Quick Takes

New first for NPR’s Andy Carvin: the Twitter interview

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“[W]hat could be more dull than two Twitter geeks with their heads buried in their laptops as the interview subject patiently waits for us to type?” writes NPR’s Andy Carvin in this detailed account of his May 19 Twitter interview with Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser and author of the speech that President Obama delivered on U.S. policy on the Middle East. The ground-breaking interview may have been visually dull to those who watched it on video stream, but the tactics that Carvin used to solicit and ask questions, and NPR’s rationale for allowing him to accept the White House’s invitation to host the chat, turned out to be of great interest to Twitter heads and journalists.

Quick Takes

WTF, an insider’s emotional journey through world of comedy, comes to public radio

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WTF with Marc Maron, a twice-weekly podcast that regularly ranks among iTunes’ most popular, has been adapted for public radio broadcast. The 10-episode series features startlingly honest conversations between Maron and top comedians and entertainers, including Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien and Louis C.K.Maron launched the podcast during a dark time in his life — in fall 2009, when he was in the midst of a divorce and had just lost his job at now-defunct Air America. “I was in a very bad place,” Maron said. “My career was relatively washed up. I was broke.

Quick Takes

WDSC in Daytona may end PBS programming July 1, could close altogether

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WDSC, the PBS affiliate at Daytona State College, is in jeopardy of closing, the local News-Journal is reporting today (May 19), further complicating the already messy pubTV situation in Florida, with WMFE-TV’s sale to a religious broadcaster pending in Orlando (Current, April 18). Administrators say the college has already cut the $250,000 for PBS programming for the next fiscal year and is also struggling to pay $1.5 million overall to run the station.

Quick Takes

Director experiences real Seoul at this year’s INPUT

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“Four jam packed days, dozens of films, discussions, debates, brutal honesty, humor mixed with painfully serious subject matter, and a delirious evening of Korea’s top musical acts in an eclectic concert in our honor and broadcast live.” That’s how Judy Erlich, director of the critically acclaimed Most Dangerous Man in America doc, describes the recent pubTV INPUT Festival in Seoul on ITVS’s Beyond the Box blog. “INPUT is all about culture clash and aesthetic variance,” Erlich writes. “What works in Denmark may be completely inappropriate in Indonesia. The Islamic young woman sitting next to me literally covered her eyes during the opening event, which included a rather explicit sexual how-to sequence.”Overall, “INPUT had real Seoul.”

Quick Takes

Be More Award goes to Masterpiece’s Rebecca Eaton

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ORLANDO — Masterpiece Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton is this year’s “Be More” Award recipient. Eaton has increased the icon show’s audience by 54 percent over last year, and was named one of Time magazine’s 2011 100 most influential people in the world. During the presentation at its national meeting here, PBS President Paula Kerger said Eaton “has committed herself to the highest standards of excellence and artistic expression for public broadcasting and has shepherded in a new generation of loyal viewers.” Previous recipients include docmaker Ken Burns, Sesame Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney, newsmen Jim Lehrer and Bill Moyers and children’s champion Fred Rogers.

Quick Takes

NewsHour’s O’Brien to conduct live Space Shuttle interview

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PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien will conduct a live interview with Commander Mark Kelly and the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour at 6 a.m. Eastern Thursday (May 19). Questions are coming from the public via YouTube, Twitter and Google’s Moderator service. So far 2,254 people have submitted 1,839 questions and cast 13,421 votes for which to ask. The interview will run live on the NewsHour’s website and YouTube channel. Inquiring minds (well, at least one Current reporter) want to know: Will O’Brien ask, ahem, that infamous question, whether astronauts fool around in space?

Quick Takes

KCET plans on-air fundraiser for Japan disaster relief

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KCET in Los Angeles has received a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission to air a live pledge show for Japan earthquake and tsunami relief. A spokesperson for the FCC said about a dozen such waivers have been granted.The fundraiser is from 8 to 11 p.m. Pacific May 24. It will feature guests from the Japanese-American community including actor George Takei, and a pre-taped interview with Gene Otani, lead anchor for Newsline, NHK’s weeknight English-language newscast. Also, on May 18, Otani will answer live questions via Ustream moderated by KCET’s editor-in-chief of blogs Zach Behrens that will run on KCET.org and KCET’s Facebook page during the 3 p.m. Pacific hour.The station is working with the U.S.-Japan Council to allocate all money raised during the pledge to relief organizations in Japan including the Japan Platform and the Center for Public Resource Development.

Quick Takes

PBS Digital Learning Library graduates into larger LearningMedia

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ORLANDO — PBS and WGBH today announced PBS LearningMedia, the next generation of the PBS Digital Learning Library. It’ll be a digital media platform to “help re-imagine classroom learning, transform teaching, and more creatively engage students,” the network said in a statement. “Digital media content – so pervasive in the lives of children – has the potential to dramatically change the way students learn and participate in a global society,” PBS President Paula Kerger said. Including content from more than 55 member stations, independent producers and public institution partners, the first phase of development will combine existing infrastructure models from the PBS Digital Learning Library (formerly EDCAR) with local services from WGBH’s Teachers’ Domain and its partners, WNET/New York and Kentucky Educational Television (KET). PBS LearningMedia will be offered in two tiers from local member stations: a free version available to every teacher, and a premium service with features such as bulk registrations, analytics, integration with assessments, and credit-bearing professional development courses.

Quick Takes

Education Department approves $27.3 million for Ready to Learn

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Ready to Learn is safe. On Monday (May 16) the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS expressed appreciation to Congress and the U.S. Department of Education for providing $27.3 million in continued funding for the initiative, which helps public television stations develop educational resources on-air, online and on the ground that provide young children – especially those from low-income backgrounds – with fundamental reading and math skills. The project was endangered in recent budget rounds.

Quick Takes

Australian newspaper hits back at ad breaks inserted into “PBS NewsHour” Down Under

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ORLANDO — PBS’s intention to insert underwriting spots into programming on a test basis beginning this fall, creating major buzz at its National Meeting here this week, comes just as an Australian newspaper is editorializing against new commercial breaks in PBS NewsHour on that country’s SBS network. Those interruptions, which began earlier this month, prompted The Australian to write, “Not only is NewsHour now being interrupted with totally inappropriate advertising, but SBS appears to be amateurishly clipping its editorial segments in order to accommodate the ads.” The paper also called NewsHour SBS’s “most valuable program.”

Education/Engagement

New mindset requires new habits: listen, earn trust, partner-up

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The professionals who work to engage public media groups in their communities are still learning what it takes. In a series of articles, associates of the Wisconsin-based National Center for Media Engagement will lay out what they’ve learned. Executive Director Charles Meyer begins the series. I’ve always been blessed with a fast metabolism. Sadly, I’ve reached an age at which my metabolism has decided to slow things down.

Quick Takes

Surprise! Another GOP governor wants to eliminate state pubcasting funds

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A proposal by Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) to zero-out nearly $2 million in annual funding for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network prompted hearings in the statehouse today. Citizens who testified before the Senate appropriations committee overwhelmingly opposed the measure. According to local news accounts, LePage’s proposal surprised even top Republican lawmakers when it landed last week.The governor is offering to restore public funding of gubernatorial campaigns, which he targeted in an earlier version of the two-year budget, by completely eliminating MPBN’s annual subsidy. The Times Record of Brunswick, which published an op-ed today slamming the governor’s trade-off, describes it as a “double-dare: Squawk too much about my MPBN cut and I’ll simply go back to Plan A and reinstate my proposed Clean Elections funding cut.”LePage has had a contentious relationship with MPBN, but he says he’s trying to balance the budget, not settle old scores, according to Maine’s Capitol News Service, which provides news to MPBN.MPBN officials were also shocked by the proposal, and say they don’t yet know what services or programs would be canceled if the governor’s proposal is enacted. “My focus right now, my total energy, is on making sure we don’t lose that money,” Jim Dowe, MPBN president, told the Portland Press Herald.

Quick Takes

PBS previews new primetime architecture for PTPA in Orlando

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Programmers got a look at PBS’s new fall primetime architecture at the Public Television Programmers Association meeting taking place today (May 16) in Orlando, Fla., just before the PBS National Meeting.PBS’s John Wilson, s.v.p and chief programmer, and Shawn Halford, senior director of program scheduling, said the changes are taking place to better serve viewers looking for similar shows, build a larger potential membership base, create a stronger selling proposition for audience-focused underwriters and better leverage marketing and promotion.Schedule changes include transitioning Nature from Sundays to Wednesdays, moving Frontline later on Tuesdays after December pledge and shifting Independent Lens and P.O.V. from Tuesdays to Thursdays. Beginning this winter, Sunday evenings will bring specials in first hour of prime, an Antiques Roadshow spinoff (still to be announced) in the second hour, and the Roadshow in hour three.One item of discussion: PBS is shifting underwriting and station breaks from on-the-hour to several minutes into the program to pull audience along between shows. But won’t that undermine one of the core values of PBS, the uninterrupted programs? Beth Walsh, senior director of PBS research, is crunching data from dial tests and focus groups held just last week, programmers were told, so more will be known once those numbers are out. A subcommittee of the PBS Board is working on how all the changes will affect common carriage.

System/Policy

Making the most of what PBS can do

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PBS’s budget for next year reflects a harsh reality: Revenues from member stations are flat for a third straight year, and scant other income opportunities lie ahead. The all-important annual program budget, as projected for fiscal year 2012, will remain at about $200 million, where it’s been stalled for a decade. For the first time in the past five years, there will be no new children’s series. The News and Public Affairs Initiative is on hold. PBS is retooling its primetime schedule to attract more viewers and underwriters and negotiating to push down program production costs per hour.

Programs/Content

Launch postponed for PBSnews.org

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PBS has postponed the rollout of an online news aggregation site called PBSnews.org that it had planned to start in January or February. … Plans for the news site had grown out of the PBS News and Public Affairs Initiative and a report filed almost two years ago by Tom Bettag, a network news veteran …

Development

With projects on hold, PBS hunts spendable cash, tweaks primetime schedule

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Don’t tell the county fire marshal, but the president of PBS keeps working while her staff evacuates the building in deference to a fire alarm. Kerger travels, meets future donors, smiles dazzlingly at galas, and works some more with the determination of a distance runner, which she is.Here she tells readers:

PBS will propose hot-switching station breaks to help build audience flow, though the new practice would make it hard for stations to slide programs around the schedule,
The network needs to raise immediately spendable money, though she wants it to start accumulating an endowment,
Why PBS didn’t promise Bill Moyers a slot on Friday night in particular. Kerger spoke with Current editors in her conference room at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va. The transcript is edited. Current: The proposed PBS budget for next year makes a point of concentrating attention on primetime.

Programs/Content
Malone on mic

Radio joins local probes, ruffles local feathers

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WLRN Radio and the Miami Herald have been collaborating on multiplatform news production for eight years, but the investigative-reporting package that they published this month, “Neglected to Death,” took their partnership to a new level. The package of radio reports by WLRN’s Kenny Malone and articles by Herald reporters grew out of a year-long computer-assisted reporting project that revealed systemic failings in the regulation of Florida’s assisted-living facilities. Over several months, Malone followed up on the Herald investigative team’s findings of incidents of negligence and abuse to produce two character-driven radio features, the first of which aired locally and on NPR’s Morning Edition. Malone’s first piece focused on the case of Aurora Navas, an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient and facility resident who wandered outdoors one night without supervision and drowned in 18 inches of water. It was one of many accidental deaths for which Florida regulators failed to probe or prosecute.

Jim Lehrer

Lehrer hands off anchor role to reporting team

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Jim Lehrer, who has reported the news of the day for more than 50 years, became part of it May 12 when he announced that he will step away from the weeknight anchor desk at PBS NewsHour in June. A big Washington Post story the next day, dominating the feature section, lauded him as “one of America’s most respected newsmen.” It estimated that come June 6, when Lehrer cuts back to once-weekly appearances, he will have anchored some 8,000 broadcasts “and a few zillion newsmaker interviews.”

This week (May 19) Lehrer turns 77. “I feel good about this,” Lehrer told Current May 13. “I thought I might have second thoughts, but no. This was my idea, I planned it, I worked out a way to do it.” That planning began about three years ago, Lehrer says.

Quick Takes

It’s in the New York Times, it must be true: Keillor is indeed leaving PHC

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OK, it’s really, truly, finally official: A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor is indeed retiring. That’s what he tells the New York Times, anyway. “In order to have some say about this and in order to maneuver this, I should do this sooner rather than later,” he says in today’s (May 13) story. “One should not wait for the very last minute, when one has become a pitiful hulk shambling on and off stage exciting the sympathy of the audience. I don’t want to come to that point.” When Keillor told the AARP Bulletin in March that he was leaving, Minnesota Public Radio chief Bill Kling, who brought Prairie Home into national distribution, downplayed the announcement as a publicity stunt.

Quick Takes

WFCR takes new name: New England Public Radio

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Western Massachusetts broadcaster WFCR-FM has adopted a new name — one that seems to speak of ongoing expansion: New England Public Radio. CEO Martin Miller announced the plans at a station event Wednesday night. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the station announced it has arranged to buy new quarters in downtown Springfield, south of its longtime home in Amherst, and has bought a new FM frequency in the Berkshire Mountains town of Adams, northwest of Amherst. The news and classical music station, licensed to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, added a second program schedule, all-news/talk, on a leased station in the 1990s and in October acquired WNNZ-AM for the schedule. By building translators in addition, one or both of its program streams now span from southern Vermont to northern Connecticut, New Hampshire to Albany, N.Y. Where it may encounter competition from another growing regional public radio franchise, Northeast Public Radio (WAMC).