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.

Development

Donors demand clearer view of station reality

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The bad news: Public radio is a small part of a rapidly expanding nonprofit sector. Competition with other nonprofits for mind-share and donor support will intensify. Moreover, public radio lacks the financial transparency that donors increasingly expect.

System/Policy

Donors demand clearer view of station reality

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Fundraisers got an outsiders’ view of pubradio from a former insider at the Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference, July 10 [2003], in Snowbird, Utah. This article is adapted from remarks by longtime public broadcaster Robert G. Ottenhoff, president of GuideStar, a leading source of information for monitoring the performance of nonprofits of all kinds. Ottenhoff founded Newark’s WBGO-FM, served as executive director of the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority and then became chief operating officer of PBS. I was asked to come here today and give you an outsider’s perspective on public radio. I’m an avid listener of public radio.

System/Policy

Managers’ forum builds a consensus: Goodbye!

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Five years after setting it up as a way of helping public TV make decisions with new decisiveness and agility, members voted decisively and nearly unanimously this month to shut it down. The National Forum for Public Television Executives, which never had a full-time staff and is folding with 87 public TV licensees — about half of the total number — as members, had held useful discussions but never proved itself indispensable, leaders said. Fifty of the 55 member stations voting in a recent ballot favored closing the forum, said Chairman Gary Ferrell last week. The forum’s governing council decided to call for the vote in June. They modeled the vote after a “sunset” vote required by the forum’s charter after its first year.

CPB

Public broadcasting system revenues, 1982–2003

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The system’s revenues passed $2 billion late in the 1990s and $2.3 billion during fiscal year 2003, the latest year for which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has complete figures. Dollar figures below are in thousands. The portion from private, non–tax-based sources passed 50 percent of the total in fiscal year 1986 and has hovered around 60 percent since FY1999 (see “Private sources row”). Source: CPB’s annual Public Broadcasting Revenue reports. For breakdowns between public TV and public radio and other details, see CPB’s latest full report, for fiscal 2003 system revenues, in a PDF file.

System/Policy

Dereg struggle seen assisting public TV

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There’s hope for public broadcasting in the upwelling of citizen opposition to FCC deregulation of commercial TV, broadcast historian Robert McChesney said in a keynote address at the PBS Annual Meeting June 7. “It’s this movement of an aroused and engaged citizenry that really is the future that will genuinely expand and enhance public-service media in the United States,” McChesney asserted. Dereg became a matter of public debate as the FCC adopted new rules June 2, loosening limits on station ownership. A single company can now own stations reaching up to 45 percent of the country’s population, up from 35 percent (and the real reach permitted is greater, since the FCC by policy counts only half of UHF viewers). The changes are expected to excite a frenzy of station purchases by media giants.

System/Policy

CPB will focus on three initiatives to assist public TV

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Wielding a grim financial analysis of public TV by a big-name consulting firm, CPB has begun a campaign to glue together a consensus supporting three initiatives to end the stagnation:

catching up with other nonprofits in attracting “major gifts” of $1,000 or more from donors;

improving station efficiency, especially by consolidating operations;

using program research more effectively and taking other unspecified steps to re-examine public TV’s “approach to national programming.”

CPB President Bob Coonrod and Chief Operating Officer Kathleen Cox discussed the initiatives in a Current Q&A. Coonrod said the CPB Board called for the consensus building in its statement of objectives adopted in fall 2002. Coonrod told station managers the three initiatives show the greatest potential for improved performance among some 30 possible efforts examined by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. None is a “silver bullet” that could solve public TV’s money problems, he said. Likewise, he doesn’t want to wait for such long shots as Congress endowing a public TV trust fund with proceeds from spectrum auctions.

System/Policy

Talk through ‘gray areas,’ giving staff a moral compass

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A manager in ethical hot water can be compared to a frog in a soup pot, says Carter McNamara. If you put a frog in a pot of hot water, it will immediately jump out, McNamara writes in The Complete Guide to Ethics Management: An Ethics Toolkit for Managers. But if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and very gradually increase the heat of the burner, you can boil the frog before it knows what’s up. The point here is that most ethical problems are created not by management mischief but by poor decisions made by managers under stress. For public broadcasters struggling to manage rapid change, stress is constant.

System/Policy

Strategic advantage: women as station leaders

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There are 31 women general managers in public television. When this was reported to a gathering of women at the 2002 PBS Annual Meeting, the room burst into applause. For good reason. These are 31 highly accomplished women who shoulder not only c.e.o. responsibilities at their stations but also, in many cases, heavy national workloads as well. Yes, we’ve come a long way since the days when there were only three or four women g.m.’s in the room at public TV conferences.

System/Policy

PBS loses biggest underwriter as it considers 30-second credits

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ExxonMobil will stop underwriting Masterpiece Theatre after spring
2004, the oil company announced Dec. 13. It has spent more than
$250 million on MT and other PBS programs over 32 years. In recent
years, the company has spent about $10 million a year, providing full
funding for the drama series, says Jeanne Hopkins, v.p. of communications
at WGBH, which packages the series. For years before merging with Exxon, Mobil had also supported another series
of largely British dramas, Mystery!, but Mobil had dropped funding
of the sister series Mystery!

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.

System/Policy

On the road with a circuit-riding Native American radio engineer

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Lakota radio engineer Alex Lookingelk rides the highways of Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota, covering as many as 5,000 miles a month in his Chevy S-10 pickup. In the past seven years, Lookingelk has become known as a circuit-riding engineer for the public radio stations on the reservations and an all-around advisor to the stations. “He’ll say, ‘I have to go over to KGVA in Montana’ — that’s about a 12-hour drive,'” says Frank Blythe, executive director of Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), based in Lincoln, Neb. “He handles most of the Upper Plains’ technical problems and he also gets involved in the politics.” On his long drives, Lookingelk has plenty of time to chew on his worries about reservation radio and the tough-to-beat circumstances and habits that afflict it.

Development

As local as appropriate

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As different as they are, these public radio outposts share a carefully tuned appropriateness of structure. There’s the young two-transmitter operation on the Massachusetts shore. Dotted along Alaska’s southeastern panhandle, there are five little stations that survived the contraction of the state’s oil economy. And there are nearly 30 outlets of Minnesota Public Radio that connect small outstate burgs with the rich resources of a big state and the Twin Cities. Station operators say their structures handle functions locally that should be done locally, while relying on parent or sister stations to do other jobs that benefit from economies of scale.

Programs/Content

Friction and smoke at Whiteriver

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The internecine warfare at KNNB, the public radio station on the White Mountain Apache reservation in east central Arizona, seems insignificant now, dwarfed by the terrifying Chediski-Rodeo wildfire that roared through the beautiful forests in June. The fire, which destroyed hundreds of homes in Arizona, blackened nearly a third of the 1.6 million-acre Fort Apache Reservation, burning Ponderosa pine destined for the tribe’s sawmills and killing the elk and deer that bring it at least $600,000 a year in hunting licenses. Before the fire, the 20-year-old station in Whiteriver was a focal point of power struggles among factions and tribal leaders. But when the largest wildfire in Arizona history struck the reservation, Apaches put aside those disputes and KNNB focused on essentials: telling listeners how to survive and how to help. They interrupted regular programming with evacuation orders, emergency plans and information about relief and rescue efforts for the more than 20,000 residents in KNNB’s broadcast area.

System/Policy

While rhetoric flows, WFUV and opponents seek alternative tower site

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Fordham University’s WFUV-FM and its opponents across the street at the New York Botanical Garden have been quietly pursuing an alternative site for the station’s tower, even while their defenders sparred publicly in FCC forums June 27. After eight years of legal struggles with the botanical garden, WFUV hangs its antenna from a tower that, despite being cut short by halted construction, offends the garden’s management. Both sides are encouraged by progress of negotiations for the alternative site. Garden spokesman Karl Lauby says only that the site is “up north” and WFUV General Manager Ralph Jennings won’t discuss its location at all. Neither wants to set off new opposition or alert landowners that their site is a rare one.

Development

Markey, Dodd will back trust fund for digital content

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A bill introduced in the House May 2 brings the DOIT proposal for a trust fund supporting digital educational content one step closer to “done it.” The legislation introduced by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) proposes to invest proceeds from spectrum auctions in a permanent trust fund for that purpose. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) is preparing a similar bill in the Senate, earmarking 50 percent of all future auction proceeds for such a fund. Markey’s Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act (H.R. 4641) also provides for up to $300 million in funding for public broadcasting’s digital conversion. The bill looks very much like the trust fund proposed last April by the Digital Promise Project led by former PBS President Lawrence Grossman and ex-FCC Chairman Newton Minow.

System/Policy

House hearing loomed as CPB panel rushed to fix grant rules

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As Congress threatened to convene a hearing on how CPB distributes its money, a public TV review panel released a proposal last month to change the formula that allocates grants to stations. The fixes ought to please North Carolina’s UNC-TV, which had complained to hometown members of Congress — who pressed for the hearing — that several state networks like itself pay more in PBS dues than they receive in Community Service Grants (CSGs). The proposal would aid state nets by establishing a credit for licensees that operate three or more transmitters. If the recommendation is adopted by the CPB Board, UNC-TV would see an 80 percent increase — about $320,000 — in its base grant in fiscal year 2003, according to CPB. The changes would also reduce the gap between the dues that UNC-TV pays to PBS and the grants it gets from CPB.