Current (https://current.org/2008/02/page/3/)
ABC News will collaborate with New York’s WNET-TV to produce a Feb. 26 broadcast of the New York Philharmonic from North Korea, reports the New York Times. The broadcast will be distributed via PBS as well. “I didn’t want to just show a concert,” said Neal Shapiro, WNET’s president, about the collaboration with ABC. “It was a historic place at a historic time.”
NPR’s Alison Stewart, host of the Bryant Park Project, talks with the New York Observer about leaving commercial TV for public radio. She says she appreciates being free from the emphasis placed on appearance in TV: “[T]here was a certain element of like, wow, NPR is a place where I could grow old gracefully.”
Anthony Brandon, president of WYPR in Baltimore, went on the air yesterday to explain the firing of host Marc Steiner. Brandon said the ratings for Steiner’s local public affairs show were declining, and the host’s refusal to make changes in the program left management with no choice, reports The Baltimore Sun. A pre-taped interview with Marc Steiner preceded the Brandon segment, during which Steiner said he and management have different ideas about the role of public radio in the community. Later on his blog, Steiner wrote that Brandon “has constantly attempted diminish what I and our listeners did six years ago in raising funds to purchase what was then WJHU” and the station has been “hijacked.” Steiner and Brandon’s on-air interviews with Maryland Morning host Sheilah Kast can be streamed here.
Pubcasters may not be as successful at fighting off federal budget cuts as in the past, says NPR head Ken Stern in a New York Times article about the Bush administration’s proposed budget. “I worry that this gets lost in a whole lot of other issues,” he said. John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, was confident next week’s pubTV lobbying day in Washington would help fend off cuts.
The Bush Administration budget includes an extra $20 million for DTV education, Broadcasting & Cable reports. The money would go to the FCC for DTV awareness efforts. In its original DTV transition bill, Congress only set aside $5 million for consumer education, to be administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The total $25 million federal outlay “is far too little to educate a nation of 300 million people,” said John Dingell (D-Mich), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The government “should not be attempting this transition on the cheap.”
KCPW-FM/AM in Salt Lake is up for sale. The board of Community Wireless of Park City, licensee of Park City’s KPCW and sister KCPW, voted unanimously to “spin-off” its Salt Lake stations “in order to better focus its attention on serving its KPCW listeners in Summit and Wasatch Counties,” according to a statement issued on Sunday. The board authorized Ed Sweeney, KCPW g.m., to form a new non-profit that would raise money to purchase KCPW’s AM and FM outlets, but it will accept offers from other interested nonprofits. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that KCPW has been losing money since 2006.
More on the Bush Administration’s proposed cuts to CPB’s appropriations: Pubcaster advocate Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told Broadcasting & Cable that “the Administration’s proposal to slash funding is short-sighted and I fully expect Congress to reject it. ” Ken Stern, NPR c.e.o., calls for “renewed support” from the more than 2 million citizens who called lawmakers to complain about the last real funding fight in 2005, citing a recent Pew report that highlighted NPR’s growing news offerings. Not all cultural programs fared as poorly as pubcasting–the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Kennedy Center, among others, are slated to receive slight funding bumps, the Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, an OMB spokesman tells the Los Angeles Times that “The administration’s proposal is consistent with the evolving role of public broadcasting in a marketplace that has benefited from the tremendous growth and diversity of programming.”
What would a Microsoft (or Google) takeover of Yahoo mean for public TV and radio? It will accelerate the growth of online advertising revenues, and traditional media will lose money so fast, “it will be too late to reinvent yourself then,” predicts pubcasting consultant Rob Paterson. Public TV and radio have to move quickly to solve their “business model problem,” Paterson writes, by figuring out how to “offer the best content from TV and Radio AND keep the stations whole.”
The New York Times gives high marks to African-American Lives 2, the follow-up to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s celebrity genealogy investigation that aired on PBS in 2006. The four-part series begins Wednesday and, the Times’ Felicia R. Lee writes, “belies its sleepy name with the poetry of history, the magic of science and the allure of the family trees of Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Tom Joyner and Maya Angelou.”
President Bush’s proposed federal budget for fiscal 2009 recommends deep cuts for public broadcasting: the $400 million that was previously approved for CPB next fiscal year would be cut in half and the White House would rescind $220 million from a 2010 advance appropriation of $400 million. In addition, the White House provides no advance appropriation for CPB in 2011 and no additional monies in 2009 for digital conversion costs or upgrades to the Public Radio Satellite System. The cuts represent a 56 percent reduction of CPB funding from 2008 levels, according to CPB. In a statement issued this morning, CPB President Patricia Harrison described the proposed cuts as “draconian.” With such politically unpopular proposals as a freeze on all domestic programs and $178 billion cuts to Medicare, the White House will have a hard time exerting its will with Congress in the upcoming budget process, according to Politico.
Switching to an iPhone has changed the way Wired editor Chris Anderson listens to public radio, he writes on a blog tied to his influential book, The Long Tail. By capturing his favorite programs as podcasts, Anderson avoids pubradio pledge drives but voluntarily answers Ira Glass’s appeal for contributions toward the bandwidth bill of This American Life. “I just don’t care that much about KQED, and now that I’ve got another way to get the shows I like, I don’t really feel much of a connection to it,” Anderson writes. “Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don’t have to take the bad shows with the good. I’ve got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it.
Successful producers help talent compensate. They make a deal with their talent: “I’ll help you maneuver the everyday travails of living life, and you will go out there every night and try to give the performance of your life.”
On Friday, Baltimore news/talk station WYPR fired Marc Steiner, the talk show host who led the 2002 campaign to create a freestanding station when Johns Hopkins University wanted to sell it, the Baltimore Sun reported today. Steiner blamed differences with President Tony Brandon; management blamed falling ratings for Steiner’s midday show, which focuses on Baltimore affairs. WYPR plans a show called Statewide with a wider scope befitting the station, which now has repeaters in the western and eastern reaches of Maryland.
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler says NewsHour’s state-focused “Big Picture” series, which features discussions with citizens about election issues, is “exactly what public television ought to be doing.” However, “the press, in general, and television in particular, including PBS, did not do a good job at the time of explaining the implications of Democratic primaries in Michigan and Florida,” he says. Getler received letters on both topics, including one from a viewer upset by the lack of African Americans in the NewsHour’s Colorado discussion group.
It would be a shame “if ‘Miss Austen Regrets’ goes more unseen than most Masterpiece fare because of PBS’ scheduling, which forces the hollow-eyed Jane to compete against several dozen heavily muscled gentlemen in padded uniforms,” says Variety of Superbowl Sunday. “It’s the kind of dunderheaded scenario, frankly, from which even the dashing Mr. Darcy would be hard-pressed to affect a rescue.”