At the groundbreaking, from left, KCRW Foundation Board Chair Michael Fleming, station board member Deborah Ramo, KCRW President Jennifer Ferro and Santa Monica College President Chui L. Tsang. (Photo: KCRW)
• KCRW broke ground Wednesday for a 35,000-square-foot Media Center to be constructed on Santa Monica College’s Academy of Entertainment & Technology campus. Over the past 30 years, the station noted in a press release, the KCRW staff “has grown from 14 to 110 in extremely cramped offices and studios beneath Santa Monica College campus.”
Natale
• Vme TV, the Spanish-language public TV multicaster, is adding Lo Mejor de SuperLatina to its weekend lineup starting July 5. Hosted by six-time Emmy nominee Gaby Natale, the show will feature interviews with Latino celebrities and newsmakers including entertainer Enrique Iglesias, singer-songwriter Don Omar, producer and singer Prince Royce and Mexican TV actor Eugenio Derbez.
• Kickstarter on Thursday launched two new project categories that have “brought huge amounts of energy and ingenuity” to the crowd-funding site — journalism and crafts. The change could make it easier for new journalism projects to garner the kind of success Roman Mars had in 2012 with his 99% Invisible campaign.
• Fiona Ritchie, producer and longtime host of NPR’s The Thistle & Shamrock, co-authors a new book, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland to Ulster and Appalachia, which hits bookstores in September. It covers nearly 400 years of musical history and includes a foreword by Dolly Parton and a CD with 20 songs by artists such as Pete Seeger.
• Hillary Clinton went on Fresh Air yesterday to promote her new memoir, Hard Choices, and faced a tough line of questioning from Terry Gross. The host peppered the former Secretary of State with queries about her stance on the Iraq War and how her views on gay marriage had “evolved” over the years, leading to some testy answers from Clinton and a smattering of reaction from political blogs. National Journal said that agreeing to the interview was “a mistake” for the politician, noting that GOP opposition group America Rising “clipped the audio [about gay marriage] and blasted it out online.”