Quick Takes

Vegas PBS inundated with media credential requests for debate

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Vegas PBS is Ground Zero for one of the most anticipated debates in the nation this election season: Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) vs. GOP candidate Sharron Angle. It’s their only face-off during the campaign. The station is approaching 85 requests for media credentials from the major networks (CNN, FOX News and MSNBC) as well as reporters from as far away as Japan, Germany, Netherlands,  England and France. The Thursday (Oct.

Quick Takes

WFCR secures AM outlet for its news expansion

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Massachusetts station WFCR is buying WNNZ, a 50,000-watt outlet on 640 AM, and converting it into noncommercial operation, the WFCR Foundation announced today. WFCR began programming NPR news and talk on WNNZ in 2007 under contract with Clear Channel Communications. The $600,000 purchase, to be initially financed through a four-year loan from Public Radio Capital, secures the AM outlet for WFCR’s expanding news and information service. In August, the Amherst-based pubcaster acquired another channel for news — WNNZ-FM, a 100-watt station on 91.7 MHz that was previously operated by prep-school students of the Deerfield Academy.

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“Think twice” before attending Oct. 30 rallies, Schiller tells NPR staffers

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In a memo to NPR employees today (Oct. 13) posted on the Poynter Online Romenesko journalism blog, President Vivian Schiller cautioned staffers against participation in the dueling rallies on the National Mall planned for Oct. 30 by Comedy Central’s faux-news pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. ” … [N]o matter where you work at NPR you should be very mindful that you represent the organization and its news coverage in the eyes of your friends, neighbors and others,” she said in the memo, which was attached to a copy of NPR’s News Ethics guidelines.

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CPB’s Harrison expects pubmedia news coverage to “gore people’s oxen”

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In an interview with the St. Louis Beacon, the nonprof news site partnering with St. Louis’s KETC, CPB President Pat Harrison makes a strongly worded case for the corporation’s involvement in funding news coverage. “My job is to invest in high quality journalism and let the chips fall where they may,” Harrison said. “I don’t even have to like it; I just have to make sure it gets funded.

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LA Times TV critic ponders KCET’s fundraising future without PBS shows

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“KCET is dead; long live KCET,” writes Los Angeles Times TV Critic Robert Lloyd in today’s (Oct. 13) column. He’s adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the station’s departure from PBS as of Jan. 1, 2011. “If, as the station has claimed, the economic downturn had made it difficult for KCET to raise the money PBS demanded from it, will it be any easier, without the lure of an Antiques Roadshow or American Masters, to raise the money to realize this unrevealed new vision?”

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President appoints “Takeaway,” Sesame Workshop contributor to financial board

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President Barack Obama today (Oct. 13) announced his choice for appointments to several administration posts. Included is Beth Kobliner, to serve as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability. The financial expert has a regular segment on public radio’s The Takeaway and is a content adviser to Sesame Workshop’s upcoming Financial Education Initiative, a bilingual outreach program to promote financial literacy in very young children. Here’s a video interview of Kobliner at last year’s TV Critics Press Tour, discussing her participation in the doc “Your Life, Your Money,” which ran on PBS in April 2009.

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Is an independent KCET an innovative concept, or doomed to failure?

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Here’s an interesting exchange on the future of soon-indie KCET between Doc Searls, head of Project VRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and John Proffitt, longtime public broadcaster and pubmedia analyst. “KCET has some faith — or at least a good idea — that Whatever Comes Next will be good enough for lots of people to watch,” Searls writes on his blog. ” … Dumping PBS was a brave move by KCET. They deserve congratulations for it.”

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Kling reveals his plan for regional news expansion

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Just what does Minnesota Public Radio’s Bill Kling have in mind for the regional news initiative announced last month as his next act? A $100 million expansion of newsgathering capacity at public radio stations in four to six major markets, reports Newsonomics blogger Ken Doctor. Minnesota Public Radio and KPCC in Los Angeles, sister stations in Kling’s American Public Media family, are planning an alliance with New York’s WNYC and Chicago’s WBEZ. Each participating station would hire 100 reporters and editors.”That’s ‘public radio’ grown into ‘public media,’ meaning that these news operations would be digital-first, text-heavy and video-ready, while porting over the audio from radio,” Doctor writes. “In other words, not re-purposed ‘radio’ news, but the kind of standalone, multi-platform news operations we’re starting to see, as with TBD in Washington, D.C.”Kling hinted at the regional initiative last month when announcing his plans to retire and during a speech at the Aspen Institute in August.

Quick Takes

Forty years ago: KPFT bombed off the air twice in its first year

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Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston “was the first radio station in the United States to be bombed off the air” in May 1970, soon after going on the air, recalled Rick Campbell in a Houston Chronicle blog. That October, 40 years ago this month, the station was dynamited into silence a second time during a broadcast of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested; two got off by testifying against Jimmy Dale Hutto, who was convicted and sent to jail. He allegedly planned to bomb the Pacifica stations in Berkeley and Los Angeles. When the station resumed broadcasting in January 1971, PBS’s Great American Dream Machine covered the event live. “Outside this room, people are celebrating free speech,” said station manager Larry Lee on PBS, “and something is wrong when free speech is a cause for celebration, and there are armed police out there guarding us.” Guthrie wrote a song for the occasion, including these lyrics: “When I get to Houston, pull out my strings, walk to the station, you can hear me sing — you get bombed, all God’s chillun get bombed.”

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How to use video games for more than fun

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“Gaming for the Greater Good” is the intriguing title of the Wednesday (Oct. 13) webinar from the National Center for Media Engagement. Learn how video games can do much more than entertain. Online will be Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges, research fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop; Felix Brandon, general manager of MoneyIsland, an online financial literacy game; and Alexa Belajac, director of education and community engagement at WYEP-FM. Register here.

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First Core Publisher news site explores upstate New York economy

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The first Core Publisher news site from Public Interactive is up and running to “rave reviews” from sponsoring station WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., according to the Core blog. Innovation Trail is a collaboration among WXXI and four other upstate New York stations: WNED in Buffalo, WRVO in Oswego, WSKG in Bringhamton, and WMHT in Schenectady. The CPB-funded site focuses on the area economy. The blog says this is the “alpha version” of the website.

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NPR study oversimplifies barriers to audience growth, Sutton says

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NPR’s latest audience study provides good insights for promotion, marketing and multi-platform service strategies, but its recommendation that NPR adopt a less formal presentation style “is an over-simplification that public radio cannot afford to accept,” writes John Sutton, Maryland-based public radio marketing consultant, on his blog. Many programming changes over the past decade have moved public radio to a more conversational style that’s accessible to a broader audience–from host changes at Morning Edition, launch of Public Radio International’s The Takeaway, to the reinvention of economics reporting by This American Life and Planet Money, he notes. “Yet the latest research once again shows that public radio’s elite and highbrow sound remains a barrier to growth. Changing hosts and presentation style hasn’t changed the perception. Public radio’s audience has grown despite the perception among non-listeners that it is elite and highbrow.

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Radio K at University of Minnesota loses CPB funding

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CPB has cut $50,000 in funding from the University of Minnesota’s Radio K due to low ratings, reports the school’s Minnesota Daily newspaper. Radio K marketing director Alex Gaterud told the paper that the station gets about five times that much from student services fees, but it will still feel the loss. “In any public radio or public broadcasting setting, that’s a huge hit,” Gaterud said. “We’re confident we can deliver [an] excellent product continuously, but we’re still looking to fill that gap.” The ratings were gathered via Arbitron’s Portable People Meters, which have been controversial in the past for producing much lower numbers than the previously used listener diaries (Current, Sept. 21, 2009).

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Ron Hull, still busy in pubcasting after 55 years

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Here’s a tribute to public broadcasting at its best, through the experiences of longtime Nebraska Educational Television programmer Ron Hull, who just turned 80. Although Hull has come and gone from the station a few times, “he never really went away,” the local Journal Star noted. He’s now senior adviser to NET and professor emeritus of broadcasting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and reports for work in his fourth-floor office at 6:30 every morning. “This place I love,” he said — even after 55 years.

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Knight News Challenge introduces new categories

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The Knight Foundation announced four new categories for its next Knight News Challenge: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. Details at Knightblog and Neiman Labs. The window for entries opens Oct. 25 and closes Dec. 1.

Quick Takes

Days after KCET’s withdrawal from PBS, surprise and confusion

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Although it had been negotiating with KCET for nearly a year over a dues disagreement, PBS was taken aback with the Oct. 8 announcement that the station was dropping its membership. “How quickly it happened was a surprise,” PBS President Paula Kerger said in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday (Oct. 10).The decision left confusion in its wake. KOCE President Mel Rogers says it has to “ramp up in a hurry” to assume primary station status.

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KOCE will step up to primary status in L.A. area, president Mel Rogers says

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KOCE in Huntington Beach, Calif., will assume primary PBS station responsibilities in the Los Angeles area when KCET severs its ties with PBS, writes station president Mel Rogers in a short note on the KOCE website. Rogers also called area PBS affiliates KLCS and KVCR its “partner stations.” He said the three will work together “to ensure all PBS shows are not only available, but are easy to find for our viewers.” Those stations, along with KCET, have been discussing a four-way partnership in an attempt to solve the tricky overlap situation in the L.A. market (Current, Aug. 5).

Quick Takes

KCET to drop PBS membership Jan. 1

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KCET, public television’s major station in the nation’s second-largest media market, is dropping its PBS membership as of Jan. 1, 2011, station President Al Jerome told Current Friday (Oct. 8). The Los Angeles station will be the largest independent pubcaster in America. Jerome said he and Gordon Bava, chairman of KCET’s board of directors, came to the decision “very recently.” Jerome told his staff at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Friday, and also informed PBS that afternoon. The station had petitioned the PBS board for a dues reduction or a shift to PDP (Program Differentiation Plan) status but was rebuffed (Current, Aug.

Quick Takes

WTIU’s ‘Friday Zone,’ a rare local kids’ show on pubTV, returns for 11th season

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The 11th season of what may be the only locally produced kids’ show on public TV premieres today (Oct. 8) on WTIU in Bloomington, Ind. The Friday Zone is a weekly program for children ages 8 to 11 with guests, projects and on-location segments — the Thanksgiving edition includes a trip to an orchard and corn maze. Co-hosts are Indiana University students Emily Fergason, a junior, who returns from last season; and newcomer Taylor Crousore, a sophomore. The show won a regional Emmy last year.