Quick Takes
Talent Questers unveil their demos
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Online voting is underway on five-minute demos created by the five remaining contestants in the Public Radio Talent Quest.
Quick Takes
Lehrer was soft on Petraeus and Crocker
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Like many viewers, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler wasn’t too impressed with Jim Lehrer’s questioning of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Sept. 12. Getler writes of the NewsHour segment, “For an issue that is at the heart of this moment in our history, the half-hour, as a whole, seemed too flat and dry to me, an under-utilized opportunity. It offered a calm nod to those frustrations that engulf millions of Americans about where this war is going without really pressing more specific questions about military and diplomatic strategy and the associated costs in lives, money and reputation that are on people’s minds.” (See video and transcript of the segment.)
Quick Takes
Also off-limits, South Side: Cokie Roberts
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The suburban Chicago Daily Herald points to a broadcast segment about a bar fight between spunky two women to characterize :Vocalo, Chicago Public Radio’s idiosyncratic new offshoot station for the young and nonwhite. The new station in Indiana, which reaches only southern parts of Chicago, went 24/7 this month, the Sun-Times reported. CPR President Torey Malatia described the thinking behind :Vocalo in Current. Listen for yourself.
Quick Takes
City Attorney request documents from KPBS
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San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre has requested documents from KPBS related to cancellation of its local program Full Focus, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. Aguirre also requested documentation about the station’s largest donors and how KPBS chooses participants for its Editors Roundtable. KPBS spokeswoman Nancy Worlie told the Union-Tribune, “There’s not much in the documents, but whatever Aguirre does with this only Aguirre knows. We are flattered he wants to spend his time looking into us.”
Quick Takes
Brown is the New Green aptly investigates Latino experience
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“I’ve long thought that someone should make a documentary on the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the Latino experience in the United States,” says San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. in a commentary about Brown Is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream (airing tonight on PBS). The film, says Navarrette, fulfills this wish. It unpacks Latino identity as it relates to “politics, business, entertainment, marketing and media,” and also addresses the “contradictions and mixed messages that Latinos send everyone else.” Navarrette quotes filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez: “‘Latinos are such an enigma to America.'”
Quick Takes
Underwriting sales agency bought by NPR, WGBH
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The largest producing organizations in public radio and TV, NPR and WGBH, said in a release today that they’re buying what is probably the largest broker of underwriting time on local stations, Boston-based National Public Broadcasting. It represents 60 stations in pubTV, 120 in pubradio, NPR, NPR.org, PBS.org and the NewsHour. Bob Williams, a sales exec who had built an earlier business selling ad time on cable TV, established the business 10 years ago as National Public Television and later expanded into radio.
Quick Takes
PBS parrot star dies at age 31
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Alex, the super-smart parrot featured on PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers and the Nature episode “Parrots: Look Who’s Talking,” died last week at age 31. Alex–who could identify objects, colors and shapes–was known for his verbal interactions with Alan Alda on Scientific American (see video).
Quick Takes
‘Every place is not the same’
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‘If I had to choose one genre to do for the rest of my life, I would do road shows,” says Pittsburgh documentary maker Rick Sebak. His 10th national show for PBS, To Market to Market to Buy a Fat Pig, premiered last month and took him to markets in eight cities. The WQED producer has dabbled in travelogues before with The Pennsylvania Road Show in 1992 and the national A Program About Unusual Buildings and Other Roadside Stuff in 2004. Right now, he’s rolling across the country — in a boldly trademarked WQED minivan — to make a doc tentatively titled A Ride Along the Lincoln Highway about the country’s first transcontinental route, which snakes from Times Square past the Great Lakes to the Golden Gate. Sebak’s “get-acquainted tour,” as he calls it, is collecting the first footage for the show, planned for the PBS schedule in summer or fall 2008.
Quick Takes
PBS Ombudsman: Crossroads needs context
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Responding to viewer criticism about the latest American at a Crossroads doc–Robert Kaplan’s “Inside America’s Empire”–PBS ombudsman Michael Gelter says the programs need more introductory context. The problem for viewers, he says, is “the concept of what this Crossroads series is supposed to be.”
Quick Takes
Comic strip responds to Ken Burns’ The War
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In response to Ken Burns’ The War, creators of the comic strip Baldo will introduce a Latino WWII vet character on Sept. 17, reports Editor & Publisher. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas-Austin professor who has advocated against The War, helped creators Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos develop content for the new character.
Quick Takes
Rural pubTV stations get USDA digital grants
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The USDA gave six rural public TV stations a total of $4.95 million to build out their digital infrastructure in advance of the February 2009 analog TV shut-off. Pubcasters in Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee received rural development grants ranging from $1.86 million down to $25,510.
Quick Takes
Yikes, a critic who is of two minds!
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“As a reading lesson, Super Why! is brilliantly clever,” says a New York Times review today. “As a lesson in literary interpretation, it fails miserably,” writes Susan Stewart, who contends that the new PBS children’s series neutralizes the power of dark but enduring fairy tales.
Quick Takes
For those who hate wordless humming
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Tomorrow afternoon ATC will announce the winner of a contest to write lyrics for the show’s enduring theme. Nina Totenberg can be heard on NPR.org warbling the four finalists culled from nearly 1,000 entries. Listeners’ voting to pick the winner closed last night. A Californian named Bruce Dick is the finalist with the shortest entry, which nevertheless emphasizes quite a big claim for the show: “Not just many things considered / Not just most things / In fact, all.” Now we can’t get that out of our minds.
Quick Takes
NPR talks with Made in L.A. filmmaker
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On NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday, Neal Conan talked with filmmaker Almudena Carracedo about her film Made in L.A., which debuted Tuesday on the PBS series P.O.V.
Quick Takes
LA Times on Burns’ The War: an epic poem
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“[Ken] Burns sometimes gets dinged for being too heartland; a critic for this paper chided his ‘pure Hallmark’ moments. But the whole point here is the contrast, the Hallmark against the horrors,” writes Paul Lieberman in a Los Angeles Times feature about Burns and his upcoming film The War. “He’s not producing a textbook but ‘an epic poem,’ and he’s tried to distinguish his from the other WWII films by focusing on the interplay of home front and war front, using Sacramento, Luverne, Minn., Mobile and Waterbury.”
Quick Takes
“Bluegrass makes hangovers go away!”
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WAMU’s announcement that it will drop bluegrass music from its weekend schedule later this month and upgrade its HD Radio service prompted nearly three dozen listeners to post comments yesterday on DCist. A handful of listeners applauded the change: “I just don’t ‘get’ Bluegrass music. Waaay too twangy and countrified for me,” wrote one. But many others found reasons to object. The new Sunday afternoon news/talk line-up is “extraordinarily lame AND lazy,” wrote one listener.
Quick Takes
Made in L.A. another window into labor of undocumented immigrants
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The film Made in L.A., which runs tonight on PBS as part of the P.O.V. series, is an “excellent documentary,” according to a New York Times review. The doc follows the labor activism of three Latino women in L.A.’s garment manufacturing industry. Writes the Times’ Andy Webster: “Congress may not be able to decide how to process the nation’s illegal immigrants, but the film understands that they’re simply here, an integral component of the economy.”
Quick Takes
WordGirl is funny, Super Why! is “sugary-sweet”
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The new PBS kids’ show WordGirl “doesn’t just teach, it also entertains with humorous situations that should appeal to children and their parents,” writes Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TV critic Rob Owen. The new Super Why!, however, is a “sugary-sweet show that may entertain its target audience of 3-to-6-year-olds, but may repulse parents the same way Barney does.”
Quick Takes
New York Times on new PBS series WordGirl
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“WordGirl takes the [superhero] conceit back to an earlier era, with a sensibility that could only have been conceived by creators who may have watched too many Rocky and Bullwinkle shows,” writes Elizabeth Jensen in a New York Times article about the new PBS children’s series.