Published by Current, a service of Current Publishing Committee,
Takoma Park, Md.
Copyright 2006.
E-mail to webmaster:
Thanks to WHRO in Norfolk, Va., for serving this site to the Web.
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) |
|---|
... 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.
