One year ago, on Dec. 10, 2009, Curtis Monk had a heart attack. Monk, president of Commonwealth Public Broadcasting, which operates Virginia’s Community Idea Stations, doesn’t remember anything about that day after his wife called 911. But his rescuers, paramedic Julie Anderson and emergency medical technician Desirée Myers, spent the year wondering how he was doing: They had to shock his heart three times to bring it back to life, and soon after turned Monk over to the hospital. On the anniversary of his rescue, the Richmond (Va.) Ambulance Authority reunited Monk and his lifesavers, as part of an employee appreciation day.
KCET in Los Angeles, going independent of PBS membership on Jan. 1, 2011, has announced its lineup. Pubcasting programmers have been waiting to see how the station will fill its schedule without longtime PBS staples like Frontline, Masterpiece and Antiques Roadshow.According to the station, KCET will have a “new on-air look” and organized “themed viewing blocks” to make it easier for viewers to find shows. On primetime:Sunday: Hollywood movies. First Works looks at how directors approach their craft.
The good news: 2011 promises to be a big year for 4G, with new mobile devices hitting the marketplace, and networks upgrading. The bad news: While many industry players remain enthusiastic, few will see much 4G revenue in 2011. That’s the outlook from the Yankee Group, the Boston-based tech research and consulting firm.Among its 21 specific predictions:— Mobile users will flock to the simplicity and savings of hotspots, which will reduce 4G subscriptions in the long run.— Mobile video won’t be “the killer 4G app” everyone is expecting. Consumers will spend more time with music services like Pandora and Slacker.— In the rush to roll out 4G, operators are cutting corners on security. Yankee thinks that in 2011, a denial-of-service attack will take a 4G network down.
The New Jersey Network, which Gov. Chris Christie wants to cut from the state coffers, could be heading to a new steward, Richard Stockton College. College President Hermann Saatkamp has asked the governor to make NJN part of a college nonprofit managed as a broadcast and radio operation in conjunction with a group of state colleges. The station would be administered through Stockton’s 501c3 organization. The college has been home to WLFR-FM since 1984. The proposal could keep NJN on television and the radio into next year, when budget cuts were expected to end programming (Current, July 6).
What if PBS NewsHour had been approached by WikiLeaks with its raw, secret diplomatic cables? How would the news staff have handled the material? On Nov. 29, the cache of documents was given to journalists at the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Le Monde (the New York Times also received the data, via the Guardian).That was one question for Hari Sreenivasan, online and on-air correspondent with the show, in today’s (Dec. 9) online Reddit chat marking the one-year anniversary of its revamp (Current, Jan.
Barrett Golding, indie curator of NPR’s Hearing Voices, on Tuesday (Dec. 7) was named a USA Rasmuson Fellow by United States Artists. He is one of 52 artists receiving $50,000 each from the grant-making and advocacy organization. Winners include “cutting-edge experimenters and traditional practitioners from the fields of architecture and design, crafts and traditional arts, dance, literature, film and media, music, theater arts, and visual arts,” the group said. The fellows were announced at a celebration Wednesday night at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.
The New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority — whose future is set to be debated yet again today (Dec. 9) in Trenton — has approved two long-term lease agreements, hopeful that the New Jersey Network will remain in the state after it is cut loose from state funding (Current, July 6). So far interested buyers include WNET/Thirteen and WNYC in New York City and Philadelphia-based WHYY. The Senate State Government Committee is expected to discuss today disbanding the authority and could consider a bill to give control of NJN’s future to a bi-partisan committee of legislators.
Nonprofits remain upset with Apple’s ongoing ban on making donations on the iPhone through charity apps. Donors are directed out of a nonprofit’s app and to its own website, making the process of contributing more cumbersome.CPB and the Public Radio Exchange met about three years ago with Eddy Cue, the Apple exec in charge of iTunes, which handles the App Store. “We heard there were really serious internal discussions about this at Apple after that, but we haven’t gotten any traction,” Jake Shapiro, executive director of PRX, told the New York Times in a story Wednesday (Dec. 8).“One of Apple’s major objections,” he said, “has been that if donations were to go through its payment mechanism, it would have to be in the business of managing and distributing funds and verifying charities as well.” PRX has developed iPhone apps for pubradio stations and programs. Shapiro told the paper that the apps had the potential to become a “core revenue source” for the organizations.An online petition protesting the ban has nearly 2,000 signatures as of Thursday morning.Current reported in March that public broadcasters who have tried raising funds from mobile givers via texting have met with very limited success.
The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) and Independent Television Service (ITVS) have teamed up to survey the field of independent journalists who have been paid or commissioned to produce reporting for public radio, TV or digital platforms within the past two years. The Scan of Public Media’s Independent Journalists, to be conducted by MarketTrends Research through Dec. 31, was commissioned by CPB to provide a more complete picture of the journalistic capacity of the field. It complements findings of the census of public radio and television journalists conducted this summer by Public Radio News Directors, Inc. This survey seeks insights about formats and distribution outlets for indie media makers, as well as their sources of income outside of public media. “The scan is part of a larger-capacity building initiative of AIR funded by CPB and designed to help the organization develop a strategy for a) sustaining AIR’s core programs and b) [determining] how the talents of independent producers can best be directed to build/strengthen the public media industry,” AIR explains on its FAQ.
Veteran Chicago newsman and former Vocalo writer Robert Feder has joined Time Out Chicago, a weekly cultural magazine, as media critic. Feder left Vocalo in November, just as the blogs were moving from an independent site to WBEZ’s online home.
The new chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee is Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). That’s good news for pubcasters, because also in the running was Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), who favors halting all federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Rogers, on the other hand, voted in June 2005 to restore $100 million for CPB. And earlier that year, when Kentucky Educational Television reached out to him, Rogers helped raise awareness of public broadcasting’s role in public safety efforts, culminating in a partnership between APTS and the Department of Homeland Security/FEMA on the Digital Emergency Alert System (DEAS).
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), sponsor of a bill to defund CPB, has asked the Government Accountability Office to audit CPB and NPR funding. Two Texas congressman sent a similar letter to the independent investigative agency on Nov. 18, singling out NPR.In a Tuesday (Dec. 7) press release, Lamborn said that “it is imperative that an accurate and complete snapshot of CPB’s use of taxpayer funding be available to lawmakers and the public. Unfortunately,” he said, “the charts, figures, statistics and documents posted on these entities’ websites — and often cited in the news media — do not sufficiently account for the complicated revenue streams between and within these entities. Efforts by Congressional staff, including the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), to contact CPB and NPR for clarification in this regard have been frustrating and limited in success.”NPR’s Anna Christopher told Current: “This is a surprising claim, as NPR quickly and respectfully responded to each and every CRS inquiry.
WBUR in Boston has a new general manager. Charles Kravetz, longtime news and programming director of New England Cable News, is stepping into the position to be vacated by Paul La Camera on Jan. 1, 2011. Upon arriving at the new cable channel in 1992, Kravetz assembled a news operation from scratch. Within five months he supervised the building of a newsroom, hired 90 staffers and started 24-hour programming.
A white paper on the future of public media warns that the field must step up its public advocacy and structural reforms if it is to meet the news and information needs of local communities and citizens.”Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” by veteran news exec Barbara Cochran, follows up on the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, October 2009. That report challenged public broadcasting to “move quickly toward a broader vision of public service media,” one that is “more local, more inclusive and more interactive.”Although policymakers and philanthropic organizations must do many things to support the field’s transition to digital public media, Cochran writes, public broadcasters themselves must demonstrate their commitment to change and make a bold, compelling and united case for it.”There is universal agreement that funding sources — whether government, philanthropic or corporate — will not provide more money to support the status quo,” Cochran writes. “Many recognize that some of the funds now going to public media could be redirected for greater efficiency and less duplication. Some believe public media missed an opportunity to bring new ideas to the table when the FCC’s national broadband plan was under discussion.”Cochran endorses the dramatic journalistic expansion proposed by public radio, including local newsgathering, and calls for public television to develop a new strategy to enhance its news output and community engagement. But she challenges the field to redirect its resources from “outmoded broadcasting infrastructure and duplication of service to building digital capacity.”
Alyce Myatt, a programmer and former producer who has experience with foundations, PBS and production, is the new director of media arts for the National Endowment for the Arts. She starts work Jan. 3 as head of NEA’s grantmaking in film, video, audio, web and other electronic media. Myatt served as PBS’s director of children’s programming, an e.p. for Children’s Television Workshop and Nickelodeon, as a grantmaker for the MacArthur Foundation and, most recently, as executive director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media, an association of foundations interested in media. She succeeds Ted Libbey, the NPR music commentator and now PBS arts advisor, who took the NEA job in 2002. Last year NEA laid out $8 million for media-arts projects.
KLRU in Austin, Texas, has set the stage (literally) for what it calls a “world-class celebration” to unveil its new Austin City Limits theater. The big event is Feb. 24, 2011, and rocker Steve Miller and his band will do the honors. A new Austin city skyline backdrop will also be revealed — fans of the show know what a big deal that is. The move has been several years in the planning (Current, July 20, 2009) and will provide the iconic music show with a 2,500-seat auditorium (up from its present 250) in a $300 million downtown redevelopment (as opposed to its nearly hidden studio on the University of Texas campus).
Calling it a “first-of-its-kind agreement,” the Washington Post is reporting today (Dec. 7) that noncom Pacifica Radio is adding the Middle East-based news channel Al Jazeera English to its five outlets nationwide. Stations in New York, Houston and Berkeley, Calif., will begin to carry the audio portion of Al Jazeera’s TV news broadcast this week; Los Angeles and Washington will do so next year. Pacifica is the first American radio broadcaster to air programming from AJE, the English-language offshoot of the Arabic-language Al Jazeera network. Read the Pacifica press release here.Houston NBC affiliate KPRC/Local 2 shot a segment this morning at Pacifica’s KPFT.
Four ITVS films were honored last week (Dec. 3) at the IDI Documentary Awards ceremonies, presented by by the International Documentary Association: “Waste Land,” which received the IDA Pare Lorentz Award; “For Once in My Life,” for music documentary; “Bhutto,” the ABC News VideoSource Award; and “The Oath,” the IDI Humanitas Award. Watch clips here.
Hollywood’s The Wrap eyeballs the overall public broadcasting picture — “Massive budget shortfalls, vicious in-fighting and a power shift in Washington” — and predicts even more dire times ahead. Congressional champions are few, it says, and the incoming GOP members are even more anti-pubcasting than during the mid-1990s, when CPB was nearly extinguished. “These people are more conservative to the point where the only media they see as legitimate is Fox, and everything else is unreliable,” says Raphael Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton.And just how relevant is public broadcasting? “All media is being asked to reinvent itself — and that includes public media,”says Tom Glaisyer, a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation. “Their heart is and should be in producing quality public media, but there’s been a lack of comfort with making the kind of argument in favor of what they offer that needs to be made.”Read Current’s analysis of the situation here.
PBS documentarian Ken Burns has some strong opinions about reality television — and all are negative. In an interview for a Kansas City Star series on the subject, he tells TV critic Aaron Barnhart: “The nomenclature is what’s infuriating to me. This is not reality. Nobody proposes or dates or checks people out in front of millions of people. The notion that this is reality is beyond the pale.