Quick Takes
How to liven up public radio without resorting to cannibalism
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Producer Doug Gordon offers his Modest Proposal for Making Public Radio More Entertaining and invites your comments and ideas on DirectCurrent.
Quick Takes
Hutchison in for Stevens on Commerce Committee
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Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas will replace Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska) as the GOP’s ranking member on the Commerce Committee, which oversees broadcast legislation, while Stevens is under indictment, TV Week reports. Congress is about to recess for its August break and the party conventions and won’t be back in session until mid-September.
Quick Takes
WMUB drops evening jazz, goes all-news
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WMUB in Oxford, Ohio, is adopting an all news/talk format next week. The format switch moves longtime evening host Mama Jazz to WMUB Jazz, a 24-hour HD-2 channel and online stream, and clears evening slots for repeats of the Diane Rehm Show and Talk of the Nation. The station invited listener feedback on its Directions blog, where a couple of commenters questioned why WMUB would drop the music programs that differentiated it from Cincinnati’s WVXU, a nearby NPR News station. “By focusing our format, we believe we will increase our ability to attract and retain new listeners as well as serve the great majority of current listeners,” said Cleve Callison, WMUB g.m., in a statement. “This change thus orients us toward future growth in audience and local fundraising capacity.”
Quick Takes
Food and beverage marketers seek kids online
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“The nation’s largest food and beverage companies spent about $1.6 billion in 2006 marketing their products to children [ages 2-17], according to a Federal Trade Commission report released Tuesday,” reports the Washington Post. About 200 million of that went to cross-promotional campaigns using films, TV shows, video games. “The Internet–though far less costly than television–has become a major marketing tool of food companies that target children and adolescents, with more than two-thirds of the 44 companies reporting online, youth-directed activities,” the report said. The FTC recommended that media companies license their characters to healthier food and drinks and that food and beverage marketers expand their efforts to educate kids about healthy choices. Lawmakers sought the study because of concerns about growing childhood obesity rates.
Quick Takes
Sen. Ted Stevens indicted
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Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the longest serving GOP senator in U.S. history and a longtime pubcasting advocate, was indicted on federal corruption charges tied to his relationship with an Alaska oil exec. According to Senate Republican rules, Stevens will have to give up his position as vice chairman of the influential Commerce Committee, among other leadership positions, the New York Times reports.
Quick Takes
Backlash against Garfield’s take on online commenters
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Bob Garfield tells On the Media listeners what he really thinks about the “frustrating, maddening and extremely discouraging” online feedback he often receives from anonymous commenters and gets an earful from Ira Glass. Then, the social media consultant and blogger Derek Powazek weighs in: “Comments online are just like conversations in newsrooms – sloppy and stupid and often wrong. But they’re the raw stuff that great journalism starts from.”
Quick Takes
Network builder Jack McBride dies
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One of public broadcasting’s master builders, Nebraska’s Jack McBride, died Monday from complications of lung surgery, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. He was 82. McBride was the first employee of the University of Nebraska’s TV department in 1953, put KUON on-air in 1954, won funding for a nine-station NET network in 1963, and added radio, a national school-video distributor, an intensive experiment with interactive videodiscs and many other ventures, serving until retirement until 1996. In 1990, NET was the first state net to lease a satellite channel to serve schools; today it has 303 downlinks across the state, according to the network. “There wasn’t anyone better at looking into the future,” said longtime program chief Ron Hull.
Quick Takes
No such thing as “race transcendence,” says Smiley
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“There is no such thing in America as race transcendence, and Obama’s going to find that out real soon,” says Tavis Smiley in an AP story about how he and other journalists are addressing issues of race in the presidential campaign. Smiley started a blogosphere firestorm when he criticized Obama on The Tom Joyner Morning Show for not appearing on Smiley’s State of the Black Union cablecast on C-SPAN in February. “Just because Barack Obama is black, doesn’t mean he gets a pass on being held accountable on issues that matter to black people,” Smiley says in the article. “We have an awkward history about how to talk about race in the nation and in newsrooms,” says NewsHour and Washington Week’s Gwen Ifill, whose book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama will be published early next year. “I don’t see any hesitancy about addressing it,” she says.
System/Policy
Satradio merger okayed without pubradio provisions
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The compromise package of fines and consumer protections imposed by the FCC in exchange for approving the merger of the Sirius and XM satellite radio companies July 25 did not include key provisions sought by public radio advocates. Pubcasters lobbied members of Congress and commissioners to triple from 8 to 25 percent the spectrum capacity that the merged company would have to set aside for public interest and minority programming. They also asked the commission to require the inclusion of HD Radio receiving chips in satellite radio receivers, allowing subscribers to receive free digital signals from terrestrial stations. Neither provision was in the final agreement approved in a 3-2 party-line vote on Friday. Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, who backed the provisions, ended up voting against the merger.
Quick Takes
Next on eBay: Sting’s bass, Andy’s Fender Telecaster, Stewart’s drums
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In the run-up to WNET/WLIW’s Madison Square Garden benefit concert Aug. 7 — the last performance of the reunion tour of The Police — four donors have bid a total of $39,700 on eBay for packages of front-row seats and other special goodies involving the band and their opening act, the B-52s. Stay tuned on eBay for Wave 2 of the auction, Aug. 4-14, which will dispose of autographed instruments from The Police. Meanwhile, tickets are selling for $125 and up, and seating is being expanded to include seats behind the stage.
Quick Takes
Bryant Park fans keep up the fight
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Consultant Rob Paterson, a passionate fan of NPR’s soon-to-sign-off Bryant Park Project, has started The BPP Diner, a Ning site “where the show continues.” Another supporter gives instructions on how to turn a cereal box into an oversized postcard for registering unhappiness with NPR. And John Proffitt has compiled his favorite listener responses to news of the cancellation. “What I find remarkable is that so many in the audience ‘get it,'” he writes. “Making NPR’s decision here all the more puzzling / frustrating.”
Quick Takes
Haarsager’s “joyless decision” on Bryant Park
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Interim CEO Dennis Haarsager explains NPR’s decision to cancel Bryant Park Project to fans who are lobbying to save the show: “For non-commercial media such as NPR, sustaining a new program of this financial magnitude requires attracting users from each of the platforms we can access. Ultimately, we recognized that wasn’t happening with BPP.” In an earlier posting on his Technology360 blog, Haarsager reveals his personal conflict over a decision he describes as “joyless.” “I’m not sure how someone who has done articles, speeches and consulting about the importance of disruptive investments . .
Quick Takes
“What’s wrong with WNYC?”
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Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff isn’t happy that WNYC has taken PRI’s “illuminating” To the Point off the air, and he’s unimpressed with the station’s explanation that they want to put new, more diverse voices on the air. Hentoff calls To the Point’s replacement, Michel Martin’s Tell Me More, “a reasonably competent but basically undistinguished magazine-style show—sort of like ‘smooth jazz’ radio in contrast to Newark’s WGBO-FM.” When he called WNYC’s public relations folks, says Hentoff, he “got a whiff of WNYC’s yearning for younger demographics—just like the commercial stations. That’s the reason for The Takeaway, the new alternative to National Public Radio’s invaluable Morning Edition, which used to be heard on both AM and FM. The Takeaway, a breezy but often marginal hour-long show, makes me jump ship to WNYC-FM at 8 a.m., which is now the only place to hear the far more invaluable and in-depth Morning Edition.”
Quick Takes
Nova ScienceNow: grotesque, tantalizing
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“Take a little of the grotesque, a lot of the tantalizing and a heavy dose of friendly analogies, and you have Nova ScienceNow, a science program in a newsmagazine format that will leave laymen of almost any age feeling smarter and better informed,” writes New York Times critic Neil Genzlinger in a review of tonight’s episode on the leech’s return to the medical field, scientists’ search for extraterrestrial signals, creating stem cells without the use of embryos, and a new deep-sea camera. [Episode website.] “Pretty much everything gets an analogy, apt or ridiculous,” says Genzlinger. “Stem-cell treatments would be like putting fettuccine in a blender and making a cheesecake out of it. Yes, [host] Dr. [Neil deGrasse] Tyson puts some fettuccine in a blender.” The info is all “served up brightly, and at a level that a child can grasp but that doesn’t bore an adult.”
Quick Takes
Newscasts provided for commercial station
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Starting today, Santa Fe Public Radio (KSFR) will provide five newscasts every weekday to commercial KVSF-FM, owned by Hutton Broadcasting LLC, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported. The Triple A station (“Project 101.5”) will air the newscasts at about 7:25, 8:25, 9 and 9:25 a.m. and 5:20 p.m. In the regional AP competition, KSFR has been named New Mexico News Station of the Year for four years in a row and has received more than 50 awards in five years.
Programs/Content
Here I am, your special PBS Kids Island (come to me, come to me)
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PBS Kids Island, an online amusement park located on the Raising Readers website (www.readytolearnreading.org), offers learning games created by producers of Super Why!, Word World, Sesame Street and Between the Lions, most collected from their separate sites, grouped by reading skill and divided into three levels of difficulty. On the cartoony Island, kids can choose games to play from a carousel ride and win tickets they can use to buy things from the prize booth — video downloads, printable games and coloring sheets. In their own tree house, a kid can stash or play with their prizes and display their awards. Project advisors who work with low-scoring schools eligible for federal Title 1 aid encouraged PBS to give kids the opportunity to choose activities on their own on the Island, because low-income kids don’t get to make many choices or take risks or try experiments, says Sharon Philippart, project director for Raising Readers at PBS. Parents, teachers or caregivers sign up their kids and can monitor their progress through the levels.
Quick Takes
Jarvis: Forget the curmudgeons
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Jeff Jarvis, blogger/professor/new media thinker, reprises his dismissive attitude toward old media “curmudgeons,” based on an experience he had at last weekend’s Public Radio News Directors Incorporated conference in Washington. Jarvis and Terry Heaton gave a mostly well-received presentation on blogging and journalism at the meeting, but there was at least one loudly contentious pubradio newsman in attendance. Jarvis says: “I have decided I’m not going to waste my time anymore with lazy, rude, self-important, self-delusional, intellectually dishonest, closed-minded curmudgeons who bark against the full moon of change.”
Quick Takes
Grief and anger over Bryant Park cancellation
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Fans of Bryant Park Project, NPR’s web-based morning news service for younger audiences, are describing the show’s pending cancellation as evidence that public radio is: (a. only interested in serving wealthy old fuddy-duddies; and, (b. doesn’t have the stomach for experiments with new media. “NPR isn’t giving up on the Web. It’s just giving up on its younger audience members, the ones who don’t have Scrooge McDuck-size moneybins they can dig into come pledge time,” writes Daniel Holloway, a film critic who appears regularly on BPP, on Huffington Post.
Quick Takes
KPCW’s Feulner signs off, possibly forever
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Blair Feulner, founder and longtime manager of KPCW in Park City, Utah, may have talked himself out of a job. During a July 15 on-air sign-off, Feulner told listeners he was taking a six-month sabbatical. The announcement took trustees of KPCW licensee Community Wireless of Park City by surprise, according to a report posted on KPCW’s website. Feulner and his board have been in a stand-off over his demands for a renewed employment contract since March, and the Park Record reports that the board appears to be split over what to do about him. Joe Wrona, the Community Wireless executive committee member who handled negotiations over the pending sale of Salt Lake sister station KCPW, told the press that Feulner’s leave of absence is unauthorized and the board is “struggling to try to make decisions that are in the best interest of Community Wireless, and that do not constitute a betrayal of the trust that Community Wireless listeners, donors and employees have placed in the board of trustees.”
Quick Takes
‘Wrench’ a jalopy, viewers say
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There’s been no shortage of dismissive reviews of Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns, the animated Car Talk spin-off PBS launched July 9. Now viewers weigh in, and it’s not much prettier. “Click and Clack? Surely, you jest!” Mary Sykes of Raleigh, N.C., wrote to PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler.