Current (https://current.org/2009/06/page/4/)
Reporter John Eggerton of Broadcasting & Cable decided to see for himself how things were going at the FCC’s DTV call center. He tried three times. First, call demand was too high; “goodbye,” a voice said. Next, Eggerton said he was put “on hold with music that recalled the funky jazz of 1970’s detective show soundtracks.” Third time — nope, didn’t make it through to speak with a human then either.
How did your station celebrate today’s milestone DTV transition? At PBS affiliate WGVU-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich., “dignitaries, photographers and reporters jammed into the … control room for a live broadcast counting down the final seven minutes of the station’s analog signal,” reports The Grand Rapids News. Two local bigwigs – including Grand Valley State University President Emeritus Arend D. Lubbers, who welcomed viewers when the station started broadcasting in 1972 – did the honors at 10 a.m. and switched off the power to Channels 35 and 52. “I thought it would hurt, but it didn’t,” Lubbers reported.
This week the House Appropriations Committee okayed its subcommittee discretionary allocations for FY2010, reports APTS in its weekly legislative update. That’s the amount each subcommittee has to draft its spending bill. The subcommittee that funds most pubcasting programs (Labor, HSS and Education) received $7.5 billion more than FY2009, for a total of $160.65 billion. “Although this is a welcome increase,” APTS noted, “key elements of President Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda will likely account for much of this increase, making funding in the Labor-HHS bill extremely competitive.” The bill should hit the House floor for a vote July 22. The House Appropriations Committee also this week retained PTFP’s $20 million in the House Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Subcommittee’s bill.
Support for easier licensing standards for Low Power FM stations is growing in Congress and at the FCC, according to reports [here and here] on yesterday’s House subcommittee hearing on the Local Community Radio Act of 2009. The FCC’s extensive experience in FM licensing “refutes the claim that elimination of third-adjacent channel protection requirements would result in pervasive interference,” Peter Boyle, chief of the commission’s Audio Division, told lawmakers in his written testimony. “In fact, the potential for interference would be limited to areas immediately adjacent to LPFM transmitter sites.” NPR has long opposed proposals allowing more flexibility in channel-spacing rules for LPFM stations.
An “essay to read and keep”: Margaret Low Smith of NPR describes the basic ingredients needed for public radio to “become essential in the lives of more Americans.” In the final commentary commissioned by the Station Resource Group’s Grow the Audience project, the network’s top programmer calls upon the field’s creative talents to go beyond the classic “driveway moments” and learn what it takes to create “harddrive-way moments.” Smith boils it down to traditional elements of public radio journalism–good story-telling, engaging guests and vibrant personalities, “great tape,” and versatility in the crafts of reporting, producing and editing. She also sets the bar high for the content being produced in any medium for any platform. “It needs to be extraordinary.
Now that the absolutely final DTV transition is really here, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is looking back over the long, laborious process leading up to this point, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Markey is former chair of the House Telecommunications (now Communications) Subcommittee. “When I held the first Congressional hearing on then-high definition TV (HDTV) in the early fall of 1987, ” he wrote in an e-mail, “I never imagined that it would take almost 22 years to reach this moment.” He said he “aggressively advocated for such a switch and successfully convinced the FCC in 1990 to begin pursuing a digital standard.” Markey gave up his communications post this session to focus on energy policy.
PBS today announced job cuts and other cost reductions during a staff meeting at headquarters in Arlington, Va. It faces a $3.4 million deficit in next fiscal year’s budget, spokesperson Jan McNamara told Current. A total of 45 positions, or about 10 percent of the staff, are affected, including elimination of vacancies. A six-month salary reduction of 3.85 percent for all nonunion employees starts July 1. On Jan.
The NewsHour unveiled two of its collaborative reporting projects on-air and online this week. Generation Next, a follow-up to Judy Woodruff’s 2006-07 series on young Americans, began its month-long run with reports airing on the NewsHour and NPR on Monday. Patchwork Nation, a multimedia project examining how the recession is affecting different types of communities, also launched with feature reports by the Christian Science Monitor and KWMU in St. Louis. The Monitor created Patchwork Nation as a reporting project for the 2008 election; as part CPB’s big intiative backing collaborative multimedia projects dealing with the recession, it teamed up with the NewsHour and 14 pubcasting stations to focus the coverage on economics reporting.
A team of runners from WNET participated in yesterday’s J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge run in Central Park. Led by Stewart Roberts of the underwriting department, participants (above) included Janice Fuld, Ashlinn Quinn, Samantha Gibb, Arielle Altman, Kristin DiQuollo, Kathryn Minas, Corey Nascenzi and Maura Thompson. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation has donated more than $1.75 million to nonprofits from runs in six countries on five continents during the past three years, according to its website.
During a recent appearance in Seattle, Anthony Bourdain had an odd question for fellow celeb chef Mario Batali about actress Gwyneth Paltrow: “Why would you go to Spain with the one b*tch who refuses to eat ham?” Paltrow is co-host of Batali’s PBS show Spain … On the Road Again. But Bourdain asked it with a wicked grin, so it’s all in good fun. Paltrow, an avowed macrobiotic eater, has a website, GOOP, that raves about the virtues of the diet.
NPR is planning a gathering to remember pubcaster Sheryl Flowers (right), who died Monday at age 42 after an 18-month battle with breast cancer. The event will be at 5 p.m. June 15. Anna Christopher, NPR spokesperson, said details are still being finalized. Flowers was a longtime executive producer of The Tavis Smiley Show on public radio and television, and current director of communications for Smiley’s production company. In an audio statement on the show’s website, Smiley called Flowers “the creative force, the genius most responsible for making me sound a whole lot smarter than I am.” A full obituary will run in the June 22 issue of Current.
“The Mosque in Morgantown” filmmaker Brittany Huckabee hopes it helps audiences realize the similarities and differences between religions because “that’s pretty important in a time when Americans are trying to engage with the larger Muslim world, to understand what’s going on here at home inside the often closed doors of mosques.” The film, part of the America at a Crossroads project, premiered at the Metropolitan Theater in Morgantown, W.V., last night. It centers on Asra Nomani, who entered the mosque to pray in the main hall where only men were allowed. Her move caused reactions through the mosque there as well as others across the country. The film debuts on PBS on June 15.
PBS is ordering an additional 26 episodes of its popular WordGirl program on PBS Kids GO! That brings the total number of half-hour shows to 78.
One of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s transmitters, hit by lightning last week, is up to full power again — just in time to be shut down permanently on Friday for the DTV transition. “That’s kind of the joke around here,” Everett Helm, director of engineering, told the Gazette-Times in Corvallis, site of the transmitter. Helm said this was a rare occurrence: The lightning appears to have caused carbon to form inside the antenna’s electronics, which caused the equipment to heat up slowly and eventually short out over the weekend.
Looks like a possible PBS reality show, Agents of Change, probably won’t happen, according to D.C.’s The Hill newspaper. Producer Gabe Gentry had contacted at least two U.S. Reps about participating. The program would follow teams of young supporters conducting nationwide town halls to determine issues of concern. The teams would help draft legislation, the public would vote on what bill they most wanted, and lawmakers would take it from there. But one government watchdog found the idea “wholly inappropriate” and said it would “would undermine the credibility of the institution.” At least two legislators expressed interest to Gentry awhile back, but he’s finding no support now.
WDUQ in Pittsburgh launched its year-end fundraiser last week with a special appeal to its listeners: forgo thank-you gifts for your contribution and the NPR News and jazz station will send 10 percent of the pledge to NPR. General Manager Scott Hanley, who announced the special fundraising appeal during the NPR Board meeting last month, said he has a “six-figure problem to resolve” in closing the station’s year-end budget gap, but folks at WDUQ are “very concerned about what is happening at NPR.” As much as the station’s supporters “love coffee mugs and tote bags, they love NPR more.” Prior to the campaign’s launch on June 4, Hanley blogged about the cutbacks undertaken at NPR this year, adding: “The most stable source of income for NPR is fees for programs from stations like WDUQ. But, in times like these, it isn’t enough.” Contributions from WDUQ’s campaign will “be on top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in programming fees that DUQ has already committed to pay to NPR,” Hanley wrote. It’s not huge, but it’s a start.”
Gather.com, the social network in which American Public Media holds a controlling interest, announced yesterday that it has secured $5.3 million in equity financing. Investors include Allen & Company, American Public Media, former chief executive officer of Lotus Development Corporation Jim Manzi, former Hill Holiday chief executive officer Jack Connors, Kevin McClatchy, Andrew Tobias and the Gerace family. The Boston-based company benefited from a big surge in “engagement marketing” bookings, according to this news release. The investors’ cash will “fund operations at its current run rate through to profitability expected in early 2010.” Paidcontent reports that Gather has raised “at least $25 million over the years since being founded in 2004.”
KERA in Dallas will launch a Triple A public radio station in the nation’s fifth largest market with its purchase of 91.7 FM, a noncommercial radio frequency owned by religious broadcaster Covenant Educational Media under the call letters KVTT. The deal, announced today and billed as the largest radio transaction of 2009 to date, was brokered by Public Radio Capitol and partially financed by its Public Radio Fund. Other lenders include National Cooperative Bank and FJC, a public foundation that offers a special loan program for nonprofits. With a potential audience of 5.5 million listeners in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan region, the transaction is a major expansion for public radio’s Triple A format, according to Erik Langner, who has been working on the deal since January 2008. “We did a lot of due diligence with the board to see how other public Triple A radio stations were operated,” KERA marketing chief Debra Johnson tells a local blogger for the Dallas Observer.
“The Prenups: What Filmmakers and Funders Should Talk About Before Tying the Knot” is an informative new site “dedicated to improving communications and collaborations among filmmakers, funders, strategists and advocates,” according to the Center for Social Media, which advises the project. Money people, policy people and film people each bring different skills, needs, concerns and assets to collaborations, the center says. The Prenups explores why some funder/maker relationships thrive, while others don’t.
Now the Red Cross is getting involved in the final DTV transition, which occurs June 12. In a press release, the group said the switch from analog to digital signals “will have a real effect on the disaster preparedness plans of many people who have relied on small portable televisions with antennas for emergency communications in a disaster.” Those sets won’t work without a converter box, as Broadcasting & Cable points out. The FCC issued a statement (PDF) instructing viewers to connect a battery-powered digital-to-analog converter box to continue to receive emergency warnings in a power outage.