Registration is now open for the June 23 webinar on LZ Lambeau from the National Center for Media Engagement. The event, a belated welcome home to Vietnam vets, was the largest single outreach in public broadcasting, with around 70,000 participants over three days last month. At least three stations are now planning similar or scaled-down tributes; the webinar will feature reps from sponsoring station Wisconsin Public Television offering advice. A CPB-funded toolkit also is coming up.
The Daily Record of Parsnippany, N.J., today (June 6) takes an in-depth look at the challenges facing NJN pubTV and radio. It reports that state aid is drying up, staff cuts are “a near certainty” and a draft plan is attempting to “reinvent” the New Jersey Network. “A radical restructuring of NJN appears likely, and it’s not clear what the station will look like when it’s done—and whether a not-for-profit, independent charitable media organization can survive, let alone thrive,” it says.
By now you’ve probably heard about NPR President Vivian Schiller’s controversial remarks about the future of radio at D8, the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference. But you may not have seen the hilarious video that introduced those remarks. Check it out, in all its “NPRness,” here. (“Auto-Tuned Things Considered.” Heh.)
WTTW-Channel 11 will let go 12 percent of its staff, between 25 and 30 positions, due to poor corporate underwriting and a $1.25 million cutback in state funding, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting. Station President and CEO Dan Schmidt said early retirement packages will be offered first, then layoffs. Schmidt also said executive compensation would be reduced 5 percent more, bringing the two-year reduction in top management salaries to 10 percent. A companywide salary freeze from 2009 will stay in effect until 2011. WTTW also will close its employee cafeteria.
Here’s a nice bit of publicity for PBS’s upcoming “Tenth Inning”: Docmeister Ken Burns will toss the first pitch at the long-awaited debut game of Nationals phenom pitcher Stephen Strasburg, according to the Washington Post’s D.C. Sports Blog. The date for Strasburg’s first major league shifted several times, and luckily Burns had been scheduled to appear at Nationals Park on June 8. The game is sold out, although online resale sites have a few remaining tickets for up to $1,000. Yes, for one ticket.
A unique mentoring program provided PBS with analytics and advice for PBS.org, reports Internet Retailer. The digital analysis firm Web Analytics Demystified last month began the Analysis Exchange project to “provide training in web analytics to students and build up the industry’s base of analytics experts,” said founder and CEO Eric Peterson. “There are not enough qualified, experienced people doing web analytics in business.” The students, many of whom are already Internet professionals, receive training in web analytics and then research nonprofit websites for no cost to the organization. At PBS, the study found that, for example, the StumbleUpon recommendation site was generating the most traffic from social media for PBS.org, but wasn’t sending visitors that were highly engaged once they arrived.
Jake Shapiro of Public Radio Exchange challenges Apple’s prohibition on iPhone applications that solicit donations for charitable causes in a guest article for Ars Technica. “The excuse that ‘Apple doesn’t want to be held responsible for ensuring that the charitable funds make it to the final destination’ is a cop-out,” Shapiro writes. “Apple, of all companies, can’t credibly say it’s not up to the technical and logistical challenge.” The policy presents an “acute problem” for public media, which depends on listener contributions to support content that is “hugely popular” across Apple’s iTunes and iPhone/iPad platforms. Shapiro is responding to Ars Technica’s earlier reporting on how iPhone users reacted to “push notification” fundraising appeals from This American Life.
NPR President Vivian Schiller’s remarks at D8 yesterday don’t jibe with her reassurances that NPR “is not trying to do an end run around stations,” writes public radio marketing consultant and researcher John Sutton on his blog. If she truly believes that radio towers won’t exist in 10 years, then NPR’s long-term strategy must not include the audiences and revenues aggregated by local stations. “It can’t. Not if the towers are gone. So what replaces the $68 million NPR now gets in station revenues?
The West Virginia Educational Broadcasting Authority, licensee for the state’s pubradio and television stations, on June 2 approved the transfer of underwriting funds from the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation to state-controlled accounts, reports the Charleston Daily Mail. Critics are concerned the move may result in the authority making pubcasting programming decisions. The shift was requested by Kay Goodwin, state secretary of education and the arts, to improve accountability. “Currently, all proceeds from underwriting go directly to specific foundation checking accounts, on which no foundation directors have signature authority,” Goodwin said at the Wednesday meeting. “Foundation directors make no determination as to how funds are expended from those checking accounts.”
The Federal Communications Commission announced June 2 (PDF) that it is seeking members for an FCC-Native Nations Broadband Task Force to help the agency increase broadband deployment and adoption on Tribal lands. The group will help develop a consultation policy, get input from Tribal governments, develop recommendations to promote broadband within its communities and coordinate efforts with other federal departments and agencies. Applications are due to the FCC by July 15 for the two-year appointments.
A Gulf Leak Meter widget and live video stream of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have provided PBS NewsHour with a “significant increase” in Web traffic, the show reported today (May 27). Newshour and NPR are providing the embedding code for the widget free and it has been used by more than 3,000 websites including YouTube, Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, ProPublic, Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and many local PBS stations. Subscribers to the PBS Newshour YouTube channel doubled in one 24-hour period. More than 1 million viewers have watched the video feed via Newshour and NPR websites. The crisis began April 20 when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 17 workers and left 11 missing, and oil continues to flow from a well some 5,000 feet below the surface.
While state budget woes continue to threaten public broadcasters, WTVI in Charlotte, N.C., is running into county funding problems. Mecklenburg County provides about 23 percent of the station’s operating budget, or about $860,000, President Elsie Garner told Current. Garner got a heads-up call from the county manager in March that the funding would be zeroed out under a proposed fiscal 2011 budget. The station geared up for a fight with a “very complex and well-orchestrated” plan of attack, Garner said. The League of Women Voters was instrumental; that group didn’t want to lose its televised debates. Thousands of postcards of support poured in to the county.
Next Sunday the funder of The Principal Story, a doc that aired in September on P.O.V., will receive the first Woodward A. Wickham Award for Excellence in Media Philanthropy, bestowed by Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media. The grantmakers’ group said the award was named after the late MacArthur Foundation Vice President Woody Wickham to honor funders who demonstrate Wickham’s “creative, often courageous” grantmaking (Wickham obituary, February 2009). The Wallace Foundation, which backs initiatives to improve school leadership, stepped forward as full funder of the doc by Tod Lending and David Mrazek (Current, Sept. 8, 2009; program website). Jessica Schwartz, senior communication officer for Wallace, said the funder hadn’t commissioned a film before but found it would be the most effective way to reach its target audiences.
NPR President Vivian Schiller said some very provocative things this morning at D8, the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference, according to a live blog of her appearance. Early in her Q&A session, Schiller tells the Journal’s Kara Swisher: “First of all, note we don’t call ourselves National Public Radio anymore. We’re NPR.” The change reflects NPR’s job to provide universal access to news and information, she explains, “that used to mean radio, but we don’t think we should be limited to that anymore….We just wanted to reach more people, on more platforms. We want to make it as widely available as possible.” Schiller predicts that radio towers will be gone in 10 years and Internet radio will take its place.
The PBS Annual Meeting in Austin earlier this month may be over, but it continues to generate vital news: KQED is announcing winners of its Seussical Twitter rhyming contest that took place at the breakfast launch for The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That (KQED image above, dig those striped parfaits!). The grand prize, a complete, 40-plus volume set of Dr. Seuss books, went to Mary Ann Dillon, Ready to Learn coordinator at PBS Eight/KAET in Phoenix. Her Tweet:A person’s a personNo matter how smallAnd PBS kidsAre the smartest of allRunners-up, who received books from “The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library,” didn’t quite hit the anapestic tetrameter rhythm exactly but managed to have fun. Here’s a ditty from an obviously annoyed Holly Emig, program schedule manager of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority:PBS Kids and the CatCame to playBut I didn’t win the Cat at my tableAnd someone must payBut our favorite may just be this one from David Lowe, g.m. at KVIE in Sacramento, who diverted from writing about the new PBS show to focus on more pressing matters:The Austin Hilton didn’t holdMy board chair’s reservation. Thankfully it wasn’t my faultOr I’d have no job preservation.Yovel Schwartz, Cat in the Hat project supervisor at KQED, told Current that the contest actually was announced in advance via several Twitter feeds and internal PBS sites and newsletters.
Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky has introduced H.R. 5477, the Ready To Compete Act, that would fund pubTV’s Ready to Learn and Ready to Teach (which encompasses PBS’s popular TeacherLine). It also adds two new programs: Ready to Achieve, a national, on-demand digital media service that would allow pubTV stations to share content in a central location; and Ready to Earn, to support educational digital content and services for adults, including GED preparation and workforce training. In a statement, Lonna Thompson, interim president and CEO of the Association for Public Television Stations, said, “Education has been, and continues to be, at the core of the mission of public television. Local public television stations, which are some of the last locally owned and operated media outlets in this country, will now have an opportunity to expand upon this mission.”
In its latest experiment with soliciting text donations, This American Life used the push notification system on its iPhone app to ask listeners to support the show. The response from tech savvy readers of Ars Technica was not positive. “The pushed message for donations felt a bit off-putting,” the online technology journal reported last week. “Getting a donation pitch during or after a show is expected. A random notification pushed to your phone isn’t.”
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler takes on comments on Tavis Smiley’s show that have created a bit of a buzz in the conservative blogosphere. In his May 25 program Smiley interviewed Avaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament. Ali said that radicalized Islamist terrorists “got into their minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.” Smiley replied, “But Christians do that every single day in this country.” Ali: “Do they blow people up?”
A draft copy of a Federal Trade Commission paper on bolstering journalism includes recommendations to spend more money on CPB, and establish a commercial broadcast spectrum auction tax going toward pubmedia. The paper, “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism” (PDF), is not an official document, rather a draft for discussion at the third and final FTC workshop on news coverage on June 15. It advises boosting funding for CPB, noting that its 2009 federal budget allotment was $409 million, while per capita spending on pubcasting in Finland and Denmark is 75 times that figure. It offers up an idea for a spectrum auction tax on commercial stations, with proceeds going to a pubmedia fund. Or how about allowing taxpayers to direct part of their taxes, maybe up to $200, to a specific media institution?
Liane Hansen, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday since 1989, plans to leave the program next May. She’ll be visiting public radio stations over the next year while other NPR journalists take turns behind the mic. “It’s not you, it’s me,” she said in a letter to listeners broadcast on Sunday. “I’ve made the personal decision to move to where I have always wanted to live — by the ocean.” Hansen will continue working for NPR as a freelancer once her contract as WESUN host expires.