People

Arkansas pubTV advocate Jane Krutz dies at 86

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Jane Krutz, an enthusiastic advocate for the Arkansas Educational Television Network for more than 47 years, died March 25 in Little Rock. She was 86. “It is literally true that there might not have been an AETN without her,” said Allen Weatherly, executive director of AETN, in a tribute to Krutz on the network’s website. “In fact, she was advocating for a public television station for Arkansas years before we finally made it to the air in the mid-1960s.”

Krutz frequently appeared during membership drives, testified before Congress for public broadcasting in 1995, served since 1996 on the AETN Commission, and received the PBS National Volunteer of the Year award. The state network’s original studio, still in service, is named for her.

Quick Takes

Stanley Harrison dies at 81; headed communications at CPB

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Stanley Harrison, a former communications director for CPB, died of cardiac arrest after a stroke on April 5 in Miami Beach, Fla. He was 81.Harrison oversaw communications for CPB from 1976 to 1985.He was born in Baltimore to Frank and Thelma Baer Harrison. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and his doctorate in government and public administration from American University in Washington, D.C.At the time of his death, he was teaching at University of Miami’s School of Communication. He also taught part time at American University and at the Pentagon. Earlier in his career he worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.Harrison wrote several books, including 1998’s Editorial Art of Edmund Duffy, about a Pulitzer Prize-winning Baltimore Sun cartoonist, and, in 1999, Mencken Revisited: Author, Editor & Newspaperman.

Quick Takes

WCNY’s new vice president of advancement is a former mayor

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A former mayor of Elmira, N.Y., is the new v.p. of advancement, communications and content delivery at dual licensee WCNY in Syracuse. John Tonello will oversee the $20-million “Campaign for WCNY” to raise funds for the station’s new Broadcast and Education Center downtown. He’s also responsible for membership, public relations, volunteers and events, development, grants and overall fundraising, as well as brand image, on-air trafficking and messaging on all WCNY platforms. Tonello has more than 20 years of experience in communications, public affairs and information technology. He was mayor of the south-central New York city from 2006 through 2011.

Quick Takes

Mobile500 Alliance picks up four more public broadcasters

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Four more pubTV stations have joined the Mobile500 Alliance, a group of TV broadcasters advocating for partnerships to accelerate the nationwide availability of a commercial mobile digital television service. The organization is headed by John Lawson, a former APTS president.New to the alliance are Chicago’s WTTW, Maryland Public Television, Public Broadcasting Atlanta and New Mexico PBS. They join three other pubcasters in the alliance, MHz Networks in Washington, D.C., WGBH in Boston and Twin Cities Public Television in Minneapolis-St. Paul. WGBH, Public Broadcasting Atlanta, and New Mexico PBS are already broadcasting Mobile DTV.Dan Schmidt, WTTW president, said the station’s board formed a committee to consider the best options for using WTTW’s broadcast spectrum.

Quick Takes

No adequate reason to ban political and issue ads on pubcasting, appeals court rules

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A federal appeals court in San Francisco today upheld the law banning for-profit goods-and-services ads on pubcasting stations but threw out the restrictions on issue-oriented and political ads.A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 for the mixed verdict in a First Amendment case brought by Minority Television Project, longtime licensee of noncommercial San Francisco station KMTP-TV. The FCC had fined KMTP in 2003 after it illegally aired commercials for goods and services 1,900 times between 1999 and 2002, the appeals court said.The court accepted the government’s traditional argument that goods-and-services advertising would harm public stations’ programming by boosting their incentive to reach bigger audiences. But the judges said Congress violated the First Amendment by restricting ads about public issues and political candidacies without showing how the ads would damage programming.Even if political candidates could buy time to run cartoons of themselves as superheroes, “the possibility that such cartoons would replace Sesame Street anytime soon seems quite remote,” Judge Carlos T. Bea speculated in the opinion. Judge John T. Noonan concurred.They said Congress had cited no evidence indicating that political advertising would harm pubcast programming.In his dissent, Judge Richard A. Paez said he couldn’t see a tenable reason for permitting political ads while blocking consumer goods ads. After decades of protection from commercial pressures, public broadcasting could be jeopardized by the ruling, Paez wrote.

Quick Takes

Center for Investigative Reporting announces Knight-backed YouTube channel

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The Center for Investigative Reporting is launching an investigative news channel on YouTube, funded by an $800,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, to serve as a hub for investigative journalism. The channel will feature videos from commercial and noncom broadcasters and independent producers, including NPR, ABC News, The New York Times, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop and ITVS. 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 J. Rosenthal, executive director of center in Berkeley, Calif. “We hope this initiative generates revenue that supports the work of nonprofit organizations and independent filmmakers everywhere. Collaborative efforts like this are no longer the future of journalism; they are today’s reality.”The initiative has been in the planning stages since last year.

Quick Takes

“This American Life” heads to movie theaters on May 10

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WBEZ’s This American Life is planning its third live simulcast show, May 10 from the Skirball Center at New York University to 550 movie theaters nationwide. “I saw this amazing dance performance by Monica Bill Barnes’ company,” said host Ira Glass in the announcement, “and I thought — that is totally in the style of our radio show. But obviously you can’t have dance on the radio.” So TAL “built this lineup of stories mixed with super visual things,” he said, centered on the theme, “The Invisible Made Visible.” In addition to the dancers, guests include fellow pubcaster Glynn Washington, host of Snap Judgment; comic Mike Birbiglia with a new short film; and live music by the rock band OK Go.

Quick Takes

Meet the guru behind “Fresh Air’s” web success

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WHYY’s Fresh Air is one of the fastest-growing public-radio shows on the web, reports Nieman Lab. One major force behind that success is web producer Melody Joy Kramer, who has “slowly and single-handedly built a huge following by approaching the job as a digital native, a citizen of the community she wanted to reach. She figured out how to turn radio stories into conversations.”The show’s Twitter account now has 70,000 followers, up from 3,800 before she arrived in January 2010 from Wait Wait . . .

Quick Takes

Don’t ignore potential of mobile web, NPR advises

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Apps for tablets and smartphones may get buzz, but public media stations have a growing opportunity to reach audiences not just with apps, but via web pages optimized for mobile devices. Traffic to station websites from mobile devices has grown from 9 percent last July to 14 percent in March, according to Steve Mulder and Keith Hopper of NPR Digital Services. And while both usage of NPR apps and visits to NPR’s mobile site have grown, the latter has outpaced app usage in growth over the past two years. NPR now has twice as many mobile web users as mobile app users.“Your app is great for people who already love you,” Mulder and Hopper write. “But your mobile site is the best way to help everyone else discover you.”The growing use of mobile-optimized sites may be due to traffic from social media, searches and email, all of which guide mobile users to websites.

Quick Takes

Collaboration to power media transformation in Macon, head of journalism center writes

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Tim Regan-Porter, director of the new Center for Collaborative Journalism in Macon, Ga., provides early details on how the Knight-backed partnership among Mercer University, the local Telegraph newspaper and Georgia Public Broadcasting will work, in a post today (April 10) on MediaShift.The ambitious vision, Regan-Porter said, is “not only establishing a new model for journalism education but also helping to transform local communities and save democracy itself.”Mercer journalism students will train in a working newsroom, alongside professional journalists, through the four years of the program — some students even living above the center, Regan-Porter said. GPB is boosting local coverage by launching Macon Public Radio, which will make the central-Georgia community the only town outside Atlanta to have “significant locally focused public-radio programming,” he said. The university’s journalism department is doubling its faculty, bringing in digital media instructors. “And the combined efforts of The Telegraph and GPB allow for improved coverage,” Regan-Porter said.The center also will work with local religious and civic organizations “to get information to neglected segments of the community and to train their members in digital technology and media consumption.” “Collaboration is the modus operandi that will power the transformation we seek,” he said.

Quick Takes

NEA may cut up to $1 million in PBS arts programming support

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The National Endowment for the Arts is considering substantial cuts — possibly totaling $1 million — in funding for PBS arts programming through the NEA’s Arts in Media initiative, according to the New York Times.The NEA told execs with Great Performances and American Masters that the shows would each receive $50,000 in the 2012 financing cycle, down from $400,000 each in 2011. Independent Lens would get $50,000, down from $170,000; P.O.V., $100,000, down from $250,000. KQED in San Francisco was turned down for a $350,000 request; it received $200,000 for its PBS series Sound Tracks in 2011.Simon Kilmurry, executive director of P.O.V., told the newspaper that the proposed cuts were “a huge surprise and a blow to how much we can support filmmakers, and it’s perplexing.”Last year the NEA revamped and renamed its Arts on Radio and Television category of grants as Arts in Media. Of that $4 million, about half previously went to shows on PBS. But this year the category is open to content on media platforms including online, mobile, theatrical release and digital games.

Programs/Content

Output: BackStory with the American History Guys scales up to weekly

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Produced as a series of monthly specials since 2008, the show will relaunch in May with new segments exploring historical themes suggested by the week’s news events. With three historian hosts billed as “the American History Guys,” BackStory makes a nod towards the wisecracking Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk, known to public radio listeners as “the car guys,” and there’s certainly joviality to their banter with each other and listeners who call in. But BackStory takes its history seriously. Andrew Wyndham, executive producer and media director for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, prefers an analogy made by a station program director who said BackStory could “do for history what Carl Sagan did for science.”

Each of the show’s hosts brings special expertise to the subject: Peter Onuf, a professor at the University of Virginia, specializes in 18th-century American history, and Brian Balogh, also of U-Va., is an expert on the 20th century. Ed Ayers, a history professor and president of the University of Richmond, covers the gap between them, 19th-century America.

Development
Ron Kramer

Did Kramer overreach in Oregon?

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… Citing a conflict of interest between Kramer’s role as station chief and his oversight of the separate nonprofit Jefferson Public Radio Foundation, license holder Southern Oregon University terminated his annual contract as JPR executive director….

People

MPT hires new v.p., Sill to be KPCC’s executive editor, three Illinois pubcasters retire, and more…

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Rick Lore is Maryland Public Television’s new v.p. and chief development officer
Lore is responsible for membership, on-air fundraising, major and planned giving, publications, outreach and community engagement at the state network headquartered in Owings Mills. Lore joined MPT on an interim basis last fall after Joe Krushinsky left his job as v.p. of institutional advancement. Krushinsky now directs station development services at PBS. Previously Lore served as executive director of Friends of Milwaukee Public Television, the fundraising affiliate of Milwaukee Public TV; directed  on-air fundraising for PBS; and led development at New Hampshire Public Television. Lore, who began his pubTV career in 1989 in San Jose, Calif., has won eight PBS development awards and is a frequent conference speaker.

Tech

Jacksonville to host second centralcast facility for public TV

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The pull of economic strains and push of technical advancements continue to spark collaborations among stations, with seven pubTV outlets signing onto a CPB-backed joint master-control project in Florida and two Oregon stations preparing to link via fiber lines and share a single schedule. The CPB Board on March 27 unanimously approved a $7 million grant for a centralcasting facility that will serve six stations in Florida and one in Georgia. The Jacksonville Digital Convergence Alliance LLC will run one master control with customized programming streams for WJCT in Jacksonville; WFSU, Tallahassee; WPBT, Miami; WBCC/WUCF, Orlando; Tampa stations WUSF and WEDU; and WPBA, Atlanta. Depending on how many additional stations sign on, the participating pubcasters will save as much as $20 million over 10 years, according to CPB’s estimates. Cost savings have become imperative, as CPB’s supplementary appropriation for digital projects is nearly depleted.

Programs/Content

Hearing by ethics watchdog could sew up feud in Seattle

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Members of a Seattle-based media-watchdog group weighed in March 31 [2012] on a yearlong dispute between an antiabortion group and KUOW, the city’s all-news pubradio outlet, bringing the disagreement to an end for the time being. A majority of panelists convened by the Washington News Council voted in agreement that KUOW had made errors in a story involving the Vitae Foundation, and that the mistakes merited on-air corrections or clarifications. KUOW had already corrected and clarified the story, though only on its website. But most members of the WNC panel agreed that KUOW had no responsibility to give the Vitae Foundation additional on-air coverage after the story aired. Vitae had asked KUOW for on-air reporting as reparation for the initial story’s flaws, and initially the news council had backed that request.

Programs/Content

NPR deal will help to measure, and monetize, web streaming

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An agreement between NPR and Triton Digital, a provider of digital services to radio stations, will give NPR stations a new option for measuring and monetizing online audiences while also allowing the network to access analytics and metrics for all participating stations. The master agreement between NPR and Triton, announced March 27, provides two services to stations: Webcast Metrics, which measures listening to live streams, and Ad Injector, a system that replaces on-air underwriting credits with online sponsorship credits. “They’re independent products, but the idea is that they can work hand in hand,” says Bob Kempf, v.p. of NPR Digital Services. By more thoroughly measuring online listening, stations expect to raise more revenue through selling local sponsorships of their online streams.

Measurement of listening to web streams is uneven throughout the system, Kempf says. Some stations already use Triton, others measure pageviews of the web pages where links to their streams reside and still others aren’t measuring at all.

Collaboration

CPB will give guidelines to journalism hubs

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CPB is evaluating proposals from six regional journalism hubs for another year of operation and will furnish the centers with a shared set of best practices to follow if they receive additional funding. The guidelines will be designed to address challenges that the seven Local Journalism Centers have encountered during their two years of growth, such as negotiating editorial control and finding paths toward financial sustainability. Launched in 2010 with $10.5 million in CPB funding, the LJCs brought public broadcasters together in regional collaborations to report on focused areas of coverage, such as agriculture, border issues and health care. With the hubs entering their third year of operation, CPB hired a consultant to review which LJCs have succeeded, which have struggled and which factors have made the difference. At a meeting of the CPB Board March 26, interactive-media consultant Rusty Coats reported that four LJCs have established a clear voice and focus throughout their editorial products, while the rest have faced greater challenges.

Quick Takes

Channel sharing after spectrum auctions on agenda for April FCC meeting

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The FCC’s tentative agenda for its April 27 public meeting includes several items of interest to public broadcasters.The commission will consider a report and order establishing a regulatory framework for channel sharing among TV licensees. Stations face the option of relinquishing some spectrum and sharing a 6 MHz channel  — possibly pairing commercial and noncom broadcasters — as part of the upcoming spectrum auction and subsequent repacking (Current, Feb. 28).Also on the agenda is consideration of a notice of proposed rulemaking inviting public comment on allowing non-CPB grantees “to conduct on-air fundraising activities that interrupt regular programming for the benefit of third-party non-profit organizations.” In its “Information Needs of Communities” report in June 2011, the FCC noted that religious broadcasters have argued that they should be able to “devote a small amount of air time, up to one percent, to help fundraise for charities and other nonprofits.” Currently, noncoms, including pubcasters, must receive a special waiver to do so.