Current (https://current.org/2009/01/page/4/)
Jim Lehrer will conduct an extended interview with outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney about his past eight years in office tomorrow night on The NewsHour. Anne Bell, public relations manager, says producers expect the interview to be at least 20 minutes long.Â
A fire destroyed the programming, business and development offices of WNIT-TV on Sunday, but the broadcast facilities in a separate building were not affected. No staff members were injured and the station remains on the air. See a photo and updates on the station’s website. The cause of the fire remains undetermined.Â
Worldfocus, the international news program from WNET.ORG (WNET/WLIW), is launching Worldfocus Radio on the online radio network BlogTalkRadio. The 30 minute interview and call-in show, hosted by anchor Martin Savidge, will air Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. (ET). Listeners can call in or join a live online chat. Podcasts will also be available via iTunes. Tonight’s show will bring in experts to talk about the history of the conflict in Gaza.
“Waltz with Bashir,” an ITVS International animated doc, won the Best Foreign Language Film at the 66th annual Golden Globe Awards Jan. 11. It’s the latest in a long line of honors for the Israeli film, including recent prizes from the Critic’s Choice Awards, National Society of Film Critics and, on Jan. 12, the LA Film Critics Association.
Gene Parrish, a longtime pubradio broadcaster known for his programs on classical, jazz, opera and choral music, died Jan. 2 [2009] of lung cancer in Harbor City, Calif. . . .
President-elect Barack Obama has selected his former Harvard classmate Julius Genachowski to head up the FCC. Genachowski, 46, was chief counsel for former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. He also is credited for directing Obama’s impressive online campaign strategy.
Media analyst and blogger David Weir, a former v.p. at KQED, mulls “What’s at Stake With Public Broadcasting.” He says although he usually writes on private-sector media, “Every time I mention NPR … my in-box explodes with reader reaction.”
American Public Media has been granted $2.95 million for three years by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for the network’s citizen journalist project. “Public Insight Journalism” encourages the MPR audience to become involved in the news-gathering process. More than 70,000 radio listeners and website users are signed up to participate.
NPR News won three of the 13 duPont-Columbia awards announced today by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Silver Batons recognizing excellence in broadcast journalism went to: All Things Considered for its coverage of the earthquake that devastated China’s Sichuan Province in May 2008; “Sexual Abuse of Native American Women” by Laura Sullivan, a two-part report that aired on ATC in July 2007; and “Giant Pool of Money,” a one-hour documentary on the subprime mortgage crisis that This American Life produced in collaboration with NPR News. PBS’s duPont winners are “Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story”, a documentary presented on Independent Lens, and “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?,” a four-hour series on racial and economic disparities in health care by California Newsreel and Vital Pictures. In addition, Oregon Public Broadcasting won for The Silent Invasion, a local documentary on environmental threats posed by invasive plants and insects.
With the all-digital future arriving, if haltingly, and a bigger share of viewers likely to come through DTV multicast channels, public TV stations are reconsidering how to use their bitstream, making over their channels, and in some cases adding new services to woo audiences. The wee audience, for one. Little kids and their parents are a vital audience and constituency for public TV, and mockups of the stations’ future DTV menu often featured a dedicated channel for them. To supply it, stations had access to a 24-hour PBS Kids feed, packaged by PBS. That changed in 2005 when the network acceded to the desires of its two biggest producers for children and joined a partnership to package Sprout, a cable channel for preschoolers.
ITVS has launched the blog “Beyond the Box,” an extension of its monthly newsletter by the same name. The blog/website will serve as the central location for ITVS news and updates about funding, docs and events and “create more and better opportunities to showcase ITVS-funded projects with filmmaker profiles, production and broadcast updates, video clips and more,” according to an introductory post by Sally Jo Fifer, president.Â
Analysis of the DTV transition problems continues. Here’s a good piece from Congressional Quarterly reminding readers that the transition has been contemplated in Washington for more than two decades and, as one telecom expert says, “… The single biggest problem with the digital TV transition: It’s nobody’s baby.”
Sesame Workshop is releasing an environmental-theme DVD, “Sesame Street: Being Green,” on Earth Day, April 7. On that link, don’t miss the photos of actor Paul Rudd enjoying himself in a rotund Earth costume.
On January 20, inauguration day, Frontline will broadcast Dreams of Obama, a new personal and political biography from producer Michael Kirk that begins with Obama’s days at Harvard Law School and traces his path to the office of President. The full program is already available online on Frontline’s website.Â
What happens when the copyright culture, based on restriction upon restriction, meets the Wild West of today’s media market and an oncoming generation with little patience with those old ways?
Anyone who watched, say, the ABC World News in late November and early December would have known that a tiny band of terrorists had come ashore in Mumbai, killing more than 100 Indians and foreign visitors, and that most observers speculated the attack probably came from Pakistan. They would have known that Thai protesters had occupied the Bangkok airport, stranding hundreds of tourists. And they would have known that economic chaos and cholera were descending on Zimbabwe, which President Robert Mugabe held in what was almost literally a death grip. But they would not have known that the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo had been handed over from United Nations forces to those of the European Union. They would not have heard that drugs manufactured around the world were being exported to the U.S. with few, if any, safeguards against accidental or deliberate adulteration.
Since 2005, a whole slew of us — consumers, manufacturers, public officials — have been learning about or working toward digital TV transition on Feb. 17. So why, with just a month to go, might that date be pushed back? John Eggerton of Broadcasting & Cable mulls how Feb. 17 went “from set in stone to writ in sand” in a mere week.
A panel of experts in Britain recommended last month that the country begin switching off the analog radio airwaves around 2017 and transition to digital radio. Digital radio is slowly gaining interest internationally: Australia will roll out in May, and Germany will announce plans soon.
For those of you keeping score at home, please mark one more for, one more against moving the DTV transition date. Add the FCC chair to the “nay” list, those opposing the delay. FCC head Kevin Martin says pushing back the long-planned Feb. 17 date would be “confusing” for consumers. Meanwhile, on the “yay” side, FCC commish Jonathan Adelstein says it’s “just as well” the date changes because consumers can’t get through to the help lines anyway.
Add police and fire chiefs to the growing list of folks weighing in on a possible delay of the DTV transition date, due to problems with the converter coupon program. The Association of Public Safety Communications Officials says if there is indeed a delay, it needs to exclude channels on spectrum to be used for public safety communications.