VegasPBS “may have found just that new business model” that will help public TV stations survive, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “While maintaining and even expanding its traditional educational mission, VegasPBS has branched out in ways unusual for PBS stations,” including landing Homeland Security grants to build a regional emergency response support system. The station is now an $18 million-a-year diversified business, with nearly $63 million in net assets. And General Manager Tom Axtell says the station may launch a nightly newscast, a rarity in the pubTV system. “We have weathered the recession pretty well,” he said.
KCPW in Salt Lake City is less than two weeks from a loan default that could put it off the air. The new nonprofit licensee celebrated its purchase of KCPW frequency to maintain the news/talk station in 2008, but it’s now struggling to make payments on loans that financed the $2.4 million purchase. Wasatch Public Media has until Oct. 31 [2011] to pay off a $250,000 loan from National Cooperative Bank, and if it fails, the bank will call in a separate $1.8 million loan. A rescue package put together last week by Salt Lake’s Redevelopment Agency fell through over the weekend.
“I was trying to watch Masterpiece Mystery! tonight, and the intrusive and pointlessly repetitious imposition of a large, animated, pink and blue graphic advertisement for the PBS Fall Arts Festival on top of the program in progress was extremely annoying,” writes one of several displeased PBS viewers to Ombudsman Michael Getler. Several spoke out against PBS’s ongoing experiment with on-screen program promotion graphics.
PBS Kids launched more than 40 cross-platform games today (Oct. 13) — its largest offering of interactive math content for preschoolers to date — designed to help children build math skills. The games are accessible through computers, mobile devices and interactive whiteboards so that children engage with the same characters as they cross devices, PBS said in a press release. Games include Monkey Jump from Curious George, a Hermit Shell Crab Game from The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! and a Carnival Count-off from Fizzy’s Lunch Lab.
WMFE-TV in Orlando, Fla., may have announced its sale on April 1, but that deal has yet to be finalized, reports the Orlando Sentinel. The FCC told the newspaper it is wading through more than 500 public comments on the impending sale to religious broadcaster Daystar, and is examining the makeup of its proposed local board. Meanwhile, WMFE-FM has had two successful fund drives since the April announcement and continues on the air. The new PBS primary station in the Orlando market is WUCF-PBS, a collaboration between University of Central Florida and Brevard Community College. Viewers who tune to the former WMFE-TV now see a screen directing them to WUCF-PBS.
For NPR to truly reflect the rich diversity of America, it must shed the “monochromatic vision” that it shares with many liberal institutions, writes Joel Dreyfuss, managing editor of The Root, in an open letter to incoming NPR chief Gary Knell.Dreyfuss, a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists that pressed Knell’s predecessor Vivian Schiller to diversify NPR’s newsroom, warns that Juan Williams’s “fiery exit” from the network last October was much more than a badly handled personnel decision “gone nuclear.” He points to former NPR News chief Ellen Weiss, who fired Williams and resigned months later after an internal inquiry into the dismissal, as an example of the arrogance and “liberal myopia” that has inhibited NPR’s efforts to fully represent the “glorious rainbow cacophony” of voices, stories and worldviews to be found in America.”[A]s you tackle your mountain of issues,” Dreyfuss writes to Knell, “I hope you’ll be brave enough not to fall into the trap of believing that your problem was Juan Williams. It wasn’t just that NPR was uncomfortable with a somewhat conservative voice; NPR has never been comfortable with black voices and brown voices and white voices that challenged conventional liberal thinking. . . .The bigger issue is not just whom you put on the air but who makes decisions about what is news and what isn’t, what’s important and what’s not, how long a story should be, how many resources should be assigned to cover this or that and where your foreign bureaus are located.
CPB is publicly announcing its grant of more than $6.6 million to consolidate broadcast operations of nine New York public television stations, plus New Jersey’s pubTV network, into a single entity. The grant will allow the stations to build and manage an automated central master control — a CPB priority in recent years — which will handle on-air operations of 34 pubTV channels run by the stations. The facility will be housed at WCNY in Syracuse. CPB expects that the stations will have combined savings of $25 million over 10 years. Each station will retain control of its broadcast schedule and multicast channels.
In approving its $250,000 short-term loan to Salt Lake’s KCPW, the city council overruled the recommendation of its redevelopment loan committee, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The committee considered the loan too risky because KCPW had not proven it could repay the principal on its debts, the Tribune’s Glen Warchol reports. A city councilman told Warchol that the station, which has until Oct.31 to pay off its $250,000 loan to National Cooperative Bank, is important to the city’s development and promotion efforts. “It clearly is not going to be the most secure piece of debt we own. It is not without risk,” said Councilman Carleton Christensen.
30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin will host Here’s the Thing, an interview show via podcast, starting Oct. 24 for WNYC in New York City, the Associated Press reports. Guests will include big names such as actor Michael Douglas, Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins, reality-show celeb Kris Kardashian Jenner, comic Chris Rock, actress Kathleen Turner, author Erica Jong and veteran talk-show host Dick Cavett.Baldwin has subbed for host Kurt Andersen, and supplied some pretty funny pledge pitches to stations. But he was interested in doing more, said Dean Cappello, WNYC’s chief content officer. “Alec is one of our hometown guys,” he said.New interviews will be available about once a week and probably end up as an on-air radio show.
Tiny KCSN-FM at California State Northridge may not be big enough for an Arbitron rating, but it sure has some huge fans helping it raise money. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are playing what the Los Angeles Times calls “a rare small-theater show” as a benefit for the station. U2 has donated a guitar signed by all four band members that could go for upwards of $150,000 during the fall pledge drive. Also contributing: Mick Jagger, Coldplay, Sheryl Crow and others. Why?
David Frum is resigning as a commentator on APM’s Marketplace, he announced on his blog today, because his role as a conservative counter-point to former Department of Labor Secretary Robert Reich has become untenable.”So long as the topic is ‘green jobs’ or NLRB regulations or immigration, my thinking aligns reasonably congruently with the current conservative consensus,” Frum writes. “But on the issues that today most passionately divide Americans — healthcare reform, monetary policy, social spending to aid the unemployed, and — soon — the American response to the euro crisis, I have to recognize that my views are not very representative of the conservative mainstream.”Frum made his farewell appearance on Marketplace’s Oct. 12 broadcast, and will advise producers on potential successors.
[Warning: Contents of this blog post may get you into trouble at your workplace, either for its lurid subject matter or the volume of your laughter at the aforementioned lurid subject matter. Also, please proceed with caution as this blog post contains material dealing with sordid details of the sex lives of various public broadcasters. Listener discretion advised.]Julian Joslin, co-writer and narrator of the Ira Glass Sex Tape, tells Huffington Post he used parts of nine Fresh Air episodes to create the 11-minute parody that’s currently ricocheting around the Web. HuffPost calls it “a barbed love letter to public radio’s self-seriousness,” also noting that it’s “the only sex tape that might actually shock the nation, because it’s fancy enough to have ‘two acts.’ ” Guest-starring voices include Planet Money’s Alex Blumberg and This American Life contributor Jonathan Goldstein.
Salt Lake City’s KCPW-FM has secured a loan that will allow it to stay in business. The Salt Lake City Council unanimously approved last night a $250,000 loan to the community-licensed station, which will go toward repaying another lender.KCPW was staring down an Oct. 31 deadline for repaying a $250,000 loan from National Cooperative Bank. Failure to do so would likely have shut down the station, which is still working to pay off several loans that financed the 2008 purchase of its license from previous owner Community Wireless of Park City. (Earlier coverage in Current.) KCPW tried to raise the money during a recent 12-day on-air drive but fell significantly short of the goal.KCPW now must repay the city within six months.
Free Press and the New America Foundation are sponsoring a panel, “The Next Big Thing: How Public Media Innovation Is Changing Journalism,” Oct. 18 in Washington, D.C. Experts will discuss how public media in the U.S. and U.K. are investing in innovative Web, mobile and community media projects and collaborations. Speaking will be Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer of the BBC; Sue Schardt, c.e.o. of the Association of Independents in Radio; Joaquin Alvarado, s.v.p. of digital innovation at American Public Media; Jake Shapiro, c.e.o. of Public Radio Exchange; and Craig Aaron, president of Free Press.
For the first time, a Nature film has won the Grand Teton Award, the top prize at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, considered one of the wildlife doc industry’s highest honors, for Broken Tail: A Tiger’s Last Journey. In all, Nature received six of 22 awards at the festival, for films including the season opener, Radioactive Wolves, about species living in the “dead zone” around the disabled Chernobyl nuclear reactor. On hand for the award announcements in Wyoming were Series Executive Producer Fred Kaufman, Series Producer Bill Murphy and Series Editor Janet Hess.The biennial conference, which ran Oct. 3-7, drew more than 650 international leaders in science, conservation, broadcasting and media. This year’s competition included 510 films from more than 30 countries.
Oh that Peter Sagal. The host of pubradio’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me has recorded a truly unique pledge pitch for WCQS/WYQS in western North Carolina.It references state Sen. Jim Forrester’s statement in an interview last month that Asheville is a “cesspool of sin” due to the state’s tolerance of homosexual “mischief.”Sagal gleefully congratulates listeners for Ashville’s victory over Wilmington and Chapel Hill, and proclaims that “nothing helps keep Asheville drowning in ungodly filth more than WCQS.” He ends the pitch by urging, “keep Asheville demonic, people.” For a $100 contribution, members can get a nifty “Welcome to the Cesspool of Sin” T-shirt, destined to become a collector’s item.
CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan received a complaint letter from a 9-year-old in North Carolina who is unhappy with the end of production for FETCH! With Ruff Ruffman last year. “There has been a huge uproar about FETCH! going away,” says Kate Taylor, executive producer at WGBH. “PBS decided that 100 shows were enough and they needed to save their money for new shows.””It is true that we are not commissioning additional episodes,” responds Linda Simensky, PBS v.p. for children’s content, “but we have produced 100 episodes of the series, which is a substantial number.
Two of the latest Nobel Peace laureates, announced on Oct. 7, are profiled in public broadcasting documentaries. Pray the Devil Back to Hell, one of the five-part Women, War and Peace series, premieres tonight (Oct. 11) on PBS (check local listings for times), and tells the story of Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee. And Johnson Sirleaf is one of the Iron Ladies of Liberia on Independent Lens.
The Association of Public Television Stations has hired The O Team to lobby on spectrum fees and the upcoming spectrum incentive auction, reports The Hill, citing lobbying disclosure records. Bob Okun, a former NBCUniversal vice president and one-time assistant to ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), will work for the public broadcasting advocacy group. Other Okun clients include the National Association of Broadcasters and Comcast.
I’ve Got Issues, a community affairs program on KTWU-TV in Topeka, Kan., generally concentrates on the big picture: affordable healthcare, teacher pay, terrorism. But for its upcoming “Face Your Fears” episode Wednesday (Oct. 12), it’s exploring the topic of phobias by bringing participants face to face with what they’re most afraid of — such as big spiders and wriggly snakes, reports the local Capitol-Journal.“We’re going to have some fun with it,” VanDerSluis said. “It’s going to be serious and quirky at the same time.”Jared Gregg, coordinating producer, said the topic emerged during a brainstorming session when a staffer admitted being terrified of roller coasters. Experts will appear on the show to explain phobias.