About Current
Julie Drizin named executive director of Current
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The longtime public media producer and journalist joins Current Jan. 20.
About Current
Tyler Falk joins Current as assistant editor
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Current’s reporting roster has grown with the addition of Tyler Falk. As a freelance journalist, Tyler has written about topics including food, energy and business innovation. He’ll now turn his attention to the world of public radio, picking up that beat from Senior Editor Ben Mook. Ben will cover development and digital media. As a contributing editor for CBS Interactive, Tyler blogged daily about business innovation for SmartPlanet.com.
About Current
Janssen rejoins Current as digital editor
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Mike Janssen, a journalist who has reported for Current for nearly 15 years, has returned to the staff full-time as digital editor. Janssen’s hiring, which took effect April 1, expands Current’s editorial team and supports an expansion of coverage on Current.org, the website covering U.S. public media and nonprofit news organizations. Current, its sister newspaper, will continue to provide in-depth news coverage and analysis of the field, with a shift in emphasis to enterprise reporting. “Mike is uniquely qualified to help lead Current’s digital expansion,” said Karen Everhart, managing editor. “He sets high standards for reporting and narrative journalism; he knows public radio inside and out; and his leadership in using digital platforms to provide timely, original news coverage on Current.org and via social media has enhanced the value of our news service over many years.”
“I’m excited to be back on board with Current full-time and to have the chance to take our web coverage to the next level,” Janssen said.
About Current
Current Reader Survey closes on Friday
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Current has come a long way in the past two years, but we haven’t stopped thinking about how much more we’d like to do. We’re asking readers to share their insights on our news service and public media coverage by participating in our 2013 online Reader Survey, which closes at the end of this week. Please take a few minutes to tell us how you use Current and what we could do to make our publication and website even more useful in the years ahead. Your feedback will guide us as we make decisions about how to focus our editorial resources and which new products and services would be most valuable to the public media community. You can access our short survey online here: http://tinyurl.com/current-survey
If you have any questions or want to give feedback directly, contact Kathleen Unwin at 877-745-8776 X. 1
Thanks from the entire staff for sharing your thoughts, and for your support of Current.
About Current
Last chance to participate in Current’s 2013 Reader Survey
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Dear Readers,
I wanted to take a moment to remind you about Current’s Reader Survey. Not that long ago, Current Newspaper and Current.org became a part of our family as a new center at the American University School of Communication. We take our role in managing Current very seriously, and look to you to help shape the future direction of this important industry resource. For over thirty years, Current has been the independent news and information source for public media professionals. We intend to build upon its strong foundation by adding additional editorial bandwidth and online resources to further serve you.
About Current
A letter from the editors
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We’ve been preparing for months to bring you a new, improved web service, one that highlights more of our news coverage and analysis of the evolving world of public media.
About Current
Best way to congratulate the editors: Subscribe!
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To Karen Everhart, recently appointed interim managing editor of Current:
The announcement that the March 12 issue of Current is the last to be published under the editorship of Steve Behrens brought back so many memories for me from the last 35 years. In 1977, Steve and I were colleagues and he was the editor of the in-house publication of the nonprofit where we both worked when I introduced him to my good friend Jim Fellows. Jim loved smart and talented people, and he soon became a fan of Steve’s many journalistic talents. So, it wasn’t too surprising for me when, a couple of years later, Jim persuaded Steve to join him at the National Association of Educational Broadcasters to design and launch a new newspaper covering exclusively the field of public broadcasting. We greatly missed Steve’s talents on our staff, but I understood how persuasive Jim could be. Jim was enormously proud of his honorary title as founder of Current. He believed deeply in the importance of Current’s contribution to the development of public broadcasting as a profession and to the field as a whole. I think it’s fair to say that Jim was as strong a champion for Current as anyone in public broadcasting for decades. He certainly felt it to be one of the most important legacies of his own long career in educational and later public broadcasting.
About Current
Current transition: Behrens to Everhart
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Karen Everhart, senior editor of Current for 20 years, will succeed founding editor Steve Behrens after this edition. Larry Kirkman, dean of the American University School of Communication, appointed Everhart as interim managing editor. She joined Current in 1992 and covered public TV for 16 years before moving to the public radio beat in 2007. The school, with support from the Wyncote Foundation, took responsibility for publishing Current a year ago. Behrens, 63, gave notice last fall that he’d retire from the position in six months. Before leaving the premises, he will coordinate the relaunch of Current.org this spring, at long last, using WordPress as a content management system.
About Current
Current owner transfers paper to American U.
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Current is likely to have a new publisher in January — the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.
Details of the contract transferring the print/web publication remain in negotiation, but the governing boards of the university and of Current’s longtime publisher, New York’s WNET, have approved the deal in principle. Approval by the WNET Board, Dec. 9 [2010], prompted coverage in a New York Times blog Dec. 12. WNET accepted responsibility for publishing Current in 1983, after the collapse of the paper’s founding parent, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.
About Current
What readers say about Current, 2010
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Here’s a piece of unfinished business: reporting back the results of Current’s reader survey taken at the start of the year, with thanks to those of you who responded. We delayed mostly because of the shortage of space in recent issues and not because the results were ugly. Indeed, 72 percent of respondents rated Current “quite useful” or “extremely useful” in their work. In my work, Current and current.org are this useful:
Extremely useful: 31 percent
Quite: 41
Somewhat: 24
Not very: 4
Not at all: 1
Readers also rated Current high in fairness, accuracy, readability and other qualities, as you’ll see in the chart below. It was especially gratifying to see that 93 percent of respondents rated us “good” or “excellent” in fairness.
About Current
Fellows seriously injured in rush-hour accident
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James A. Fellows, a longtime leader in public TV, remained in critical but stable condition last week after being hit by a car in Bethesda, Md., Dec. 2. Since the accident he has had five major operations at Bethesda’s Suburban Hospital to mend broken bones and other damage. Though he still faces many risks, doctors said last week he was trending for the better, according to Fellows’ friend Pete Willson. On Dec.
About Current
A 20th anniversary letter from the editor
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Twenty years is an anniversary round enough to permit us at Current to indulge in some hoorah, and to recognize the people who have made the paper possible for two decades. Marking the occasion, we published an updated edition of the paperback A History of Public Broadcasting last month, and inaugurated a companion website of the field’s historical documents, Public Broadcasting PolicyBase (PBPB). Since its first issue, March 17, 1980, Current has grown in many respects — in professionalism, in average page count (threefold), in circulation (fivefold), in advertising support (vastly), and in sustainability. (The growth allows and requires us to expand our staff this year, adding a fourth editor.)
It’s our pleasure to work on a community newspaper for a community full of so many people with fine passions, admirable skills, high ideals and damned good fights. It’s a community paper for a community the size of a small town but spread across a continent.