Quick Takes

PBS should bypass stations and go straight to cable or satellite, writer says

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“Most public television stations will merge or go broke in the next five years … and PBS in its current configuration can’t be far behind,” predicts Jack Shakely, president emeritus of the California Community Foundation, in the Aug. 22 Los Angeles Times. And why is pubTV “awash in red ink” while networks including the History Channel, A&E, National Geographic and Animal Planet make money? “PBS should market itself as a network to cable and satellite providers rather than having each individual affiliated station across the country offer itself for free,” Shakely says.

Quick Takes

PBS scores seven Creative Arts Emmys

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Masterpiece’s “Cranford” and Ken Burns’ National Parks documentary won two Emmys each at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards over the weekend (Aug. 21). PBS took seven statuettes in all. “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” won for nonfiction series and writing for nonfiction programming. Exceptional merit in nonfiction filmmaking went to “Nerakhoon (The Betrayal),” on P.O.V., about the members of a Laotian family forced to leave their homeland due to the secret war waged there by America.

Quick Takes

Pogo a go-go

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Now here (boing) is a great way (boing) to start off your week (boing). Check out KUER’s (boing) coverage of Pogopalooza 7 (boing) last weekend in Salt (boing) Lake City. “Extreme pogosticking” — who knew?

Quick Takes

Iowa’s KBBG sets $200,000 goal for endowment

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KBBG, the largest African-American owned and operated noncom radio station in Iowa, has set a goal of $200,000 to establish an endowment, reports the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier. The station hopes to reach that figure within three years. “Given what we’re facing– whether it’s the economic turndown, or even closer to home with the surge in crime and incidents and invasions — the station is probably more important to the community it serves at this point in history than perhaps at any other time,” said KBBG President Louise Porter. “And the best way to secure the future of the radio station is to establish an endowment fund.” This past weekend (Aug.

Development

Buyer will take Nightly Business Report to ‘a new level’

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WPBT sells to entrepreneur with history of legal disputes: Mykalai Kontilai, whose NBR Worldwide this month purchased Nightly Business Report, a staple of public TV carried five nights a week on 250 stations, talks about how his years as an instructional television distributor gave him a strong sense of public broadcasting values. ¶ He talks about how he’ll use that background to develop an educational outreach using the show to teach real-world financial responsibility. He talks of his plans to bring NBR to international audiences. ¶ What he doesn’t want to discuss are more than 20 lawsuits from 1999 through 2010 filed in San Diego County Superior Court against him or his companies — including five alleging breach of contract.

Quick Takes

New “Local Show” on KCPT highlights work of area nonprofits

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KCPT in Kansas City, Mo., has launched a monthly pubaffairs show in the midst of struggling with funding and staff cutbacks, reports Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart. The Local Show will spotlight local nonprofits, and then those groups may use the segments as promotional material. The “Difference Makers” features are underwritten by Hallmark’s corporate foundation. Local Show Producer Nick Haines said the greeting-card company “was interested in funding nonprofits to tell their story.” Inspiration for the show was the Minnesota Channel, a 24-hour station created by Twin Cities Public Television, which airs programming that the station creates through a partnership among TPT and nonprofits.

Quick Takes

KIXE GM drops “Democracy Now!,” raising ire of local progressives

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KIXE in Redding, Calif., is “angering progressives” by dropping Democracy Now!, says the local Record Searchlight newspaper. General Manager Philip Smith arrived in July from KLRU in Austin, Texas, where he was oversaw engineering and programming. Smith told the paper he hadn’t seen the show, which airs on more than 850 pubtv and pubradio stations, until he got to the station. “If it were properly couched as a progressive informational or opinion show … that would be OK,” Smith said.

Quick Takes

Nightly Business Report gets new owner

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A company headed by “a former manager of mixed martial artists” has purchased Nightly Business Report, according to the New York Times. Mykalai Kontilai told the paper that the deal was completed Aug. 13 and the staff was informed today (Aug. 18). Kontilai’s partner in the venture is Gary Ferrell, a former president and chief executive of North Texas Public Broadcasting, parent company of KERA in Dallas.

Quick Takes

Former pubcaster headed up jury in Blagojevich trial

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A former videotape librarian for pubstation WTTW in Chicago was the jury foreman in the high-profile corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. James Matsumoto, 66, told the local NBC affiliate that deliberations were “frustrating” and “exhausting,” and that he knew from early on that the jury would have trouble reaching a unanimous verdict. On Tuesday (Aug. 17) that verdict came down: Guilty on one count of lying to the FBI, hung jury on 23 other counts. Matsumoto worked at WTTW from December 1978 to October 2006, according to the station.

Quick Takes

City joins other Green Bay groups assisting WPT with LZ Lambeau budget overrun

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The city council of Green Bay, Wisc., voted 10-2 on Tuesday (Aug. 17) to waive $10,000 of its $48,000 bill for law enforcement for Wisconsin Public TV’s LZ Lambeau event in May, according to local ABC affiliate WBAY. The outreach event, a belated “welcome home” to Vietnam veterans, drew some 70,000 vets and supporters to Lambeau Field (Current, June 7, 2010). The Packers NFL team, the Chamber of Commerce and Brown County also have pledged contributions to assist the station, which ran $350,000 over budget for the $1 million event.

Quick Takes

Rice students object to KTRU sale

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Rice University students have launched a “sincere and civil” protest to block the sale of their campus radio station KRTU to the University of Houston, the Houston Chronicle reports. “We are totally opposed to the sale,” KTRU p.d. Joey Yang tells the newspaper. “This is our radio station, and we’d like to keep it.” The UH Board of Regents approved the $9.5 million purchase yesterday, but the FCC must also approve the license transfer. UH plans to expand its public broadcasting operations by converting KRTU into a classical music service broadcasting on 91.7 as KUHC; KUHF on 88.7 FM, the hybrid-format NPR station that it put on the air in 1950 with student volunteers, is to devote its schedule to news.

Quick Takes

UNC-TV intended to fight doc request, e-mails show; reporter no longer on staff

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WUNC-FM reporter Laura Leslie in Chapel Hill, N.C., continues to doggedly pursue the perpetually breaking news story on UNC-TV’s Alcoa coverage controversy (Current, July 26). The Raleigh station was widely criticized for turning over reporter Eszter Vajda’s notes and unbroadcast footage from her story on Alcoa’s bid to re-license four dams. Leslie reveals that internal UNC-TV e-mails show that station management did not want to comply with the lawmakers’ request. “They fully intended to fight it on journalistic grounds,” she writes in her station blog. “But they got no backing on that from UNC President [Erskine] Bowles, from board members, or from the AG’s office, where they sought legal expertise.” Also, Vajda’s producing partner Martin Sansone told WFAE in Charlotte that he took $3,000 from an Alcoa opponent for airfare to fly from his home in Britain to assist Vajda.

Quick Takes

Stevens funeral streaming live today

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The funeral for former Sen. Ted Stevens, a strong champion for pubcasting on Capitol Hill, will be streamed live today (Aug. 18) at 2 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time (6 p.m. Eastern) on several pubstations, including KTOO via its 360 North statewide channel. Stevens died Aug. 9 in a plane crash. KFSK in Petersburg, Alaska, has an audio segment online about Stevens’ importance to pubcasting, particularly in that state.

Quick Takes

A new home for NPR’s Local News Initiative

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Public Radio Program Directors will take over the NPR-backed Local News Initiative (LNI) and Morning Edition Grad School (MEGS) projects, a four-year national effort to provide training, conduct research and promote best practices in public radio newsrooms. Research and information resources developed through the projects since 2006 will be integrated into PRPD.org, and PRPD is planning a series of webinars based on the MEGS workshop findings. LNI began with the 2006 PRPD study, “A Sense of Place,” focus group research that examined how listeners valued the local news produced by their public radio stations. Morning Edition Grad School, a series of workshops and toolkits for enhancing local presentation of public radio’s most important national program, was the biggest of several projects aimed at improving local news. PRPD plans to create new workshops that will serve the needs of more stations; it’s also exploring how to adapt MEGS principles for music-formatted stations. “PRPD embraces this opportunity to extend the system’s knowledge resources and work to continue advancing skills and audience understanding at the station level,” said Arthur Cohen, PRPD president.

Quick Takes

APTS selects Spencer Stuart to conduct search for president

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The Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) announced today (Aug. 18) that it has hired executive search firm Spencer Stuart to find its new president and chief executive officer, a position Larry Sidman vacated in April (Current, March 14, 2010). Co-chairs of the APTS Board search committee are Polly Anderson, general manager and CEO of of KNME-TV in Albuquerque, N.M.; and Elizabeth Christopherson, president, CEO and director of the Rita Allen Foundation in Princeton, N.J. Lonna Thompson continues as APTS interim president and CEO.

Quick Takes

Fundraiser aims to save “Style Wars” film, a 1984 graffiti doc on PBS

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The Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting a Sept. 9 restoration fundraiser for a historic graffiti/hip-hop documentary that aired on PBS in 1984. “Style Wars” is widely regarded as the first doc to focus on the cultural genres. “Nearly 25 years since it first stunned viewers, the film’s negative stock is beginning to decay,” reports the HipHopDX website. The event will feature three screenings of the film, a question and answer session with filmmaker Henry Chalfant, a catered reception and — of course — hip-hop beats courtesy of DJ Kay Slay on the turntables.

Quick Takes

StoryCorps animated shorts debut on POV tonight

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A new animated series debuts on PBS this evening–short adaptations of audio recordings collected by StoryCorps, the oral history project and NPR series created by public radio producer David Isay. POV, the indie film series now airing its 23rd season on PBS, will present Danny and Annie, Parts I and II, the stories of love and loss of Brooklyn couple Danny and Annie Perasa, who came to personify the StoryCorps motto, “listening is an act of love.” The animation will be paired with Salt, an “exquisite film about environment, artistry and solitude” by Australian photographer Murray Fredericks. The CPB-backed animated shorts, the first of five to be showcased on POV through Sept. 7, were created by Mike and Tim Rauch, brothers who began animating StoryCorps audio stories before presenting their ideas to Isay.

Quick Takes

Get your Wookie on in Alaska

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Got plans for Aug. 28? You might drop by Juneau, Alaska, for KXLL’s “Star Wars” party. It’s the latest event sponsored by the funky, eclectic pubcasting station that attracts an 18- to 34-year-old audience, said Bill Legere, g.m. of KTOO. It picked up KXLL (“Excellent Radio”) and another station “in a fire sale” three years ago (Current, Feb.

Quick Takes

Houston’s KUHF pursuing dual-service strategy with purchase of KTRU

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Houston’s KUHF-FM plans to buy KTRU 91.7 FM, a 50,000-watt student radio station owned by Rice University, and convert it to a full-time classical music service under the new call letters KUHC, the Houston Chronicle reports. KUHF, a broadcast service of the University of Houston that now airs classical music and NPR News on 88.7, will become an all-news station. The $9.5 million deal, approved this morning by UH’s Board of Regents, is to be financed by enhanced underwriting and major gifts fundraising. “The acquisition of a second public radio station delivers on our promise to keep the University of Houston at the forefront of creating strong cultural, educational and artistic opportunities that benefit students and the city of Houston,” said Renu Khator, chancellor of the UH System and president of the University of Houston, in a news release. Rice University students campaigned to save the station, which has long been an outlet for underground and local music, according to the Houston Press.