Current (https://current.org/2013/11/page/3/)
PBS has renewed its commitment to Tavis Smiley for another two years, keeping the talk show on public TV through 2015. “The highlight for me is surviving” as a late-night talk show, Smiley told the Associated Press. The program, which tapes in Los Angeles, will face less competition in booking guests once NBC’s The Tonight Show moves to New York in February, he noted.
This item has been updated and reposted with additional information. Boston’s WGBH and the Library of Congress will host and preserve the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a permanent collection of more than 50 years of public broadcasting history. More than 40,000 hours of content dating back to the 1950s will be digitized, stored and made available for on-site access at both WGBH’s Boston headquarters and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., according to a Nov. 14 announcement from CPB, WGBH and the Library. Development of a permanent pubcasting archive began in 2007 through a CPB initiative.
NPR’s news applications and multimedia operations are merging into a single unit to be headed by current News Applications Editor Brian Boyer. “We were already sitting right next to each other,” Boyer said. “When we moved into the new building, it was already obvious that we would be working closely together.”
The departments have already collaborated on several projects, including a web presentation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s family photos and a Tumblr, Cook Your Cupboard, which advises home cooks about how to use odds and ends from their pantries. Other desks have often approached Boyer’s team about attempting projects with multimedia components, he said, forcing him to redirect such requests to the Multimedia desk. The new arrangement will make collaboration smoother, he said.
BOSTON — American Public Television’s annual Fall Marketplace kicked off Wednesday, providing programmers with screenings of dozens of offerings from the major pubTV distributor as well as professional development sessions. APT President Cynthia Fenneman, right, greets special guests at the opening reception, appearing direct from that quirky English seaside village of Portwenn: Doc Martin actors Ian McNeice, left, and Joseph Absolom, aka Bert and Al Large. The conference continues through Saturday. (Photo: Ed Shenkman)
The NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Group has acquired full ownership of PBS Kids Sprout, according to the New York Times. The cable channel was founded by a partnership including public television in 2004. NBCUniversal bought out the ownership stakes of PBS and HIT Television Ventures, which is owned by Apax Funds. PBS branding will be removed from the channel. Another former partner, Sesame Workshop, sold its stake to NBCUniversal in December 2012.
Dana Davis Rehm, a former NPR senior v.p. and public radio station manager, is joining the American Geophysical Union as its director of marketing. Rehm left NPR in February after 13 years in various roles within the organization’s executive ranks. Her departure was part of a restructuring within the marketing and communications division under former NPR chief Gary Knell. Rehm began at NPR as v.p. of member and program services, a job that involved leading NPR’s 2005–06 New Realities initiative. After a promotion to senior v.p. of strategy and partnerships, she helped manage its acquisition of Public Interactive from Public Radio International.
DecodeDC, the political podcast and public radio show created by former NPR correspondent Andrea Seabrook, has been acquired by the E.W. Scripps commercial newswire service. Scripps bought the independently produced podcast as part of a strategic restructuring and expansion of its Washington-based coverage under Ellen Weiss, former NPR News chief. Weiss joined Scripps in February as its Washington bureau chief and developed plans to focus the bureau on enterprise and investigative reporting for Scripps-owned TV, digital and print properties. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Seabrook will join the Scripps bureau staff, which is beefing up its multimedia production capacity and folding its newspaper wire service, according to a Nov. 11 release announcing the purchase.
PBS filmmaker Ken Burns has assembled an array of top politicians, media stars and other celebrities to recite the Gettysburg Address in honor of the 150th anniversary on Nov. 19 of the famous speech. It’s part of the outreach for Burns’s documentary The Address, scheduled to air April 15, 2014. So far the video submissions, available here, include Presidents Obama, Clinton, Carter and both Bushes; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; several senators such as Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.); CNN’s Wolf Blitzer; businessman Warren Buffet; comedians Stephen Colbert and Whoopi Goldberg; PBS NewsHour’s Gwen Ifill; NPR’s Nina Totenberg; director Steven Spielberg and many others. The campaign is inspired by Greenwood School in Putney, Vt., the subject of Burns’s film.
On Monday, T-Mobile said it was looking to raise $1.8 billion to make some big investments in acquiring wireless spectrum. The company is planning to issue 66.1 million new shares of common stock to raise the money. According to Bloomberg, T-Mobile will make acquisitions through parties or through the upcoming incentive auctions, for which public television stations can choose to offer some or all of their spectrum.
Foundation support of public broadcasting increased from $100 million to $118 million from 2009-11, according to a new report from the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It’s the first comprehensive look at foundation media grant-making. The top 10 pubcasting recipients of foundation support during that period, in millions of dollars, were Thirteen, WNET in New York City, $41.5; NPR, $26.7; WGBH, Boson, $26.5; WETA, Arlington, Va., $21.9; Minnesota Public Radio, St. Paul, $13.1; Sesame Workshop, $12.4; WNYC, $10.6; KCET, Los Angeles, $8.7; Twin Cities Public Television, St. Paul, $8.5; and KQED, San Francisco, $6.3.
The board of the Pacifica Foundation on Monday appointed Summer Reese executive director of the five-station radio network, a position she has held on an interim basis since August 2012. Reese was serving as chair of Pacifica’s board when she stepped into the job on an interim basis following the dismissal of previous Executive Director Arlene Engelhardt. In recent months, Reese oversaw deep staff cuts at WBAI, Pacifica’s New York station, in an effort to resolve longstanding financial shortfalls. She also removed John Hughes as g.m. of the network’s WPFW in Washington, D.C., in September. Reese has worked as a paralegal and accounting professional for more than a decade, according to a candidate statement for a station board election for KPFK, Pacifica’s Los Angeles outlet.
Filmmaker Andrea Meller, born in the U.S. and of Chilean descent, was searching for her identity as a Latina when she came across a New York Times article about a group of voice actresses who dubbed the ABC prime-time soap opera Desperate Housewives into Spanish for the show’s secondary audio program channel.
Don Derheim, c.o.o. of KQED, is leaving next month after more than two decades at the San Francisco pubcaster, President John Boland told staff in a Nov. 6 email. Derheim will become c.e.o. of SFJAZZ, Boland said, “the largest nonprofit presenter of jazz in the western United States with a spectacular new home in the performing arts district of San Francisco.” Boland added that SFJAZZ will be “a wonderful partner with KQED Arts.” Derheim will remain at KQED through Dec.
Masterpiece announced on Sunday that a fifth season of the megahit Downton Abbey is heading into production. The Edwardian drama just completed its Season 4 run in the United Kingdom, drawing an average of 11.8 million viewers — the highest-rated drama this year in Britain. PBS said more than 24 million viewers saw the third season on PBS, making it the most-watched drama in the network’s history. Downton is also bolstering PBS’s bottom line: The public television network closed out fiscal 2013 with a $24.5 million surplus, thanks in large part to Downton distribution deals. Season 4 airs on PBS Sundays Jan.
A new wind of change is blowing through public media organizations of all shapes and sizes, sweeping through executive offices as top managers opt to move on to their next jobs or retire. More than 50 public media outlets — from NPR to WKYU in Bowling Green, Ky. — are searching for a new chief executive or general manager or have completed such a search within the last ten months. Specialists in executive recruitment and outplacements say turnover in pubcasting’s top management jobs has accelerated sharply this year. According to Current’s analysis, 30 organizations went through similar changes during 2012.
Pubcasting veteran Wayne Roth this week won election to the Bainbridge Island (Wash.) City Council. Roth, who retired in September as g.m. of KUOW-FM in Seattle, handily won the race, with 61.4 percent of the vote to his opponent’s 38.5 percent. “I’m a little incredulous,” Roth said on election night, “but the margin seems to be so large, I mean, it’s not even close.” “Well, I’m thrilled,” he added. “I’m really looking forward to joining the council and the work of my colleagues.
New FCC Chair Tom Wheeler thinks broadcasting “is a critical component of the whole mix” when discussing future uses of spectrum, he told Broadcasting & Cable’s Multichannel News in an interview Thursday. “What fascinates me,” he said, “is that people say that if you are talking about how to use spectrum efficiently, then you have to be saying something that is anti-broadcasting. That is malarkey.” Broadcasters “fulfill an important public service,” he added. “The broadcasters distribute in many ways now, including over the air.
PBS closed its books on fiscal 2013 with an extra $24.5 million — more than twice the $11 million surplus that bolstered its bottom line in FY12. Earnings generated by distribution deals for the hit drama Downton Abbey once again brought in much of the extra revenue, along with ancillary revenues from PBS Kids’ properties, short-term investment gains and reimbursements for overhead costs tied to grants. Molly Corbett Broad, chair of the PBS Board’s finance committee, announced the positive financial results Nov. 6 at a PBS Board meeting. The meeting, at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va., was the first of the network’s new fiscal year and marked the beginning of a new board term for directors elected or re-elected to new terms. In addition to electing a chair and two vice chairs, directors were briefed on PBS’s expanded efforts to diversify its content, workforce and audience.
Houston Public Media announced Nov. 7 the layoffs of eight staffers as part of a reorganization to create more multiplatform arts coverage. Four of the eliminated staffers hosted locally programmed classical music on KUHA-FM, one of the broadcaster’s two radio stations. HPM will replace the local shows with American Public Media’s Classical 24 service, though it will continue to air weekly broadcasts from the Houston Symphony. HPM also laid off two technical staff and two membership assistants.
A new survey of more than 460 community partners in CPB’s American Graduate project found enthusiasm for the station-based dropout-prevention initiative as well as challenges to overcome. The 66-page report, produced by the Civic Enterprises public-policy consulting firm and the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, found that 74 percent of 145 responding partner organizations indicated their belief that public media “provided opportunities that will have a lasting effect on youth” through the initiative. Eighty-five percent said that public media will help tackle the problem in their community in the future by building “knowledge, capacity and engagement.”
The online survey was developed by the Hopkins center, CPB and Nine Network of Public Media, a lead station in the multi-year initiative. Participating stations located in high-need communities where dropout rates are critical identified partners to be included in the survey sample. The research concluded in August.