Quick Takes

Kids programming confab in February

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A three-day course to help producers develop and sell preschool TV shows is coming up Feb. 13-15 in New York City. Little Airplane Productions, headed by former Sesame Street writer Josh Selig, is hosting its Little Airplane Academy that covers everything from pitching and designing a show to directing and production. Appearing will be Andrew Beecham, senior VP of programming for PBS Kids Sprout, and an exec from Nickelodeon. For more information contact Melinda Richards at 212-965-8999.

Quick Takes

More pubcasting help for Haiti

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WAMC/Northeast Public Radio will open its phone banks at 8 p.m. Friday during a James Taylor benefit concert for Haiti in Great Barrington, Mass. The Albany, N.Y., station will simulcast the concert, “Help for Haiti: An Intimate Evening with James Taylor.” All contributions will go to Partners in Health, a group on the island providing medical care to victims. “We need to do everything we can to help the country recover after this tragic earthquake,” Taylor said in a station statement. “I’m grateful to do my part and hope my neighbors here in the Berkshires will join me and be as generous as possible.” UPDATE: This benefit performance sold out within 90 minutes, already raising $150,000, matched by James and Kim Taylor for a $300,000 total.

Quick Takes

U.S. entries in INPUT festival selected

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U.S. public TV’s 17 entries in the annual INPUT international public television screening showcase have been selected, including five Independent Lens and three P.O.V. docs, plus programs from Masterpiece, American Experience, Frontline and History Detectives, according to Amy Shumaker of the national secretariat at South Carolina ETV. Here’s the list. The global selection of programs to be screened at the festival in May will be selected next month from among national entries. INPUT 2010 will be held May 8-12 in Budapest, Hungary. INPUT rules require that entries be split equally among three categories—documentary, drama and other.

Quick Takes

FCC will help Haiti, as are pubcasting stations

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The Federal Communications Commission will assist Haiti to provide a “continuity of service” for communications in the aftermath of the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, Broadcasting & Cable reports. Chair Julius Genachowski made the announcement after hearing from Conatel, the Haitian communications agency, that its headquarters had been destroyed and several staffers killed or injured. Genachowski also said U.S. communications companies are looking to help out as well. “Many companies have made significant offers of help, and urgent efforts are under way to coordinate and deliver assistance,” he added.

Quick Takes

KALW beta testing news website

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San Francisco’s KALW-FM launched a new website today that combines local news, arts and culture coverage and community engagement. KALWNews.org features reporting from the station’s drive-time newsmagazine Crosscurrents and provides links to reporting by other local news organizations. It also invites users to share their stories, report on their communities and submit comments or commentaries. One of the five reporting beats carved out by the KALW newsroom–criminal justice coverage–will expand under NPR’s Argo Project, a national-local pilot testing station-based approaches to online news coverage, according to Holly Kernan, news director. KALWNews.org was developed in collaboration with Margaret Rosas of Quiddities, the Santa Cruz-based company that received a Knight Foundation grant to develop an open source web publishing system for public radio stations.

Quick Takes

“Think Tank” ending 15-year run

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The long-running weekly pubaffairs series Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg is ceasing production at the end of the month, according to a press release. “It is no secret that it is very hard to raise money for any kind of media underwriting or advertising now, public or private,” Wattenberg said in the statement. “But I hope that when the economy turns around, which I believe has already begun, we will be back not only with our weekly public television program, but with some exciting specials which are already in development.” Over the past 15 years guests have included legal scholar Robert Bork, economists Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith former ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and congressman Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Quick Takes

Audience study fails to think outside the box, Hill says

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Public radio needs to completely re-engineer itself for the networked environment, writes Hearts of Space producer and host Stephen Hill, in a critique of public radio’s Grow the Audience project final report. The recommendations “are mostly bland reiterations of the core values of the public media catechism . . . , cautiously extending a toe outside the box while continuing to view the world from inside it,” he writes.

People

Robben Fleming, one of CPB’s best presidents, ‘seemed to me the least interested in himself’

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David Stewart, one of CPB’s original employees and later a writer and Current contributing editor, sent this letter after the death of Robben Fleming, a former president of CPB. To the editors:

I was very sad to learn of Robben Fleming’s death in the Feb. 28, 2010, issue of Current newspaper. He served as CPB’s president from 1979 to 1981 — sadly, one of the shortest tenures for, in my view, one of the best presidents in the organization’s history. Predictably, his obituary described a number of important decisions that provided CPB with considerable prestige, as well as new audiences for public television.

Quick Takes

Public media conference to focus on high-impact projects

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“Real Stories, Real Impact” is the subject of this year’s Making Your Media Matter confab sponsored by the Center for Social Media at American University. The meeting, In Washington on Feb. 11 and 12, will examine “methods for assessing various elements that contribute to high-impact public media projects,” according to the center. Register online.

Quick Takes

Blogger criticizes “Between the Lions” CD in Chick-fil-A kids’ meal

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Tim Graham, a blogger with the conservative site Newsbusters, was upset during a recent drive-through visit to Chick-fil-A. Included in his daughter’s kid’s meal was a Between the Lions CD, with logos of WGBH and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “This underlines how blurry the line is between public broadcasting and private-sector merchandising,” he writes on the site that calls itself “the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.” The “Hypocrisy!” in the headline refers to PBS President Paula Kerger’s comments at the recent winter press tour that children’s programming on commercial stations is built mainly around opportunities to sell toys to kids.

Quick Takes

Frontline delays “Dancing Boys” documentary

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Frontline has delayed its Dancing Boys of Afghanistan documentary due to concerns over the safety of a boy in the film, Broadcasting & Cable reports. It’s about the custom of “Bacha Bareesh,” in which boys are sold to men who keep them as concubines. In the film, an Afghan journalist infiltrated one of the rings and spoke with several boys and their “masters.” It was schedule for Jan. 19; a repeat of A Death in Tehran will air instead.

Quick Takes

BNET says San Francisco news hybrid is a no-go; Berkeley dean denies report

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The deal to start up a local nonprofit news organization in San Francisco (Current, Oct. 13, 2009) has fallen apart, according a BNET blog report quoting anonymous sources. KQED, the public radio and TV outlet that was to partner with the journalism school of the University of California in Berkeley to launch the organization with backing from philanthropist Warren Hellman, is beset by internal turmoil, reports David Weir, a journalist/blogger and former KQED exec. “Sources have told me that the various parties to the negotiations have not been able to come up with a consensus over how to run the new news organization, and as of today, financier Hellman’s patience has apparently run out.” UPDATE: Neil Henry, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, tells Poynter Institute blogger Jim Romensko: “The Bay Area News Project is alive and well and ready to start business.

Quick Takes

Strategies for pubradio audience growth lack priorities, Sutton says

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Public radio marketing consultant John Sutton is troubled by the “something for everybody” approach outlined in “Public Radio in the New Network Age,” the final report from the CPB-backed Grow the Audience project. “‘Do everything’ is not a strategy,” Sutton writes on his blog. Even if decision-makers follow the report’s recommendation to focus resources on stations in the top 50 markets, “the reality is that there aren’t enough resources to serve the objectives listed….Further prioritization is necessary to make smart, effective investments in audience growth.” The report, written by the Station Resource Group after an 18-month research and consultation project, is “silent” on how these priorities will be set, Sutton notes. “We believe the difficult decisions about who gets help and who gets left behind should be fully transparent.”

Quick Takes

Start social networking before disaster strikes

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In an interview with BayNewser, Andy Carvin explains how NPR News is using social media to track developments and find sources in Haiti. The network’s social media guru also offers some insights about how to cultivate contacts and reliable news sources over time.

Quick Takes

PBS stunned at volume of preschoolers’ video streaming: 87.5 million streams in month

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PBS was expecting online streaming of PBS Kids shows for the 2-5 set to be popular when it started late last year; the usage of shows for older kids, 6-plus, which went online earlier, had fluctuated around 2 million video streams a month. They were not prepared for the tots’ appetite: 87.5 million streams in December. PBS kept mum about the number until the press tour and the NETA Conference this week. Station folk broke into applause Wednesday as PBS education chief Rob Lippincott announced the figure. Streaming of the little kids’ programs rises in the evening as the grownups’ NewsHour grabs the TV sets, he said.

Quick Takes

$25 million in financial aid flows to pubcasting stations

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Today pubcasting stations received their share of $25 million in fiscal stabilization grants (Current, Dec. 14, 2009) from the Consolidated Appropriations Act from CPB. According to the act, the funds are provided “to maintain local programming and services and preserve jobs threatened by declines in non-Federal revenues due to the downturn in the economy” at both public TV and radio stations. President Barack Obama signed the bill Dec. 16, with funds to be distributed within 45 days.

Quick Takes

Press tour Nature panel includes Pugsley the 13-foot python

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Nature e.p. Fred Kaufman remained surprisingly calm yesterday considering he was sitting next to a man with a 13-foot Burmese python named Pugsley around his torso at TV critics press tour in Pasadena (PBS photo). Kaufman and herpetologist Shawn Heflick answered questions from reporters about the upcoming episode, “Invasion of the Giant Pythons.” Questions included: How does one go about helping a person being crushed by a python? (Pour alcohol on it, snakes despise that.) Kaufman also discussed the impetus for the show: Pythons, some dumped by owners, are quickly reproducing in the Florida Everglades; the episode takes a close look at how the species is having a serious impact on the environment. Critics also got a chance to have their photo taken with Pugsley.

Quick Takes

Overall, “good years” for PBS, critic comments from press tour

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Barry Garron, reporting on the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena for the Hollywood Reporter, tells Current the PBS executive session was generally heartening. “Except for the struggle for donations during these recessionary times, these are good years for PBS,” Garron notes. “No one is accusing them of controversial programs, following a hidden agenda or pushing their liberal ideas on children. Even better, with the Democrats in control, there are no credible threats to funding. [PBS President Paula] Kerger even said they’re getting an 8 percent increase in federal aid.”

Quick Takes

Noncoms may fundraise for Haiti, FCC announces

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The Federal Communications Commission has given permission to noncom stations to raise money for Haiti earthquake relief (PDF). Rules usually limit NCE (noncommercial educational) stations to fundraise on the air only for their own benefit. The FCC has waived the rules for past disasters including Hurricane Katrina (Current, Sept. 19, 2005), the Southeast Asia tsunami, and the Sept. 11 terror attacks (Current, Sept.

Quick Takes

Four duPont-Columbias awarded to pubcasters

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Four of the 2010 duPont-Columbia Awards announced this morning went to public broadcasting news programs, including investigative reports by American RadioWorks and Frontline/World. NPR News received a silver baton for “The York Project,” a series of conversations with voters about the role of race in the 2008 election. P.O.V., a PBS series showcasing independent film, won for The Judge and the General, a documentary about the prosecution of human rights violations in Chile. The first-ever duPont Award for a Web-based production was presented to MediaStorm and photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik for a multimedia presentation about Rwandan children born of rape. Awardees, recognized for excellence in U.S. broadcast news that aired between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009, will receive their silver batons Jan.