges of KCRW showing off a three-camera podcast from a band's live appearance on Morning Becomes Eclectic.
It was a major topic at the Public Broadcasting New Media Conference, Feb. 23-25 in Seattle.
An English-language feed from Washington replaced a rock-oriented Voice of America station in Berlin in April 2006 . It's the first NPR Worldwide transmitter overseas, but the feed is heard elsewhere overseas via the Internet, shortwave and pickup by local broadcasters.
Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite isn't afraid of Big Bird: She alleges that public TV is feeding at the public trough instead of using billions in proceeds from Sesame Street marketing. In a replay of 1995 allegations against PBS — Barney was the scam artist back then — she has the Government Accountability Office looking at the field's licensing and underwriting revenues and its infrastructure.
The Digital Future Initiative, a bipartisan panel convened by PBS late in 2005, released its recommendations of ways public broadcasting should expand its services to equal its expanded digital capacity. Though expanded funding would be needed, too, the panel plans to examine that question in a second phase of its work.
Major doc producers' groups, working with a American University project, handcrafted a statement defining four situations where court decisions about "fair use" let them use music, images and other copyrighted materials without paying a fee. Major point: it's not all the time.
Various earlier articles
Kushner's new show, Sound & Spirit, 1996
Roundtables: Friday debaters are collected, but not all are so calm, 2005
