Quick Takes
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Nearly all of the money released by Congress in fiscal year 2002 for public TV and radio’s digital conversion will go to help the smallest public TV stations meet their May 2003 transition deadline, CPB has decided.
Quick Takes
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Visit the website of Nuevos Horizontes (New Horizons), a Spanish-language radio program from the University of Illinois.
Quick Takes
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Garrison Keillor gets a satiric makeover as “Harrison Taylor” in a mock interview for The Rake.
Quick Takes
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A new website produced by WGBH aggregates content from public TV and radio on the global connections that contributed to unrest in the Middle East. Another recently launched ‘GBH site helps local parents learn about education standards and testing in the Boston Public School System and the state of Massachusetts.
Quick Takes
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Arthur Cohen, formerly of WETA, WNYC and the Radio Research Consortium, now has a website for his consulting business, Whole Station Solutions.
Quick Takes
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Mary Lou [Retton]’s Flip-Flop Shop has premiered on public TV with a serious attempt to help kids deal with emotions and “an overriding, self-conscious zaniness,” writes Lynne Heffley in the Los Angeles Times.
Quick Takes
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Barney & Friends “shrewdly combines elements of current reality hits Big Brother and The Real World, says Kansas City Star critic Aaron Barnhart.
Quick Takes
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The First Amendment gives the press too much freedom, according to 42 percent of Americans polled, according to American Journalism Review. The percentage down on the First Amendment has doubled in two years.
Quick Takes
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Jim Lehrer says he’ll stay on the NewsHour until he loses his kick for daily journalism–or starts drooling on the air–during an interview on CNN’s Reliable Sources.
People
Julia Child’s place in the Smithsonian
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Julia Child’s kitchen is now in the nation’s attic, the Smithsonian Institution’s history museum on the Mall, inserted into a miscellaneous area behind the north escalators on the first floor, past the artificial heart, Bakelite radios and Carol Burnett’s charwoman costume. Visitors last week intently watched excerpts from her many pubTV cooking shows compiled for the 2000 pledge special Julia Child’s Kitchen Wisdom. (At one point she advises people to eat the green stuff in lobsters, which she claims is just delicious.) Last fall Smithsonian curators crated up her big, rectangular kitchen in her former home in Cambridge, Mass. They meticulously reassembled it at the museum behind clear plastic shields, complete with pans on pegboards, countertops raised 2 inches for the 6-foot tall cook, and the pipe along the ceiling where TV crews hung lights. “I wish I could come in and turn everything on — it looks exactly right,” Child said at the opening of the exhibit Aug.
Development
As local as appropriate
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As different as they are, these public radio outposts share a carefully tuned appropriateness of structure. There’s the young two-transmitter operation on the Massachusetts shore. Dotted along Alaska’s southeastern panhandle, there are five little stations that survived the contraction of the state’s oil economy. And there are nearly 30 outlets of Minnesota Public Radio that connect small outstate burgs with the rich resources of a big state and the Twin Cities. Station operators say their structures handle functions locally that should be done locally, while relying on parent or sister stations to do other jobs that benefit from economies of scale.