Letson
• New details have emerged about the future of Reveal, the investigative pubradio series from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Public Radio Exchange. CIR Executive Director Robert Rosenthal tells Nieman Lab that the station plans to put its recently announced $3.5 million grant toward producing a planned weekly series to debut in January 2015. The ambitious plan to become public radio’s answer to Frontline will require a lot of collaborative reporting, CIR CEO Joaquin Alvarado said.
• Al Letson, host of both Reveal and NPR and PRX’s State of the Re:Union, is a man of many talents. His latest project: a sci-fi comic book. Letson is the writer of the graphic series Imperfect, a story about a girl who develops the power to create avatars after reaching puberty in a dystopian land. The first issue of the limited-run series is finished, and Letson has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $15,000 for three more issues.
• When the late film critic Roger Ebert attempted to reboot his movie-review show At the Movies on PBS in 2011, the retooled program lasted only a year. Now one of its co-hosts, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, lays the blame squarely at himself: “I killed At the Movies,” he writes in an article for the A.V. Club. Vishnevetsky attributes the show’s failure to his inexperience and a lack of onscreen tension with co-host Christy Lemire.
Al (along with Glynn Washington of “Snap Judgement”) came out of the Public Radio Talent Quest. There were 1400+ entries and as a judge, I heard some amazing ideas. This is continued proof that there are people who want in and it’s important for the industry to work together and find ways to create a pipeline for those who we consistently overlook.