Quick Takes
|
At NPR’s blog, Robert Smith is sizing up the competition: the new Washington Post radio station that launched this morning. “You want to take this outside for a debate over globalization? I didn’t think so.”
Quick Takes
|
“National Public Radio recently issued a testy note to Boston Acoustics, complaining about reception problems with a radio NPR had bought in huge numbers for giveaways,” reports the Philadelphia Daily News.
Quick Takes
|
Public radio reporter and producer Kathy McAnally died March 24 of cancer. She was 55. This remembrance aired on San Francisco’s KQED-FM, where McAnally worked for many years.
Quick Takes
|
Rebecca Roberts, daughter of Cokie, will host a new local talk show on WETA-FM in Washington, D.C., starting this summer. (Second item.)
Quick Takes
|
PBS ombudsman Michael Getler addresses viewer complaints about pledge programming and posts letters from pledge-weary pubTV fans in his most recent column. “PBS needs to change its name!” writes a viewer in Grand Rapids, Mich. “My suggestion is to call PBS the ‘Please Buy Something’ network.”
Quick Takes
|
CPB is accepting applications for another round of digital conversion grants to public radio stations.
Quick Takes
|
CPB plans to launch a Station Renewal Project for pubradio stations that could fall short of new audience service criteria for Community Service Grants. A recent Request for Proposals seeks a pubradio professional to serve as a consultant on the project.
Quick Takes
|
See Chicago Public Radio’s Torey Malatia get all Glengarry Glen Ross at his station’s pledge drive. Also, the station is offering a This American Life 100th Anniversary mug as a premium (that’s right, 100th anniversary).
Quick Takes
|
The San Mateo County Community College District will appeal the $15,000 indecency fine the FCC levied against KCSM-TV for naughty words uttered in an March 2004 installment of PBS doc, The Blues. KCSM was notifed of the commission’s decision last week. Washington, D.C.-based law firm Morrison and Foerster will represent the district on a pro bono basis.
Quick Takes
|
The University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., has taken its public radio station off the market. The university was not satisfied with the proposals it received for KUOP-FM but will put the station back on the market within a year. Capital Public Radio in Sacramento will continue to operate the station.
Quick Takes
|
The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the case of Clark Parrish, a religious broadcaster whose companies snapped up hundreds of FM translators from the FCC a few years ago only to turn around and sell them. “Based on the average sale price for one of their translators, their remaining spectrum holdings, which the FCC granted free, could be worth as much as $8.7 million,” CJR says. (Earlier coverage in Current.)
Quick Takes
|
New York’s WNYC-AM/FM is moving from the city’s Municipal Building into larger digs in lower Manhattan that will include a 3,700-square-foot performance space.
Quick Takes
|
The Los Angeles Times reports that on April 17 Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre will show free continuous screenings of The Armenian Genocide, the controversial documentary debuting on PBS stations that night. Filmmaker Andrew Goldberg rented the theatre after KCET in Los Angeles declined to broadcast both the film and the panel discussion that PBS commissioned to follow it.
Quick Takes
|
Consultant Robert Paterson has been working with NPR on its series of systemwide meetings, New Realities. On his blog, he shares conversations with WBEZ’s Torey Malatia, KCRW’s Ruth Seymour and Bill Buzenberg of Minnesota Public Radio.
Quick Takes
|
A new commercial AM/FM news-talk station in Washington, D.C., hopes to attract a chunk of public radio’s audience by combining a livelier sound with meatier coverage, reports the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher. The Post is partnering on the station with Bonneville International, owner of the city’s successful WTOP-AM.
Quick Takes
|
NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin says a recent NPR story took a condescending attitude toward small-town media.
Quick Takes
|
Arbitron will begin rolling out its Portable People Meter, a new audience-measurement technology, in July, reports Radio Magazine. Consultant John Sutton warns that the PPM’s introduction could bring new limitations on some of the most useful data that pubradio gets from Arbitron.
Quick Takes
|
Michael Coleman tells the Detroit Free Press that he did not embezzle from Michigan Public Media in Ann Arbor, his former employer. Coleman is now g.m. of WDET-FM in Detroit. A Detroit News columnist compares news of the embezzlement charges to “hearing that your mother has been brought up on shoplifting charges.”
Quick Takes
|
If pediatricians agree that media screen time is not appropriate for children under age two, why are Sesame Workshop and a leading child advocacy organization co-producing a DVD series for babies? “Essentially it is a betrayal of babies and families,” one critic of the new brand of infant media and toy products tells the Washington Post. Child development experts have asked Zero to Three, the advocacy group that’s co-producing the Sesame Beginnings DVD series, to end its association with the Workshop. “We believe that your partnership . .