DiRienzo successor at V-me is producer with channel's new majority owner
Carmen DiRienzo, founding president and c.e.o. of the Spanish-language public TV channel V-me, has resigned both posts effective Dec. 31, the network announced Nov. 28. She will continue to serve on its Board of Directors.
Her successor at the New York-based channel is movie and TV producer Alvaro Garnica, a nine-year veteran of Grupo Prisa, a Madrid-based media conglomerate that acquired 39.5 percent of V-me in 2009 and plans to acquire majority control, according to a V-me spokesperson. Prisa operates radio, TV and print media businesses in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, including its flagship El País, Spain’s most widely read newspaper.
Garnica, who will be g.m. of V-me Media Inc., is now g.m. of Plural Entertainment, a Prisa subsidiary in Miami that makes many of V-me’s original productions, including Aire Yoga, Ciencia en The News Hour, Paginas de The New York Times, Pase VIP, Alta tension, En Pantalla, Mi Mascota, Tu Bebe, Sexto Round, Nota Musical and Vme Cocina.
Before joining Prisa, the Spanish-born producer held various executive positions with Mexico’s Amarante Productions, Filmania.and Televisa Cine. With U.S. Spanish-language networks, he produced such series as Al Filo De la Ley, El Cartel de los Sapos, Moda al rescate, Mis Quince and Desparecidos.
Keillor unretires again
Turns out American Public Media’s former president, Bill Kling, was right — Garrison Keillor wasn’t irreversibly determined to retire from hosting A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor sparked a kerfuffle in the system in March when he told the AARP Bulletin that he was leaving the show in spring 2013. Back then, Kling had dismissed Keillor’s statement as a publicity stunt, intended to tease supporters and bring new contributors into the APHC talent mix. “He throws things out there to see what the reaction would be,” Kling told Current in March.
Sure enough, Keillor told the Sioux City Journal Dec. 1 that he had “thought about” leaving his hosting duties at the program. “And then it panicked me . . . which got me to rethinking the whole brilliant idea,” he said. “The show is going well. I love doing it. Why quit?”
For those of you keeping track, Keillor created APHC in 1974. He said his first farewell on June 13, 1987, proclaiming he was “returning to the life of a shy person.”
In March 1988 he did ‘‘A Prairie Home Companion: The 2nd Annual Farewell Performance’’ at Radio City Music Hall.
Within two years, he was back on the radio with a Prairie Home–like show called American Radio Company of the Air. By 1992, Keillor was back with APHC.
NPR hires StateImpact chief
Lynette Clemetson, a former print journalist and now director of content strategy at the Pew Center on the States, joins NPR on Jan. 17 as head of StateImpact, the network’s collaboration with member stations (stateimpact.npr.org), now staffed with 17 reporters and monitoring state government actions in eight states. Clemetson entered journalism in radio, worked for Newsweek and the New York Times, and three years ago was the founding managing editor of TheRoom.com before joining Pew.
Project manager on the StateImpact desk at NPR is John Stefany; editorial coordinators are Ken Rudin (radio) and Elise Hu (digital); the database reporting coordinator is Matt Stiles.
StateImpact’s applications developer is Chris Amico, its user experience designer is Danny DeBelius and multimedia trainer is Becky Lettenberger.
ACE chief joins PBS Board,
McKinsey exec retains chair
Economist and educator Molly Corbett Broad, president of the nation’s top higher-ed association, the American Council on Education, was elected to her first term as a PBS Board officer, and the board announced results of other board elections at its meeting Nov. 22.
The board re-elected its chair, McKinsey & Co. Director Geoffrey Sands, as well as professional vice chair Allen Weatherly, executive director of Arkansas Educational Television Network.
Broad will serve as the general (non–station-manager) vice chair of the board and as vice chair of the PBS Strategic Planning Advisory Group. She also serves on the Finance and National Policy Advisory committees and the Dues Review Task Force.
The board appointed new general director Donald A. Baer, worldwide vice chair and chief strategy officer of the strategic communications firm Burson-Marsteller. From 1998 to 2007, he was senior executive v.p. for strategy and development at Discovery Communications, and from 1994 to 1997 he served as a senior adviser in the Clinton White House.
Appointed as a new professional director is Don Boswell, president of WNED in Buffalo, N.Y. Boswell succeeds DeAnne Hamilton, who resigned from the board when she left her position as g.m. of WKAR-TV in East Lansing, Mich., to lead news station WESA-FM (formerly WDUQ) in Pittsburgh. Boswell is a pubcasting veteran of nearly 42 years in Buffalo, Dallas, Seattle and Scranton, Pa.
Also re-elected to the board: Larry Irving, v.p., global government affairs for Hewlett-Packard and a former federal telecom policymaker. Re-elected in August: Malcolm Brett of Wisconsin Public Television, Ruby Calvert of Wyoming PBS, and Paula Castadio of ValleyPBS/KVPT in Fresno, Calif.
Next Avenue senior initiative
hires eight for national staff
Public TV’s expanded web service for the country’s aging population, Next Avenue, has hired a staff of eight, including Editorial Director and General Manager Donna Sapolin, former editor-in-chief of This Old House magazine and v.p./editorial director of Women’s Day Special Interest Publications.
The web-based project based at Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minn., designed to “hyper-serve” America’s aging population, is creating what it calls a “virtual organization” with journalism hubs nationwide and employees in New York, Denver, St. Paul and Washington, D.C. It’s backed by $6 million in foundation funding.
Two dozen public television stations have signed on as Next Avenue affiliates, with the site expected to launch in April 2012.
The other hires: Larry Carlat, managing editor, is a veteran editorial director and media exec who led creative web operations for several publications including Rolling Stone.
Richard Eisenberg will be senior web editor for the Money & Security and Work & Purpose sections of the site; he previously handled Yahoo’s finance page and earlier spent 19 years at Money magazine as a writer, editor and creator of its Best Places to Live in America features. Suzanne Gerber will be senior web editor for Living & Learning; she has worked as a senior editor at InStyle and Redbook magazines, as well as editor-in-chief of Vegetarian Times.
Marilynn Larkin will be senior web editor, Health & Well-Being and Caregiving. She was a contributing editor to The Lancet and is author of five consumer health books. Judith Graham will be editor at large; she has worked as an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune and shared a Pulitzer Prize there for explanatory journalism in 2001, as well as authoring a monthly column on aging and a blog about consumer health. Carla Baranauckas, copy editor for Next Avenue, spent 21 years as an editor in various news, arts and sports sections of the New York Times.
Lisa Hogan will be content partnership manager; she was a new-media consultant in Chicago, taught online journalism and legal reporting at Northwestern University and produced online features for Oprah.com.
Vogelzang heads Maine net
Veteran pubcasting exec Mark Vogelzang has been appointed president of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, operator of the nonprofit statewide public TV and radio networks with a budget of about $10 million. He succeeds Jim Dowe, president since 2006, who is retiring. The appointment, announced Nov. 29, comes as Vogelzang completes an interim appointment as g.m. of Buffalo’s WBFO-FM, whose $4 million sale to rival WNED is pending at the FCC.
MPBN Board Chair Henry “Hank” Schmelzer pointed to Vogelzang’s experience as a past president of Vermont Public Radio to describe his qualifications: “Mark’s long tenure as the leader of a statewide public media network . . . with a roughly equal number of stations, individual donors and corporate supporters, combined with his deep knowledge of nonprofit fundraising, makes him the ideal candidate to lead MPBN into the future.”
As VPR president from 1993 to 2006, Vogelzang led the network through a $10 million endowment campaign and signal expansion project that created separate news and classical-music networks in the state. Vogelzang served on the NPR Board for seven years and was interim executive director of the NPR Foundation in 2009.
Production/programming
Paddy Hirsch has been promoted to senior producer of personal finance for the entire Marketplace portfolio and to producer of one of its shows, Marketplace Money. American Public Media announced he will oversee editorial development and look to expand personal finance coverage. Hirsch will continue hosting the Marketplace Whiteboard, a video explainer of economic concepts. He joined Marketplace in 2007, headed the New York bureau and the Entrepreneurship Desk and served as senior business correspondent during the economic crisis. He was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2010 and returned to Marketplace in July 2011.
Steve Henn will begin work Jan. 2 as technology correspondent for NPR in Silicon Valley. He’ll report on how tech affects consumers’ lives and cover startups and venture capitalists. He’s now tech and innovation reporter for American Public Media’s Marketplace. His honors include a national Edward R. Murrow for investigative reporting, and he was part of the Marketplace team that won a Peabody in 2000.
Jeff Ishee, agriculture news writer and broadcaster for WVPT-TV in Harrisonburg, Va., is the new g.m. of the Rockingham County Fairgrounds there. He replaces Dennis Cupp, who recently retired after nearly 30 years in the position. Ishee received the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation’s Agriculture Journalism Award for Broadcasting for six straight years.
WHRO-FM in Norfolk, Va., is welcoming M.D. Ridge as critic at large to review performing arts via radio, podcasts and the station website’s Arts Conversations section. Ridge follows in the footsteps of the late Edgar Loessein, a longtime reviewer for the station. Ridge is a journalist, editor and author, as well as composer of liturgical music.
Jerry Edwards has returned to WAMU-FM as the Washington, D.C., station’s morning traffic reporter. Through a partnership with the traffic news provider Radiate Media, Edwards will be embedded at the station weekdays from 5 to 10 a.m., monitoring traffic on the roads in the metro area. Edwards has covered the region’s traffic for more than two decades, including an earlier period with WAMU, 1984-2006.
Ron Della Chiesa, longtime broadcaster and host of Boston Symphony Orchestra performances on WGBH, has a new memoir out, Radio My Way (Allyn & Bacon, 304 pages). Among the memories shared in a recent Boston Globe story: the “worst interview” he ever did, with singer Eartha Kitt during his long-running MusicAmerica show on WGBH, 1978 to 1996. “I was playing this rare recording of ‘Lilac Wine,’ and she said: ‘It was stupid of you to play that. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever done.’ I couldn’t go to black; it was live. She had a reputation for being tough.”
FolkAlley.com, the listener-supported music webcaster from Kent State University’s WKSU-FM in Ohio, now features Matt Watroba as a daily host. The singer/songwriter joined Folk Alley earlier this year as a producer and part-time host after 22 years of hosting Folks Like Us at WDET in Detroit, Mich., before a format change there. Watroba’s shifts will air from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. and from noon to 2 p.m. Eastern. Watroba also produces the monthly AlleyCast podcast, available free from the iTunes Store.
Martin Gammon, an appraiser appearing on WGBH’s Antiques Roadshow, is now managing director of auction house Bonhams & Butterfields’ new Georgetown office in Washington, D.C. The Bonhams office will mainly offer consultations, appraisals and small exhibitions, according to the Washington Post, although Gammon may conduct auctions in the area on a case-by-case basis.
Jeffrey Callison, host of Insight on Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, Calif., has left the station to work as press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Gov. Jerry Brown announced the appointment. Callison has hosted the public affairs show since 2004. Before then he was news director, radio host and reporter at the station.
Education/outreach
Ben Kramer has joined KLRU-TV in Austin as director of education. He has spent 20 years as a professional educator, most recently as principal of the University of Texas Elementary Charter School. At KLRU he will lead the station’s community educational initiatives for all age levels.
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