The FCC has granted an extension to APTS, CPB, NPR and PBS for comments on the report, “The Future of Media and Information Needs of Communities in A Digital Age.” The deadline, originally March 8, is now May 7. The G4 told the FCC the delay was necessary because of the “wide-ranging nature” of the topics involved. Also, the organizations are planning regional town meetings to solicit viewpoints of community leaders and broadcast station execs. FCC order here (PDF).
At a public meeting in Washington today, the FCC previewed part of its upcoming report to Congress on a National Broadband Plan. The focus was the “national purposes” portion of the plan, “designed to support America’s competitive advantages in key sectors of the economy and society,” according to an FCC press release (PDF) with details of the presentation (a more specific report, also in PDF, here). The agency discussed potential solutions for challenges in areas including health care technology, education, energy, jobs, public safety and civic engagement. A final report is due to Congress in mid-March.
Rob Bole, CPB’s veep of digital media strategy, is working to bring together public media folks at the upcoming SXSW event. “I see an opportunity to help get out of parochial grooves, network, make connections and generally be more collaborative,” he told Current in an email. He’s gathering a list of interested pubmedia types that he’ll redistribute. There’ll be a call for “SXSW newbies” with Kevin Dando, director of digital and education communications at PBS. Bole is also planning a Sunday evening social event, a #pubsxsw Twitter hashtag for back-channel communications, and a post-SXSX briefing via WebEx conferencing.
WNIT Public Television in South Bend, Ind., is letting go eight staffers and restructuring in the wake of a 50 percent drop in state funding, according to the Elkhart Truth newspaper. The station had been studying a restructuring plan but the $200,000 loss moved it more quickly ahead, president and g.m. Mary Pruess told the newspaper. Employees were cut from several departments and levels of seniority. And bookkeeping, accounting, program scheduling and marketing will be outsourced. The state is just one facing a fiscal meltdown that endangers pubcasters (Current, Jan.
NPR will produce two live music showcases from the South by Southwest Music and Media conference: the previously announced March 17 festival opener to be headlined by Spoon, and a March 18 daytime concert featuring the Sleigh Bells. (Details on both line-ups here.) Both shows will be offered for broadcast by NPR stations, as well as live webcasts for online listeners on NPR Music. Five station partners–Austin’s KUT, New York’s WFUV, Philadelphia’s WXPN, Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current, and Seattle’s KEXP–will collaborate on the SXSW coverage by producing artist interviews and reporting on other performances throughout the festival. NPR’s own All Songs Considered will post updates to Twitter (@allsongs) and produce a daily podcast in which Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton, Stephen Thompson and Carrie Brownstein geek-out about their best music discoveries of the day. To prepare for the music extravaganza, bookmark npr.org/sxsw, where all this coverage will reside (and where you’ll find archives from previous years’ coverage) and check out the Local Natives, one of the bands to be featured at NPR’s SXSW day party.
A blogger for the San Diego Reader is reporting on a project last year from local pubcaster KPBS to buy an additional local FM station and switch its existing news frequency to a “lucrative classical music format.” That plan was not executed, says Matt Potter, staff writer and editor at the publication. He obtained the report — labeled Privileged and Confidential — titled, “Funding Our News Future: A Case for Purchasing a New Radio Frequency,” through California’s public records act. That study says that KPBS management was looking to purchase KPRI, a 30,000-watt FM station, for $8 million. Potter quotes the document: “A properly run classical music station can generate significant revenue.
The campaign to establish Long Island’s WLIU as an independent public radio outlet is faltering, according to this report by the Hamptons Independent. With a looming deadline to relocate from WLIU’s longtime home on the Southhampton campus of Stonybrook University, station leaders are also trying to raise money through a new nonprofit, Peconic Public Broadcasting, to acquire WLIU’s license. The Independent reports that actor Alec Baldwin, one of several celebrities who backed the campaign, is not fulfilling his pledge. Meanwhile, critics of G.M. Wally Smith say he hasn’t done enough to reduce operating expenses. “We do have a plan,” Smith said.
Jessica Clark, director of the Center for Social Media’s Future of Public Media project, takes on a big question on the MediaShift blog: How well are stations measuring success in multiplatform public media projects created to inform and engage the public? “Very few stations define success with concrete metrics,” Clark writes. “Most examples are anecdotal. (‘I just have a sense.’) What they consider to be ‘successful’ is very subjective. Those that do have an idea of what success means to them include metrics such as page views, unique users, and calls into station when online offerings fail to work.”
WFSU at Florida State University has demanded that its video of an Air Force commander discussing offshore drilling be removed from a state House candidate’s website. Democrat David Pleat thought the video explained the reasons he opposes oil drilling near the Gulf Coast, so he put a copy from Youtube.com on his campaign Web site, according to the Northwest Florida Daily News. The video “can be posted for educational purposes,” said Florida Channel Executive Director Beth Switzer. “We can’t, and are not allowed to, grant use in political advertisements or on websites.” Pleat’s site now carries a red X over the spot where the video once played. On a page linked to that spot, the website says the campaign feels WFSU’s request “is censorship of important information regarding oil drilling in the Gulf.”
In a lengthy feature on WGBH’s ambitions to compete against WBUR for NPR News audiences, Boston Magazine goes behind the scenes to describe rifts between WGBH management and rank and file. By its account, WGBH staff were demoralized by months of budget cuts and downsizing when station leaders opted to spend $14 million on all-classical WCRB. Author Paul Kix portrays the scene during a staff meeting at which WGBH veep Marita Rivero announced the decision: “one woman sobbed and, according to numerous accounts, screamed something at Rivero to the effect of ‘Jesus, you’ve got a lot of nerve! I can’t believe this has happened.'””This wasn’t just fury over the company’s financial state. It was also the creeping clash between the old culture of WGBH and the new, between the way things had been and the way things would need to be.””Part of the problem with ‘GBH is there’s a culture of mollycoddling where everyone’s treated the same, and everybody’s patted on the back,” Emily Rooney, WGBH’s top news talent, tells Kix.
Today in Washington, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (right) provided insights into what will be contained in the agency’s National Broadband Plan report to Congress next month. In a speech to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (PDF), he cited several important issues, including spectrum use. He said that the commission will make the recommendation to “free up a significant amount of spectrum in the years ahead for ample licensed and unlicensed use.” Experts have been predicting a coming spectrum auction, which might leave pubcasters with a tricky decision (“At what cost spectrum? Stations may face choice: Cash soon or opportunities later,” Current, Feb.
An international broadband study out today (see previous item for national numbers) shows the United States is a “middle of the pack” performer on broadband efforts, but has higher prices for high-speed and next generation Internet. The research was commissioned by the FCC and conducted by examination of existing literature from 30 countries by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Another finding: America has 30 wifi free and pay hotspots per 100,000 residents; that compares with Sweden, which has 80. The 333-page report in PDF form is here.
WVIA, a dual licensee in Pittston, Pa., is slowly returning to the air after a devastating electrical fire on Friday. Newswatch 16, in nearby Moosic, Pa., has loaned out an unused transmitter. The FCC okayed the shift in order to restore the signal, according to the Scranton Times-Tribune. Over-the-air viewers can rescan their TVs to find the new PBS signal, Newswatch 16 reports. Radio is at reduced power but operating.
“Going Radical,” an NPR investigative series that begins airing tomorrow, is the first to be produced by the new reporting unit headed by Suzanne Reber. The three-part series examines the radicalization of the Christmas Day bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Three reporters–Peter Kenyon, Dina Temple-Raston and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton–collaborated on the investigation, according to Poynter Online. Within NPR headquarters, the investigative team working under Reber includes correspondents Daniel Zwerdling and Joseph Shapiro, librarian Barbara Van Woerkom and computer-assisted reporter Robert Benincasa. NPR plans to hire a producer/off-air reporter to complete the team, but journalists will “cycle through” the unit on assignments, NPR News chief Ellen Weiss says.
A new report on broadband Internet usage that surveyed 50,000 households reveals all demographic groups are using more broadband but disparities among particular groups continue to exist, according to the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Among the findings: 64 percent of households have broadband access compared with 51 percent in October 2007. Lagging behind in broadband use are low-income households, seniors, minorities, the less-educated and the unemployed. And 30 percent of all Americans surveyed do not use the Internet in any location. The research was commissioned by the NTIA and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in October 2009.
Mobile app developers will get “a simple route to market” that lets them develop a single app for wireless devices’ various incompatible operating systems, according to the Wholesale Applications Community announced in Barcelona yesterday by more than two dozen cell phone carriers and device makers. The “distribution ecosystem” based on “openness and transparency” is backed by carriers weary of being outflanked and bullied by Apple’s iBandwagon, including such open and transparent corporate citizens as Verizon, Sprint, major foreign carriers and even AT&T, Apple’s U.S. iPhone carrier. Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson also joined. Information Week ‘s blogger expects this new League of Nations to get bogged down, fall behind and fall apart. Demonstrating that even alliance-hungry Apple competitors can’t agree on the same strategy, two more such companies, Nokia and Intel, said they will combine their Linux-based open-source mobile/netbook OS efforts, under the Linux Foundation, Ars Technica reported.
Idaho Public Television has removed spots touting the importance of public television that featured state legislators, reports the Twin Falls, Idaho, Times-News website. In a recent hearing before the state joint finance-appropriations committee on funding for the station, a senator asked IPTV g.m. Peter Morrill if the appearances gave the politicians a political advantage. Morrill looked into the spots, then replied to the committee in a subsequent letter. The legislators “did not advocate for any funding proposal, only for the general public service that we provide,” Morrill wrote. “To avoid any further confusion, I have instructed my staff to take these spots off the air during the legislative session.” The promotion project is funded by CPB.
Plenty of interesting comments in this week’s Mailbag (well, Snowbag) from the PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler. Topics include “The Bombing of Germany” from American Experience, and Frontline’s “Flying Cheap.”
Illinois Public Media in Urbana-Champaign will realign its AM, FM and TV staffing to survive its budget woes. The operation at the University of Illinois will eliminate nine staff positions, phase out the weather department, add news to its FM classical format, shift its AM news staff to more local coverage and outreach, and add three staff positions in “areas with potential for revenue growth.” General Manager Mark Leonard announced the overhaul in a statement on its website. Illinois Public Media has been operating with a deficit during the current fiscal year as a result of $110,000 in budget cuts from the Illinois Arts Council that were announced in October, Leonard said. “We cannot continue to do things the way we’ve done them in the past,” he said.
Tom Bettag, who authored a recent advisory report for PBS on its news and public affairs initiative, has joined CNN Worldwide as senior e.p. for State of the Union with Candy Crowley and Reliable Sources, effective immediately, according to a CNN statement. PBS had asked Bettag last year to consider how public TV could reinvent its news offerings, and Bettag spent time meeting with executives in both pubTV and radio news units (Current, May 11 and 26, 2009.)