Quick Takes

Intel chips in some cash for NewsHour

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PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer has signed a major new corporate underwriter, Intel Corp., through the rest of 2009. As part of the deal, NewsHour staffers will help plan and moderate several small meetings on national issues and a larger conference on innovation this year, says spokesman Rob Flynn. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the program will thank Intel with a 30-second underwriting credit and a short mention at the other end of the show, plus short mentions on Tuesday and Thursday. The NewsHour also has underwriting from Chevron Corp., Grant Thornton LLC accounting and consulting, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and more than a dozen other foundations.

Quick Takes

No snacks for thrifty PBS board

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How bad is the economy? So bad that treats for PBS board members are disappearing. At the meeting today in Arlington, Va., Chairman John Porter quipped to the board, “Symbolic of the careful work being done on the budget, there will be no snacks at break time. We’re doing every single thing to make certain the budget is as tight as possible.” Board members didn’t go hungry, as lunch was indeed provided.

Quick Takes

HuffPo launches investigative unit with $1.75 mil

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The Huffington Post has unveiled details of its expansion into investigative journalism. With an initial budget of $1.75 million, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund will hire 10 staff journalists who will coordinate stories with freelancers. Work produced by the investigative team will be available for any publication or website to use at the same time it is posted on the Huffington Post, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief. The Atlantic Philanthropies and other unnamed donors backed the venture. In its report on the HuffPo’s new unit, Poynter’s E-media Tidbits points to other nonprofit and philantrophic efforts to produce investigative reporting, including OhmyNews.com.

Quick Takes

Channeling ire over NPR fundraising

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That brouhaha over a proposed NPR pledge drive? It’s based on outdated assumptions about the potential for pubradio growth, according to marketing consultant John Sutton. “The industry is losing money each year by not allowing NPR to raise money directly from listeners,” he writes emphatically on RadioSutton. “We know from past research that listeners to two stations will support both stations and give average or above average gifts. They have room in their budgets to do both.

Quick Takes

Author looks to a more dynamic public media

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Jessica Clark, author of a a recent white paper on public media, shares thoughts on the future of public broadcasting in an interview at MediaShift Idea Lab. One point: “‘Legacy media’ is top-down, one-to-many media: print, television, radio, even static web pages. We’re advancing a more dynamic, relevant definition of public media — one that’s participatory, focused on informing and mobilizing publics around shared issues.”

Quick Takes

Some stations lagging in PBS dues

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PBS station paid dues are running about 4 percent behind last year at this date, network CFO Barbara Landes told the board at today’s meeting in Arlington, Va. As of Friday, figures were down 4 percent compared with this same time last year. That’s actually an improvement since January, when dues were down 8 percent compared with January 2008. Landes said PBS had been “tracking closely” the payment of dues, for both timeliness and amount. “Any threat to the flow of dollars has significant implications for PBS as well as producers,” she added.

Quick Takes

Nonprofits in dire straits, report says

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The nation’s nonprofits are in serious trouble, according to a report released today by the Nonprofit Finance Fund. It’s a survey of 986 nonprofits in markets across the country. Among the troubling findings: 31 percent don’t have enough cash to cover more that one month of expenses; 12 percent expect to operate above break-even this year; 16 percent think they’ll be able to cover operating expenses in 2009 and ’10; 52 percent expect the recession to have a long-term or permanent negative financial effect on their organization. This link offers both a summary and another link to the full PDF report.

Quick Takes

Employees grumbling over KQED head’s salary

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The nearly $400,000 salary of KQED president Jeff Clarke is creating discontent within the station, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. That’s a pretty good chunk of change considering the station has laid off 30 employees, cut 13 percent of its budget and froze executive salaries until 2010. Senior managers also voluntarily reduced their salaries 13 percent. “In this economy, [Clarke’s salary] just doesn’t make sense,” Kevin Wilson, president of Local 51 of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, to which most of the station’s employees belong.

Quick Takes

NPR will join PBS managers at meeting

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Reps from NPR will be attending this year’s PBS General Managers’ Planning Meeting May 11 in Baltimore. The meeting coincides with the annual PBS Showcase. At today’s PBS Board Meeting, member Jennifer Lawson said she’s pleased with the growing collaboration between the two pubcasting entitites. “I love the fact that we’re including NPR as part of these meetings,” said Lawson, g.m. of WHUT in Washington, D.C. “It’s wonderful that there are more and more forums and circumstances that bring all of us together as public media.” The board meeting runs through tomorrow at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va.

Development

On the Media apologizes for Infinite Mind lapse

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On the Media, the NPR-distributed weekly press review, released a correction last week apologizing for what it called a “lapse in journalistic judgment” in preparing its November 2008 report about the public radio show The Infinite Mind.

Quick Takes

Schiller favors planned NPR.org fundraiser over national on-air appeals

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Top NPR personalities have proposed that the network mount a national pledge drive to help close its widening budget gap. There is a historic precedent for the idea, Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg tells the Washington Post: NPR appealed for direct listener support in 1983, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. “Think how much we’d be able to do now if were were doing something similar,” Stamberg says. But during an interview with Current last week, NPR President Vivian Schiller downplayed the proposal for an NPR pledge drive. “They are not our listeners,” she said, nodding to the on-air fundraising prerogatives of member stations.

Programs/Content

That subscription fuss? An early spark in an evolving relationship

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“News this good isn’t free.” I find myself delivering some variation on that remark during every single public radio pledge break on WNPR this spring. We’ve been saying this in Connecticut for years: “Despite the fact that you don’t have to pay for public radio news, you can’t expect to just keep getting stories about the Mexican drug war from John Burnett … or Anne Garrels reporting from an unstable Pakistan for nothing.” Right? We tell our listeners all the time that their contributions make our high-quality journalism possible, and without their help, it could all go away. So it’s understandable that newspaper people might have been a little piqued by the memo leaked to Jim Romenesko’s Poynter.org blog this month.

Programs/Content

News cycle attracts record listening

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NPR programming on public radio stations topped its previous audience record by reaching 27.5 million listeners a week during Arbitron’s fall 2008 survey period. The weekly cume audience for all NPR programs and newscasts, Sept. 10 to Dec. 10, beat the previous high of 26.4 million set last spring. It is one of several ratings gains announced March 23 by NPR Research:

Measuring audiences for non-NPR as well as NPR programs on those member stations, the weekly cume hit another all-time high, 32.7 million, 6 percent larger than fall 2007.

Quick Takes

Royal succession: Age of Kings begat Masterpiece

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The first big British TV import and a model for PBS’s Masterpiece, the BBC’s 15-part An Age of Kings, is available now for the first time in 40 years, J. Hoberman writes in the Sunday New York Times. (The set on DVD sells for $32.99 at Tower.com.) Compiled from Shakespeare’s history plays — from Richard II, through the Henrys to Richard III — the series was broadcast live in Britain in 1959, with Judy Dench when she was younger but lovely nevertheless, and imported on kinescopes. Two non-network commercial stations aired it first and then National Educational Television. David Stewart looked back at the series in Current.

Quick Takes

Boucher details work ahead

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Rick Boucher (D-Va.), new head of the House Communications, Technology & Internet Subcommittee, recently laid out his priorities for Broadcasting & Cable magazine. They include reauthorization of the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act, which allows distant viewers, mainly rural, to receive network signals even if they cannot get a local affiliate delivered over the air. Boucher also wants to tackle Universal Service reform, industry funding of telecommunications service to hard-to-reach areas.

Quick Takes

Texas college ponders future of station

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Odessa (Texas) College trustees are mulling radio partnerships as an attempt to keep its public broadcasting station on the air, according to The Odessa American. The college can’t afford to keep paying around $100,000 a year to cover the station’s budget shortfall. Texas Public Radio in San Antonio is interested in either helping manage the station or taking it over, but trustees would like to see a local coalition running the station.