Mike has held the role of digital editor since 2014. Before becoming editor, he covered public radio and digital initiatives in public media for Current. Mike has also written for a variety of publications as a freelancer, was a Public Media Corps fellow, and has hosted talk and music shows on community radio stations in the Washington, D.C., area. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family, playing banjo, cooking, and making coffee and cocktails.
Three NPR journalists will start academic fellowships starting this fall, with Dina Temple-Raston and Alison MacAdam joining the Nieman program at Harvard, and Louisa Lim attending the University of Michigan as a Knight-Wallace fellow. Temple-Raston, who covers counterterrorism for the network, will study the use of big data in intelligence gathering. MacAdam, a senior All Things Considered editor, will study the business of the art world. In Michigan, Lim will study the sustainability of China’s current political structures. She currently reports from Beijing.
The University of Kentucky has sued a reporter at its public radio station, WUKY in Lexington, in an attempt to guard information she had requested about surgical practices at its pediatric hospital. By filing the complaint, UK is challenging the state’s attorney general, who in March endorsed reporter Brenna Angel’s request for documents. UK declined the AG’s request as well, citing state and federal privacy laws. The dispute began in December 2012, when Angel made an Open Records Request to the university regarding the cardiothoracic surgery program at Kentucky Children’s Hospital in Lexington. The program has been suspended pending an internal review, according to local media reports.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is adapting a book about cancer into a six-hour series for public TV, reports the New York Times. The project was originally conceived by Sharon Rockefeller, CEO of WETA in Washington, D.C., who read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer in late 2010. Rockefeller herself had been treated for advanced cancer. The broadcast will coincide with an outreach campaign.
NPR and Miami’s WLRN are collaborating to boost coverage of Latin America, with NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro assigned to a new foreign desk in São Paulo. In addition to Garcia-Navarro, the team of journalists includes Tim Padgett, a longtime reporter on Latin America and the Caribbean who previously wrote for Time and Newsweek and recently joined WLRN. Padgett’s primary task will be to coordinate coverage from Miami. Four reporters on the staff of the Miami Herald and its sister Spanish-language publication, El Nuevo Herald, will also contribute. WLRN and the Herald have collaborated on news coverage for a decade.
Beginning May 6 on NPR’s All Things Considered, listeners will hear five voices from the past that may have a familiar ring. They’re a bit weathered with age but still share personal stories about navigating extraordinary twists in their lives.
The Pacifica radio network rarely enjoys a drama-free moment, but with two of its five stations on a tight schedule to find new studios, tensions among network leaders and local volunteers are even higher than usual. Last week Summer Reese, interim executive director of Pacifica, took a redeye from the West Coast, where Pacifica is headquartered, to appear in court in Washington, D.C. The landlord of WPFW, Pacifica’s Washington station, is selling the building that houses the station’s studios to a developer who has plans for a new hotel on the site and needs WPFW to move out of the way. Reese and WPFW leaders have been searching for a new location for months, but the site on which the station had already paid rent has prompted a backlash among station volunteers: The studios are located outside the District of Columbia and shared with a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications. Some WPFW volunteers have gone to court to block that move, and Reese is sympathetic to their cause. Meanwhile, Pacifica’s debt-burdened New York station, WBAI, is also on the hunt for a new home and faces an equally pressing deadline to find one.
Listeners to WPPB in Long Island, N.Y., can listen to Morning Edition or the BBC Newshour if they want to know what’s happening now. But if they’re looking for an inkling of what’s going to happen, they can ask McMahon.
WPFW-FM, the Pacifica station in Washington, D.C., faces a deadline to vacate its studios at the end of month and still has no clear plan for relocating, reports the Washington City Paper. Programmers and listeners have opposed a plan to move to studios in Silver Spring, Md., that would be leased from a subsidiary of Clear Channel. Even Pacifica Interim Executive Director Summer Reese opposes the move — she’s asked WPFW’s Local Station Board to determine whether the station can back out of the sublease agreement. The building’s landlord also is questioning the lease, reportedly because Pacifica briefly lost its corporate charter earlier this year. Pacifica’s poor finances, as well as WPFW’s, have thwarted the station’s efforts to negotiate for other locations.
The music world of Austin, Texas, is now being shared with a global audience thanks to Austin Music Map, a website developed by the city’s public radio station, KUT.
In a post on his website, actor Harry Shearer describes how he learned about the cancellation of his long-running show on KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif. On Monday, KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro told Shearer that “Le Show was being cancelled from the airwaves.” Shearer had suspected that Ferro was preparing to end the weekly program’s run on KCRW, but he was surprised by the timing, which was “‘effective immediately,’” he wrote, quoting Ferro. “Thus does public radio, in one more small way, come to resemble ever more closely commercial radio’s way of doing business,” Shearer commented. The station announced the cancellation April 15 as part of an overhaul of its weekend schedule.
The licensee of KJZZ and KBAQ in Phoenix has asked the FCC for temporary permission to sidestep the agency’s rules governing language in underwriting announcements in a test of whether “enhanced” sponsor messages could boost income. In a March 18 letter to the FCC, the Maricopa County Community College District proposed a three-year trial window “to conduct a limited and controlled demonstration project to test a modified loosening of the Commission’s enhanced underwriting policies.” Under the looser rules, KBAQ and KJZZ would air announcements that include:
“factually accurate information concerning interest rates available at underwriter banks, credit unions, automobile dealerships, and other local businesses”;
notification of sales and special events such as discounts and promotions; and
qualitative adjectives based on factual data, such as “certified,” “accredited,” “award-winning,” “experienced” or “long-established.”
During this experimental phase, the stations would monitor listener satisfaction and revenue resulting from the enhanced announcements. If sales rose and listeners accepted the new language without complaint, other public radio stations could adopt the looser rules as well, the college district suggested. In the letter, submitted by communications attorney Ernie Sanchez, the college district cited the need to experiment as stations grapple with cuts in state funding, declines in underwriting revenue and the possible elimination of federal support for public broadcasting. “Could public radio stations remain financially viable, even with diminished federal funding, if the guidelines were simply relaxed or — expressed another way — enhanced somewhat more than previous levels?” the letter asked.
Public radio’s American Routes is celebrating its 15th anniversary on the air with a dance and concert in New Orleans and a discount for stations adding the show. The April 19 concert at the New Orleans Rock ‘n’ Bowl will feature the Treme Brass Band, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Irma Thomas, Ivan Neville and other luminaries of the Louisiana and New Orleans music scenes. Sponsored by WWNO-FM in New Orleans, the fundraiser for the music program will be recorded and distributed to stations for broadcast during the week of July 4. Hosted by folklorist and anthropology professor Nick Spitzer, American Routes airs on 260 stations. It has faced challenges to maintain steady carriage as more stations adopt news/talk formats and has “won and lost” some battles in that effort, Spitzer told Current in an email.
Milwaukee Public Radio host Mitch Teich could have predicted a few outcomes from his decision to take up speedskating — sore muscles, bruises from the occasional spill on the ice at high speed — but probably not the biggest story of his journalism career.
The Public Radio Program Directors Association will expand its training programs for stations this year and continue its Sense of Place studies of local audiences, with funding from NPR and the Millstream Fund. PRPD will offer three workshops based on the Morning Edition Grad School classes that it has offered in recent years. “New MEGS” will extend training to all newsmagazines, including All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, and is designed for hosts, news directors and program directors. The first workshop will be offered May 18 in Charlotte, N.C.
“JMEGS” (MEGS for Journalists) applies MEGS principles to journalism, focusing on selecting stories, interviewing, writing, planning newscasts and promoting news reports. JMEGS was piloted in 2009 but has not yet been implemented.
New England Public Radio in Amherst, Mass., got a helping hand earlier this month from a famous friend when listener and local resident Bill Cosby staged a benefit performance for the station’s capital campaign. Cosby’s March 2 show at Symphony Hall in Springfield, Mass., raised $140,000 for the station, drawing more than 2,000 attendees who each paid from $37.50 to $75 to see the comic. The event stemmed from relationships between Cosby and various station staff that developed over the past few years. Cosby first got in touch Tom Reney, host of the station’s weeknight jazz show, says General Manager Martin Miller. Cosby and his wife then began donating money by sponsoring challenge grants during on-air fund drives, for which they were credited as “Dr. Bill and Dr. Camille.” The comedian visited the station in 2011 for an interview, and when he came back for a second interview, Miller discussed the station’s capital campaign with him.
NPR will test a system for delivering emergency alerts to individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing in Gulf Coast states under a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The project marks the first attempt to deliver real-time emergency messages such as weather alerts via radio-broadcast text to those with hearing disabilities. Through the Public Radio Satellite System, NPR will relay emergency alert messages received from FEMA via the Radio Broadcast Data System to public radio stations in the Gulf region. The stations will broadcast the alerts to receivers that are able to display text messages. Volunteers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing will be alerted to the warnings by flashing indicators on their radios or by a bed-shaking device that can be triggered by radios.
The board of directors of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters has dismissed NFCB President Maxie Jackson as of March 4. He had led the organization since January 2010. Neither Jackson nor Sue Matters, chair of the NFCB Board, would discuss the reasons for Jackson’s dismissal, due to terms of a severance agreement. NFCB Board Treasurer Janis Lane-Ewart is acting as interim president of the organization. The board plans to start a nationwide search for a new leader.
Public radio will be well-represented at the musical portion of the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, March 13–16. The NPR Music showcase March 13 will feature the Yeah Yeah Yeahs performing new songs from their forthcoming album Mosquito, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mexican rockers Café Tacvba and others. Audio of the live set at 8 p.m. Eastern will be offered for station broadcast and distributed online; NPR Music will also offer a live video stream through its website and mobile apps. Café Tacvba will put in double duty and appear in a March 14 showcase arranged by NPR Music’s Alt.Latino channel, along with Molotov, also from Mexico. Rounding out the lineup is Bajofondo, a band led by Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla, who has scored films including Brokeback Mountain and The Motorcycle Diaries.
Thurston Briscoe is no longer at WBGO-FM in Newark, N.J. His last day was Friday. The news was first reported on the blog of the Public Radio Program Directors Association. Briscoe had served as the station’s program director for 23 years. When asked by Current whether Briscoe left willingly or was dismissed, General Manager Cephas Bowles said only, “Let us say that he is no longer at the station. That’s our position right now.”
The FCC has approved the sale of a West Virginia college station to Pittsburgh Public Media, a jazz webcaster run by former employees of the city’s defunct WDUQ-FM. PPM will pay $135,000 for the 1,100-watt WVBC-FM, currently operated by Bethany College in Bethany, W.Va. It plans to switch the station at 88.1 MHz to a jazz format starting in April, says Chuck Leavens, PPM president. The station now airs music and college sports. PPM was established in 2010 in a bid to buy WDUQ, which broadcast both NPR News and jazz to southwestern Pennsylvania.
