Current (https://current.org/2012/10/)
In a further sign of public media’s embrace of the digital front, on Oct. 30 both NPR and Southern California Public Radio in Los Angeles won multiple EPPY Awards for their websites.
The Smiley & West show is being picked up by two Chicago radio outlets, after WBEZ dropped the program due to sagging audience numbers. Tavis Smiley and his co-host, author and activist Cornel West, will be heard on Newsweb Radio progressive talk WCPT-AM and Midway Broadcasting urban news/talk WVON-AM, reports Chicago media critic Bob Feder. Thirteen stations have dropped the show since June 2011, with several taking issue with the co-hosts’ political opinionating or citing complaints from listeners. WBEZ’s cancellation and related comments from Torey Malatia, station president, triggered an angry letter from Smiley that sparked a widely reported controversy in Chicago. The program is distributed by Public Radio International.
Superstorm Sandy has knocked both transmitters of freeform WFMU in Jersey City, N.J., off the air, but the station is still webcasting from the Pittsburgh home of DJ Doug Schulkind. The station is surrounded by water and has no power, but its studios did not sustain damage. Current is working on coverage of other stations affected by the storm. Was your station or others that you know of affected? Leave a comment or email us at [email protected].
Big Money 2012 is an ongoing cross-pollination between PBS’s Frontline and American Public Media’s Marketplace that works to incorporate traditional news documentaries with online multimedia reports and print investigations.
The proposed Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting has a projected three-year budget of $1.5 million.
The U.S. Copyright Office has renewed an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows documentary filmmakers to continue to rip content from DVDs and streaming video for “fair use” incorporation into their work, according to Kartemquin, a Chicago documentary house that was part of a coalition that worked to originally secure the right in 2010. “However,” Kartemquin noted, “the decision not to allow an exemption for Blu-Ray means that the future is uncertain and in some ways worryingly limited.”
The all-fundraising content WQED Showcase multicast channel in Pittsburgh has brought in $140,000 in pledges in its first year — that’s $30,000 more than projected, according to the local Post-Gazette. “Over 40 percent of donations through Showcase were new donors,” Deborah Acklin, president of WQED Multimedia, said at an Oct. 25 station board meeting. The Showcase channel launched late last year, apparently a first in the pubcasting system. The newspaper also reports that on WQED, concerts and regional specials “aren’t inspiring viewers to donate as in years past, prompting a reduction of such pledge fundraising days by 18 percent.”
The FCC’s first spectrum auction workshop for broadcasters, Oct. 26 at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., covered a wide range of concerns from stations, reports Broadcasting & Cable, including new channel assignments, the timing of the auctions and compensation plans for stations giving up bandwidth. And Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake said that while the auctions would directly involved only the top 25 to 35 markets, spectrum repacking will affect far more. The workshop is archived online at the FCC website here.
After five years as president of Orlando’s WMFE, the Florida pubcasting outlet that completed the sale of its TV station last month, José Fajardo will leave the position on Dec. 1. His departure follows closure of the $3.3 million transaction transferring ownership of WMFE-TV to the University of Central Florida. Under an earlier sales contract, negotiated in 2011, the pubTV station was to be purchased by Community Educators of Orlando Inc., a nonprofit affiliate of Texas-based religious broadcaster Daystar Television. But the transaction came under FCC scrutiny and was withdrawn.
Three staff positions — including that of the television station manager — have been cut at WKYU at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. The lay-offs were part of a restructuring that prepares the dual licensee for a potential 10 percent reduction in federal funding. WKYU staff members who lost their jobs are Terry Reagan, development director; Linda Gerofsky, TV station manager; and Dorin Bobarnac, engineer. Thirty-one employees remain at the dual licensee. James Morgese, a veteran pubcaster who took over as director of educational telecommunications at the university earlier this month, told Current that the restructuring includes creation of a single content division and allows radio and television staff to collaborate in producing programs for radio, television and the web.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $3.2 million in grants to 10 pubTV operators serving rural areas, assisting with equipment upgrades that will replace aging equipment, strengthen broadcast signals, or build capacity for digital production. The USDA grants are earmarked for digital conversion and were awarded as part of a larger package of federal aid to 24 projects improving broadband access, telecommunications infrastructure and public TV’s digital broadcasts. Each of the pubTV operators have already converted their primary transmitters to digital. In some cases, the grants will help pay for upgrades of older, analog equipment, enhance their master control operations or strengthen their digital signals. Since the elimination of the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, which backed technical upgrades of both public TV and radio stations until Congress zeroed it out in 2011, the USDA funds have become increasingly important for rural pubTV stations.
Freelance radio and print journalist Ashley Milne-Tyte set off a lively exchange of the philosophical differences between radio producers who work under deadlines to produce daily news stories and those who focus on long-form personal narratives that have been popularized by programs such as This American Life and Radiolab. Writing on her personal blog after attending this month’s Third Coast International Audio Festival in Evanston, Ill., Milne-Tyte questioned why so many attendees and presenters seemed to turn up their noses at the prospect of reporting daily news. The vast majority of public radio’s listeners tune in for the news, she wrote, and there’s a lot of skill and discipline involved in producing news spots. Milne-Tyte has produced daily news spots for American Public Media’s Marketplace and has done features for NPR, WNYC and PRI’s The World. “Spots and short features are great instruments through which to hone your writing, and you learn so much doing them,” she wrote.
Producers of the program have made public the full list of questions they had originally emailed to their interview subject for the controversial piece.
Granite State Challenge, the longtime academic quiz show from New Hampshire Public Television, is returning to the airwaves after a yearlong hiatus due to state funding cuts, reports the Concord Monitor. Unitil Corp., a public utility holding company, and the New Hampshire Higher Education Assistance Foundation are now sponsoring the program, in which 16 high-school teams compete. This season, the show’s 29th, students on the winning team as well as their school will each receive a $1,000 scholarship. Granite State Challenge premiered Jan. 30, 1984, making it one of the longest running high school quiz shows in the nation.
Public television’s Major Market Group has presented its 2012 William Kobin Public Television Leadership Award to Lloyd Wright, president of WFYI Public Media in Indianapolis. The MMG, a consortium of 34 pubTV stations in the nation’s largest broadcast markets, met for its annual meeting Oct. 1 and 2 in Arlington, Va. Wright has led WFYI for more than 23 years, and was recently re-elected to his fourth term on the PBS Board of Directors. For the past two years he’s also served as chair of the MMG’s Board of Directors.
An interview that went awry for Radiolab sparked an outcry from listeners and an unusual apology from a show unaccustomed to accusations of insensitivity. Current spoke with Jad Abumrad, Kao Kalia Yang and WNYC about the controversy.
Both partners gain new platforms for their programming and can learn from each other’s distribution, audience engagement and fundraising strategies.
Detroit Public Television has created a blog, Modern Day Midwives, to take an updated look at the nursing services that are the focus of Call the Midwife on PBS, which is set in 1950’s London. Georgeann Herbert, s.v.p. content and community engagement for DPTV, said the idea came to her on an elevator at a local hospital that runs a midwife program through its OB-GYN department. She tells the PBS Station Products & Innovation blog: “I wondered, what is life like for a modern-day midwife?” she said. “Would they be viewing the show?
Shaun Yu, interim co-manager of Classical 88.1 WDPR in Dayton, Ohio, has been appointed president and c.e.o. by the station’s board of directors. Yu succeeds former President Georgie Woessner, who retired in June. During the leadership transition he has been co-managing WDPR with a station volunteer who is also a board member. “It is my honor to lead this organization, which is rooted so firmly in Dayton,” Yu said in a prepared statement. “The fact that we can boast of a full-time classical music station speaks of the extraordinary support of this community.”
Search committee chairwoman and WDPR board member, Linda Menz, said 30 candidates were considered for the position.
Telecom attorneys Scott Flick and Paul Cicelski of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman have pored over the FCC’s massive Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for upcoming spectrum auctions and condensed the main points from the 205-page document into a five-page client advisory, Flick reports in a Pillsbury blog post. “In addition to providing a relatively painless way for those interested to learn more about this proceeding,” he writes, the advisory “should provide a road map for parties seeking to identify the issues that will most greatly affect them so that they can focus their attention on those specific aspects of the NPRM when preparing comments for the FCC,” which are due Dec. 21.