Quick Takes
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On Jan. 6, Baton Rouge pubradio station WRKF will be the latest to drop daytime music on weekdays to carry more news and info programming, the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.
Quick Takes
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Chicago Sun-Times critic Phil Rosenthal pans Austin Hoyt’s American Experience three-parter on Chicago, which he says gives the city a “4-1/2-hour thrashing,” with none of the affection of Ric Burns’s and Lisa Ades’s history of New York. [Earlier Current article.]
Quick Takes
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WHYY aired a talk show on the pitfalls of grant-funded journalism Dec. 17, but the station’s own central role in such a controversy was kept off the air, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. News Director Bill Fantini resigned Dec. 9, the day before the Philadelphia Daily News reported on a widely criticized news-funding partnership he negotiated.
Quick Takes
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Muslim-American businesses and organizations sponsored the two-hour PBS documentary “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet,” notes Alessandra Stanley in a New York Times review, and the program has the feel of a “lengthy informercial for Islam.” But the doc is “well worth watching both as the first serious attempt to tell the story of Muhammed on television and also as a testimony to the hypersensitivity of our times.” In the LA Times, Howard Rosenberg described the program as a “candid, thoughtful, flowing, visually stunning film.”
Quick Takes
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The Seattle Weekly reports that the CPB Inspector General may launch an audit of KCTS.
Quick Takes
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USA Today looks at audience trends for financial advice programs, and declares that the competing Wall Street Week franchises both “look like losers.”
Programs/Content
Meeting the HD demand: PBS matching rollout to buyers’ slow uptake
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With its pockets emptier than usual and few viewers demanding high-definition pictures, PBS is moving to HD more cautiously than the commercial networks. Rather than converting its schedule overnight, as the networks seemed to have done, PBS’s HD planners suggest moving to the fine, widescreen picture as fast as viewers buy receivers capable of displaying it. For every 10,000 HD receivers purchased, the network proposes to produce one additional hour of high-def programming. PBS now broadcasts about 48.5 hours of HDTV a year. Nearly half of that—22 hours—comes from the Latino drama American Family and the rest from monthly specials.
Quick Takes
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Chicago’s WBEZ-FM assumed management of community station WLUW-FM Dec. 4, reports the Chicago Sun-Times.
Quick Takes
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The Washington Post previews I’d Rather Eat Pants, a serial drama airing this week on NPR’s Morning Edition.