Programs/Content

Hearing by ethics watchdog could sew up feud in Seattle

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Members of a Seattle-based media-watchdog group weighed in March 31 [2012] on a yearlong dispute between an antiabortion group and KUOW, the city’s all-news pubradio outlet, bringing the disagreement to an end for the time being. A majority of panelists convened by the Washington News Council voted in agreement that KUOW had made errors in a story involving the Vitae Foundation, and that the mistakes merited on-air corrections or clarifications. KUOW had already corrected and clarified the story, though only on its website. But most members of the WNC panel agreed that KUOW had no responsibility to give the Vitae Foundation additional on-air coverage after the story aired. Vitae had asked KUOW for on-air reporting as reparation for the initial story’s flaws, and initially the news council had backed that request.

Programs/Content

NPR deal will help to measure, and monetize, web streaming

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An agreement between NPR and Triton Digital, a provider of digital services to radio stations, will give NPR stations a new option for measuring and monetizing online audiences while also allowing the network to access analytics and metrics for all participating stations. The master agreement between NPR and Triton, announced March 27, provides two services to stations: Webcast Metrics, which measures listening to live streams, and Ad Injector, a system that replaces on-air underwriting credits with online sponsorship credits. “They’re independent products, but the idea is that they can work hand in hand,” says Bob Kempf, v.p. of NPR Digital Services. By more thoroughly measuring online listening, stations expect to raise more revenue through selling local sponsorships of their online streams.

Measurement of listening to web streams is uneven throughout the system, Kempf says. Some stations already use Triton, others measure pageviews of the web pages where links to their streams reside and still others aren’t measuring at all.

Collaboration

CPB will give guidelines to journalism hubs

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CPB is evaluating proposals from six regional journalism hubs for another year of operation and will furnish the centers with a shared set of best practices to follow if they receive additional funding. The guidelines will be designed to address challenges that the seven Local Journalism Centers have encountered during their two years of growth, such as negotiating editorial control and finding paths toward financial sustainability. Launched in 2010 with $10.5 million in CPB funding, the LJCs brought public broadcasters together in regional collaborations to report on focused areas of coverage, such as agriculture, border issues and health care. With the hubs entering their third year of operation, CPB hired a consultant to review which LJCs have succeeded, which have struggled and which factors have made the difference. At a meeting of the CPB Board March 26, interactive-media consultant Rusty Coats reported that four LJCs have established a clear voice and focus throughout their editorial products, while the rest have faced greater challenges.

Programs/Content

Digital journalists look for lessons in work of Andy Carvin, NPR’s one-man newsroom

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On a recent afternoon at NPR, Andy Carvin was watching a video of a protest purportedly shot in the Syrian city of Homs, a locus of that country’s uprising against its repressive regime. The video’s location surprised Carvin, considering the firepower the government has unleashed on the city to quell the uprising. As he often does, he looked for telltale landmarks in the background, listened to the chants and accents of the protesters, and checked if the weather in the video matched the day’s forecasts. He ended up asking his Twitter contact who had disseminated the video for more verification. This vetting process occupies most of Carvin’s workdays.

Programs/Content

@acarvin’s example

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After the Arab Spring began, NPR’s Andy Carvin remains a rare breed. More journalists are using Twitter to find stories and connect with sources, but Carvin says few use it as he does….

People

Alex Chadwick: Recharged to cover an energetic beat

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Alex Chadwick was lost. It took a journey to an unlikely place — the whitewater rapids of a Utah canyon — for him to find his way back to radio. In 2008, Chadwick found himself absent from the airwaves for the first time in decades. He had stepped down as host of the NPR show Day to Day to return to reporting, only to be laid off a month later, an unceremonious end to 31 years at the network. He then devoted himself to caring for his wife and partner in broadcasting, Carolyn Jensen Chadwick, who was battling multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood cells.

Programs/Content

New NPR ethics code discourages outside contracts

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NPR journalists must seek management approval to sign work contracts with other media outlets, and most such requests will not be granted, according to a comprehensive revision of the network’s ethics guidelines approved unanimously by the network’s board Feb. 24. The board reaffirmed the network’s desire to regulate moonlighting such as the ongoing appearances of former NPR news analyst Juan Williams on Fox News — a gig that led to his firing in 2010 and an extended hullaballoo exploited by Fox and Republican partisans. Publication of the NPR Ethics Handbook concluded a 15-month process that the Board initiated after Williams’s dismissal. The guidelines specify that a news employee must get written permission “for all outside freelance and journalistic work,” a continuation of NPR’s previous policies.

Programs/Content

Keillor’s fundraiser for Obama revives complaints of bias

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Like many entertainers, Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor has never tried to hide his liberal political leanings, but his decision to host an Obama re-election fundraising party in his Minnesota home last week worked the conservative blogosphere into a lather about NPR’s political bias. Yet NPR has no control over Keillor or his nationally syndicated weekly program. And there’s no guarantee that his program’s distributor, the Minnesota-based American Public Media Group, could heel its star vaudevillian if it tried to neutralize him politically. Keillor owns his production company and is responsible for the show’s content. APMG took a measured stance by endorsing Keillor’s First Amendment rights as an individual.

Tech

NPR app for motorists gets radio from the Web as well as stations

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Some new Ford cars will let their drivers shout “hourly news!” or “topics!” and choose public radio programming either on their local stations or through a smartphone streaming audio from the Internet. Bringing in webcasts and on-demand streaming gives drivers a vastly greater range of listening options and could make it even easier for them to hear public radio without help from their local stations. That ability is already within reach for drivers who have a smartphone and a cable or adapter to connect it to a car stereo. But coupling a smartphone with the new NPR app to Ford’s SYNC AppLink system may help popularize web audio listening, a scenario that dismays some pubradio station leaders. Regardless, some station execs are also praising NPR for taking the lead as the first news organization to develop a dedicated in-car app that showcases its programming.

Programs/Content

APM acquires Knight-nurtured Spot.us crowdfunding site

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Minnesota-based American Public Media announced Nov. 29 the future cohabitation of two new-media tools for use by public media newsrooms. APM’s Public Insight Network (PIN), which helps journalists find story topics and sources in their communities, has acquired Spot.Us, a platform for raising money to support freelance reporting. Launched in 2008, Spot.Us allows freelancers to post pitches on its website for stories they’d like to report and ask for donations to support their efforts. Spot.Us takes a 10 percent cut of the donations for its own expenses and charges news organizations to create surveys for their websites. Readers who answer the surveys get credits that they can apply to Spot.Us story pitches.

System/Policy

NPR rooted in stations that still require federal dollars

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When Gary Knell officially started work this month as NPR’s president, he probably found no shortage of ideas about what he should do with an organization that has recently survived bad headlines, turmoil at the top and a near-death experience with federal funding cuts. But he would be well advised to ignore some of those recommendations. Some say NPR should simply forgo federal funding, which accounts for 2 percent of its annual budget. Receiving even that small amount, they say, leaves NPR vulnerable to accusations of political bias in its news coverage. How much easier it would be, they argue, if public radio would give up the federal dollars and ignore the occasional outbreaks of criticism from Capitol Hill.

Programs/Content

Colorado net assigns idle AM to Triple A duty in Denver

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Colorado Public Radio has found a new use for the spare AM frequency that it couldn’t sell. OpenAir 1340 took to the air last month, bringing the Denver area a Triple A–format station featuring rock, folk and indie music ranging from the present day to rootsy influences. The station signed on Oct. 31 with the song “Colorado” by Denver band Paper Bird, an early indicator of OpenAir’s commitment to showcasing local music. CPR has already recorded more than a dozen local bands in its studios for broadcast on OpenAir.

Quick Takes

Anonymous lender saves Salt Lake station from default

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An unexpected intervention from an anonymous lender has saved Salt Lake City’s KCPW-FM from defaulting on a loan, ensuring that it will continue operating for the foreseeable future. Leaders of the news station learned Oct. 25 [2011] that they could borrow up to $250,000 from the anonymous lender, enough to enable them to repay a loan from National Cooperative Bank due Oct. 31. The anonymous lender will give KCPW six months to repay, says Ed Sweeney, KCPW’s g.m.

The breakthrough came after a roller-coaster month for KCPW.

People

Norman Corwin, auteur of radio’s golden years, 101

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Norman Corwin, a radio writer and producer whose pioneering programs made him one of the most renowned creators of shows during radio’s Golden Age, died Oct. 18 [2011] of natural causes. He was 101. Corwin’s name may be unfamiliar to most people today, but during the 1940s his productions for CBS drew huge audiences and influenced a generation of writers and directors in all media. He wrote on a wide range of subjects in a ringing, poetic tone that had few parallels in its time and would be almost unheard of on today’s airwaves, even in public radio.

Programs/Content

Two more feeds syndicate jazz to public radio

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Public radio stations shopping for a plug-and-play jazz stream now have double the options to consider, with two newcomers to the field offering mainstream jazz services. Last month KPLU in Seattle/Tacoma announced that it will soon offer its Jazz24 stream, which it now broadcasts online and locally on an HD channel, to stations around the country. KPLU says the channel now draws a monthly web audience of 100,000 listeners, 90 percent outside the Seattle area. Meanwhile, some former hosts and creators of JazzWorks, a service that changed hands in May along with Pittsburgh’s WDUQ-FM, are now offering a jazz service under the name of Pubradio Network, competing with their old channel. Add those to the incumbents — JazzWorks, now operated by WDUQ’s buyer, Essential Public Media, and the Jazz Satellite Network from Chicago’s WFMT.

Programs/Content
Seun Kuti

Musicians’ stories join their music in Sound Tracks for PBS

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Steve Talbot worked in public TV for more than 20 years before trying his hand as chief fundraiser for one of his own projects. His timing was not the greatest. On the day in 2008 when Lehman Brothers imploded, PBS agreed to back the pilot for Talbot’s Sound Tracks, a newsmagazine-style show about contemporary music around the world. The hourlong debut, which aired in January 2010, got positive feedback from viewers, programmers and PBS, but the recession has hampered Talbot’s efforts to make more episodes of Sound Tracks ever since. He’s still raising money to produce additional episodes.

Tech

FCC plan could give LPFM apps an edge over FM translators

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Applicants for thousands of FM translators may have to reapply if the FCC goes through with its proposal to give new low-power FM stations a chance to compete for the same frequencies. In a July 12 Notice of Proposed Rule Making, the FCC asked for public feedback on a proposal to resolve a years-old backlog of applications for FM translators — low-power stations that relay the signals of full-power FM stations. The commission began a long hiatus from granting translator licenses in 2005 due to concerns that the new relay transmitters could crowd out potential LPFMs, a newer category of 100-watt noncommercial FMs introduced to originate programming. Like earlier struggles over LPFM rules, these policy decisions pit existing stations — including public stations trying to extend service using translators — against the commission’s plan for bringing new community voices to radio. FCC rules give LPFMs and translators equal standing for interference protection; both are secondary to full-power FM stations.

Programs/Content

StateImpact pilot begins scrutiny of government in eight states

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Pubcasters in three states have started airing reports and posting stories online as the first participants in StateImpact, a large-scale project spearheaded by NPR that could unite the member stations and the network for an unprecedented level of collaborative newsgathering. The objective: to strengthen coverage of state government in all 50 states in coming years. Visit stateimpact. npr.org and you’ll see a map of the United States with three states highlighted in green — Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Stations in these states have gone live with their own StateImpact sites, with links from the national site.

Programs/Content

Changes at Maine documentary school worry its devoted alumni

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The departure of the entire four-person faculty from Maine’s small but influential Salt Institute for Documentary Studies has caused concern among the school’s alumni, many of whom found their way into public radio via Salt’s unique classes in audio production. The teachers who left have either declined to discuss their resignations publicly or said their reasons for leaving were personal and unrelated. The executive director of the Portland-based school and its board of trustees echo those accounts. That has done little to assure alums, however, who fear that the close timing of the departures suggests problems behind the scenes. “It’s a pretty clear picture that there’s an underlying issue and a reason they all decided to leave,” says Jen Dean, a photographer and Salt grad who has represented alumni in meetings with Salt leadership.

Programs/Content

Panel to NPR: Rein in punditizing

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NPR should have its journalists phase out any long-term contracts for appearances on other media outlets, monitor those appearances more carefully and make clearer distinctions between reporting, analysis and commentary in its programming, the network’s ethics-policy task force advised Feb. 25 [2011]. Bob Steele, head of the task force, presented recommendations for revising the ethics code to the NPR Board last month. Steele, director of the Prindle Institute for Ethics and distinguished professor of journalism ethics at DePauw University and a journalism values scholar with the Poynter Institute, was retained by NPR President Vivian Schiller to head the task force. The 13-member task force included NPR employees, outside journalists and citizens at large.