People

Ancient human remains found under Alaska station

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KCAW/Raven Radio in Sitka, Alaska, may not have a skeleton in its closet, but it has one in its basement. Contractors working beneath the studio in October uncovered human remains that may predate the 103-year-old building. KCAW General Manager Ken Fate told Current on Nov. 28 that the station is “working closely with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska” to determine whether the body is that of a tribal ancestor. The station reported on its website that when the bones were discovered between two slabs of bedrock, work immediately stopped.

People

APM chief McTaggart, seen as competitor, leaves NPR Board

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American Public Media’s president, Jon McTaggart, won re-election to the NPR Board this summer but won’t be taking the seat after all. McTaggart resigned from the board at NPR’s request after an outside legal analysis determined that his promotion to president of APM and Minnesota Public Radio presented a potential conflict of interest with his service on the NPR Board. Since his first election to the board three years ago, McTaggart had been promoted from chief operating officer to chief exec of American Public Media Group, the parent company of APM/MPR. That put him uniquely and simultaneously on the boards of the two largest producers and distributors of public radio programming. Marita Rivero, v.p. and g.m. of WGBH’s television and radio stations, will fill the NPR Board vacancy instead.

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.

People

Los Angeles Press Club Awards, 2011

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KPCC’s Susan Valot and KCRW’s Kim Masters were recognized among best journalists in Los Angeles. Valot, a reporter who covers Orange County for Pasadena’s KPCC, was lauded by Press Club judges for producing “well-rounded reports with an authoritative, informed tone” and making great use of sound. Masters, a former NPR correspondent who now covers Hollywood for KCRW in Santa Monica, was named top entertainment journalist. Judges cited her voicing and thorough, substantive reporting on L.A.’s entertainment business. KPCC’s newsroom won top recognition in four categories of the radio division: for feature reporting by Madeleine Brand and Kristen Muller; entertainment reporting/criticism by Larry Mantle; use of sound by Kevin Ferguson; and the talk/public affairs program Airtalk with Larry Mantle.

People

Knight-Batten Award, 2011

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NPR social media specialist Andy Carvin received a Knight-Batten Award for innovation in journalism. Carvin, whose job as the network’s senior social media strategist this year evolved into round-the-clock tweeting of Arab Spring protests, received a Knight Batten Award of Special Distinction honoring his pioneering use of Twitter in newsgathering. The Knight-Batten awards panel chose Storify as this year’s Grand Prize winner and honored three other innovators with Special Distinction Awards. The panel selects winners for innovative uses of new technologies in newsgathering and civic engagement. Carvin and his “Twitter community” were both cited for the award.

People
Shelia Rue

PRPD/ARA Don Otto Award, 2011

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Programmer Shelia Rue received the Don Otto Award at PRPD. The veteran programmer and workshop instructor for Public Radio Program Directors was honored for career contributions to the field at a presentation during the association’s conference last month in Baltimore. Rue, p.d. at Tampa’s WUSF since 2008 (and lately its classical sister station, WSMR), previously directed programming at KUSC in Los Angeles and WUNC in Chapel Hill, N.C. She also ran her own consultancy, SR Sound Programming, and shared her expertise with other programmers by running PRPD’s training workshops. The award honors the legacy of an influential mentor to the founders of PRPD, the late Don Otto — a “proactive, innovative and creative thinker,” said Steve Olson of Audience Research Analysis, announcing the award Sept. 22 [2011].

People

DEI Benchmarks Award, 2011

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New Hampshire Public Radio was cited for outstanding performance in fundraising. NHPR, based in Concord, ranks among the most efficient public radio outlets in converting listeners into givers, and it raises more net underwriting revenue per listener-hour than peer stations, according to DEI’s Benchmarks analysis, which evaluates fundraising performance across the public radio system. The New Hampshire network’s achievements in major-gift fundraising are especially impressive, according to Joan Kobayashi, g.m. of KMFA in Austin, Texas, who announced the award this summer during DEI’s Public Media Development and Marketing Conference in Pittsburgh. NHPR’s program for soliciting donations of $1,000 and higher has increased its revenues 60 percent over the past five years. The gains are especially notable because New Hampshire ranks near the bottom of all 50 states in charitable giving, she said.

People

Public Radio News Directors Inc. Awards, 2011

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KJZZ, WBEZ, WBGO and KLCC led the annual contest among local pubradio newsrooms.
Each took three or more first-place PRNDI awards in a competition among peer-group stations. PRNDI groups stations into tiers based on the number of full-time news staffers they employ. In division A, comprising stations with the largest newsrooms, KJZZ in Phoenix and Chicago’s WBEZ each received three top prizes. All three PRNDI awards to WBEZ recognized Inside and Out, a special series on juvenile justice that aired across a six-month period in 2010. WGBO, a news and jazz station in Newark, N.J., won six first-place awards in division B, including stations with three or four full-time journalists.

People

Primetime Emmy Awards, 2011

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Masterpiece Classic’s Downton Abbey led PBS’s Emmy winners. Among six Primetime Emmys presented in September [2011] to the British costume drama was the highly coveted statuette for best miniseries. Producers of documentary and performance series brought PBS’s Emmy total up to 14 while earning recognition for exceptional merit in filmmaking, nonfiction programming and Creative Arts specialties. The American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences presented its Primetime Emmys in two ceremonies last month: a Sept. 10 [2011] event recognizing achievements in TV’s Creative Arts, and a Sept.

People

News and Documentary Emmys, 2011

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It’s been a very good Emmy season for indie documentaries on PBS. POV received four of the six statuettes credited to PBS in the National Academy of Television Arts and Science’s Sept. 26 Emmy announcement. Two went to Food Inc., putting it at the top of the documentary and long-form informational programming categories. In a likely first for a Web-based service run by a radio network, NPR Music was honored by the Television Academy for the Project Song video “Moby” as one of two News & Doc Emmy winners for innovation in arts, lifestyle and culture coverage.

People

For Erbe, accident was a tumble into the unknown

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Bonnie Erbe’s life took an ominous turn over Memorial Day weekend, but she doesn’t remember much of what happened. The longtime host of public TV’s To the Contrary was astride her Hanoverian horse, Stand Out, that Sunday, riding in a hunter/jumper show at the Prince George’s Equestrian Center in Upper Marlboro, Md. They approached a fence on the stadium course for a jump, but something went wrong. “The last thing I remember is hanging onto the horse’s neck and thinking, ‘Oh, no,’” Erbe said. Meanwhile in Baltimore, Cari Stein, former executive producer of the 20-year-old all-female news-analysis program, was entertaining a houseful of holiday guests, purposely ignoring her cellphone.

People

CPI hires four, Abumrad gets $500K MacArthur fellowship, three join FCC panel, and more…

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Ellen Weiss, the NPR News chief who took the network’s blame for the Juan Williams affair, has joined the Center for Public Integrity as its executive editor as of Oct. 3, the watchdog newsroom announced. The center is headed by one of her predecessors at NPR, Bill Buzenberg. “Ellen Weiss is one of the best and most creative news executives in the business,” he said in a news release. CPI hired three other top editors, including Christine Montgomery, the center’s new chief digital officer, who was managing editor of PBS.org for two years while it expanded and then sharply reduced its online-news plans.

People

Gary Knell, Sesame Workshop c.e.o., hired as NPR president

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Gary E. Knell, president and c.e.o. of Sesame Workshop for a decade, will start work Dec. 1 with the same titles at NPR, the network announced today. The NPR Board voted unanimously to hire the widely experienced leader of a comparably prominent, esteemed and successful public media institution who had preparatory stints as a legislative aide and in private media and public TV. An NPR spokesperson said Knell would take a reduction pay. His Sesame Workshop compensation came to more than $746,000, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported today [Mark Memmott’s blog].

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Robert M. Reed, first g.m. of Hawaii’s public TV network, 79

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Robert M. Reed, the founding manager of Hawaii’s public TV network who became a publisher and an author, died of respiratory failure Sept. 17, 2011, in Winter Park, Fla. He was 79. He started the Hawaii Educational Television Network in 1962 and served as its g.m. and an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii. In a 20-year career in public television, he also served as g.m. of KUED in Salt Lake City and as head of public TV’s national syndication service in Bloomington, Ind., and at PBS.

People

Moyers returns in January with weekly hour

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The latest incarnation of Bill Moyers’ distinctive brand of talk programming will be the hourlong, multiplatform Moyers & Company, distributed by American Public Television. The January debut for the program — provided fully funded to pubTV stations — will mark the first time PBS has not been the distributor of an ongoing Moyers program to public TV stations, dating to his first show in 1972. His most recent series, Bill Moyers Journal, left the air April 30, 2010, when he retired. “Collaborating with APT offers stations flexibility in deciding where a broadcast can best serve their communities and it offers producers greater flexibility regarding the Web,” Moyers told Current in an email. “And we intend a major use of Web and social media.”

Moyers described the new show to pubTV stations in a letter Aug.

People

PBSd venture and MHz project aim to export public television

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Television viewers in Great Britain, the Middle East, Russia and India could soon be watching American public TV shows, if two initiatives get up and running in the coming months. The PBS UK channel is being bankrolled by W. David Lyons, an entrepreneurial oilman from Calgary, Alberta. The programming will be assembled by PBS Distribution (PBSd), a partnership of PBS and WGBH that holds international rights to a “significant number” of public television titles, said Jan McNamara, PBS spokesperson. In a separate venture, Virginia-based MHz Networks, which feeds international content to some 30 American public TV stations on its Worldview multicast channel, will reverse direction with its MHz America package, pushing local shows from at least five pubTV stations and independent producers to foreign markets. Each could be on the air abroad by year’s end or soon after.

Brooke Gladstone

A comic book to explain media? — a scene so sad that it’s funny

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Long after giving a title to her new serious comic book, On the Media co-host Brooke Gladstone is having to explain it away. When forced into giddy sound-bite mode on The Colbert Report July 26, she was quick to say that The Influencing Machine doesn’t follow the alarmist line you’d expect. “This title is what I want to fight — the popular notion that the media are controlling our minds,” she said. “It’s really a mirror.” Calling the book “Our Harmless Media Lapdog” wouldn’t have fit the book, either.

People

John F. Gregory, Pasadena radio leader

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John F. Gregory, an early general manager at KPCC-FM in Pasadena, Calif., died May 9 at his Los Angeles home. Gregory led the station at Pasadena City College in the late 1970s and early ’80s, longtime KPCC newsman Larry Mantle wrote on a station blog. During that time Gregory professionalized the station, establishing it as one of the first NPR-member stations and hiring a full-time staff of five to qualify for CPB funding. He hired Mantle as news director in 1983. After the college separated from the Pasadena city public school system, the station went with the college and changed its call letters from KPCS to KPCC in 1979.

People

Bob Paquette of WFCR-FM; senior producer, morning host, 55

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Bob Paquette, senior news producer and local host of Morning Edition at WFCR-FM in Amherst, Mass., died unexpectedly May 28 of an apparent heart attack. He was 55. For many listeners, Paquette was “the voice of WFCR every morning,” station General Manager Martin Miller said in a release. “There are no words to express our shock and grief over the loss of our colleague and friend Bob Paquette. Our heartfelt condolences and sympathies go out to Bob’s husband, Michael Packard, and to their families, friends and colleagues.”

“Believe it or not, getting up at 4 a.m. is not such a bad gig,” Paquette said in his profile on the station’s website.

People

Chris Ulanowski, former WRVO news director, 51

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Chris Ulanowski, a former news director at WRVO in Oswego, N.Y., died May 30. He was 51. Ulanowski spent 27 years at the station, winning the Syracuse Press Club’s career achievement award in 2008. During his tenure as news director, the station won three national awards in two years for “Talk of the Nation: Religious Bricks,” on issues of church and state in the Mexico, N.Y., school district. It took first-place awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. Awards in 2000 and won first- and second-place PRNDI awards in 1999.