Quick Takes

Pew surveys find increased perceived believability rankings for NPR News

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NPR is one of few national broadcast news organizations to see its “believability” ratings increase last year in survey research by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, according to the State of the News Media, the annual report from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Twenty-seven percent of survey respondents said they believed “all or most” of what NPR reported, an increase of 5 percent from surveys conducted in 2006. The percentage rating PBS’s NewsHour as highly believable remained at 23 percent, unchanged since 2004. Political ideology continues to influence the credibility ratings that respondents gave to specific news organizations, and NPR saw a bigger increase in its credibility ratings by Democrats (37 percent of whom described NPR as highly credible) than Republicans (18 percent). [Scroll down on this page to charts on Broadcast & Cable credibility.]

Quick Takes

NOW on PBS $1 million in red, announces eight-week furloughs

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NOW on PBS is $1 million short for 2009 and has announced all employees will take unpaid, eight-week furloughs this year. John Siceloff, executive producer, said in a memo to staff that no one will be laid off. He cited “severe cuts” in grants to the show by philanthropies struggling with “plummeting endowments.” Ironically, the announcement comes just as the show was awarded the prestigious Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, given by the Annenberg Center at USC.

Quick Takes

Mountain Lake PBS faces 28 percent state funding plunge

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Mountain Lake PBS, located at 1 Sesame Street in Plattsburgh, N.Y., is facing a 28 percent loss in its budget if the state’s 2009 budget proposed by Gov. David Paterson is approved. President and CEO Alice Recore told the local Press Republican that 14 members of the State Assembly have sent a letter on behalf of New York pubTV stations to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, asking that $5.7 million in funding be restored, which would bring the reduction down to about 20 percent — in line with other education funding cuts.

Quick Takes

BBC World Service producing daily segment for WBUR’s Here & Now

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Producers of Here and Now have forged a new content partnership with the BBC World Service. Beginning today, the BBC will contribute a daily segment to the midday news magazine, which is produced at WBUR in Boston. Public Radio International, which distributes both Here and Now and BBC World Service programming to U.S. public radio stations, announces the new partnership here. “PRI has consistently found that strategic partnerships enhance the quality of content, which helps listeners better understand our interconnected world,” said Michael Arnold, PRI content director.

Quick Takes

John Williams scores new theme for “Great Performances”

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Five-time Academy Award winner John Williams’s new theme music for Great Performances will debut March 25 on its production of King Lear. “After 36 years of showcasing the best in the performing arts for American audiences, we wanted to reinvigorate our Great Performances broadcast identity for today’s digital HD generation,” executive director David Horn said in a statement.

Quick Takes

Pew journalism project issues sixth annual report on State of the News Media

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“The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem,” according to The State of the News Media, an annual report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “It is a revenue problem—the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.” The Columbia Journalism Review has a quiz to test your recall on changes since 2004, when the project issued its first report.

Quick Takes

Media creators ponder their “Ethics, Money and Mission”

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This year’s Making Your Media Matter conference, “Ethics, Money and Mission,” featured an appearance by George Stoney, an early advocate of public television and now an NYU professor and filmmaker. Nonprofit heads, funders and students from as far away as Nigeria and Kenya participated in the event last month; videos and links to various reports are now on the website of the Center for Social Media of American University, which organized the event.

CPB

CPB inquiry, deficits: more tribulations for KMBH

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A public broadcaster removed unexpectedly from the board of Catholic Church–controlled KMBH public radio and TV in Harlingen, Texas, is heading an effort to create an independent public radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. Betsy Price of Brownsville and 30 other volunteers call themselves Voices from the Valley. Their goal is to provide more local and NPR programming than KMBH currently carries. The group’s forthcoming announcement of its board members may coincide with more news about KMBH, the region’s only pubcaster: CPB’s inspector general is completing a review of its compliance with grant rules and examining station financial documents related to CPB. The inspectors are likely to find an operation that, like a significant minority of public stations, is in “fragile” fiscal condition.

Quick Takes

Arkansas stations 50 percent off fundraising projections

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Fundraising is 50 percent off projections at the Arkansas Educational Television Network Foundation. Executive Director Allen Weatherly cited the recession and reception issues during its DTV transition. Those problems affected KETS in central Arkansas and KETZ in southeast Arkansas. The foundation is the broadcaster’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit fundraiser.

Quick Takes

FCC issues rules for final stage of DTV transition

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The FCC today announced station requirements for the last stage of the digital transition. Rules for stations that have not yet transitioned include notifying viewers of potential signal loss, providing information about antennas in viewer education campaigns, and reminding viewers of the importance of rescanning digital TVs and converters. The deadline is now set for June 12.

Quick Takes

Spy story from ‘This American Life’ slated for movie screens

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Variety reports that This American Life and Endgame Entertainment will produce a feature film based on the Arthur Phillips short story “Wenceslas Square.” The spy love story was featured on This American Life last summer. TAL’s Ira Glass and Alissa Ship, who handles film rights and development, will produce the film with James D. Stern of Endgame Entertainment.

Quick Takes

Sesame severs 20 percent of staff; takes heat on “Good Night Show”

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Sesame Workshop announced today that it is cutting 67 of 355 positions, citing “the unprecedented challenges of today’s economic environment.” Also today, Harvard University psychologist Susan Linn, who heads up Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, asked the PBS KIDS Sprout network to dump The Good Night Show, an evening program about a puppet getting ready for bed. “It is disturbing that that even as late as 9:00 p.m. – after three hours of television viewing – Sprout would encourage its preschool audience to ask parents for even more screen time,” Linn said in a statement on the group’s website. Sandy Wax, head of Sprout, told The Associated Press that says she lives in the “real world” where families watch television, and is trying to do her best to put on programs that help parents.

Quick Takes

G4 requests OMB meeting for $307 million FY2010 pubcasting supplemental

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CPB, APTS, PBS and NPR on March 6 jointly submitted a letter to Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, requesting a meeting “in the next two weeks” regarding a $307 million supplemental funding request for fiscal 2010. The leaked document appears on the Talking Points Memo website. “Some local stations may disappear entirely, undermining the universal service mandate of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967,” the letter states. It adds that the “longstanding mechanism” of two-year advance funding for CPB, “while vital to public broadcasting, is ill-suited to the current economic crisis.” Supplemental funding for FY2012 would be “simply too late” for stations, so a line item for FY2010 is “indispensable” for the system.

Quick Takes

Saberi’s parents report recent phone call

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The parents of Roxana Saberi, the freelance journalist detained without charge by the Iranian government, received a phone call from their daughter on Monday, according to this local news account. “She just said she loves us,” Reza Saberi, Roxana’s father, told the Fargo InForum. “But she said, psychologically, it’s really hard to be in prison. It sounds like she’s under great pressure.” Brian Duffy, managing editor of NPR News, said that news organizations have a responsibility to speak up on her behalf. Saberi “provided valuable and accurate reports from a very important and interesting part of the world,” Duffy said.

Quick Takes

MPR request for state aid tops $1.3 million

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Advocates for Minnesota Public Radio appeared at the state Capitol in St. Paul yesterday to make the case for funding requests pending before the state legislature. MPR seeks $850,000 to build three new stations and $525,000 to convert some existing stations for HD Radio broadcasts, according to KARE-TV in Twin Cities. In addition, the state network is asking lawmakers for a portion of the revenues generated by the so-called Legacy Amendment, which Minnesota voters endorsed last fall. The Legacy Amendment primarily provides taxpayer funds for clean water protection and natural resource conservation, but it includes a dedicated pool of money for arts, arts education and preservation of Minnesota’s cultural heritage and history.

Quick Takes

Cookie Monster hits CapHill

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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack yesterday told The Washington Times that Cookie Monster was always his favorite Sesame Street character, and that beets were his least favorite vegetable. The revelations followed a press conference during which Cookie Monster told the Capitol Hill crowd he was there “to get more cookies. Do you think I came to town for a Cabinet position?” The fun was all part of an event highlighting Healthy Habits for Life: Get Healthy Now, the new collaboration between Sesame Workshop and the National Women, Infants and Children Association (WIC), a nonprofit that helps low-income pregnant and nursing women with nutrition information and food assistance.

Quick Takes

Webinars tomorrow and March 25 on innovation grants

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CPB’s Public Media Innovation (PMI) Fund is offering risk-capital grants of $5,000 to $50,000 for innovative projects that foster the understanding of economics. Total for this round: $200,000. Deadline: midnight, April 17, no exceptions. An hourlong webinar will be held twice, at noon March 11 and March 25, for grantseekers who want to hear about the project. Sign up for the webinar online.

Quick Takes

News organizations issue joint appeal on behalf of journalist detained in Iran

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Top execs from seven news organizations, including NPR and PBS, are appealing to international human rights groups to verify the health and well-being of Roxana Saberi, a freelance journalist who is being held in Evin Prison in Tehran. Saberi, who has reported for NPR, ABC News and the BBC among others, was detained by Iranian authorities on Jan. 31 and has been denied contact with her family since Feb. 10. “We now ask that the specific charges against Roxana Saberi be made public,” the execs said in a jointly issued statement.