Quick Takes

AU purchases 96,000-square-foot building for its WAMU-FM

By |

WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., will soon move to a much bigger home. Licensee American University has purchased a 96,000-square-foot building for the pubradio station and its Bluegrass Country operation. “A first-class radio station depends on great staff and an appropriately-sized and outfitted facility,” WAMU General Manager Caryn G. Mathes said in the announcement. “We have the staff, and now, thanks to American University, we will have the facility.” WAMU, housed in a 23,000-square-foot space since 1993, should be broadcasting from the Connecticut Avenue building early in 2013. The station will use about half the total space, with the remainder for other university purposes.

Quick Takes

Coming soon on “Family Feud,” it’s Team Vogelzang!

By |

“Being on a syndicated television program was not on any life’s list that I ever had,” said Mark Vogelzang, president of Maine Public Broadcasting Network. And yet there he is, on an episode of Family Feud scheduled to air Feb. 8, alongside his son and daughter and their spouses.The Vogelzangs heard about a regional audition for the show at a furniture store in Lynn, Mass., just north of Boston, in spring 2011. Between all the kids and grandkids, “we have 16 people in the family, so we figured we could probably mount a team,” Vogelzang told Current. Finally it was decided that Team Vogelzang would consist of Mark, son Aaron and wife Alisha, and daughter Sarah and husband David Jones.

Quick Takes

There’s good news in numbers at PBS Board meeting

By |

ARLINGTON, Va. — PBS President Paula Kerger told the PBS Board that 2011 was an “amazing year amidst extraordinary challenges.” Kerger, speaking Friday (Feb. 3) at PBS headquarters, sparked two rounds of applause from directors with lots of impressive numbers.According to Nielsen data, the 2010-11 season ended with a 1.33 national primetime average, up 4 percent over 2009-10. Currently, Kerger said, PBS’s primetime audience is “significantly larger” than that of several popular cable outlets: 104 percent over Bravo, 75 percent over TLC, 70 percent over Discovery.

Quick Takes

“Moyers and Company” sparks letter to CPB ombudsman

By |

Moyers and Company, the latest offering from pubTV veteran newsman Bill Moyers, a longtime target of conservative criticism, has prompted a complaint to CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan from Prof. Victor Lieberman of the University of Michigan’s Department of History, who calls the program “strident, undisguised left-wing advocacy.” “I should like you to attempt to defend what seems to me to be completely indefensible programming,” Lieberman wrote to Kaplan.Moyers, contacted by Kaplan, defended the show. “Take a look at only our first three broadcasts and you’ll find guests from across the political and cultural spectrum, including President Reagan’s former budget director and a corporate CEO,” he said. “More diversity to come.”Lieberman also had concerns about Page Eight on Masterpiece Contemporary, previously addressed by PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler.

Quick Takes

Turning public radio’s funding model upside-down

By |

As public radio listeners gain more options for listening to and supporting their favorite shows, the value proposition that’s at the center of local station membership revenues is about to be up-ended, writes radio consultant Mark Ramsey. Listeners now can directly support programs like This American Life, and this gives them less incentive to contribute during a local station’s pledge drive, he says. The station’s role in presenting the show also changes — “from distribution partner to advertising vehicle” — because local broadcasts become a highly effective way of turning more listeners on to the program.Under a system of direct listener support of public radio programs, the fees that stations pay for national programs should be discounted, Ramsey writes, and local outlets should put more of their money into curating a unique localized listening experience for their audiences.

Quick Takes

South Carolina ETV makes “hard decision” to close WJWJ after nearly 40 years

By |

South Carolina ETV is closing the studio and office of its Lowcountry public TV station, WJWJ, after nearly 40 years in Beaufort County, according to The Beaufort Gazette. WJWJ will no longer produce local programming, and two staffers lost their jobs. “We have had other reductions over the past year because of our overall state funding, but there has not been another facility like this that we have closed,” said South Carolina ETV President Linda O’Bryon. The decision was made because WJWJ wasn’t paying for itself. “In other locations, we have revenues that are coming in to offset the costs, and in this area we just didn’t have the revenues and we had to make some hard decisions,” O’Bryon said.

Quick Takes

KUHT-TV in Houston lays off 12 employees across five departments

By |

As part of an ongoing reorganization, KUHT-TV in Houston has laid off 12 staffers. The Houston Chronicle describes it as “part of a cost-cutting move by the new general manager.” Personnel were cut in production, programming, development, technology and administration. Lisa Trapani Shumate, executive director and g.m. of Houston Public Media, said reductions were made “to bring expenses into alignment with revenue.”“You cannot build an organization when you are not operating from a strong financial position,” she told the paper. “We wanted to get things into alignment and build on our plan to achieve our objectives and provide the new media offerings we are going to have.”Also, Debra Fraser, currently station manager on the radio side, will now be in charge of news programming, engineering and technical operations for all three stations — KUHT-TV, KUHF-FM and KUHA-FM — as director of operations and station manager.Top managers John Proffitt of KUHF-FM and John Hesse of KUHT-TV departed in December 2011.

Quick Takes

Mississippi Public Broadcasting honored for Freedom Ride interstitials

By |

An informative series of 40 interstitials on the Freedom Riders has won Mississippi Public Broadcasting and its Assistant Director of Production Edie Greene a 2012 Public Humanities Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, for preserving the state’s culture. The 30-second interstitials tell personal pieces of the larger story of the Freedom Rides, the 1961 civil-rights protest that challenged segregation in the deep South. The bus journeys culminated in Jackson, Miss., where hundreds of the activists were jailed.Greene told Current that initially MPB was considering producing a film, but soon favored the interstitial approach. “Basically, in an age of Tweets, we micro-messaged a documentary,” she said. “By doing this, we had the flexibility of airing each interstitial several times, we put them on our YouTube channel and we put them on radio.

Quick Takes

Bay Area nonprofit news organizations discussing merger

By |

Two prominent nonprofit news organizations, The Bay Citizen, based in San Francisco, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in nearby Berkeley, are in merger talks, the Wall Street Journal reported.The paper quoted Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting,as saying, “There’s been no decisions made and it’s unclear where the conversations will lead, if anywhere.”The Bay Citizen produces news for its own website, but also provides San Francisco-area coverage for The New York Times. The Center for Investigative Reporting partners with major news media outlets, including public broadcasters such as Frontline and NPR.The merger discussions follow the December death of Warren Hellman, the San Francisco investor and philanthropist who originally donated $5 million to launch the two-year-old Bay Citizen and continued to play a role in its development. The Journal also reported that the news site’s chief executive, Lisa Frazier, and its interim editor-in-chief, Steve Fainaru, would be leaving next week. No reasons were cited for the departures.Citing unnamed sources, the Journal said it was unclear whether the two nonprofits would continue to operate as separate brands in the event of a merger. Sources also told the paper that Phil Bronstein, the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and current president of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s board, has been in talks about taking an “editorial leadership position” in any combined organization.

Quick Takes

WTVI-TV in Charlotte could partner with local community college

By |

Community licensee WTVI-TV in Charlotte, N.C., is in early merger talks with Central Piedmont Community College to keep the pubcaster on the air, reports the Charlotte Observer. WTVI President Elsie Garner and CPCC President Tony Zeiss met with Mecklenburg County Manager Harry Jones last week to see if the county would underwrite transition costs for a merger, the paper said. But Commissioner Bill James referred to the plans as “a little PBSkull-duggery,” and added: “We have defunded our PBS affiliate. Ever since then, they’ve been trying to figure out a way to get back on the government dole.”Last June, Garner asked Mecklenburg County to restore a total of $1 million in funding that was cut in recent years, saying that the station wasn’t in immediate danger of shutting down but “if you keep bleeding money, after awhile, yeah that’s the logical thing.” Last year WTVI ran a deficit of about $300,000 on a budget of $3.2 million, and at the midpoint of this fiscal year fundraising is off by several hundred thousand dollars, Garner told the paper.Garner said talks with CPCC were in preliminary stages.

Quick Takes

“Marketplace,” KQED spanked for phony commentary by war veteran

By |

Marketplace retracted a commentary by Leo Webb, an Occupy Oakland protester who described himself as an Iraqi War veteran struggling to recover from his experience as an Army sniper, after bloggers at This Ain’t Hell did some basic fact-checking and labelled his story “BS.”After looking into Webb’s story themselves, editors at Marketplace agreed. They replaced the commentary with an Editor’s note that read, in part, “Marketplace has an obligation to provide accurate information. That was not met in this commentary. It has been retracted and the text and audio have been removed from the web site.”Webb’s commentary was an installment of “My Life is True,” a series of first-person narratives by people living on the edges of the economy. It was produced through an experimental project of the New America Foundation, and first aired on KQED in San Francisco.Marketplace deserves credit for bringing more voices into its coverage of the economy, writes Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, but its handling of the commentary and the reaction to it reveal laziness in fact-checking and a disregard for standards of transparency in web publishing.Wemple credits bloggers of This Ain’t Hell for investigating Webb’s claims, and for preserving a digital record of his account.

Quick Takes

Hinojosa, WBEZ’s Mitchell to receive Studs Terkel awards

By |

Two pubradio broadcasters are among this year’s recipients of the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards, reports Robert Feder, media writer for Time Out Chicago. Honored at March 14 ceremonies in Chicago will be Maria Hinojosa, host of  NPR’s Latino USA, and Chip Mitchell, a reporter for WBEZ-FM. The third recipient is Mick Dumke, political reporter for the Chicago Reader. The annual honors are presented by the nonprofit Community Media Workshop, a resource and advocate for grassroots local journalism that Terkel helped found in 1989. This year the awards commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Terkel, a writer famed for his oral histories of working-class Americans and a broadcaster known for his Studs Terkel Program, which aired on pubradio WFMT in Chicago from 1952 to 1997; Best of Studs Terkel still airs on the station.

Quick Takes

Governor proposes ending state funding to Rhode Island PBS

By |

David Piccerelli, president of Rhode Island PBS, said he was shocked to learn of Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s proposal to eliminate state funding for Channel 36, which provides about a third of its $3 million budget. “If this is a policy plan that the governor wants to put forth,” Piccerelli told local CBS affiliate WPRI, “then I think we should probably put together a policy plan rather than just cutting us off at the knees and telling us to go do it.” Chafee’s proposed budget cuts RI PBS’s current state support from $932,562 to $425,286 next fiscal year, and ends it altogether in 2014. The rest of the station’s budget is around $1.25 million in private donations and $750,000 from CPB. Rhode Island PBS is running a $90,000 operating deficit this fiscal year.“The original intent of public television was to provide educational programming for poor communities that didn’t have access,” Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger said. “Times and needs have changed and most people, regardless of income, have access to hundreds of channels and different mechanisms. … Everyone still has access to WGBH Channel 2 in Boston.”

Quick Takes

NPR launches new page on Facebook

By |

“This is NPR,” a new Facebook page, provides a peek behind the scenes at its people, headquarters and stations nationwide. There are links to events, job opportunities, photos of folks who stop in for studio interviews, pictures by NPR White House Correspondent Ari Shapiro on the campaign trail.

Quick Takes

The moment is right … for these ads

By |

Pubradio WTMD at Towson University in Maryland has a unique new ad campaign that came into being after “a crazy night of flashing lights and creativity,” and probably will make you giggle. Or blush. Or both. A local photographer and ad agency both donated their services for the work, which shows what happens to ears that become aroused by all that great music on WTMD.

Quick Takes

“Financial Fitness” creator leaves WCNY in dispute; two new hosts announced

By |

WCNY-TV in Syracuse today (Feb. 1) announced two new hosts for its longest-running local show, Financial Fitness, while the local Post-Standard is reporting that host J. Daniel Pluff, who started the program in 1992, has left following an ongoing disagreement. Pluff said the station wouldn’t let him decide on guest hosts for the investment advice show, which he produced on a volunteer basis. WCNY President Robert Daino told the newspaper that the station has to maintain editorial control over the program, which regularly scores better ratings than national PBS offerings. New hosts are Jim Burns, a columnist for the Post-Standard and president of J.W. Burns and Co., an investment firm, and Vicki Brackens of Brackens Financial Solutions Network and a regular panelist on Financial Fitness.

Quick Takes

@readingrainbow goes to one very worthy Tweeter

By |

LeVar Burton, former longtime host of pubTV’s popular Reading Rainbow, has claimed @readingrainbow, reports Huffington Post, with a little help from fellow Tweeters. On Tuesday (Jan. 31), Burton had contacted the account holder directly, who hadn’t used @readingrainbow in three years. When that didn’t work, Burton Tweeted far and wide, asking the Twittersphere for help, and sites like Gizmodo got involved. “Less than two nostalgia-filled hours and hundreds of retweets later,” HuffPost says, the Twitter account was turned over to Burton. Despite the show’s demise more than two years ago (Current, Aug.

Quick Takes

Peter and Carl, a la Lego

By |

Just in case you missed it, here is a photo of Lego versions of Carl Kasell and Peter Sagal of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Creator Dave Kaleta appeared on the WBEZ/NPR show’s Listener Limerick Challenge in September 2011.UPDATE: And leave it to intrepid media reporter Jim Romenesko to get the story behind all this.

Quick Takes

Six Goldsmith finalists include two public media projects

By |

Two public media projects are among six finalists for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, presented annually by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes, Sandra Bartlett and Susanne Reber, along with Jim Morris, Ronnie Greene, Chris Hamby and Keith Epstein of the Center for Public Integrity, were nominated for “Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities,” which for the first time publicly revealed the EPA’s internal “watch list” of the nation’s most troublesome air polluters. “This report triggered immediate enforcement action in two states, a push for openness by the EPA and an avalanche of coverage across the U.S.,” the Shorenstein Center noted in its announcement.Also, Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica received a nod for their report, “Presidential Pardons: Shades of Mercy,” co-published by the Washington Post. The analysis of presidential pardons during the Bush administration revealed that white criminals seeking pardons were far more likely than minorities to succeed, which “prompted the Justice Department to launch a review and ignited a debate about why pardons are underused, how to eliminate bias and how best to reshape the entire system,” the center said.Finalists receive $10,000. The winner of the Goldsmith Prize, along with its $25,000 cash award, will be announced on March 6 at the Kennedy School.

Quick Takes

Eben Peck leaves CPB for American Society of Travel Agents

By |

Eben Peck, on the staff of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the past seven years, most recently as senior director of government affairs, is the new vice president of government affairs for ASTA, the American Society of Travel Agents. At CPB, Peck was the organization’s primary liaison with the federal government. In his new position, he will be responsible for all of ASTA’s state and federal and state lobbying, as well as its political action committee, ASTAPAC.