Quick Takes

After half a century, WNED’s Daly retiring from broadcasting

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Dick Daly, senior consultant at Buffalo’s WNED, is retiring after more than 50 years in broadcasting, the station has announced. Daly has been with WNED since 1987, when he was hired as radio veep, overseeing classical music station WNED-FM and news station WEBR-AM (later WNED-AM). In 1993 he became senior v.p. of broadcasting, which put television operations under his guidance. Daly’s broadcasting career began in 1957 in Minnesota as a reporter, news director, and news editor. In 1967, he was an accredited correspondent reporting on the Vietnam War for NBC affiliate WDSM in Duluth, Minn.

Quick Takes

Big FCC/pubcasting meeting today

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Don’t forget about today’s important FCC meeting to discuss “Public and Other Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era.” It will be streamed live here from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Panels include: “A 1967 Moment … A Vision for Public Media,” “Varieties of Public and Noncommercial Media,” “Purposes of Public and Noncommercial Media,” “New Platforms, Approaches and Structures,” “New Strategies for Supporting Public and Noncommercial Media” and “Communications and Regulatory Policy.”

Quick Takes

Dancing with the (pubcasting) star

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Louisiana Public Broadcasting President Beth Courtney takes to the stage to show off her dancing prowess on May 8 as the Big Buddy Program sponsors its fourth annual “Dancing With the Stars Baton Rouge” fundraiser, reports 2theadvocate.com. Audience members can bid to dance with Courtney and other local celebrities, as well as Elena Grinenko and Fabian Sanchez, who have appeared on the hit TV show Dancing With the Stars.

Quick Takes

Our blog is on the move

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Current’s blog, keeping you linked to all things pubmedia, is now also located at http://currentpublicmedia.blogspot.com/. You may click there for news updates, as well as the blog archive.For RSS feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions tohttp://currentpublicmedia.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.Fear not! Your intrepid Cloggers (Current bloggers) will continue to bring you the very latest news from around the country.

Quick Takes

Texas Tech Public Media continues growth

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After four years of negotiations, Texas Tech Public Media’s acquisition of KUTX in San Angelo is complete — the latest move in its “explosive growth” during the last several years, according to Lubbock Online. The station is now KNCH 90.1 and began transmitting April 4 from Lubbock. Home base for Texas Tech Public Media is KOHM-FM, South Plains Public Radio.

Quick Takes

New station heads in Florida and Illinois

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WEDU in Tampa Bay, Fla., has a new president and CEO: Susan Howarth, former head of WCET in Cincinnati, reports the Tampa Bay Business Journal. Howarth joins the station next month. That means Dick Lobo finally gets to retire. He wanted to leave in September 2009 but agreed to remain until a successor was appointed.Jack Neal is the new g.m. at WEIU FM & TV in Charleston, Ill., reports the Eastern Illinois University newspaper, the Daily Eastern News. Neal joins the station from his post as station manager at PBS affiliate KUHT at the University of Houston.

Quick Takes

Fueled by donuts, KRWGers meet their constituents in New Mexico

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KRWG staffers were out early yesterday morning to chat with viewers and listeners, reports the Deming (N.M.) Headlight. “With coffee in one hand and a donut in the other,” as the paper said, folks from the New Mexico State University PBS affiliate met with customers at the 5 a.m. Donuts shop in Deming to get their input on programming and other station matters. “When we added Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me, it will be a year ago in July, it was because of these conversations,” said Glen Cerny, executive director of university broadcasting at the station, in Las Cruces, N.M.

Quick Takes

Pubmedia Working Group to assist Public Media Corps, WGBH’s World channel

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The Public Media Working Group (PMWG) and American University’s Center for Social Media will focus on two “signature collaborative opportunities” for this year, according to the Center. PMWG sprung from the Center’s 2009 paper, “Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics,” and is comprised of advocates with “a commitment to increasing users’ access to and engagement with public media.” PMWG provides an opportunity for much-needed collaboration, the Center noted. “Innovators within the system are currently isolated, lacking spaces for sharing best practices and identifying joint strategies.” This year, the partners will first work on the National Black Programming Coalition’s Public Media Corps.

Quick Takes

New report seeks to develop nonprof news best practices

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“Ethics for the New Investigative Newsroom” (PDF), a report with recommendations from a round-table meeting of leaders in nonprofit journalism, stresses that the news entities be transparent about funding, vet donors carefully, and establish walls between reporters and funders. The paper is one of the first attempts to establish best practices for the growing field of nonprofit journalism. It was published by the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, based on a roundtable there in January. More from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Quick Takes

Map details cable access channel providers across America

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The Alliance for Community Media, representing more than 3,000 PEG (public, educational and governmental) access organizations, helped compile a map showing providers of local cable access TV channels nationwide (click to enlarge). Included are nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, government agencies and multi-jurisdictional authorities; still to come are libraries and cable providers. For more information, visit the Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age blog from the New America Foundation, a D.C. think tank.

Quick Takes

Ted Garcia leaving TV post at CPB

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Ted Garcia, CPB’s senior vice president, television content, is departing effective Saturday, according to a note to public broadcasting stations and an internal CPB memo. Garcia had been in the post since February 2008. His duties included overseeing and managing CPB’s national public television programming initiatives. Previous to that work, he had been g.m. of KNME-TV in Albuquerque, N.M. Garcia will remain as a consultant through Sept. 30.

Quick Takes

KWBU in Waco shutting down by June 1

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Citing an impending $400,000 budget shortfall, PBS affiliate KWBU in Waco, Texas, is ending its broadcast at the end of May, according to a statement from Joe Riley, station president. The move will not affect its NPR broadcast. Riley told Current that it hasn’t yet talked to nearby PBS affiliates to as to the future of its channel. “The first thing we had to do, was let our staff know,” he said. Ten full-time and four part-time employees are affected, about two-thirds of the staff.

Quick Takes

Talk trash at tomorrow’s Peer Webinar

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The National Center for Media Engagement, along with ITVS and CPB, are offering a Peer Webinar tomorrow on resources and tools for multiplatform outreach and engagement. It’ll feature an exploration of how ITVS uses its content in unique ways, such as a Garbage Dreams online game (“Start with one neighborhood, one factory and one hungry goat … “). There’ll also be a preview of the new ITVS website for broadcasters, producers and teachers. It all kicks off at 2 p.m. Eastern, register here.

Quick Takes

CPB selects Tovares to head up Diversity and Innovation efforts

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Joseph Tovares is the new senior vice president for Diversity and Innovation at CPB. Pat Harrison, CPB president, said in a statement that Tovares “will work to extend public media’s reach and service through innovation.” The statement said Tovares “was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the NPS/Diversity and Innovation fund agreement for CPB,” which was yet to be publicly announced (Current, April 19). He has also served as senior director of operations for Television Programming. Before his CPB tenure he was executive producer for La Plaza, the Latino production unit at WGBH; and series editor and director of New Media at American Experience. His station experience includes KLRN in San Antonio; KLRU in Austin, Texas; and KET in Lexington, Ky.

Quick Takes

FCC task force starting work on National Broadband Plan initiatives

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The FCC is assembling a spectrum task force to coordinate long-term planning and implementation of recommendations in the National Broadband Plan, reports Broadcasting & Cable. One main goal is promoting the possible auction of spectrum to create more space for wireless broadband (Current, Feb. 8). Heading up the task force will be Julius Knapp, chief of the Office of Engineering Technology; and Ruth Milkman, chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. Members will include heads of the Enforcement, International, Media, and Public Safety and Homeland Security bureaus, and the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis.

Quick Takes

Pubradio’s newest classical stations setting records for listenership, fundraising

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Since its conversion into a listener-supported public radio station last fall, New York’s classical WQXR has gained more than 127,000 listeners–enough to make it the top-rated public radio station in the country, the New York Times reports. This despite its move to a less powerful frequency last fall under new owner WNYC. The WQXR audience is also responding generously to on-air fundraising appeals. The February pledge drive blew past its $750,000 goal to raise $1.3 million from some 10,000 WQXR listeners, 57 percent of whom had never donated to WNYC before. Likewise, Boston’s classical WCRB–now under the ownership of WGBH–recently set a new record for the most money raised from radio listeners in a single day.

Quick Takes

Upcoming FCC workshop to focus on noncom media

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Public and noncom media is the focus of the next FCC “Future of Media” workshop Friday in Washington, D.C. Subjects include: Potential for greater collaboration among public broadcasters, PEG channels, noncommercial web-based outlets, and other new media entities; infrastructure needs and assets of public and other noncommercial media; and possibilities for new kinds of noncommercial media networks and associated funding models. The speaker and panelist list is a who’s who of pubcasting, including CPB Board Chairman Ernest Wilson, CPB President Pat Harrison, NPR President Vivian Schiller, Frontline Executive Producer David Fanning, PBS President Paula Kerger, APM’s Digital Innovation Senior veep Joaquin Alvarado, PRX Executive Director Jake Shapiro, NPR’s Digital Media Senior veep Kinsey Wilson, and APM President Bill Kling. There’ll be a streaming video feed of the event from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Quick Takes

KUT is favored choice to revive campus music venue

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The University of Texas is looking for a new entity to manage the Cactus Cafe, a campus music venue and bar, and KUT-FM is the hands-down favorite among student leaders, the Austin American-Statesman reports. The public radio station has offered to work with student organizations to program music events, but it doesn’t want to manage the bar. “I don’t want a line item in KUT’s budget for alcohol,” says Stewart Vanderwilt, g.m., during a public forum on options for the cafe. Early this year the university announced plans to shut down the money-losing venue, but, after an outcry from students and Austinites, it’s now looking for ways to make it self-supporting. Vanderwilt suggested a combination of ticket sales and philanthropic support.

Quick Takes

Youth bring home RFK Journalism Awards for radio

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Two of public radio’s youth media training units received 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for radio reporting. Youth Radio won in the international category with Rachel Krantz’s investigation of hidden abuses of homosexuals in the military. Her story aired on NPR’s All Things Considered. WNYC’s Radio Rookies earned top recognition for domestic reporting with “This is the South Bronx,” first-person narratives of teens living in poverty, by Miguelina Diaz, Keith Tingman and Amon Frazier.