Current (https://current.org/2011/07/page/4/)
Applications are now being accepted for the latest round of the New U: News Entrepreneurs Working Through UNITY fellowship, a competitive program funded by the Ford Foundation for journalists of color who want to become entrepreneurs. Participants will attend a “startup camp” in October in Las Vegas, get one-on-one mentoring, and compete to win $10,000 in start-up funding. Fellowship winners will be announced in September.
Nightly Business Report has opened a Phoenix bureau in partnership with Eight, Arizona PBS. Ted Simons, host of the station’s Horizon current-events show, will lead the coverage. NBR now has bureaus in Silicon Valley and Denver, and in May launched a weeknight broadcast on SiriusXM satellite radio. The show was acquired in August 2010 by former educational video salesman Mykalai Kontilai.
Sprout, the children’s TV partnership of Sesame Workshop, PBS, NBC Universal and HIT Entertainment, is launching a multiplatform initiative in August, “Kindness Counts,” to “support the development of empathy in preschoolers,” the channel said in a press release Thursday (July 7). The campaign will include public service announcements, digital and social media components, programming tie-ins and local extensions targeting parents and caregivers of preschoolers on the subject of bullying. Sprout said 83 of parents it surveyed are concerned about their preschoolers potentially being bullied or bullying others.
KEET-TV in Eureka, Calif., one of the smallest stations in the pubTV system, has received two grants for its documentary, J.A. JIVE: Jazz Music in the Japanese American Internment Camps (w.t.), which uses Japanese woodblock animation. The National Park Service selected it as one of 24 projects to get $2.9 million to “preserve and interpret sites where Japanese Americans were confined during World War II.” The hourlong work by local artist Amy Uyeki won $96,465 and was one of three projects cited in a press release from the U.S. Department of the Interior. The documentary also received $22,000 from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program.KEET-TV producers Claire Reynolds and Sam Green are collaborating with Uyeki to tell the stories of former internees who played music in the camps, through interviews and historical footage combined with a 10-minute animated short based on actual events. Uyeki’s parents were both interned with their families at Gila River and Minidoka Internment Camps.
Lawrence Grossman, PBS president from 1976 to 1984, tells the Columbia Journalism Review that the educational roots of public TV stations, as extensions of universities and boards of education, may still hold it back from taking on local news coverage responsibilities. “The idea was to avoid issues that would fragment, or raise hackles,” Grossman says in a cover story. “It had a lot to do, I think, with the educational culture that says our job is not to antagonize anybody or to raise tough issues as part of education. Our job is to make everybody happy.”Only a few public TV stations are experimenting with news, the magazine says. “Others have yet to attract solid funding for their efforts and many of the rest aren’t interested in pursuing more news.
KCET-TV just received a $206,300, two-year grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a new arts series titled ARC, reports the Los Angeles Times. The show will run both on the air and online, where new content will be updated daily. Plans call for 24 episodes a year on TV, fed by four different production units, the paper says, “each assigned to explore a single theme in the arts and produce a five-minute segment for each show.” Juan Devis, KCET’s director of production and program development, will select a collaborator to cover each beat — arts and cultural history, portraits of contemporary voices in the arts, the arts and education, and the politics of the arts. KCET will produce a fifth segment in-house that will tie each episode together.
NPR and the Association of Public Television Stations haven’t yet given up on the Public Telecommunication Facilities Program, which was shut down in April after the federal budget battle (Current, April 18). According to a story on the Radio World website, lobbying efforts to restore PTFP funds are already under way.NPR is asking Congress to approve $20 million for PTFP for fiscal 2012, said Mike Riksen, NPR’s vice president of policy and representation.”Even though the fund is relatively small, it is heavily relied upon by public radio stations to replace equipment that is worn out or antiquated,” he told Radio World. “It has been a big boost to public radio stations and keeping them on the air.”And Patrick Butler, APTS president, told Current in a statement: “APTS and its member stations have been reaching out to key Members of Congress to work with us to restore PTFP funding. This funding is critical to public television and radio infrastructure needs, and there is no other current federal funding source addressing these needs. We’ll continue to press strongly for PTFP funding.”
In an excerpt from NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik’s book Page One: Inside The New York Times and the Future of Journalism, Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen details the lessons learned thus far on the foundation’s ongoing Knight News Challenge grants.”Sometimes we missed a good idea on the first pass,” Ibargüen admits. “Toward the end of one year’s contest process, I asked Gary Kebbel, then program director at Knight, to review a range of rejected applications to make sure we weren’t missing something obvious. He came back with what has become hNews, a project proposed by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to write computer code to address the issue of authenticity of information on the Web. Their team created microformats to identify the source of important elements cited in every news story such as its origin, date and location, and whether it had been corrected. When Gary and I talked about it, I’m not sure whether we were happier to have found a gem of an idea or relieved we hadn’t missed something so obvious.”To date, Knight has awarded $23 million to 56 media innovators chosen from more than 10,000 entries.Folkenflik’s book, just published by Participant Media, is a companion to Andrew Rossi’s documentary on the newspaper.
Baltimore’s WTMD 89.7 FM and Urbanite Magazine teamed up to launch The Great Baltimore Check-In, a web-based city-wide networking game that mixes social media check-ins with tried-and-true radio traditions of trivia quizzes, ticket and CD give-aways and grand prize drawings.The game, linked to participants’ foursquare accounts, is a “cross between a scavenger hunt and city guide,” writes Steve Yasko, WTMD g.m. It’s designed to break-through the social barriers of Baltimore’s often self-contained neighborhoods by encouraging participants to explore landmarks, attractions and businesses that are further beyond their doorstep.The Great Baltimore Check-In is also a source for sponsorship revenues. WTMD and Urbanite are selling underwriting and ad packages to local businesses and planning a series of meet-ups and special events through the end of September, when the contest ends.”I hope this offers a few thoughts on changing the way we think about web income,” Yasko wrote in a July 5 message to public radio colleagues. “The web is not an income source—it’s tool to support and expand those activities we already do in the day to day.”The partners aim to enlist between 3,000 and 5,000 participants during the three-month contest. Within 48 hours of the July 4 launch, 350 active players had registered. Attendees of the Public Radio Program Directors conference, convening in Baltimore Sept.
“We’re past PBS,” KCET President Al Jerome tells the Los Angeles Times in a story posted Monday (July 4). “We’re doing our own thing now. All we have to do is stay to our game plan, and we’re gonna do just fine.”KCET is developing new programs including L.A. Tonight with Roy Firestone, featuring the sportscaster chatting with local subjects; Global Watch, a weekly half-hour foreign affairs show hosted by author Reza Aslan; Live at the Ford, a performing-arts program from the local Ford Amphitheatre; and The Time to Care for elder caregivers. KCET departed PBS membership in January, and WMFE in Orlando did so July 1 as it awaits a decision from the Federal Communications Commission on its sale. “Our system is undergoing a transition as we move from a structure that was largely based in the original analog broadcast model to one that meets the needs of a multi-platform digital world,” PBS President Paula Kerger told the paper.
Mary Jane Wilson, 67, former program director at WKAR-TV in East Lansing, Mich., died June 26. She served as director from 1989 until her retirement in 2006.“Those of us who were lucky enough to have Mary Jane as a friend know that she was the real deal,” said Carrie Corbin, former program manager at WGVU in Kalamazoo, Mich., who called Wilson “a programmer who would do anything for you.”“Many was the time that Mary Jane dropped off a tape at the bus station on Friday afternoon to meet our 6 p.m. broadcast after we had a machine failure,” Corbin said.Wilson began her career as a student employee, then staff member, at Instructional Television at Michigan State University. In 1970 she moved to University of Delaware as a media specialist, and then to media work at the Helene Fuld School of Nursing in New Jersey. She returned to Michigan in 1978 and began working for WKAR-TV.She was born in Windsor, Ontario, the daughter of Peg and Stanley Wilson; the family became U.S. citizens in 1943 when Mary Jane was 3 years old. She graduated from Michigan State with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in radio and television and educational media.Following her retirement from WKAR, Wilson continued to be active at the station, volunteering for auction and taking on ascertainment and Nielsen reporting tasks.She is survived by several cousins and good friends, a statement from the station said.A memorial service will take place July 9 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Grand Ledge, Mich.
WKAR, public TV and radio, has switched overseers at Michigan State University in East Lansing, as of Friday (July 1). It’s now part of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, the school announced. Effective July 15, Gary Reid, g.m. of student station WDBM and a senior academic specialist with the college, will become WKAR’s acting director of broadcasting. Reid also just won the Michigan Association of Broadcasters’ 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. He will replace DeAnne Hamilton, director of broadcasting services since 2003 and a member of the PBS Board.
The New Jersey Network signed off for one last time at midnight Friday (July 1), several years after the state announced it would no longer fund the pubcaster. The Star-Ledger reported its final moments: “The broadcast cut to a small room of empty cubicles. The lights turned off, and a small, blue NJN sign glowed on the back wall. The screen faded to black. ‘New Jersey Network.
The future of the 35-year-old Radio Information Service, a volunteer reading program for listeners who are blind or visually impaired, remains uncertain under pending ownership changes at WDUQ-FM, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. About 800 persons subscribed to the service in 2009, when the nonprofit that ran it folded. “This is not our program, but we are willing to help and donate the subcarrier to broadcast the programming,” said Lee Ferraro, g.m. of WYEP, one of the partners set to acquire WDUQ. He said RIS will be broadcast at least through July.”The RIS isn’t out there broadcasting people telling jokes for entertainment purposes,” said Lillian Wolff, an RIS volunteer for 16 years. “Listening to the news like this makes these people feel like a part of society.”