People

‘Piano Jazz’ host Marian McPartland, a dame at jazz crossroads

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Piano Jazz hits its silver anniversary in April, a landmark that surprises nobody more than venerated host and pianist Marian McPartland. “It’s kind of amazing that we’ve managed to be on the air for 25 years and no end in sight,” she says with a laugh. “I sort of envisioned doing it for a few months, or at the most a year. It never occurred to me that people would like it as much as they do.” Today it ranks among public radio’s most popular music programs, airing on 241 stations and reaching almost 400,000 listeners a week.

Programs/Content

With StoryCorps, Isay campaigns to save Grandma’s tales

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Last week a miniature mobile recording studio came to rest in Vanderbilt
Hall of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, marking the debut of StoryCorps,
an ambitious undertaking led by independent public radio producer David Isay. StoryCorps aims to popularize the recording of oral histories by making
it easy for average Americans to interview one another. Each mini-studio,
called a StoryBooth, features tables, chairs, digital recording equipment
and a trained facilitator in a quiet, comfortable setting. Booth users are encouraged to bring older relatives and, in 40 minutes of
talking, tease out their stories. They walk away with a compact disc of the
interview, and another copy goes to a new Library of Congress archive.

System/Policy

Radio that’s representative: Listeners control vote for Pacifica boards

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Pacifica Radio is emerging from bitter years of factional struggle with new bylaws that may make it the world’s most democratic media organization. The bylaws, which escaped legal challenge and won approval by a California judge Sept. 15, entrust listeners, volunteers and staff members to elect boards at Pacifica’s five stations. Those boards will oversee station matters such as spending, programming and hiring top managers, as well as appointing a national board of directors to run the network. About 90,000 of Pacifica’s listeners and 700 of its volunteers and staffers are eligible to vote in the first election under the bylaws, estimates Carol Spooner, secretary of the network’s interim national board.

NPR

‘Day to Day’ debuts to high expectations

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Any pressure the producers of Day to Day might feel is understandable. The new show’s selling points read like a wish list compiled by someone burping
up buzzwords from pubradio confabs. NPR pitches the newsmag — its first since
Weekend Edition Sunday, 16 years ago — as a midday show newsy enough
to draw listeners on lunch breaks back to NPR, but zesty and offbeat enough
to pepper the schedule with diversity and youthfulness. Not only that, but stations are looking to Day to Day to lift ratings
between their towering drivetime tentpoles, Morning Edition and All
Things Considered. Further, as pubcasters hunt high and low for partnerships, Day to Day
builds off an editorial and promotional relationship with Microsoft’s online
magazine Slate — a pairing that has alarmed a few media watchdogs.

Programs/Content

Online audio market Public Radio Exchange begins beta test this month

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Creators of the Public Radio Exchange plan to launch their service
this fall, opening a new channel for independent producers to sell work
to stations. PRX operates somewhat like an Amazon.com of the indie world. A subscribing
station gets an account and uses a web-based interface to browse and
search for pieces uploaded by producers. They can consult background
information provided by producers and reviews written by other users. Independent producer Jay Allison hatched the PRX idea in late 2001,
hoping to ease indies’ ordeal of getting their work aired.

Programs/Content

Triple-A strikes chord with disenchanted listeners

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One musical voice gaining ground on public radio sounds a little scruffier than the rest. Rather than a viola or sax, it bears a six-string axe and a heavier backbeat than your average chamber ensemble. Triple-A, an eclectic format that blends rock, folk, blues, world music and other genres, has already proven popular and lucrative for stations such as New York’s WFUV, Philadelphia’s WXPN and southern California’s KCRW. But smaller stations in fly-over country, inspired by the format’s major-market success, are also displacing jazz and classical music for newer musical genres that carry themselves like outsiders. As a result, listeners may be tuning in to the sultry lilt of young chanteuse Norah Jones or the twang of O Brother blues rather than Mozart and Gershwin.

System/Policy

Zwerdling remains at NPR in new job; tensions still run high

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NPR has promised veteran reporter Daniel Zwerdling another year
of work, but colleagues are still asking what management’s decision
to eliminate his old job signals about the network’s journalistic
priorities. Zwerdling will contribute NPR reports to PBS’s Now with Bill
Moyers, taking a job previously held by Emily Harris. Harris
is NPR’s new Berlin correspondent. Zwerdling can move into another
job if the Now partnership ends, but he says the grant-funded
Science Desk opening pays 25 percent less than his current salary. NPR’s Oct.

System/Policy

NPR asks porn entrepreneur to drop KCRW from hold music

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It was almost a landmark case: NPR vs. The World’s Most Downloaded Woman. The woman is Danni Ashe, a web-porn entrepreneur whom public TV viewers might remember from Frontline’s “American Porn” documentary. Her image has been downloaded from her subscription website over 1 billion times, earning her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Her expertise on matters pornographic recently landed her in a Slate article, which let drop that callers to her Los Angeles office who get put on hold hear KCRW, a local NPR affiliate.

Programs/Content

Content Depot: Getting audio gets flexible

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This summer public radio will get a taste of an impending change in the technological status quo: the Content Depot. This far-reaching set of upgrades and innovations in the field’s means for moving audio around the country will streamline how producers and stations select, send, acquire and automate programming. In particular, the Content Depot standardizes how the NPR-operated Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) stores programming and feeds it to stations. Today the process relies on a hodgepodge of media on both ends of the transfer. PRSS stores programming in forms including analog tape and compact disc, while stations download it from a PRSS satellite and save it on hard drives and other media before broadcasting it.

Programs/Content

‘The Tavis Smiley Show’: created for a black audience, but all are welcome

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There’s a burden resting on the broad shoulders of this man who’s bopping
his head to a funky beat, tongue out in a soulful pout, enjoying himself
before launching into the next segue. Tavis Smiley is at a studio mike, grooving to bumper music between
segments on a recent installment of his morning show, broadcast today
from NPR’s Washington headquarters instead of his Los Angeles digs,
because he’s in town for the Public Radio Conference. Smiley has polished off a double interview about U.S. policy on Cuba. Coming up, he’ll elicit a string of outrageous jokes from comedian Dick
Gregory in a comedy feature that’s a regular part of his Friday shows. “Back by popular demand, Dick Gregory,” he reads in a practice run,
then pauses.

Obituaries

Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

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Rick Madden, who helped to reinvent public radio during 19 years at
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, succumbed to brain cancer Feb. 21. He was 56. Madden died at his home in Rockville, Md., with his wife and two daughters
close by. He had been diagnosed with the disease in December 2000.

Obituaries

Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

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Rick Madden, who helped to reinvent public radio during 19 years at CPB, died of brain cancer Feb. 21. He was 56. Madden

Madden died at his home in Rockville, Md., with his wife and two daughters close by. He had been diagnosed with the disease in December 2000.

People

Record-breaking deejay shift: 100 hours in Jersey City

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The 100 hours that made Glen Jones famous started and ended with a dream. To be precise, they started with “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha and ended with a wistful ballad, Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream.” In between, Jones, who hosts a weekly show on WFMU in Jersey City, N.J., weathered extreme fatigue and, if his feat is verified, broke the Guinness world’s record for most continuous hours of deejaying. Actually, “broke” is not strong enough — he spun records and interviewed guests for a whole extra day longer than the former record of 73 hours and 33 minutes, set last September by a British deejay. [The publishers of The Guinness Book of World Records verified the record later in the year, according to WFMU.]

His marathon featured a comprehensive mix of American pop music, everything from classic rock to big band to show tunes.

People

KCRW’s Ruth Seymour: ‘The art is to keep yourself open to change’

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. . . And the way she couples spur-of-the-moment decision-making and openness to change with highly principled management has prompted some to call her the “Lady of the Iron Whim,” one of her many nicknames. She is not afraid to make enemies, or even fire longtime volunteers, if it helps keep the schedule fresh. . . .