System/Policy

PBS grandfathers sectarian shows

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In a compromise with the few pubTV stations that carry religious programming, the PBS Board voted June 16 to allow them to keep their PBS membership without dropping the shows. Member stations also can carry worship services and other clearly sectarian programs on their DTV multicast channels or other distribution platforms so long as they don’t carry the PBS name or PBS-distributed programming. The ruling pleased the handful of pubTV stations that have longtime commitments to religious broadcasts. The PBS Board, aiming to maintain a clear separation between public TV’s identity and religious groups, did draw a line on sectarian programs, but the new member eligibility rule is much less restrictive than what the network’s Station Services Committee proposed in February. Stations that want to keep their membership in PBS won’t be able to add any new sectarian programs on their main channels or wherever PBS programs or the PBS name are used.

Quick Takes

KMBH warns of “scam or fantasy” as its critics seek support for a new station

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KMBH-FM, in Harlingen, Texas, is warning listeners that anyone else soliciting donations for public radio in the Rio Grande Valley “may be a scam or a fantasy.” The Brownsville Herald reports that the on-air spots trouble organizers of Voices of the Valley, which is asking for pledges of support to establish an independent public radio service for the region. KMBH, which also operates a public TV station, is controlled by the Catholic Church. Msgr. Pedro Briseño, the president of KMBH and pastor of Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Harlingen, denies that the spots are intended to discredit Voices from the Valley.

Programs/Content

Julia: Borrowing Hollywood buzz for the real thing on PBS

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The late French Chef Julia Child is getting a burst of extra attention with the Aug. 7 release of Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep as pubTV’s breakthrough, endearingly unpretentioius cooking teacher. So both PBS and WGBH, Child’s earliest pubTV home, are capitalizing on the movie debut with an online compilation, an in-person panel recorded for the Web, and a retrospective August pledge special. PBS’s video portal just launched an online anthology of five French Chef episodes, eight of Baking with Julia and 13 of Julia Child Cooking with Master Chefs. A related “Bon Appetit Collection” page holds 13 Made in Spain programs and 23 segments from Everyday Food, including recipes and cooking tips.

Quick Takes

House votes to restore PTFP funding

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The House voted 259 to 157 last night to pass the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill. It contains the $20 million for the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program that had been in doubt. “This is a major victory for the public television community and represents a significant step toward the restoration of funding for local stations in this difficult economic environment,” the Association for Public Television Stations said in a statement. PTPF funding has dwindled from $43.2 million in fiscal 2003 to $18.8 million in fiscal 2008. During its February Capitol Hill Day, APTS lobbied hard for PTFP money, saying the decline created a “critical backlog” of applications outnumbering grants 2 to 1.

Quick Takes

WFSU and WMFE end reading service for the sight-impaired

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More victims of budget cuts: Reading programs in Florida for listeners who are blind or sight- impaired. WFSU in Tallahassee says it’s turning off its service July 1, and WMFE will discontinue local reading of the news while airing the national In-Touch network. The two stations and seven others in Florida are losing annual state grants; WMFE’s was $38,800 a year. There’s no more money to pay for equipment and volunteer coordination, WMFE President Jose Fajardo told the Orlando Sentinel. Established in 1993, the service’s volunteers read local newspapers and magazines from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays.

Quick Takes

New York pubcaster inspires documentary

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John Robinson is director of corporate support at WMHT in Troy, N.Y., where he supervises an underwriting staff of three. He’s also the subject of the doc Get Off Your Knees: The John Robinson Story, which has its broadcast premiere tonight on the station. Robinson is a congenital amputee, born with stunted arms and legs. In addition to his pubcasting duties, he gives motivational speeches to school and community groups. “I’m never going to thumb wrestle with you, I’m never going to be the center of the basketball team,” Robinson tells students in the film.

Quick Takes

Colorado Public Radio reduces then freezes wages

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A 3 percent salary cut and subsequent 12-month salary freeze begin July 1 at Colorado Public Radio, reports the Denver Business Journal. CPR President Max Wycisk said in a statement that the changes will allow the statewide network to keep present staffing levels.

Quick Takes

WHYY ends longtime show, terminates staffers, closes bureau

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Philadelphia’s WHYY is ending it 46-year-old nightly news show Delaware Tonight on July 17, reports the Wilmington News-Journal. Beginning in August there’ll be expanded online news and a new weekly state public affairs show. Its two-year-old Dover bureau will close, and the Wilmington bureau, where Delaware Tonight is produced, will reduce its staff. All told, there’ll be a decrease from 13 full-time and three part-time employees to five full timers; those remaining staffers will have a weeklong unpaid furlough starting July 18. Chris Satullo, WHYY’s executive director of news and civic dialogue, said the moves are part of a transition from legacy radio and TV broadcasting to a multimedia source for news and entertainment.

Quick Takes

Dish Network entering new carriage talks, rep tells congresswoman

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A representative of Dish Network told Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) yesterday that the satcaster is planning new talks with noncom TV stations on multicast or HD signal carriage, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Cable operators and DirecTV already have such deals. Eshoo introduced a bill that would force such carriage, citing public interest. Jeffrey Davis, spokesman for the Association of Public Television Stations, told Current in a statement that Dish Network, for the most part, is not carrying local public television stations in HD in any markets except Hawaii and Alaska, where carriage is federally mandated. The statement added: “It is our sincere hope that Dish and public television can reach a private agreement.

Quick Takes

State budget woes force WQLN cuts

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Facing a loss of $800,000 in Pennsylvania state funding, or about 25 percent of its budget, WQLN Public Media is terminating staff and making other budget cuts. Affected are WQLN-TV and WQLN-FM. Five jobs have been eliminated; among those are the program director and engineering director. The three remaining top managers will get salary cuts. President and g.m. Dwight Miller will lose 10 percent, the others 5 percent.

Quick Takes

CPB to invest in local news collaboratives for pubradio

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CPB is offering grants to public radio stations to expand local news gathering and digital platform reporting capabilities. In a request for proposals issued June 11, CPB solicited proposals from groups of 3-6 stations to collaborate in creating multimedia coverage on a single news topic of strong local interest. The concept is similar to the content verticals proposed for NPR’s Argo Project. Successful proposals for the local journalism centers will describe plans to employ multi-disciplinary teams of journalists, including editors to ensure quality standards, reporters who are comfortable reporting on multiple platforms, and facilitators working with social media and other engagement tools. “We want to make sure that this is not only a conspicuous play on volume of coverage but also quality,” said Bruce Theriault, senior v.p. of radio.

Quick Takes

Latin American Discovery Channel to carry Sesame Workshop show

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Sesame Street’s Abby Cadabby will host 3, 2, 1, ¡VAMOS!, a new half-hour preschool show starting June 22 on Discovery Kids Latin America. The program offers segments from the interactive program Play With Me Sesame and the multi-media project Global Grover, as well as Bert and Ernie’s Great Adventures, the first claymation series from Sesame Workshop.

Quick Takes

Can Planet Money be a money maker?

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Negotiations over the future of Planet Money, the NPR blog and podcast on global economics, include the option of operating it as a for-profit, according to this report by AOL’s DailyFinance. “Like everyone else in the business, we’re trying to figure out if there are other revenue models that might work for us,” says Adam Davidson, the NPR reporter who teamed up with This American Life’s Alex Blumberg to report “Giant Pool of Money,” the 2008 documentary that launched their multimedia spin off for NPR.org. “One of many possibilities raised has been the possibility, like many not-for-profits, of having a for-profit fundraising arm.” But Davidson adds: “I can say with 100-percent assurance that our core goal is to be a not-for-profit, mission-driven company.”

Quick Takes

PBS board okays “three nons” requirement

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In a compromise with the small number of PBS stations running religious programming, the PBS board today approved a membership requirement that would allow those shows to continue but would ban more sectarian programs to be added on primary channels. Also, religious programs may be carried on multicast channels or other platforms as long as PBS branding is not included. This was the final requirement recommended by the Station Services Committee after more than a year’s work updating membership criteria. The “three nons” question had been sent back to the system for additional input (see Current, April 13). Also at the meeting in Arlington, Va., the board accepted the fiscal year 2010 operating budget, which includes a $3.4 million deficit.

Quick Takes

Doug Mitchell honored for pubradio journalism training

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Public Radio News Directors Inc. presented its Leo C. Lee Award to former NPR producer Doug Mitchell. The award, which honors distinguished contributions to public radio journalism, recognized Mitchell’s work to “encourage young people – and particularly young people of color – to get into public radio,” PRNDI announced on its website.Mitchell, who left NPR in lay-offs announced in December, is a 20-year veteran of NPR News, and he worked for over a decade to establish a public radio journalism program for young people. Through Next Generation Radio, as the training program was called, “Doug did what a trainer is supposed to do–encapsulate the best values of the organization and transmit them intact to a new generation,” wrote former NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, in a blog posting about the loss of present and future talent with Mitchell’s exit. “Using the metaphor of these days, he was a Moses to their Joshua.”Mitchell recently explained his motivation in creating the program on Transom: “[F]or 15 of my 21.5 years at NPR, my version of teaching was giving back. That’s an old-school term meaning that at one point in my life someone helped me, and after a period of time, I ‘gave it back’ to someone else who needed help.”

Quick Takes

“Saddle Up” launches new website

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PubTV’s Saddle Up with Dennis Brouse has a new website. It’s designed to be an educational tool for horse enthusiasts. Brouse said in a statement he hopes the site will show users “how to develop a strong connection with their horses.”

Quick Takes

“Bruno” staffer cited PBS as possible destination for film

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Uh-oh. First young man Michael Kinsell alleged a link to PBS to advance his plans to become the next Mister Rogers. Now comes word that a staffer for the infamous comedian Sacha Baron Cohen mentioned a potential affiliation with PBS in the lead-up to filming of his latest project about a gay fashion designer, Bruno. A California woman, Richelle Olson, has filed suit saying she was duped by a call from a fake corporation linked to Cohen. A rep asked her if a “celebrity” could announce numbers at a charity bingo game Olson runs, and told her that his appearance would be taped for “a television station such as Discovery Channel or PBS.”

Quick Takes

FCC handles flood of 700,000 DTV callers this week

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More than 317,000 calls came into the FCC’s toll-free DTV help line yesterday (PDF), the agency reported, as stations said farewell to analog signals. The FCC termed that number “extraordinarily high.” Total calls in the runup: Nearly 700,000 between June 8 and 12. Almost 30 percent of callers asked technical questions about their digital converter boxes. “Most” of those, said the FCC, were taken care of with directions for rescans of the boxes to receive channels that had moved to new frequencies.

Quick Takes

WFUV covering Bonnaroo Music Festival

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WFUV’s Rita Houston will present special coverage of the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival on tonight’s edition of The Whole Wide World, airing 7-10 pm. Online listeners can catch her live show here (choose the ‘FUV branded streams). Houston, music director for the NYC station, will produce live broadcasts, video podcasts and other online coverage through out the weekend.