Current (https://current.org/2011/04/page/2/)
The Broadcasting Board of Governors has elected David Ensor, former NPR reporter, as the new director of Voice of America (VOA). Ensor’s more than 30-year career includes reporting for the All Things Considered team in the 1970s, along with a winning a National Headliner award. He’s been director of communications and public diplomacy for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, since January 2010 and will join VOA in June.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of American Public Media’s The Splendid Table, will now also contribute to the Huffington Post. She’ll write a weekly question-and-answer column for readers looking for culinary advice.
Bill McCarter, president and g.m. of WTTW/Channel 11 in Chicago for 27 years before retiring in 1998, died of complications from cancer Thursday (April 21). He was 81.Dan Schmidt, who succeeded McCarter as president and c.e.o. of Window to the World Communications, told his staff in an email Friday: “Bill left an indelible mark on WTTW, WFMT and public media nationally,” according to Chicago media columnist Robert Feder.Before joining WTTW, McCarter ran WETA-TV in Washington, D.C., and was chairman of the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS). He also spent time at WHYY in Philadelphia and WNET in New York. McCarter was an early advocate of private funding for stations. He created Washington Week in Review and The McLaughlin Group, and was a prime mover behind Sneak Previews, the first national showcase for movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, and Soundstage. During his tenure, WTTW and classical music WFMT-FM (98.7) won 12 George Foster Peabody Awards, five DuPont Columbia Journalism Awards, and 150 regional Emmy Awards.McCarter began his career at WFIL in Philadelphia, where he worked with Dick Clark on American Bandstand, according to an obituary from WTTW.
KQED is offering quite the thank-you gift to listeners: A Pledge-Free Stream. Beginning today (April 21), fans who donate at least $45 online before May 5 will receive access to a special programming stream to listen to KQED Public Radio on a computer or smartphone without interruption for the duration of the May fund drive.”This is, we hope, only a step toward alternative funding models that generate significant donor revenue and enable uninterrupted access to great programming,” Donald Derheim, station c.o.o., said in a statement. “We’re hopeful that what KQED does here in the Bay Area will spread everywhere to the benefit of public radio listeners around the world.”KQED’s innovations in fundraising — audience memberships, pledge nights, and televised auctions — date to the 1950s. The first-ever on-air public broadcasting auction, on KQED in 1955, featured civic leaders, physicist Edward Teller and stripper Tempest Storm (Current, Feb. 3, 1997).The new Pledge-Free Stream will be a second stream of KQED Public Radio with all regular programming including live news reports (except for traffic updates).
Vivian Schiller may no longer be president of NPR, but that isn’t stopping her from making news with her views on public radio. “You are now competing in the big leagues and are no longer the scrappy underdog,” she said, addressing her remarks to former colleagues during a speech at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center Wednesday (April 20). “You must become your own disruptors. If you don’t aggressively reach out to new audiences on new platforms, someone else will. There is no such thing as lasting media loyalty, especially in this age of media promiscuity.” She also said public radio needs to “let go of the nostalgia” of the craft.
Craig Gilbert, who created TV’s original reality series, An American Family, on WNET and PBS in 1973, said the experience “was pretty damn tumultuous, and I don’t want to go over it anymore.” But luckily for New Yorker readers he does, in the mag’s current issue. He’s displeased with HBO’s upcoming Cinema Verite, which dramatizes the making of the controversial 12-part program focusing on the Loud family. “If you are given the assignment to write a two-hour film that exposes the making of An American Family, the only avenue to take is that the producer is corrupt,” Gilbert says.The memory of a call from Pat Loud still stings. She was hurt by public reaction to her family — one critic called the family “affluent zombies.””Pat was screaming,” Gilbert says. “She’d taken a below-the-belt hit, and it hurt.
TIME magazine has selected its Top 100 most influential people in the world, and it includes Masterpiece Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton. Her tribute is written by actress Gillian Anderson, who appeared in Any Human Heart on the pubcasting series. “As Masterpiece, still on a publicly funded network, celebrates this remarkable [40-year] anniversary, we Americans are fortunate to have Rebecca at the helm: someone committed to bringing great television drama to the widest possible audience, week after week,” Anderson writes. Among Eaton’s fellow honorees on the 2011 list: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Facebook c.e.o. Mark Zuckerberg, and Britain’s Prince William and his fiancee, Kate Middleton.
A Georgia judge whose sentencing practices were scrutinized in “Very Tough Love,” a recent edition of This American Life, has threatened to sue host Ira Glass and his public radio program for libel.The March 25 episode examined the drug court administered by Superior Court Judge Amanda Williams for Georgia’s Glynn, Camden and Wayne counties through the stories of three offenders who participated in the rehabilitation program, including a young woman who attempted suicide after Williams sentenced her to indefinite detention in solitary confinement. Glass contrasted the punitive sanctions that Williams imposed with national guidelines for drug court programs, concluding that the judge’s approach is unduly harsh.But a lawyer representing Williams has challenged the facts behind Glass’s reporting, in both a 14-page letter threatening a lawsuit and a press release describing the story as malicious and Glass as an “admitted character assassin.””I do not admit to being a character assassin,” Glass wrote in response to Mercer University Law School Professor David Oedel, Williams’ attorney. “Also: I am not a character assassin….My story was about how this particular drug court, run by Judge Williams, is not run like other drug courts. Nothing in Judge Williams’ and Mr. Oedel’s press release and letter contradicts that.” TAL posted a clarification and correction to the original story, but is standing resolutely behind its reporting, armed with its own set of attorneys.”Our clients’ broadcast and related web publication are the product of intensive investigative journalism and, consistent with Mr. Glass’s reputation, represent fair, accurate and unbiased reporting,” wrote Michael Conway of Foley & Lardner, the Chicago-based firm representing Glass.
KERA in Dallas is eliminating six staff positions and ending its Think television production this week, the station announced today (April 20). (The radio version of the show, Think with Krys Boyd, continues on KERA-FM.) Mary Anne Alhadeff, KERA president, said in a statement that the organization has had a balanced budget for six consecutive years, “and it is important that continues.”“The position reductions and the ending of Think TV are part of an ongoing management process to remain fiscally responsible and to move the organization forward in an ever-changing media landscape,” Alhadeff said. The statement cited uncertainty over federal public broadcasting funding for fiscal year 2012, which comes up for debate soon on Capitol Hill. CPB provides $1.8 million to the dual licensee, or about 11 percent of its operating budget.
Jon McTaggart, chief operating officer of American Public Media Group, parent company of Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media. will take charge as c.e.o. July 1. McTaggart was unanimously chosen by the board today (April 20) to succeed founder Bill Kling. See Current’s story.
Andrew Sussman is the new executive producer of PRI’s The World, Public Radio International announced today (April 20). He’ll supervise all on-air and online components of the show, and lead the staff at headquarters in Boston as well as its London bureau. Sussman, senior program producer, has been with the show since its inception in 1995. He’s also been a manager at the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, an editor at the English-language daily Moscow Times and a host and reporter for Radio France’s European bureau.
Better funding to public television and radio is one of Newton Minow’s six goals for the next 50 years in American telecommunications. In this month’s Atlantic, the former Federal Communications Commission and PBS chairman reflects back over the half-century since he called television programming a “vast wasteland,” in a speech on May 9, 1961, to the National Association of Broadcasters (audio and transcript here).”The ‘vast wasteland’ was a metaphor for a particular time in our nation’s communications history, and to my surprise it became part of the American lexicon,” he writes. “It has come to identify me. My daughters threaten to engrave on my tombstone: On to a Vaster Wasteland. But those were not the two words I intended to be remembered.
Lynn Allen of Boise, Idaho, a former longtime employee of Idaho Public Television, died unexpectedly March 28 on vacation in Mexico, after a sudden illness. She was 68.In recent years, Allen coordinated the Independent Television Service’s Community Cinema program in the state for IdahoPTV. Boise, Idaho, was the launch city six years ago for the outreach, now the largest engagement initiative in pubcasting with 100 markets nationwide screening Independent Lens features and hosting discussions. ITVS compiled a short tribute video about Allen here.Allen arrived at IdahoPTV in 1980 shortly before it became a statewide system. She worked four years as administrative assistant to the general manager before assuming duties as the system’s first personnel manager.
The FCC rejected a petition to block the license transfer of Rice University’s student-operated radio station KTRU-FM, clearing the way for the controversial $9.5 million sale to close later this month. The University of Houston’s KUHF will take over the college station’s 91.7 MHz frequency and launch a full-time classical music service under the call letters KUHC.Friends of KTRU, a group of students, alumni and other supporters who mounted spirited protests of the sale last summer, took its challenge all the way to the FCC. But, in a decision released April 15, the commission dismissed the Friends’ petition, which objected to the transfer as a set back for broadcast localism and diversity in noncommercial educational radio.”The decision shows a lack of commitment on the part of the FCC to its own public statements regarding the importance of localism and diversity in American broadcast media,” Friends of KTRU said in a statement.Rice students will be giving up their analog broadcast channel, but not their station. They will continue to program KTRU as an Internet radio station and HD Radio channel of Pacifica’s KPFT in Houston, broadcasting on 90.1-HD2 FM.Classical KUHC will originate from KUHF’s studios on campus and should launch within the next month, according to Richard Bonnin, U-Houston spokesman.Radio Survivor published a detailed analysis of the FCC decision.
The original Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, the critically acclaimed 1987 documentary on PBS, will be preserved with a $550,000 donation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Washington University in St. Louis Library announced today (April 19). The four-year grant will support work to copy the images from acetate-based film, highly susceptible to decay, to a more stable, polyester-based film. Included in the project are the documentary’s complete, unedited interviews. The original film and interview footage were donated to the University Libraries in 2001 as part of the Henry Hampton Collection, one of the largest archives of civil rights media in the United States.
ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, reporters who collaborated with This American Life and NPR’s “Planet Money” to report on the 2008 financial meltdown, received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Their award-winning coverage began with an in-depth story on the hedge fund Magnetar, which became the basis of This American Life’s “Inside Job” episode. ProPublica acknowledged its public radio partners in a statement today: “Jesse and Jake’s work was greatly augmented by partnerships with public radio’s “Planet Money” and This American Life. While radio reporting is not eligible for the Pulitzer, we want to acknowledge a great debt to, and celebrate our partnership with, Adam Davidson and Ira Glass and their teams.”
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the sale of WDUQ in Pittsburgh was delayed after negotiations over the asset purchase agreement extended beyond the 90-day deadline announced in January. Susan Harmon of the Public Media Company, the offshoot of Public Radio Capital that formed a partnership with Pittsburgh’s WYEP-FM to buy WDUQ, said the contract should be signed within days. “There was one clarification that needed to happen on Friday,” April 15, the day of the deadline, Harmon said, and the lawyer who needed to weigh in wasn’t available.Departing WDUQ G.M. Scott Hanley moved on ahead of schedule, signing on April 1 as communications chief for the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. In a farewell to colleagues after 30 years in pubradio, Hanley wrote about the leadership challenges ahead:”Over the past decade, there was great fretting about how NPR was not a digital company – that people of our experience and age could only ‘speak digital with an accent,'” Hanley wrote. “I think the greater concern is having leadership that is not fully immersed in the values and vision of NPR and public media.
This year, St. Patrick’s Day was the deadline for pubcasters to ask Uncle Sam for help replacing their ancient, failing transmitters, or for a broadcast starter-set to put a new station on the air. It was also one of those days when Congress lurched toward its budget compromise — and took back the offer. Gone is the 49-year-old Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, a $20-million line item in the Department of Commerce, which had been saved year after year by supporters in Congress. This time they were too busy saving PTFP’s younger and bigger sibling, CPB.
Since launching an NPR news and local talk format on WGBH 89.7 FM in late 2009, the pubcaster has gained listenership at the expense of WBUR, Boston’s dominant NPR News franchise, according to the Boston Globe. The audience shifts during the weekday noon timeslots — when WGBH’s locally focused Emily Rooney Show goes up against WBUR’s national Here and Now — suggest that ‘GBH’s gains have come at ‘BUR’s loss, Emerson College professor Jack Casey tells the Globe. WGBH also has the advantage of a powerful broadcast signal that reaches far beyond metropolitan Boston, where WBUR’s audience is concentrated.
Martin Busch, the “father of South Dakota Public Broadcasting,” died April 15 at his home in Atchison, Kan. He was 89.Busch started as program director for KUSD-AM in 1954 at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, gradually working his way to director in 1960. Busch oversaw the establishment of KUSD-TV/Channel 2, which went on the air in 1961, the first educational television in the state “and part of his vision that everyone in the state, especially children in schools, should have access to educational programming,” according to the Sioux City Journal. During his tenure, he also participated in the early development of similar state systems regionally, as well as national NPR and PBS.Busch was also well-known for his radio show The Bookshop, which ran from 1956 to 2001. He was a member of the South Dakota Hall of Fame.