Quick Takes

Webcasters find friends in Congress

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U.S. Rep Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.) introduced a bill that aims to throw out a controversial new royalty structure for music streams, passed in March by a panel of three copyright judges, that many webcasters say will put them out of business if it goes into effect. Webcasters support the lawmakers’ measure, which would set rates at 7.5 percent of streaming-based revenue–or roughly the same level as those for satellite radio–instead of basing the rate on the annually escalating, per-play standard that the record labels wanted and the judges decreed. Internet radio station operators have been bombarding Congress with pleas to intervene, an effort that became more urgent earlier this month after the copyright panel rejected all requests to reconsider its decision. In an arcane but crucial legal point, the bill would also change the standard by which future royalty rates are set from the nebulous “willing buyer/willing seller” concept to one that webcasters say more fairly balances the needs of copyright owners, users and the public good. For pubcasters, the new bill would set the new rates at 1.5 times what they paid in 2004, which was last official year of the system’s previous streaming rate deal with the labels.

Programs/Content

PBS ombud: Airing Perle film an “abdication of journalistic principle”

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PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler thought several of the America at a Crossroads films were excellent and described one in particular, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, as “one of the most gripping hours I’ve spent in front of the tube in quite a while.” But he also agreed with critics and viewers who blasted PBS for giving an hour to neocon adviser Richard Perle during the series. The decision to re-present the initial case for a war “that has, at the very least, gone badly” instead of examining what went wrong and where the powers that be should go from here represents a “stunning avoidance of the real crossroad that we are at,” Getler wrote. He also criticized the series’ lack of substantive discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Quick Takes

MSNBC anchor coming to NPR morning show

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Alison Stewart, host of MSNBC’s midday news show The Most, will co-host of an “upcoming 24-hour multimedia news service and morning drive show for Adults 25-44,” NPR announced today. The new show is working-titled the Bryant Park Project, now in a “Rough Cuts” blogging phase. Her new colleagues have posted a musical video tribute to Stewart. Before joining MSNBC in 2003, she anchored for ABC News, reported for CBS Sunday Morning and other shows and won a Peabody for MTV News election coverage. ‘Bistro says Stewart was music director of Brown University’s commercial college station, WBRU, when she was a student.

Quick Takes

Antoniotti resigns at Detroit station

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Detroit Public Television said yesterday that Steve Antoniotti, its president since 1995, “tendered his resignation because of an acknowledged failure to comply with station requirements, unrelated to financial matters.” Chief Operating Officer Dan Alpert will serve as interim g.m. The board chairman declined to discuss what those requirements were, the Detroit Free Press reported today.

Quick Takes

On-air changes follow shift of control at KKJZ, Long Beach

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Jazz announcers Chuck Cecil and Helen Borgers stayed on the air at KKJZ in Long Beach, Calif., when Mt. Wilson Broadcasters took over operation of the station April 21, the Orange County Register reported. But others, including Joni Caryl and Scott Willis, lost their gigs. On the same day, listeners of KUOR-FM in Redlands, east of Los Angeles, lost jazz programming entirely when its licensee, the University of Redlands, took the occasion to drop its KKJZ simulcast and picked up Southern California Public Radio’s all-news service, repeated from KPCC in Pasadena, the Redlands Daily Facts said. SCPR plans to launch a news bureau at the Redlands site.

Quick Takes

Something about it broke me

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Like many newspaper commentators, Arizona Republic’s Robert Robb found inspiration for a column in what he heard on NPR, or saw on its website, in this case: The painful-to-read profiles of the Virginia Tech victims. He wrote: “So many lives of promise. I was holding it together until I came to Henry Lee, a computer engineering freshman at Virginia Tech. Lee moved to the United States from China as a child and entered elementary school here not speaking English. He nevertheless became his high school salutatorian. He was, however, reluctant to speak at his graduation ceremony, but was talked into it.

People

James Lee Mathes, 73, and Fred Burgess, 64

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Two public broadcasters active in southern California during the 1960s and 1970s, James Lee Mathes and Fred Burgess, retired to Kansas together in the 1980s. They died within seven months in 2007. James Lee Mathes
James Lee Mathes, 73, a pioneer in public TV at KCET and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, died March 27 [2007] in his home state, Kansas. He had pancreatic cancer. Mathes worked on such KCET projects as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series and an eight-nation simulcast, as well as fundraising and general administration.

Quick Takes

CPB Board member Ernest Wilson now a dean

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Ernest James Wilson III, a CPB Board member, was named dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication on Thursday, the USC Daily Trojan reported. He is a visiting professor of public diplomacy at Annenberg and a faculty member at the University of Maryland. He succeeds Geoffrey Cowan, who was also a Democratic member of the CPB Board.

Quick Takes

And the Webby Award nominees include

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Register and vote by April 27 for the annual Webby People’s Voice Awards. Nominees connected with public TV and radio include:PBS Kids Sprout cable channel’s Sprout Diner in Family/Parenting;NPR.org in News and in Radio;the NPR Podcast Directory in Podcasts;Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly in Religion;NPR’s This I Believe in Religion;Nova scienceNow in Science;P.O.V. in Television; andCurious George in Youth.The public chooses the People’s Voice Awards, while the 500-plus members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose the Webby Award winners in a parallel competition. Both sets will be announced in June.

Quick Takes

Post account of Burns’ meeting with Latino activists refuted

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Ken Burns and PBS executives met yesterday with leaders of the “Defend the Honor” campaign to discuss the filmmakers’ plans to collaborate with Hector Galan in producing new material for The War. Spokespeople for Burns and PBS are refuting the Washington Post’s account of the meeting. The Post reported that Burns agreed to re-edit his series to incorporate the new segments. “Ken is not opening his film,” Burns’ spokesman Joseph DePlasco told Current. “Ken’s film is done.”

Quick Takes

Radio manager Ray Dilley dies

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Ray Dilley, 67, manager of the Nebraska Radio Network, founding manager of Vermont Public Radio and developer of NPR Worldwide, died over the weekend of April 13-15.

Quick Takes

IMA backs Google’s web performance metrics

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Integrated Media Association has proposed that public radio’s web operations use Google Analytics as their standard system for measuring website usage. To establish the metrics for a pilot group of 50 stations by July 1, the IMA Board decided to invest up to $25,000 of the surplus from its February conference. It’s asking the CPB Radio Program Fund to put in $500,000.

Quick Takes

Critic sees capitulation in PBS decision

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By bowing to pressure from Latino activists seeking changes to The War, PBS and filmmaker Ken Burns set a “lousy precedent,” writes Charlie McCullom, TV writer for the San Jose Mercury News.

Quick Takes

Copyright judges reject webcaster appeals

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The Copyright Royalty Board yesterday rejected all requests from webcasters that it reconsider the new fee structure for Internet radio it announced March 2. Webcasters have said the new rate structure, which raises the royalty rates and assesses fees on a per play basis, will cripple Internet radio. In addition, pubcasters that stream lots of hours would see their own rates rise dramatically. The new fee system goes into effect May 15; lawyers representing webcasters say the next step is likely an appeal to D.C.’s U.S. Court of Appeals. Coincidentally, a coalition of artists and webcasters yesterday announced “a national campaign to save Internet radio.”

Quick Takes

NPR expects to move HQ in 2011

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NPR has outgrown its office space in Washington, D.C., and plans to move to larger quarters in 2011, the Washington Post reported today (second item in roundup). The network now occupies 210,000 square feet in two buildings near the city’s new convention center. On its last move, 13 years ago, NPR left a building where it had 88,000 square feet.

Quick Takes

Unedited version of Crossroads soldier stories available

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WETA, which oversaw production of the America at a Crossroads series, will make an uncensored version of one of the films, Operation Homecoming, available to stations that request it but hasn’t publicized the offering, reports the Los Angeles Times. PBS will only offer a sanitized version of the film depicting soldiers’ war stories, some of which include profanity. “Our policy, in the name of trying to eliminate errors so a station doesn’t unwittingly punch up the wrong version, is to keep it relatively clean and straightforward,” said John Wilson, PBS programming chief. The film is scheduled for 10 p.m. Monday, which falls within the FCC’s “safe harbor” for edgy content, but will air an hour earlier in the central time zone.

Quick Takes

HearVox News: Community Broadcasters Agenda: revised

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Check out this spoof revised agenda for this week’s Community Broadcasters Conference: “0815-1000: Case Studies in New Facilities and how building would have been easier with webcasting and everyone at RIAA dead from painful diseases.”

Quick Takes

The Making of a Personality, Chapter XIII

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Tucker Carlson, briefly host of a PBS talk show between his gigs on CNN and MSNBC, will host a game show pilot for CBS, Who Do You Trust?, TV Week reported. With his game tryout on Dancing with the Stars, Carlson continued his climb to bow-tied personality status — someday potentially eclipsing altogether the memory of George Will, Pee Wee Herman, Bill Nye and even Orville Redenbacher.