Quick Takes

“Big Uneasy” over NPR’s response to Shearer film

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Was NPR’s decision not to devote more airtime to Harry Shearer’s documentary on New Orleans–even if it was paid for as underwriting–a case of censorship, quibbling over credit language, or fainthearted journalistic commitment to covering problems with the levy system constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers? All three theories played out over the blogosphere after Shearer wrote for the Huffington Post about his difficulties in getting NPR’s newsmagazines to report on his documentary The Big Uneasy and in placing underwriting spots promoting its Aug. 30 debut. “NPR has decided its initials stand for nothing,” Shearer wrote, taking a jab at the network’s recent decision to abbreviate its name on-air. “What the network itself stands for at this moment sounds a lot like censorship.”NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard looked into Shearer’s complaints last week and found that his desire to promote himself from a guest on Talk of the Nation to Morning Edition or All Things Considered, the NPR shows with the biggest audiences, were misguided–and complaining about it in the Huffington Post was disingenuous.

Quick Takes

University cancels ag doc to ensure it’s “scientifically sound”; was to air on TPT

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The decision by the University of Minnesota to cancel broadcast of the documentary “Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story,” continues to generate controversy. The film, exploring agricultural pollution and possible solutions, had been set to air on Twin Cities Public Television on Oct. 5. The story was broken by the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a local news site.University News Service director Daniel Wolter told the Daily Planet that the Bell Museum is responsible for halting the release. That’s part of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, and where the film was to premiere on Oct.

Programs/Content

At the Movies returns in 2011 with new cast, Ebert producing

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Renowned movie critic Roger Ebert, who literally owns the trademarked thumbs-up/thumbs-down gesture, is returning to public TV, where he started his on-air career 35 years ago. Starting in January, Ebert will produce the weekly show Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and do a monologue for each episode. The balcony front-row reviewers will be Christy Lemire of The Associated Press and Elvis Mitchell of The Treatment on KCRW with additional opinions from movie bloggers Kim Morgan and Omar Moore. Ebert said he’d known Lemire and Mitchell for some time. “Kim and Omar I met online and admired.”

The show will be distributed through American Public Television.

Quick Takes

HoustonPBS selects Torres-Burd as executive content director

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Patricia Torres-Burd is the new executive director of content at HoustonPBS/KUHT, the licensee announced today (Sept. 20). She will develop and coordinate local, national and international content initiatives across multiple platforms. She previously worked as g.m. at Locke Bryan Productions, a film and video company. Between 1995 and 2008 she was with several international broadcasting ventures including Latin America Broadcasting and RTV B92 in Serbia. She also previously worked at the station as unit director and series producer from 1991 to 1995.

Quick Takes

Management deal a likely outcome for WBFO in Buffalo

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Two Buffalo pubradio licensees may be moving toward a licensee management agreement under which independent nonprofit WNED would operate the university-owned WBFO, the licensees announced Sept. 15. SUNY’s University at Buffalo, which owns the stronger news station, WBFO, “is committed to remaining as the license-holder for WBFO and its repeater stations,” according to the joint statement. But the university also wants to reduce its contribution to operating costs. When its station manager took another job last fall, the university didn’t hire a permanent successor.

Quick Takes

Search is on for new NPR ombudsman

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NPR is looking for a new ombudsman, reports the Ombuds Blog (“News and Information For and About Organizational Ombuds”). The blog says it’s “one of the most high-profile News Ombuds in the U.S., and not the type of position for which there is often a public search.” Current Ombudsman Alicia Shepard was appointed in October 2007 for a three-year term. Think you have what it takes to explain the network and its news-gathering issues to the public? Click here for more information and to apply.

About Current

What readers say about Current, 2010

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Here’s a piece of unfinished business: reporting back the results of Current’s reader survey taken at the start of the year, with thanks to those of you who responded. We delayed mostly because of the shortage of space in recent issues and not because the results were ugly. Indeed, 72 percent of respondents rated Current “quite useful” or “extremely useful” in their work. In my work, Current and current.org are this useful:
Extremely useful: 31 percent
Quite: 41
Somewhat: 24
Not very: 4
Not at all: 1
Readers also rated Current high in fairness, accuracy, readability and other qualities, as you’ll see in the chart below. It was especially gratifying to see that 93 percent of respondents rated us “good” or “excellent” in fairness.

Programs/Content

Thinking outside the core

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While our audience stereotypes may be better informed than they were 40 years ago, they can blind us to our potential for growth and change, with equally dangerous consequences. Today there are many indicators that we have room for audience growth on radio if only we expand our view of the potential.

Quick Takes

Former Florida pubcaster now heads International Broadcasting Bureau

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The U.S. Senate on Thursday (Sept. 16) confirmed Dick Lobo, former c.e.o. of WEDU in Tampa, Fla., as director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, reports the St. Petersburg Times. He’ll oversee Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which includes Radio and TV Marti; he ran the Cuba office in 1994 and ’95 under President Bill Clinton. The International Broadcasting Bureau is part of the larger Broadcasting Board of Governors, which distributes programs in 59 languages (check out Alhurra Television, serving 22 countries in the Middle East).

Quick Takes

Kling supports net neutrality in letter to FCC

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In a five-page letter Thursday (Sept. 16), outgoing Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media founder Bill Kling advises the FCC to ensure a “reasonable cost structure” and redirect Universal Service Funds (currently subsidizing phone access) “toward investment and innovation” for public broadband, reports MinnPost.com’s David Brauer. Kling, who announced his retirement Sept. 10, predicts that “public media’s largest audiences in 10 years will be in automobiles with mobile Internet ‘radios.’ … As the 2011 model cars emerge with mobile Internet ‘radios,’ ISPs and device manufacturers are moving demand from broadcast to wireless broadband.”Kling also suggests that the FCC require ISPs that develop private broadband networks “carry all relevant applications and programming from Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) qualified public service media organizations at no cost to the content producer.”

Quick Takes

Kachingle update: Not much to report

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Remember Kachingle (Current, Nov. 23, 2009)? Seven months ago when the online micropayment service launched it was touted as a potential savior for cash-hungry online news entities. But Columbia Journalism Review checks in and doesn’t find a lot of money Kachingling around. The Kachingle medallions are on about 300 sites but none are major news organizations.

Quick Takes

NJN, legislature unsure of strategy for network departure, paper says

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Hearings continue on the fate of the New Jersey Network. A 10-member panel heard testimony Thursday (Sept. 16) at Stockton College in Pomona on a proposal to cut all state funding to the New Jersey Network’s public radio and television and spin it off as an independent entity. “But after the second of three hearings, it was clear that neither lawmakers nor NJN executives had a solid strategy about turning the broadcaster into a money-maker,” writes the the Press of Atlantic City. At the meeting, Janice Selinger, acting exec director of NJN, said the network assumed that the legislature and governor would come up with a plan.

Quick Takes

PBS needs to run American-made fiction programming, writer says

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Where’s the quality American dramas and comedies on PBS? That’s what writer David Pierotti is wondering in the latest Independent online mag of indie production. He admits there is indeed fiction on PBS, but “it all comes with an accent. Every show references ‘queues,’ ‘lorries,’ ‘bobbies,’ ‘bangers,’ ‘blokes” and ‘bollocks.'” Why, he asks, “must the public station of the United States of America rely upon Britain’s hand-me-downs like some destitute street urchin?”He also has a few suggestions, including PBS creating, say, a Law & Order: Pittsburgh. “Why can’t a community entertain its audience while supporting, encouraging and facilitating the development of local talent?”Pierotti said he’s not asking for a “dumbing down” or “injection of crassness” into PBS, “but rather an expansion of its identity.

Quick Takes

President announces STEM Video Game Challenge, co-sponsored by Cooney Center

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A competition co-sponsored by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop was announced by President Obama today (Sept. 16) at the White House, according to a press release from the center. The National STEM Video Game Challenge is part of the administration’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign. The contest aims to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) via students’ passion for playing and making video games. “I applaud partners in the National STEM Video Game Challenge for lending their resources, expertise, and their enthusiasm to the task of strengthening America’s leadership in the 21st century by improving education in science, technology, engineering and math,” the president said.

Quick Takes

Lost in space? Check out pubcasting network’s online geospatial project

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Penn State Public Broadcasting’s interesting online series, “The Geospatial Revolution Project,” went online Wednesday (Sept. 15) to explore how geospatial information transforms lives. As the site says: “Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community.” The first of the four episodes focuses on how the technology aided first responders during the Haitian earthquake relief efforts.

Quick Takes

Public Media Corps uses Cool Spots as hot spots for Wi-Fi and data

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Public Media Corps (PMC), the New Media Institute’s initiative to extend broadband adoption into underserved communities, has been plugging along since its launch in June in Washington, D.C., reports the MediaShift blog. The 15 fellows and their institutional partners are working in four neighborhoods of predominantly African American, Latino and immigrant communities. Part of the effort focuses on “Cool Spots,” or mobile Internet access hubs, said Jacquie Jones, executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium, which is overseeing the work. “The fellows set up [Cool Spots] at block parties, festivals and outdoor markets and events where the public uses netbooks onsite to complete online surveys and learn more about the PMC,” she said. “The Cool Spots are also ‘hot spots’ with free Wi-Fi to promote broadband use.”

Quick Takes

HistoryMakers heading back to school for its 10th anniversary

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The HistoryMakers, the largest archive of African-American recorded interviews in the world — many airing as PBS specials — is celebrating its 10th anniversary by partnering with schools nationwide. Starting Friday (Sept. 17) dozens of personalities included in the interview archives will be visiting their former classrooms to discuss their lives and stress the importance of education. Participants include former U.S. Senator and Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, returning to her Paul Robeson High School; former Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes, speaking at the former school that was renamed for him and his brother, Carl and Louis Stokes High School; and actress Marla Gibbs (“The Jeffersons”) going to Angela Mesa Elementary School in Los Angeles. In all, HistoryMakers will be speaking in 25 states and 50 cities.

Quick Takes

Brand’s new show from L.A. bows on Monday

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A new morning newsmagazine will debut on Pasadena’s KPCC on Monday (Sept. 20) –The Madeleine Brand Show, airing weekdays at 9 a.m. Brand, a former NPR correspondent and Day to Day co-host, will helm a one-hour program that covers news “using story-telling techniques familiar to radio listeners, but mixed together in a new way,” according to a news release. The show team includes Kristen Muller, who joined KPCC from CBS; Sanden Totten, previously a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio’s In the Loop; and, Steve Proffitt, who was senior producer on Day to Day, one of two Los Angeles-based programs that NPR canceled last year. Producers plan to cover a mix of hard news and lifestyle topics: politics, business, food, art & culture, entertainment, popular culture and parenting.

Quick Takes

Phoenix pubTV debate clip gets nearly 2 million hits on YouTube

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The opening of a KAET gubernatorial debate earlier this month — in which current Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer repeatedly stumbles over her words and then simply stops speaking — is approaching 2 million hits on YouTube. KAET g.m. Kelly McCullough told Current that someone saw the debate, posted the minute-long portion on YouTube, local TV stations took note, then CNN, MSNBC and Fox followed. By that time the clip was the fourth most-watched on YouTube, and McCullough was hearing from folks as far away as London. “It’s a good example of the multimedia nature of the world,” as McCullough noted. The Sept.