Quick Takes

PBS.org’s LulzSec attackers post hints to their motives

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LulzSec, the shadowy, mischievous hackers that launched a high-profile attack against PBS.org over Memorial Day weekend (Current, June 13), posted a statement Friday (June 17) explaining their motives and claiming they have access to far more secret information than they’ve revealed.”Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked?,” the statement says. “We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off? You are a peon to these people.

Quick Takes

Nic Harcourt moving from KCRW to KCSN

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Triple-A music veteran Nic Harcourt is joining KCSN 88.5 FM at California State University, Northridge, the school announced Friday (June 17). Harcourt has spent 12 years a KCRW/Los Angeles, 10 as music director and host of the influential Morning Becomes Eclectic program. He was the first broadcaster to webcast in video live in-studio sessions and the first pubradio host to take the show on the road with live broadcasts from events in New York, Austin, Vancouver and London, the announcement notes. “Many artists, including Adele, Coldplay and Norah Jones, have credited Harcourt for putting them on the map and helping them achieve stardom,” it adds.”Change is good,” Harcourt said. “I’m truly excited about the opportunity to work with the team at KCSN as they build a dynamic new music format for Los Angeles.” Harcourt will begin as a weekend host in mid-July, and also contribute daily commentary on new artists.The station recently hired Sky Daniels, another Triple-A powerhouse, as the new p.d. Daniels helped develop KFOG in San Francisco and has programmed stations including WLUP in Chicago, KISW in Seattle and KMET in Los Angeles.

Quick Takes

Meanwhile, on Norwegian pubTV . . .

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In a unique live broadcast that began Thursday (June 16), viewers of public television’s NRK2 in Norway can watch all 8,040 minutes of the Hurtigruten MMS Nordnorge cruise ship and its roughly 670 passengers and crew as the vessel steams north along Norway’s jagged coastline, reports Reuters. Coverage includes all on-board announcements and views from 11 cameras focusing on fjords, boat traffic around the ship, officers on the bridge and passengers strolling the decks. “It is slow, it is very slow,” said Rune Moeklebust, the project manager for the show. Moeklebust said 1.3 million of Norway’s 4.9 million residents at least were “stopping by” NRK2 between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. on the first day.

Quick Takes

Attention, producers: New NEH guidelines are up

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New application guidelines have just been posted for the Division of Public Programs on the National Endowment for the Humanities website for “America’s Media Makers: Development and Production” grants. One upcoming deadline is June 29, for “Bridging Cultures through Film: International Topics.” The division funds radio, television, and digital projects in the humanities intended for public audiences.

Quick Takes

Seltzer leaves WBEZ to head SAG Foundation

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Jill Seltzer, former head of institutional advancement for WBEZ/Chicago Public Media, is the new president of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation. Seltzer told the Hollywood Reporter that her background dovetailed well with her new position. “The job is a mixture of fundraising, program delivery and management,” she said. The foundation is a separate entity from the guild and is responsible for its own fundraising. The organization serves actors, through targeted outreach, and the general public, through literacy programs in public schools, hospitals and shelters.

Quick Takes

WDUQ staffers lose jobs as of June 30

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As part of a deal finalized Thursday (June 16), the 20 full- and part-time employees of WDUQ FM in Pittsburgh are terminated effective June 30, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports. Duquesne University is turning over control of the station to Essential Public Media, a joint venture between WYEP-FM and Public Media Co. (a new subsidiary of Public Radio Capital). Two employees, interim General Manager Fred Serino and Business Manager Vicky Rumpf, will remain through the transition.

Quick Takes

Sesame Street in Tanzania sponsors malaria outreach campaign

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The First Lady of Tanzania, Salma Kikwete, launched Kilimani Sesame’s Malaria Education Outreach Campaign today (June 16) in the East African country. The campaign includes four malaria prevention public service announcements for TV and radio in Swahili, as well as nearly 16,000 storybooks to be distributed to primary schools nationwide. Children got to hear Kikwete read the book titled Chandarua Salama (“The Safe Net”) at offices of Wanawake Na Maendeleo (WAMA) in Dar es Salaam, a charity headed by the First Lady. The storybook, printed in Swahili and English, follows Muppet friends Lulu, Neno and Kami as they go through their bedtime routine and learn the importance of sleeping under a bed net to prevent the mosquito-borne illness.

Quick Takes

#MuckReads a new “experiment in social aggregation” for ProPublica

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ProPublica has launched the Twitter stream #MuckReads, a way for readers, reporters and editors to share public-service news stories. The nonprofit investigative news org calls it the next evolution of its Investigations Elsewhere roundup.”#MuckReads is an experiment in social aggregation,” ProPublica said in on its site. “The feature as you see it is just the beginning. We’ve got big plans for feature upgrades and integration with Facebook, but first we want to see what works and what needs more tinkering.”

Quick Takes

News 21 project expands to include all journalism schools

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News 21, a journalism education project launched in 2005 at five j-schools, will be available to all journalism and mass communications programs in the country thanks to $3.9 million in new support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the two announced today (June 15). The support brings the total initiative to $19.7 million. It will be administered by Arizona State University. The expansion comes after an independent evaluation found the initiative has “already helped transform” curricula and is getting more students news jobs “at a critical juncture in the industry’s history,” the statement said.In the News 21 program, journalism students get fellowships to do investigative reporting overseen by professors and distributed through partner media outlets. One examined racial integration in California prisons, and produced this fascinating interactive map showing how various racial groups gather in sections of the yard at Folsom State Prison.

Quick Takes

FCC report picks up on AIR’s push for airtime, funding for radio indies

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The FCC’s latest report “The Information Needs of Communities” may be long on verbiage and short on remedies, but it does offer some key insights for independent producers, public media analyst Jessica Clark writes for the Association for Independents in Radio’s MQ2 blog.Public broadcasters’ expansion onto online and mobile platforms, as well as the explosion of nonprofit media outlets, creates new opportunities and more competition in many arenas, Clark writes.She points to a key FCC recommendation that policy makers reconsider which types of media deserve CPB aid. “[T]his report does not explicitly recommend additional funding for public broadcasting,” Clark writes, “However, it does recommend CPB funding requirements be reconsidered so that it’s easier for new kinds of projects and outlets to receive federal dollars.”The report directly cites AIR’s advocacy on behalf of indies, Clark notes, including adoption of local content rules requiring noncommercial stations to present “new voices” and independently produced work. AIR argued for an “intervention on behalf of independent radio producers” comparable to the legislation that established the Independent Television Service in 1988, according to the report.

Quick Takes

Radio Bilingüe announces suspension of LA>Forward, LAPM initiatives

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Fresno, Calif., broadcaster Radio Bilingüe has suspended the LA>Forward and Los Angeles Public Media projects “for the foreseeable future,” it announced Wednesday (June 15). “Radio Bilingüe’s efforts to secure a radio broadcast outlet in Los Angeles for LAPM have proven unsuccessful, while federal funding cuts to CPB’s digital appropriation are precluding the agency from assuring support to LAPM in the coming years,” the statement said. With backing from CPB, work began two years ago to develop and test programming for a new multiplatform public media outlet targeting young, educated minority listeners in Los Angeles (Current, July 20, 2009).

Quick Takes

MinnPost, Voice of San Diego get very little web traffic, report reveals

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MinnPost and Voice of San Diego — two online nonprofit news outlets often held up as models for the future of local news coverage — actually receive scant web traffic, according to a new report, “Less of the Same: The Lack of Local News on the Internet” (PDF). The study was commissioned by the FCC as part of its quadrennial review of broadcast ownership regulations. The author is Matthew Hindman, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. (Details on the 11 FCC studies here.)Hindman used comScore panel data tracking 250,000 Internet users across more than a million Web domains, focusing specifically on online local news within the top 100 U.S. television markets during February, March and April 2011. “The breadth and the market‐level granularity of the comScore data makes this study one of the first comprehensive looks at of Internet‐based local news,” Hindman notes.Out of the 1,074 online local news sources in the study identifies, only 17 are “genuinely new media outlets,” he writes, rather than online homes of established print or broadcast media.

Quick Takes

City Council drops idea for new Chattanooga Channel

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The City Council in Chattanooga, Tenn., has voted down a plan to contribute $275,000 to WTCI/Tennessee Valley PBS to launch a Chattanooga Channel, reports the Chattanoogan. Paul Grove, WTCI president, had proposed that all City Council meetings, including committees, would be aired live and streamed on a website. Grove said the channel would bring new “access and transparency” to city government. Councilwoman Pam Ladd said the channel “is a wonderful idea,” but not a priority at this time. The council will pay WTCI $60,000 to continue televising its meetings; the county is dropping that spending.

Quick Takes

WMFE pubradio safe, “hugely viable,” trustee president says

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Despite WMFE’s dire warnings to the FCC about its financial stability, trustees chairman Bob Showalter said the Orlando, Fla., station will not fail because the radio presence remains strong. “90.7 is hugely viable,” he told the Orlando Sentinel Tuesday (June 14). “Things are not dire at 90.7.” He said trustees plan on putting the $3 million from the pending TV sale in a quasi-endowment, spending the dividends on 90.7 and increasing local news coverage.

Quick Takes

BBC working on live reporting app

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The BBC is developing an app for its reporters in the field to file video, still photos and audio directly into the BBC system from an iPhone or iPad, according to Journalism.co.uk. “Reporters have been using smart phones for a while now but it was never good quality,” said Martin Turner, head of operations for newsgathering. “You might do it when there was a really important story. Now it is beginning to be a realistic possibility to use iPhones and other devices for live reporting, and in the end if you’ve got someone on the scene then you want to be able to use them. That capability is a really important one.”

Quick Takes

Assessing the value of college radio in Nashville

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What is lost when a city’s college radio station is sold and converted to a public radio outlet? It’s a question that free-form radio fans are asking with increasing frequency as student-operated FMs drop off the left end of the dial.In Nashville, where Vanderbilt University’s WRVU ended its nearly 60-year run as an FM station last week, radio audiences gained a full-time classical music service from the city’s NPR News station, WPLN. But WRVU’s fans and advocates lamented the sudden loss of a station that essentially operated as a community radio outlet. WRVU was “one of the only venues for Nashville artists of all stripes to get airplay — rappers, punks, headbangers, even blues and bluegrass bands,” the Nashville Scene reported. It also provided a “powerful forum for ideas” in ways that weren’t heard elsewhere on Nashville’s airwaves, according to Freddie O’Connell, a former talk show host who penned a June 11 op-ed for the New York Times.”There’s a false but widespread image of college radio as a pointless, narcissistic exercise — that it’s nothing more than a crew of campus oddballs who like playing D.J., even though no one is listening,” O’Connell wrote.

Quick Takes

Burns “surprised” to be identified as regular contributor to Olbermann’s new show

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Lefty TV talker Keith Olbermann announced last month that PBS documentarian Ken Burns would be a “key contributor” and “regular part” of Olbermann’s new show on Current TV — which surprised Baltimore Sun TV writer David Zurawik. “Yes, I was surprised, too,” Burns told Zurawik in a column today (June 14). “I appeared on Countdown a lot. And he’s been a friend for a long time. And when he moved [to Current TV], I said, ‘Oh, I’ll come and do it [the new show]’.

Quick Takes

Pledge programming will erode pubcasting identity and mission, Fanning says

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David Fanning, executive producer of Frontline, raised his concerns about public broadcasting on-air fundraising while accepting Quinnipiac University’s Fred Friendly First Amendment Award on Tuesday (June 14). An excerpt:”Where once stations were lead by broadcasters and educators who believed deeply in the mission of public broadcasting, now as money gets tighter a new generation of leaders comes in, brought in by worried board members who almost inevitably turn to the person in charge of fundraising to help manage the station.”With that comes programming choices that are safer, and the pursuit of audience for the sake of audience, and membership for the dollars. Why do we find it necessary to attract members with pledge programming that has nothing to do with our core programs? This is our deepest embarrassment, especially for public television. I have heard the arguments, and I understand the imperatives for local stations, but to have created such a schizophrenic programming strategy is not just misguided, but will ultimately erode our identity and our mission.”

Quick Takes

Nine pubradio outlets win national Murrows from RTDNA

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NPR, Vermont Public Radio, and Austin’s KUT led public radio news outlets in National Edward R. Murrow Awards announced today by the Radio and Television Digital News Association.NPR won Murrows in four categories of the radio network/syndication division; VPR bested small-market radio stations in three categories; and, KUT won two trophies in the competition among large-market stations.Four additional pubradio outlets — Michigan Radio; KUNC in Greeley, Colo.; WSHU in Fairfield, Conn.; and WITF in Harrisburg, Pa. — won Murrows in news reporting categories. WBUR.org, a leading pubradio website published by Boston’s WBUR, took the national Murrow for news websites in the large-market radio division.Joining NPR in the Murrow-winning radio network/syndicators division was Public Radio International for an installment of This American Life.National Murrow winners are selected from those honored during RTDNA regional contests, announced this spring.