Current (https://current.org/author/mike-janssen/page/28/)
Digital Editor
Phone: (202) 885-6419
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.
NPR President Vivian Schiller has apologized to public radio for how she and her executives handled last month’s dismissal of news analyst Juan Williams, but the network stands by its decision to let him go.
Chicago Public Radio’s board, staff and executives didn’t mince words in their latest strategic plan about their bold experiment known as Vocalo. “As a website Vocalo must be seen as unsuccessful so far.”
Stations struggling with mounting deficits often cut jobs, but the shears rarely lop off the highest rank as they did at WHQR in Wilmington, N.C., a year ago.
The afternoon team at Chicago’s newest noncommercial radio station is on the air, talking crime and punishment. Most public radio shows would steer a conversation about the city police force along a course charted by producers well in advance and predictably typecast with expert pontificators. Not Vocalo.org. Host-producer Robin Amer shares news of a personnel change in the Chicago police, a nugget fresh from the website of the Chicago Sun-Times. Co-hosts Dan Weissman and Luis Perez grill her for details from the just-published bulletins in front of her.
A proposed merger of two California pubradio stations fell apart when officials at California State University Monterey Bay voted to keep control of KAZU-FM.
Listeners are flooding the station with emails, posting angry comments and picketing the studios.
Top pubradio executives have begun discussing ideas for a comprehensive “back end” digital storage and distribution system that backers say could support a wide range of services and help stations and networks advance efficiently into new media. The execs, who met for the first time in Chicago Feb. 15, are taking up a proposal for a back-end system with the working name of the Digital Distribution Consortium. The DDC would store and catalog audio content from pubcasters and feed it to nonbroadcast platforms such as websites, iPods and cell phones. Some new-media thinkers in public radio argue for building websites that aggregate online content from various sources, but talks about “front end” strategies lead to touchy subjects such as revenue sharing, business models and public radio’s web identity.
The show from NPR and WNYC explores big ideas in science in an accessible, even addictive style.
NPR launched the next phase of public radio’s New Realities process last week, releasing an ambitious plan to strengthen ties with listeners and foster better collaboration within the system. In its 12-page Blueprint for Growth, released to general managers July 12, NPR said it will work with stations and other system partners to develop a “News Network of the Future,” a web-based music service and an infrastructure to support distribution of digital content. The network will also lead efforts to raise major gifts to support these ventures. But the blueprint goes further by asking stakeholders in public radio to reconsider their relationships with their audiences and each other. Members of the public radio community must shift their focus from competing with each other to uniting against competition from other media, the blueprint says.
Lance Orozco is one of Southern California’s most honored and recognized journalists. Yet he doesn’t work for the Los Angeles Times or a commercial megastation. Orozco has instead landed dozens of awards from area press groups by making an unlikely news powerhouse out of tiny KCLU-FM in Thousand Oaks, a Ventura County suburb northwest of Los Angeles. The station employs just four full-time staffers but has won a flood of praise for the extensive local coverage spearheaded by Orozco, its news director and reporting dynamo. Last month the Associated Press Television and Radio Association of California and Nevada awarded KCLU and Orozco nine of its Mark Twain Awards, including one naming him Radio Reporter of the Year.
An FM station in Berlin will soon become the first programmed overseas by National Public Radio.
For lovers of classical music, these are difficult times. Once pubradio’s dominant format, classical music is still widespread on the airwaves. As of fall 2002, 340 public stations aired a “very significant” amount of classical each week, according to a Minnesota Public Radio report on the genre. But news programs from NPR and other sources have been pushing symphonies and operas off stage. News eclipsed classical in 2000 as public radio’s most prevalent format and more and more stations have been shearing hours of the music from their schedules.
To stop a long slide in audience, WETA-FM in Washington, D.C., will adopt an all-news format Feb. 28. With almost unanimous approval from its board of trustees, the station will add news programs from the BBC, NPR and other sources, replacing classical music during middays and evenings, Monday through Friday. Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera and a weekly folk show will be WETA’s last music offerings. Middays will feature NPR’s Day to Day, as well as News and Notes with Ed Gordon, the replacement of Tavis Smiley’s program that is also aimed at black listeners.
Three public radio operations will merge to create a new Iowa Public Radio network, the state’s Board of Regents has confirmed. The net will include stations at three universities overseen by the regents: WOI-AM/FM at Iowa State University in Ames, KUNI and KHKE at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, and WSUI and KSUI at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Regents expect the merger will lower administrative costs and improve programming, with management of the stations centralized under an executive director and news reports and other programming shared throughout the network. Managers of the stations share that optimism but worry about lost jobs and the future of their local programs. The stations could end up with a radically revised staffing hierarchy and significant overhauls to the five program streams on their AM and FM signals. Their universities have embarked on the first step of the process — the search for Iowa Public Radio’s executive director.
Classical music, liberal-friendly talk programming and rock tunes couched in mellow ambiance might sound like familiar public radio fare. But they’re also three formats where some commercial competitors seek to stake a claim. Corporations big and small are prospecting all three areas for profitability, prompting varied reactions from pubcasters. Some warn against getting too comfortable with the newcomers, while others greet them as business partners. Coming in the new wave of would-be competitors:
Neo-Radio, a style of presenting contemporary music that, much like public radio, avoids hype and puts the listener’s desires first;
progressive talk, the left-wing’s alternative to Rush Limbaugh that recently got a boost when some Clear Channel stations began carrying Air America programming; and
a classical music network for commercial stations, under development by ABC Radio Networks and WQXR, the commercial classical station in New York.
Pacifica’s transition to a listener-elected board of directors carried an unexpectedly high price tag, and network executives are exploring cheaper alternatives. Last year the radio network enshrined its democratic principles in bylaws that empowered its staff and members of stations to elect Local Station Boards. Those boards in turn vote for the network’s national board. The bylaws were a crowning achievement to activists who spent years wresting Pacifica from an unpopular board, which had begun appointing its own members and installed a top-down governance style. But the additional governance costs have shocked some Pacifica leaders, who ask whether the cash-strapped network can sustain them.
“We don’t do anything in a small way,” says Laura Walker, and in her eight years as president of New York’s WNYC the station has learned to live large.
The cry from a distraught public rang out: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” After announcing the reassignment of Morning Edition host Bob Edwards
March 23, the network struggled to explain itself amid a coast-to-coast
NPR-bashing in the media and a record influx of listener complaints. Some public radio managers joined the attack on NPR brass. Even those who
supported the network’s aim — to strengthen Morning Edition with
a two-host setup — criticized it for poor timing and lack of public-relations
finesse. Many stations were scheduled to begin on-air fund drives shortly
after the announcement and feared repercussions.
NPR reassigned Morning Edition host Bob Edwards to make way for a two-host setup intended to strengthen the show’s news coverage, said Jay Kernis, NPR’s senior v.p. of programming.
Minnesota Public Radio will begin distributing many of its own programs this summer, depriving longtime distribution partner Public Radio International of strong offerings with combined audiences equal to 40 percent of its total listener-hours. MPR, public radio’s second-largest producer of programs behind NPR, will distribute 10 shows, including A Prairie Home Companion, directly to stations starting July 1. Marketplace and its companion Morning Report will follow a year later when their PRI contracts expire. MPR will also distribute its own specials and limited series. PRI will continue to distribute Classical 24, the 24/7 classical service it produces jointly with MPR.