Programs/Content

Smiley & West lands on two Chicago stations; town hall planned with Amy Goodman

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Two commercial radio stations in Chicago have picked up the weekly Smiley & West show after it was dropped from WBEZ, the city’s public radio news outlet. WCPT, a progressive talk station, began airing the show Sunday, Nov. 4 at 3 p.m. and will add it to its three FM stations starting in January. It also picked up The Tavis Smiley Show for its weekend lineup. WVON-AM, which targets an African-American audience, will debut Smiley & West Saturday at 11 a.m.

WBEZ canceled the show hosted by author and broadcast host Tavis Smiley and activist and critic Cornel West last month, citing a drop in audience.

Quick Takes

Ira Glass developing new scripted series about transgender man with Sundance Channel

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This American Life host and public radio superstar Ira Glass continues his foray into scripted entertainment, as a producer of a new television series in development at the Sundance Channel. The project, billed as T, will follow Terrence, a transgender man who has recently undergone sex reassignment surgery, and the story will be split between his present life as a male and former life as a female college student named Thora. Fellow TAL producer Alissa Shipp will also produce T.

Glass ventured into the world of independent film this summer with Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me, which he co-wrote and produced. The film, which had a budget of $1 million, has grossed more than $2.2 million in theaters to date, making it a financial success. This is also not the first time Glass has dealt with a commercial TV station.

Quick Takes

WFMU’s Jersey City transmitter is back on-air

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After sustaining damage to its studio and transmitters from Superstorm Sandy, independent freeform music station WFMU has resumed broadcasts on 91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ. The station announced Nov. 5 via its website and Facebook page that its 91.1 FM transmitter is back on the air; it had resumed webcasts on wfmu.org shortly after the storm. A transmitter licensed to 90.1 FM in Mt. Hope, N.Y., which also went dark during the storm, is still silent.

Quick Takes

Madeleine Brand in talks with Oprah Winfrey Network; KCRW in the wings

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Madeleine Brand, the longtime radio pubcaster who recently departed KPCC after the station revamped her show, is very busy these days. “There’s a lot is going on; I can’t say everything yet, but a lot going on,” she tells the Los Angeles Times. Beyond landing her first TV gig on KCET’s SoCal Connected, she’s had talks with the Oprah Winfrey Network and Disney Junior channel. Also, KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro has expressed interest. “When she became available, it was the clear and obvious conversation to have,” Ferro tells the newspaper.

System/Policy

Pubcasters battered by Superstorm Sandy

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When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the most populated region of the United States Oct. 29, claiming at least 90 lives and wreaking havoc on everything in its path, public broadcasting stations along the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t escape the storm’s wrath.

System/Policy

CPB sets aside 10 percent

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The looming political battle over federal spending — and the possibility of across-the-board budget cuts imposed through sequestration — has prompted CPB to alter distribution of Community Service Grants to stations. The change, implemented after CPB execs negotiated an agreement with the White House Office of Management and Budget over possible sequestration of its $445 million appropriation, boosts the amount of money stations will receive in the first of two CSG checks to be issued by CPB for fiscal 2013. But the second batch of checks, to be issued in March, will be much smaller. How much smaller depends on the outcome of the Nov. 6 general election and whether lawmakers and the Obama administration can work out a deal that would forestall some $1.2 trillion in automatic spending reductions required under the Budget Control Act of 2011.

System/Policy

Governing board rejects final bids for San Mateo’s KCSM

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Trustees of the San Mateo County Community College District in California have rejected offers from two finalists vying to acquire KCSM-TV, a pubcasting station that was put up for sale in December 2011 after accruing an $800,000 deficit. The two bidders were San Mateo Community TV Corp., aligned with Independent Public Media and headed by former pubcasters John Schwartz and Ken Devine; and FM Media TV Inc., affiliated with Public Media Co., an independent arm of Public Radio Capital. Six entities initially bid for the station. San Mateo Community TV Corp. offered $5.8 million, and FM Media TV Inc. bid $7 million, according to public records that the Bay Area advocacy group Media Alliance posted on its website.

Tech

Slow growth for HD Radio

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Nearly a decade after HD Radio went live on its first station, iBiquity Digital Corp., the company that developed and sold the technology to terrestrial broadcasters and electronics manufacturers, has yet to convince consumers that they must have HD Radio in their cars and homes.

About Public Media

Public media’s “value” derived from service to local communities

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To the editors:

Amanda Hirsch asks if the “value proposition” for public media is different today from what it was in the 1960s, and if tax dollars are essential in support of noncommercial media (Current, Oct. 22). I was there in the 1960s, making the case along with a great number of others who believed in the “educational broadcasting” that was at that point the core of our movement. The notion of federal funding came only after all other options had been declared politically or financially impossible. Many of us continue to worry that in our treasured democracy public money in support of any mass medium is precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst.

Programs/Content

KAET: 30 years from The Operation to The Latest Procedure

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In February 1983, Phoenix’s PBS station KAET aired the world’s first live telecast of open-heart surgery. The station marks that upcoming 30th anniversary with a pilot for its new occasional medical series, The Latest Procedure, featuring an anterior total hip replacement. For the hourlong surgery, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Ted Firestone of Scottsdale recorded the entire operation through a minicam strapped to his head. Viewers are with him as he meets with the patient, scrubs in, explains surgical tools and provides a personal tour of the operating room before surgery begins. They also observe what Firestone sees as he operates.

Programs/Content

Tiny KEET’s Big Bands reveals musical life in incarceration camps

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KEET in Eureka, Calif. — one of the smallest TV stations in the pubcasting system — has produced a unique documentary featuring woodcut animation: Searchlight Serenade: Big Bands in the Japanese American Incarceration Camps. The 58-minute film provides first-person accounts of nine detainees who played trumpet and saxophone and sang for their fellow prisoners. Their stories are animated with traditional Japanese woodcuts and drawings by local artist Amy Uyeki, whose parents had lived in the camps. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into the holding areas during World War II.

Programs/Content

Hearing Voices ends production

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Producer Barrett Golding said had been thinking about ending the public radio show when he learned that NPR was considering dropping its contract to distribute it. “That gave me the reason to stop producing,” Golding wrote in an email. Golding was “kinda sick of the mostly volunteer work,” he said. The weekly hourlong program compiled audio pieces from archives, independent and documentary producers, and elsewhere in public radio, usually around themes. It aired on about 100 stations.

People

AETN and KOMU win three regional Emmys apiece, leading pubTV stations

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The Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN), based in Conway, won three Emmys for “Clean Lines, Open Spaces: A View of Mid-Century Modern Architecture,” a doc that explored mid-century modern architecture through a regional lens of the American South. The program was named best cultural documentary, and Mark Wilcken received individual awards for writing and editing. “I love these old mid-century modern buildings, and I’m glad I had a chance to explain what they are, where they came from and why they are important,” said Wilcken. Two of three Emmys won by KOMU in Columbia, Mo., went to Sarah Hill and Scott Schaefer for news stories in the historical/cultural (“Concentration Camp Wedding Dress”) and human interest (“Baby Chloe’s Diamond in the Sky”) categories. In addition, KOMU’s Hill, Nathan Higgins, Jennifer Reeves, Stacey Woelfel and Lindsey Tyler received Emmys for interactivity with “Live Cyber Shave.”

The Nine Network of Public Media in St.

People

KUNC’s Grace Hood wins Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize

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A reporter for the NPR station based in Greeley, Colo., Hood earned the award for Investigating Colorado’s Online K–12 Schools, a three-part report about for-profit education. The report found that the state’s largest full-time online school was operating under questionable state oversight and delivering poor academic results. It aired in fall 2011. “Her reports demonstrated the likely abuse of millions of dollars in public funds for an online education that was producing decidedly inferior results while at the same time enriching the for-profit management company,” said Schorr Prize judge Philip Balboni, c.e.o. of Global Post. Hood has also contributed to NPR’s Morning Edition, the National Radio Project’s Making Contact and Voice of America.

Programs/Content
Meyerowitz photo of ocean with headline LISTEN in orange

From scratch at Cape & Islands

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There are now enough public radio stations to reach more than 90 percent of the American public, and pubcasters have adding specialized stations to increase listening options in areas where pubradio already exists. So it’s rare that all-new stations arise, especially in the East, or can afford to get going with sparse populations. An exception: the twin stations of Cape & Islands Public Radio, WCAI on Cape Cod, Mass., and WNAN on Nantucket Island. Founder Jay Allison, a nationally prominent independent radio producer, surveyed colleagues nationwide for advice on the stations’ sound. A selection of the responses:

Jeffrey Dvorkin, [then] v.p., news, NPR, Washington, D.C.

This is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often.

Quick Takes

Million Puppet March to stream live online

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Can’t attend today’s Million Puppet March? No worries, the Washington, D.C., event is being streamed online. There’s also a “global tweet” at 2 p.m. Eastern, “I  support continued funding of public broadcasting #pubmedia #MPM2012.” The event, which kicks off at 10 a.m., is in response to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s repeated promises to defund the system if he is elected. Speakers at the rally include Craig Aaron, president of media reform group Free Press.