Sagal pays tribute to friend and colleague Kasell. (Photo: Anthony Naglemann)
• NPR is beta-testing an app for set-top player Roku that will allow viewers to watch its archive of nearly 300 Tiny Desk Concerts. All Roku users can access the beta version, which is NPR’s first foray onto the platform. The concerts, held behind the desk of NPR Music’s Bob Boilen, have become a popular web feature and have attracted acts including Adele, Wilco and OK Go.
• In advance of Carl Kasell’s final appearance as scorekeeper of NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! May 17, host Peter Sagal shared remembrances of his longtime sidekick. “Carl has put up with endless travel, silly jokes, countless assaults on his dignity, and my stumbling and stuttering away through shows right next to him, and all he ever has to say about it is, ‘I can’t complain,'” Sagal wrote. NPR also collected the greatest hits of Kasell’s voicemail greetings and bits from the show.
• The Advanced Television Systems Committee has bestowed this year’s Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award to James Kutzner, retired PBS senior director of advanced technology, TV Technology reports. ATSC presented the award to Kutzner May 8 in Washington, D.C. Kutzner had served as PBS’s chief engineer for more than a decade before retiring earlier this year.
• Software entrepreneur Marc Andreessen has annotated NPR’s “Internet is coming” 1994 memo for News Genius. The memo made the rounds on the Internet last month after being featured on the NPRchives Tumblr. Andreessen notes that NPR was adapting to the Internet “earlier than a lot of other organizations” but criticizes the network’s decision to only offer email to employees at first as “the kind of attitude, widespread at the time, that has since led to the collapse of credibility of corporate information technology in many organizations.”
A legend for WBEZ.