Quick Takes

Three stations win My Source awards

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CPB announced yesterday its My Source Radio Testimonial Awards, given to three public radio stations and the listeners who recorded promotional spots about the roles the broadcasters play in their lives. The winners were Vermont Public Radio, KWMU in St. Louis, and WBGO in Newark, N.J. “Through the My Source testimonials we are hearing directly from the people who use and value public radio and the important role it plays in their lives,” said CPB President Pat Harrison at the Public Radio Marketing and Development Conference in Orlando.

Quick Takes

WGBH to turn off mega-billboard

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Boston’s WGBH will temporarily shut down its huge electronic screen, visible to drivers on the Massachusetts Turnpike, reports the Boston Globe. LEDs in the screen are turning off due to overheating, and the station plans to fix the problem. (Story in Current about the screen and WGBH’s new headquarters.)

Quick Takes

Multiplatform town hall addresses St. Louis foreclosure crisis

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Rob Paterson reports on the first town hall meeting held as part of the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project at St. Louis’s KETC-TV. “St. Louisans could see the enormous amount of help that was there for them,” he writes on the FASTforward blog. “They could hear stories of all the things that could happen for bad or good.

Quick Takes

Feulner abruptly signs off in Utah

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The former president of KPCW in Park City, Utah, unexpectedly left his morning show Tuesday to go on sabbatical, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Blair Feulner, who started the station in 1980, cited a dispute with the station’s board. “The board of trustees will have to meet to determine whether we want to revisit Blair Feulner’s employment status,” said a board member. (Via the PRPD blog.)

Quick Takes

Sesame Workshop prepares to unveil new website

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An upcoming revamp of Sesame Street’s website will feature a live-action Muppet guide and an option that can help prevent children from straying to other websites, reports the New York Times. Sesame Workshop is taking the site seriously. “We view this as really the future of the workshop, as becoming the primary channel of distribution down the line,” Gary E. Knell, president, told the paper.

Quick Takes

SnagFilms: streaming docs from PBS, others

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Todd Mundt takes note of SnagFilms, a site for viewing documentaries online that has PBS as a partner. “PBS has made a few moves like this — each of them smart,” he writes. “I’m watching less over-the-air public TV than ever, despite having four multicast channels on my TV, but I’m watching more PBS than in years, on other platforms that I use a lot — from Netflix (”Napoleon” was this week’s home viewing) to iTunesU and now SnagFilms.”

Quick Takes

Cartoon Tom and Ray are cute, but…

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Wednesday’s PBS debut of Tom and Ray Magliozzi in animated form gets a mixed review from the New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante, who calls As the Wrench Turns “indisputably adorable” but says, “A television program with scripts and scene boards and illustrators doesn’t merely impede their spontaneity. It also carries the vague hint of ambition, and the Magliozzi brothers have built a career relishing in the joys, essentially, of just sitting around.” (Earlier Current article.)

Quick Takes

Walker saluted with Murrow Award

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Laura Walker, president of WNYC, is this year’s recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award, CPB announced today. “Her creativity and willingness to take risks have made WNYC one of the foremost radio stations in the country,” said CPB President Patricia Harrison. In her 11 years there, the station bought its freedom from the city government, launched Studio 360, On the Media, Radio Lab and The Takeaway, among other national programs, and last month moved into a new home [New York Times story] outside of the city’s municipal building, where it operated 84 years. [Current feature on Walker, 2004.]

Programs/Content

What can come of NPR’s release of an API giving access to its story database?

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Posted in Current’s former online forum, DirectCurrent, by moderator Steve Behrens on July 17, 2008 at 12:28pm
Last year, public radio’s Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group predicted (see page 10) that freeing content could result in mashups such as “a Hidden Kitchens regional food content site that mashes up DDC audio and video content with Google Maps and Flickr photos about local restaurants and food events; a Science Talk site that draws on DDC science content combined with selected blog posts on related topics.” And there probably will be much more significant unforeseen innovations, as the DDC authors would probably agree. But to media traditionalists, freeing content also rips it from a relatively concrete “place” (radio station or website) that carries underwriting and is clearly associated with an institution that seeks to generate good will and membership, subscription, foundation or taxpayer support. Thus the freed content gets much-improved distribution, and probably added value from the mashing-up. But the institutions best positioned to reap revenue are companies like Google that put relatively little money into generating content themselves.

Quick Takes

Roll your own widgets and play NPR content

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NPR today invited Internet techies to take custom feeds of NPR text and audio– 250,000 stories going back to 1995 — and mash their own combinations for personal noncommercial or nonprofit use. It’s “the beginning of what could be some really cool stuff,” predicted Todd Mundt of Louisville Public Media, who said the idea was endorsed by public radio’s Digital Distribution Consortium. The network released an application programming interface (API) that tells techies how to play selected material in widgets and other Internet-fed outlets. A query generator spits out a section of code for selecting material by topic, program and date from NPR’s database. Available content so far doesn’t include Fresh Air, Diane Rehm This American Life and other station-produced shows.

Quick Takes

Prodigies coming through

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From the Top has announced dates and sites for its radio and TV tapings. Radio tapings are set between Aug. 10 (Aspen, Colo.) and next May 22 (Omaha, Neb.). Prodigies will hit the road for San Antonio and Lubbock, Texas; Northfield, Mass.; Cincinnati; Mesa, Ariz.; Indianapolis; Mobile, Ala.; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plus two shows at home in Boston. The TV version will be taped in New York’s Carnegie Hall May 27-31 and June 27-July 1.

Quick Takes

A fair start for a not-so-bad program

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Readers of Edutopia magazine learned that Garrison Keillor was inspired to invent his daily short, The Writer’s Almanac, by a good experience at the Minnesota State Fair in 1993. Instead of holding a trivia contest, as planned, Keillor walked into the crowd and asked fairgoers to recite favorite poems. Which they did. The article also reports that Norwegian radio NRK has picked up the show. [NRK announcement translated from Norwegian by Google.]

Quick Takes

Pubradio speech vehicle runs out of gas

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American Public Media will discontinue Word for Word, its weekly broadcast of notable speeches, effective Aug. 8, the distributor announced today. “Despite our best efforts, the program has not gained significant station carriage,” said Jon McTaggart, chief operating officer. [Program website.] Former APM exec Bill Buzenberg launched the series in June 2006 before moving to the investigative journalism organization Center for Public Integrity. The program’s host has been Melinda Penkava.

Quick Takes

Billy Crystal to host PBS comedy series

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Billy Crystal will be the host of WNET’s upcoming comedy series Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, which documents more than a century of American comedy and is due to air on PBS in January. Crystal will introduce each of the six, one-hour episodes and contribute some of his own schtick to the special. Michael Kantor (Ghost Light Films), who produced the Emmy Award-winning Broadway: The American Musical, is creator and producer.

Quick Takes

Prediction: Bryant Park Project gets 2 weeks’ notice

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NPR was expected to tell the staff of its Bryant Park Project this week that the morning show will be discontinued July 25, the New York Times reported yesterday. After 10 months’ production, the show aimed at a younger-than-Morning Edition audience was getting an online audience of a million unique users a month this spring but aired on only five analog public radio stations and 19 digital multicast channels, the newspaper said.

Quick Takes

New blog lifts the hood on NPR.org

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NPR launched Inside NPR.org, a blog, similar to advance blogs used to shape new programs such as The Bryant Park Project, that will serve as a sounding board for the network’s digital plans. Online staff will discuss services and products under development and seek feedback from users. “We hope that talking about these activities more openly will help create a virtuous cycle of product development and feedback,” wrote post authors Andy Carvin and Daniel Jacobson.

Quick Takes

Getler: WW cover-up is worse than the crime

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Washington Week made an apparently innocent slip-of-the-tongue much worse by erasing it from the program’s transcript, writes PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler. On June 20, moderator Gwen Ifill clearly didn’t mean to imply that Al Gore was gay when she said he “came out of the closet” to endorse presidential hopeful Barack Obama. But after a blogger named Tony Peyser asked about the slip-up, a producer changed the transcript. (The original transcript is available here.) Peyser, naturally, noted this in his blog, which points up the stupidity of the decision to change it in the first place, Getler writes. “Now, altering a transcript to remove a controversial or embarrassing statement is a very bad and fundamental journalistic sin, and also professionally stupid because someone will always catch it,” he said.

Quick Takes

University of Georgia buys TV station near Athens as journalism lab

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At a time when educational institutions are more likely to be spinning off broadcast stations, the University of Georgia has bought a CBS-TV affiliate in Toccoa, 50 miles north of the Athens campus. The school agreed to pay owner Media General about $1.6 million plus DTV costs f0r WNEG-TV, says the asset purchase agreement and will use it as a teaching lab for communications students producing local programs for the northeast corner of the state, according to Dean E. Culpepper Clark’s remarks on the station’s own newscast and in the Independent-Mail of Anderson, S.C. The station will remain a commercial broadcaster, but Clark indicated it may drop its CBS affiliation. Clark came to the university two years ago from the University of Alabama, where he was involved in acquiring Tuscaloosa station (now WVUA) for teaching purposes.

Quick Takes

Two local shows cancelled as Jones departs WBEZ

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Chicago Public Radio programming v.p. Ron Jones exits for “a new adventure” as the station cuts two local programs, Hello Beautiful and Right Now, an afternoon talk show. The cuts, announced this week as the station’s board met to approve the budget for the new fiscal year, prompts Chicago Reader venting about Vocalo, the experimental service for younger, web-savvy media consumers and creators. Robert Feder of the Sun-Times summarizes staff reassignments (scroll down).