Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming Channel 10 Great TV Auction, now in its 44th year of raising funds for Milwaukee Public Television. Local news site OnMilwaukee.com reports that the auction began in 1969 with a goal of $50,000; now, it raises more than $1 million annually, handling more than 20,000 items throughout its weeklong run. “During the auction, between the phone banks and everything, we have over 3,000 volunteers,” said Auction Director Sharon Fischer-Toerpe. “It takes a lot of volunteers. There are volunteers who plan their vacation around the auction just so they can be here.”
A nonprofit that operates a news site for the state of Delaware has acquired an FM broadcast license and plans to launch a new station by early summer. Delaware First Media’s purchase of WDDE, a 2,500-watt signal on 91.1 FM, lays the groundwork for the first-ever public radio station to be based in and serve the state of Delaware.
Public radio stations and NPR are promoting April as Public Radio Music Month, a campaign designed to raise awareness of the cultural contributions of pubradio’s music stations and the role federal funding plays in keeping those outlets on the air. Stations that broadcast classical, jazz and contemporary music formats have scheduled special concerts throughout the month to highlight the diversity of programming and the field’s commitment to presenting new artists. Musicians themselves are participating — and not just by performing at station events. Nearly 130 artists — including the Black Keys, the Decemberists, My Morning Jacket and the Roots — signed a “love note” to public radio, expressing thanks to local stations that play their music. NPR calculates that more than 180 public radio stations are devoted to noncommercial music formats such as classical, jazz, blues and bluegrass, and another 480 include music in their programming lineups.
The nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting is launching an investigative news channel on YouTube to serve as a hub for investigative journalism. The Knight Foundation provided an $800,000 grant to start the channel. The center, based in Berkeley, Calif., announced on April 11 [2012] that the channel will feature videos from commercial and noncommercial broadcasters and independent producers, including NPR, ITVS, ABC News, the New York Times, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. The center plans to add contributors and seek submissions from freelance journalists and independent filmmakers from around the world. “One of the goals of this partnership will be to raise the profile and visibility of high-impact storytelling through video,” said Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the center.
Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters
Final Report, Dec. 18, 1998
a.k.a. PIAC or the Gore Commission
See PDF of full report; sections of the report posted in HTML by the Benton Foundation; and the list of commission members. Executive Summary
As this Nation’s 1,600 television stations begin to convert to a digital television format, it is appropriate to reexamine the long-standing social compact between broadcasters and the American people. The quality of governance, intelligence of political discourse, diversity of free expression, vitality of local communities, opportunities for education and instruction, and many other dimensions of American life will be affected profoundly by how digital television evolves. This Advisory Committees recommendations on how public interest obligations of television broadcasters ought to change in the new digital television era represent a new stage in the ongoing evolution of the public interest standard: a needed reassessment in light of dramatic changes in communications technology, market structures, and the needs of a democratic society.
Public Law 90-129, 90th Congress, November 7, 1967 (as amended to April 26, 1968)
Enacted less than 10 months after the report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Broadcasting, this law initiates federal aid to the operation (as opposed to funding capital facilities) of public broadcasting. Provisions include:
extend authorization of the earlier Educational Television Facilities Act,
forbid educational broadcasting stations to editorialize or support or oppose political candidates,
establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and defines its board,
defines its purposes,
authorize reduced telecommunications rates for its interconnection,
authorize appropriations to CPB, and
authorize a federal study of instructional television and radio. Title I—Construction of Facilities
Extension of duration of construction grants for educational broadcasting
Sec. 101. (a) Section 391 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 391) is amended by inserting after the first sentence the following new sentence: “There are also authorized to be appropriated for carrying out the purposes of such section, $10,500,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1968, $12,500,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1969, and $15,000,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970.”
(b) The last sentence of such section is amended by striking out “July 1, 1968” and inserting in lieu thereof “July 1,1971.”
Pacifica began operation of its first and flagship station, KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., April 15, 1949. These are early bylaws of the nonprofit organization. See also Pacifica’s bylaws as of 1999. Article I
Identity
Section 1. The name of this corporation shall be PACIFICA FOUNDATION.
Virginia’s Community Idea Stations — WCVE Public Radio, WCVE PBS and WCVW PBS in Richmond and WHTJ PBS in Charlottesville — on Friday (April 20) announced elimination of 11 positions, about 18 percent of its workforce, before the end of June. A statement on the network’s website said the decision was in response to lack of pubcasting funding in the commonwealth’s budget. The stations had received about $700,000 this fiscal year; the General Assembly last week approved a budget that does not contain that support, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.Six of the 11 positions will be lost in the Educational Services department. The stations will no longer provide technology training for teachers or engineering support for schools, and will stop producing the EdTech Conference, an annual statewide technology gathering for teachers and administrators. It also will cancel a Sunday afternoon film package and “Behind the Scenes,” a web-only program on local arts organizations.
Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps expresses concern for public TV stations in the upcoming spectrum auctions, in an interview on The Communicators series on C-SPAN, reports Broadcasting & Cable. “Public television is doing a really good job with multicasting and using two or three streams to do really good programming,” Copps says on the program, scheduled for broadcast at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Saturday (April 21) and available online. “And all of a sudden, if they are going to be decreasing in number or stations are going to be thrown together, is that going to mean we are going to have less programming?”Copps also says: “There is a lot of spectrum out there, and I don’t think anybody in the United States has very much of a clue exactly how much spectrum is lying fallow.”
Want to get your documentary on public television? POV Series Producer Yance Ford will be on Twitter at 7 p.m. Eastern April 25 to answer questions about doing just that. Submit questions for her by posting to Twitter using the hashtag #docchat.
Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, co-hosts of PRI’s Smiley & West, hear from a surprising caller on their Friday (April 20) show: Music legend Barbra Streisand. The program is a tribute to Oscar-winning husband and wife songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Streisand was 18 years old when they met. She recorded many of their songs, including “The Way We Were” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” Last year Streisand dedicated a tribute album to the Bergmans, “What Matters Most.”
Domestic doyenne Martha Stewart hits the PBS airwaves this fall in a weekly culinary master class, Martha Stewart’s Cooking School. The 30-minute show will be presented by WETA, premiering in October. “PBS is the perfect home for this series,” Stewart said in an announcement. “We’ll show viewers how to prepare classic dishes as well as how to use proper techniques.” The program is based on the bestselling cookbook of the same name.The New York Times reported that Stewart and execs at her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia “believe that public broadcasting will be a better fit for her brand than daytime cable.”
WETA in suburban Washington, D.C., on June 2 will launch a new multicast channel devoted to British programming. The 24-hour WETA UK replaces Create on the station’s 26.2. “British programming has long proven popular with our audience on our principal channel,” said Kevin Harris, v.p. and TV manager of the dual licensee. The channel will feature popular Britcoms (Doc Martin, Fawlty Towers, Are You Being Served?), miniseries (MI-5, Hustle, Waking the Dead) and episodes of the original BBC Antiques Roadshow, as well as Saturday night full-length films and, beginning this fall, major British specials. Here’s a promo reel.
The Association of Independents in Radio has created a Facebook page to showcase projects in its $2 million Localore initiative (Current, Jan. 30), which pairs indie producers with pubstations on innovative community-service work.
PBS NewsHour Senior Correspondent Judy Woodruff and Ernest Wilson III, former CPB chair, have been been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy, an independent policy research center, was founded in 1780 in Cambridge, Mass. Woodruff and Wilson, now dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California, join 4,000 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members that through the years have included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, more than 250 Nobel laureates and some 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. Other members of the 2012 Academy Fellows include U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, actor Clint Eastwood, playwright Neil Simon, philanthropist Melinda Gates and Amazon Founder Jeffrey Bezos. The 2012 academy class will be inducted at a ceremony on Oct.
Alvaro Garnica, general manager of the V-me Spanish multicast channel on pubTV, recently informed station managers that it replaced all sponsor spots on its schedule with promos while it reviewed that content with its FCC counsel to ensure the spots meet noncom requirements.HispanicAd.com, an advertising and media news site, ran a short piece on March 28 addressing the issue. The removal of the spots came after CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan received a note from a concerned viewer that KVIE in Sacramento was “running ordinary commercials” for L’Oreal cosmetics, Oreo cookies, Kool-Aid and State Farm Insurance, which would be an FCC violation. KVIE told Kaplan that it airs V-me content unaltered as a pass-through on its third channel, and that the station does not insert any local underwriting spots. Its contract with V-me requires that content comply with PBS and FCC guidelines.”V-me is abiding by FCC regulations, reviewing all creative copy to ensure that it meets guidelines,” Roselynn Marra, director of stations relations for V-me Media, told Kaplan. “Additionally, as is common among public stations, V-me works with corporations to edit spots they may already have created to make them fit FCC guidelines.”
Wilbur Herrington, the founding station engineer of University of Georgia’s WUOG-FM, died March 29 of a malignant brain tumor. He was 83. He had been involved with the station in Athens since its launch in October 1972. “I can honestly say that Wilbur was, and very much will always continue to be, the heart and soul of WUOG,” Operations Director Akeeme Martin told the student newspaper, Red & Black. “He was fiercely proud of his spotless professional record, and the fact that the FCC never had to inspect WUOG,” said Tommy McGahee, a 2009 Georgia grad who worked under Herrington.
The two remaining finalists bidding for KCSM, public TV in San Mateo, Calif., are local groups affiliated with Independent Public Media and Public Media Company, reports the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club (citing a report in the Palo Alto Daily Post, which is not published online). The bid amounts are not yet public. Among offers rejected by licensee San Mateo County Community College was one from another pubcaster, KMTP-TV in San Francisco, which airs multilingual, ethic programming. Jan Roecks, the college’s director of general services, will make her recommendation on the buyer to the trustees when they meet again later this month. The Media Alliance, a Bay-area public-interest media advocacy organization, is asking for 30-day public comment period before the board approves the sale.
A public radio legend in Kansas City, Mo., is retiring at the end of the month. Walt Bodine, 91, has spent 72 years in the news business, and generations of listeners grew up hearing his trademark tagline, “What do you say to that?” His Walt Bodine Show dates to 1978, and has aired on KCUR since the early 1980s. He launched a late-night talk show, Night Beat, on a local AM station in the 1960s.His son Tom Bodine told the Kansas City Star that his father was on the air on July 17, 1981, after two skywalks collapsed during a dance at the Hyatt Regency hotel near downtown, killing 114 persons and injuring 216 more. “The night of the Hyatt skywalk collapse, he stayed on the air all night and into the morning so the show could be a place for people to express their feelings and to get up-to-the-minute information,” Tom Bodine said.
Vern Coleman, 86, who worked 14 years as an audio engineer at WGBH working on such shows as The French Chef, The Boston Pops and Evening at Symphony, died March 18 at his home in Marstons Mills, Mass., after a long battle with leukemia. He was nominated for a primetime Emmy Award for best live sound in 1976, for his work on New Year’s Eve at Pops; he attended the Emmy ceremonies in Hollywood but lost to the soundman for Johnny Carson. Coleman also worked as a contract engineer for WBUR in Boston, among other stations, and as a staff engineer of commercial WCVB. The lifelong resident of Cape Cod was born in Hyannis to local artist and educator Vernon H. Coleman and Ruby E. Coleman. He began his broadcast career in 1943, a year before he graduated from Barnstable High School, at Cape Cod’s only radio station, WOCB in West Yarmouth.
