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“My challenge is to develop a public radio sound that’s different from NPR but compatible,” says American Public Media’s Jim Russell in a Minneapolis Star-Tribune interview.
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A Washington, D.C., radio listener bemoans recent format changes, including WETA’s: “[I]t seems like radio used to be so much better.”
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Independent producer Benjamen Walker discusses his show and podcasting with Pitchforkmedia.com: “Where do I see myself as having more of a future, the Internet or NPR? I’d pick the Internet, definitely.” Also at Pitchfork, a profile of KCMP, Minnesota Public Radio’s new eclectic station.
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Podcasting has doubled the online audience for WNYC’s On the Media in just four weeks. And Tod Maffin has started PublicRadioFeeds.com, a directory to podcasting pubcasters that is similar to ours.
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“I think there’s a lot of fear in the air out there,” KCPT President Bill Reed tells the Kansas City Star, in an article about “A Company of Soldiers,” a Frontline documentary that includes profanity spoken by American soldiers under fire. “That’s how the climate is now. You have to go back to the McCarthy era to get a feel for how far this has gone.” [Via TV Barn.] KCPT is one of 40 public TV stations that will air the documentary tonight with the unedited language.
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Pittsburgh’s WQED-FM aims to remain a localized classical music station, “[b]ut the community is not holding up its part of the deal,” says president George Miles Jr. in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As Current recently reported, other stations have also been having trouble with classical.
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Listen to Current Senior Editor Karen Everhart’s Feb. 18 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (RealAudio).
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“We like to have fun with the show and we like to be adventurous, but at bottom, we want to urgently illuminate what the hell is going on in this world,” says On Point host Tom Ashbrook in the BU Bridge.
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Minneapolis Public Schools has rebuffed offers from Minnesota Public Radio to buy KBEM-FM, the school district’s financially troubled jazz station, reports the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
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CPB President Kathleen Cox tells the Washington Post that, contrary to what PBS President Pat Mitchell and her spokeswoman have said, Cox did not confer with Mitchell on whether to withdraw “Sugartime!,” the Postcards from Buster program depicting Vermont children with two mommies. “[T]he first I heard from her was after she made that decision, explaining that she had made the decision after receiving the Spellings letter,” Cox says.
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“We feel strongly that the language of war should not be sanitized and that there is nothing indecent about its use in this context.” In a memo to public TV stations, producers of Frontline ask them to take a stand for the First Amendment by airing a documentary that includes the real language of soldiers in combat [via Romenesko].
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The New York Times reports that PBS’s identity crisis goes far deeper than the announcement by Pat Mitchell that she would step down next year as the beleaguered network’s president.
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“I just wanted to make clear that I’ve got 15 months left on this job and let’s make this as constructive as we can,” says PBS President Pat Mitchell in a Washington Post column that links her announcement that she’ll leave PBS next year to her handling of the Buster “two mommies” program.
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CPB is accepting applications for the next funding round for digital radio conversion. The deadline is April 29.
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Pat Mitchell announced that she will leave her job as PBS president when her contract expires next year. News accounts in the New York Times and New York Post tie Mitchell’s exit to her controversial decision to pull an episode of Postcards from Buster that featured children with lesbian parents.
Programs/Content
Weak audience and income blamed in classical fade
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For lovers of classical music, these are difficult times. Once pubradio’s dominant format, classical music is still widespread on the airwaves. As of fall 2002, 340 public stations aired a “very significant” amount of classical each week, according to a Minnesota Public Radio report on the genre. But news programs from NPR and other sources have been pushing symphonies and operas off stage. News eclipsed classical in 2000 as public radio’s most prevalent format and more and more stations have been shearing hours of the music from their schedules.
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PBS President Pat Mitchell tells the Los Angeles Times that she’s troubled by criticisms from liberal advocacy groups. “They are our natural allies and friends,” she said. “I’d expect them to be more understanding.”
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CPB seeks a producer for a daily 4-6 hour Native music program that will be part of the American Indian Radio on Satellite (AIROS) feed.
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WETA-FM in Washington, D.C., will switch to a news/talk format Feb. 28. The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher accuses WETA and public radio at large of adopting “the commercial model of going for the biggest possible audience.”
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In a letter to Congress, the National Association of Broadcasters restates its longstanding support of existing channel protections limiting the licensing of low-power FM stations.