Current (https://current.org/2010/03/)
It’s cherry blossom (and pledge) time in Washington, D.C., and WETA is offering an e-card on its website to share a bit of the springtime splendor. The images and music are part of the station’s The Washington Cherry Blossoms: Beauty on the Basin program — available for a $60 pledge, WETA reminds visitors.
Planning to watch Food, Inc., on April 21 on PBS? Great opportunity for a potluck, POV points out. It’s encouraging viewers nationwide to meet, eat and watch the Oscar-nominated doc. Potluck hosts can register for prizes including books, gift cards and sustainable food items (dub those winners “potlucky”). Don’t know what dish to bring?
Famed educator Jaime Escalante, of PBS’s Futures with Jaime Escalante, died early yesterday morning, reports the Associated Press. He was 79. Escalante also appeared in two PBS specials, “Math…Who Needs It?!” and “Living and Working in Space: The Countdown Has Begun.” He received more than 50 awards for his PBS work, including a Peabody.
The editorial pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have become a battleground over the future of WDUQ, the NPR News and jazz station recently offered for sale by Duquesne University. Supporters of WDUQ’s current management, who formed the nonprofit Pittsburgh Public Media to buy the station and preserve its service on 90.5 FM, are fending off a take-over bid by WQED-TV/FM, which has been public about its interest in picking up NPR News programming should PPM fail. “Unless 90.5 FM is taken over by an entity with a financially solid base, such as WQED, I’m worried that the station would not be able to afford the high standards of national and local news programming to which we’ve become accustomed,” William Byham, a WQED board member, editorialized on March 24. Today, two PPM board members defend WDUQ’s legacy and paint a different picture of the proposed merger: “The merger of two public radio stations . .
Pubcasters are celebrating lots of George Foster Peabody Awards today. PBS received six — double the amount won by any other organization. Those winners are: “Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About” on American Masters; “The Madoff Affair” on Frontline; two for Independent Lens, “The Order of Myths” and “Between the Folds”; “Endgame” from Masterpiece; and KCET’s “Inventing LA: The Chandlers and their Times.” KCET also scored for “Up in Smoke,” on medical marijuana. Other pubcasting winners: Sesame Street; “The Great Textbook War,” from West Virginia Public Broadcasting; “Hard Times” from Oregon Public Radio; Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson’s coverage of Afghanistan for National Public Radio; WAMU-FM’s The Diane Rehm Show; and NPR.org (” .
Scott Jagow, author of Marketplace’s Scratch Pad blog since last February, will write his final post today. “The grant paying for my position is running out, and it won’t be renewed. Such are the times,” he explained to readers yesterday. The blog, funded through a CPB initiative for web-based economics coverage, will end. Matt Berger, the new web producer for Marketplace.org, plans to add more contributors, new multimedia features, and updates to the homepage and site design.
The critically acclaimed documentary Eyes on the Prize is returning to PBS next month. DVDs will also be available for the first six programs. For years, rights clearance complications had prevented broadcast or video sales of both of Henry Hampton’s famed civil rights history series (Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2005; Current, Nov. 21, 2005). In January 2005, the copyright advocacy organization Downhill Battle initiated its Eyes on the Screen project, “a nationwide campaign to distribute digital versions of Eyes on the Prize — the most important civil rights documentary ever made — and have screenings of it in towns and cities across the US on February 8th at 8PM,” in defiance of copyright laws.
Two years ago New Jersey Network leaders couldn’t get the state to transfer operation of the network to a nonprofit, as Oregon and Hawaii have done, but last week Gov. Chris Christie (R) got behind the move, according to an NJN news release. The proposed state budget for fiscal 2011 calls for the public TV and radio networks to be moved out of the budget by Jan. 1, so it allots only $2 million — half of this year’s state appropriation. Former NJN Executive Director Elizabeth Christopherson couldn’t win the support of former Gov. Jon Corzine (D) or the legislature before she left the job (Current, May 12, 2008). Interim Executive Director Howard Blumenthal said in the release: “Our goal is to provide anytime / anywhere service, incorporating television, radio, Internet, mobile devices and live events to engage a technologically-savvy, 21st century audience.”
New Hampshire Public Television is part of a $66 million broadband grant proposal, reports the New Hampshire Business Review. The request is being spearheaded by Network New Hampshire Now, a collaboration led by the University of New Hampshire and the Department of Resources and Economic Development. The proposal to the National Telecommunications & Information Administration’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program would be to fund a “critically needed broadband expansion” in the state. Part of the plan includes construction of a middle-mile microwave network for public safety, pubTV broadcasts, and mobile broadband communications on mountaintops.
Can nonprofit news orgs step up and rescue American journalism? CPB just announced five local journalism centers in one of many efforts nationwide. It’s a grant of some $10.5 million, “with an expectation that each Center will become self-sustaining by the end of the two-year funding period,” according to CPB. But at least one media analyst says, nonprofits just can’t achieve what needs to be done. In fact, Alan D. Mutter, a longtime newspaper editor and adjunct faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, titled his blog post today, “Non-profits can’t possibly save the news.”
A family ospreys nesting on an antenna tower are disrupting broadcasts of Public Radio Delmarva, which serves the Eastern shore of Maryland. The birds, also known as sea hawks, have lived on the tower for years, but the signal disruptions have become so frequent this spring that listeners are calling the station to complain, Gerry Weston, g.m., tells the Delmarva Daily Times. Problems occur when the birds use a rod at the top of the transmitter link to teach their young to fly. With its spring pledge drive only weeks away, Public Radio Delmarva has come up with an engineering fix intended to minimize disruption to the ospreys. “We don’t want to harm the birds, but we want to prevent them from perching on the rod,” Weston said.
Public media entities need to better work together to coordinate mapping efforts, writes Jessica Clark, director of the Center for Social Media’s Future of Media project, on MediaShift. One project she cited is the CPB-funded map being developed by the National Center for Media Engagement. The NCME is using Google Maps to layer common interests among funders, public media and communities. The New America Foundation also has started analyzing local media and government ecologies. And the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication is mapping ethnic media, “a crucial missing layer,” as Clark says.
NPR President Vivian Schiller will give the keynote address at today’s “Transforming Journalism: The State of the News Media 2010” event. It’s a followup to the new “State of the News Media 2010” report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Schiller will speak at 3 p.m. Eastern, it’s streaming here. The event is co-sponsored by Pew, George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, the Newseum.
The big announcement of CPB’s five local journalism centers last week at the Newseum is now available for online viewing. Access the archived two-hour program here.
What will become of Pacifica’s KPFK, wracked as it is by infighting over its programming, fundraising tactics and the process of selecting a new general manager? The Los Angeles Times reports that recent program changes have helped to bolster KPFK’s audience, yet the station’s latest funddrive was extreme “for its great length and its embrace of the conspiracy-addled fringe.” Critics of the format changes are targeting Ian Masters, a longtime host who brings a deep knowledge of foreign affairs to KPFK’s airwaves on weekday evenings. Meanwhile, meetings of its Local Station Board, which must appoint a committee to lead the search for a new general manager, dissolve into shouting matches. “It’s very frustrating, very frustrating,” an 80-year-old KPFK stalwart tells the Times.
WNIT in Elkhart, Ind., soon will double its space in a new location in South Bend. When it moves May 3 it’ll be the first time its offices and studio are in the same building, reports the local Tribune Business Weekly. The building had been home to CBS affiliate WSBT. “Since it was an existing television station, remodeling it to become a new television station made the best use of our financial and ecological resources,” said WNIT Board Chairman Glenn Killoren. A major gift and $1 million in TIF (Tax Incremental Financing) helped with the $6.5 million renovation cost.
Pat Aufderheide, advocate for Public Media 2.0 at American University, says in a blog that she loved every minute of CPB’s Local Journalism Centers announcement at the Newseum in D.C. yesterday. For instance, she quotes PBS President Paula Kerger: “News has become a social experience . . . Journalism must rebuild itself from the bottom up, beginning with the citizen journalist.”
WGBH is going where no station has gone before: This week it launched the first mobile DTV service in the system. The station is simulcasting its main HD channel along with its ‘GBH Kids Channel and two audio program streams. It’s the first of nine stations that announced in February 2009 their plans to begin using the technology (Current, Feb. 2, 2009). “We’re very excited to be the first in our market to offer Mobile DTV services to our audience,” WGBH’s Chief Technology Officer Joe Igoe said in a statement. “We see Mobile DTV as a way to expand our ability to deliver services to a broader geographic area on a wider range of devices.”
Will a grant from a large but little-known foundation help PBS in a big way within the next year? PBS President Paula Kerger, speaking to the PBS Board at its meeting today at headquarters in Arlington, hinted at a possible “very large grant” from the Anne Ray Charitable Trust, one of three entities under the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. It’s named for the granddaughter of the founder of agricultural products giant. MinnPost reports that Margaret Cargill was known as the “silent philanthropist,” because she made more than $200 million in anonymous donations to charities before her death in 2006. According to the Foundation Center, the trust’s $2.12 billion in assets make it the twenty-second largest foundation in the nation.
NPR has added ingest capabilities to its open Application Programming Interface, the technical system for distributing NPR content on the web that first launched in 2008. “Until today, the NPR API has been a one-way fire hose of content, pushing hundreds of thousands of stories from NPR and the twelve NPR Music partner stations out to the world,” blogs NPR’s Daniel Jacobson, director of application development. “Now the API is read-write, allowing authorized external parties to post stories to the NPR API.” For the first phase of API Ingest Project, released on March 24, Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Northwest News Network are posting stories to the API. Three additional pilot stations–San Francisco’s KQED, Boston’s WBUR and Philly’s WXPN–are next in line to begin uploading their stories.