Current (https://current.org/2006/12/page/2/)
Henry Becton will retire as WGBH president Oct. 1, 2007, and will be succeeded by Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Abbott, the Boston station’s board unanimously decided Dec. 6. WGBH released this statement.
The New Yorker has declined to post on its website the article about WBAI host and freeform pioneer Bob Fass that appears in this week’s issue. But you can download two MP3s of clips from Fass’s Radio Unnameable, one of which is 90 minutes of a 1966 appearance by Bob Dylan.
NPR’s Lynn Neary reports on the This American Life TV show as it prepares for its debut next year. “I don’t see any positive aspect of being on camera,” says host Ira Glass. “I am 47 years old, I don’t like looking at myself. After a certain point, no one likes looking at themselves on television. There’s just no upside.”
American Public Media has dropped Barbara Bogaev as co-host of Weekend America and is relocating some of the show’s staffers to St. Paul, Minn., according to an internal memo posted at LA Observed.
KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, is moving into new studios this week, 10 months after its former studios burned to the ground.
PBS Blend — a coffee that’s “sweetly balanced and smooth, with full flavor and a rich finish” — will be sold by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which announced it today from Waterbury, Vt. The coffee is grown in Mexico with environmentally responsible practices, and its Fair Trade Certified label indicates the farmers get a fair price, the company said. Green Mountain ranked No. 1 in Business Ethics magazine’s list 100 “best corporate citizens,” not far above Starbucks, and No. 98 among Fortune Small Business magazine’s top 100 fastest-growing small stockholder-owned companies, right after Peet’s Coffee.
“I would argue that the nascent social media phenomenon and a threatened public media field would mutually benefit from an early embrace,” writes Jake Shapiro on his blog. “Social media needs some of the articulation of the values and aspirations that have guided the best of what public broadcasting has achieved, and public media needs to break out of its broadcast borders to fulfill its public service media mission regardless of the particular technology delivery platform.”
Verizon will soon add the digital cable channel PBS Kids Sprout (Current story about the channel’s launch here) to its FiOS TV service. The fiber-based digital TV service is currently available in parts of California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, and will soon be available in parts of Delaware and New Jersey.
“The sort of radio that seems to prevail is radio that has a very clear voice of its own,” says Garrison Keillor in an interview in the Buffalo News.