NPR

NPR Labs to end run as stand-alone unit after losing consulting work

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NPR will integrate NPR Labs into its general budget and tighten its focus on public radio after almost five years of running the division as self-sustaining. Under the restructuring, NPR Labs will transition from its status as a stand-alone unit and move from NPR’s distribution division to its technology and operations division. NPR Labs will also drop the Technology Research Center name that it used to market consulting work to clients. The restructuring eliminated the top job at NPR Labs, held by Rich Rarey, a 34-year NPR veteran. Rarey, who will leave July 31, took the job of director of NPR Labs in February when founding director Mike Starling took a voluntary buyout offer and retired.

American Public Media

Salt Lake City’s KCPW hits fundraising goal to keep programming

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With a day to spare, Salt Lake City’s KCPW-FM hit its goal of raising $42,000 to pay off delinquent programming fees and avoid going dark. KCPW was six months in arrears on payments in programming fees to American Public Media. Station staffers took to the airwaves, sidewalks and online starting June 29 to try raising the money by July 3. The station hit the goal Wednesday afternoon. Of the $42,000, $12,765 came in from an Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign.

Programs/Content

GPB coming to Atlanta airwaves with WRAS-FM deal

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In a channel-sharing agreement announced Tuesday, Georgia Public Broadcasting will expand its public radio service into the Atlanta market starting June 1 via Georgia State University’s 88.5 WRAS-FM. GPB Radio will program the station with a news format from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., providing Atlanta with its first public radio outlet to air news in midday hours. The city’s WABE, operated by Atlanta’s public school system, airs NPR’s newsmagazines but also schedules classical music from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays. “We wanted to bring something that is not currently in the market,” said Bert Huffman, v.p. of development for GPB. “We recognize that people can get classical music from WABE.”

Development

Study evaluates strength of public radio’s “halo” for sponsors

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ATLANTA — The positive associations that public radio listeners have with corporate sponsors and underwriters are as strong as ever, according to a report unveiled July 11 during the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference. Results of the 2013 NPR Underwriting Research project, presented by radio analyst Paul Jacobs, showed that the so-called “halo effect” that companies gain from public media sponsorships is unchanged since 2010, the last time researchers looked into it. A 2003 NPR study first identified the power of public radio sponsorships to influence listeners’ perceptions of the quality of the companies who pay for them. “We’re seeing absolutely no decline in how your listeners feel about you,” Jacobs said. “Despite the fact we live in a time of media fragmentation, one of the constants you have is that your audience loves you.”

“You have something that money can’t buy — your listeners trust in you so much that that trust transfers to the companies that sponsor you,” Jacobs told the audience at the PMDMC Thursday.

CPB Board

Life cycle of a reform: independence of CPB Program Fund

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Ron Hull, a former director of the Program Fund, reflects on the value of buffer from partisan politics
 

Jan. 2, 1979 — Robben Fleming, a university president and an authority on (labor) negotiations, comes to CPB as its third president. Also in January, the politically appointed CPB Board suspends its committees to reevaluate their roles. This decision shelved the board’s Program Committee, which traditionally had voted aye or nay on national production proposals for public TV. Even before Fleming arrived, the CPB Board had been rethinking this process.

Quick Takes

WFCR takes new name: New England Public Radio

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Western Massachusetts broadcaster WFCR-FM has adopted a new name — one that seems to speak of ongoing expansion: New England Public Radio. CEO Martin Miller announced the plans at a station event Wednesday night. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the station announced it has arranged to buy new quarters in downtown Springfield, south of its longtime home in Amherst, and has bought a new FM frequency in the Berkshire Mountains town of Adams, northwest of Amherst. The news and classical music station, licensed to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, added a second program schedule, all-news/talk, on a leased station in the 1990s and in October acquired WNNZ-AM for the schedule. By building translators in addition, one or both of its program streams now span from southern Vermont to northern Connecticut, New Hampshire to Albany, N.Y. Where it may encounter competition from another growing regional public radio franchise, Northeast Public Radio (WAMC).

Quick Takes

CPB launches $4.4 million, 20-station American Graduate program

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CPB kicked off its American Graduate initiative Tuesday (May 3) at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

The $4.4 million project aims to boost graduation rates in 20 communities nationwide, using multiplatform content for at-risk students and their teachers. Host Ray Suarez, a senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour and the event’s host, said the graduation rates among Hispanics and African-Americans was only about 54 percent in 2007. “This is something we really don’t have an option to fix — we have to,” Suarez said. Appearing were Hill Harper, star of CSI:NY, a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School; he also wrote the best-selling Letters to a Young Brother: Manifest Your Destiny. Actress America Ferrera, best known for Ugly Betty, talked about her mother’s anger when Ferrera’s sister was told “not to bother” with applying for college because she was Hispanic.

Quick Takes

Forty years ago: KPFT bombed off the air twice in its first year

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Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston “was the first radio station in the United States to be bombed off the air” in May 1970, soon after going on the air, recalled Rick Campbell in a Houston Chronicle blog. That October, 40 years ago this month, the station was dynamited into silence a second time during a broadcast of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested; two got off by testifying against Jimmy Dale Hutto, who was convicted and sent to jail. He allegedly planned to bomb the Pacifica stations in Berkeley and Los Angeles. When the station resumed broadcasting in January 1971, PBS’s Great American Dream Machine covered the event live. “Outside this room, people are celebrating free speech,” said station manager Larry Lee on PBS, “and something is wrong when free speech is a cause for celebration, and there are armed police out there guarding us.” Guthrie wrote a song for the occasion, including these lyrics: “When I get to Houston, pull out my strings, walk to the station, you can hear me sing — you get bombed, all God’s chillun get bombed.”