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Project Core: A vision for scale and growth

Over the past three years, CentralCast has been hard at work implementing critical upgrades that lay the foundation for a more resilient and advanced future. And now, the culmination of these efforts is taking shape in our most ambitious initiative yet: Project Core.

Quick Takes

PRX partners on launch of searchable-sound database Pop Up Archive

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Pop Up Archive, an online sound library backed by a 2012 Knight News Challenge funding, launches this week. Co-founders Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith write in a Knight blog post that their original goal “seemed simple: to help audio producers organize their archives and create searchable sound. As we launch Pop Up Archive publicly, our goal has grown much bigger. We want to make it easy for all storytellers to find and reuse recorded sound.” Partnering with Public Radio Exchange, they’ve made thousands of hours of sound searchable through auto-transcription, auto-tagging and sound management tools.

Tech

CPB gives $1 million to build and expand emergency communication services

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Five pubcasting stations are receiving a total of $1 million in grants from CPB to expand emergency alert and communications services. CPB announced the grants today to WSKG in Binghamton, N.Y.; Maine Public Broadcasting Network; Vegas PBS in Nevada; WGBH in Boston; and Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minn. Each will work with community partners and other pubmedia entities to acquire or develop digital wireless technology to assist first responders, emergency-management agencies and the public during disasters. Using pubmedia digital broadcasting technology, officials can send emergency information through text, audio and video.

People

Robert Conley, first host of All Things Considered, dies at 85

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Robert Conley, the first host of NPR’s All Things Considered, died of parotid cancer Nov. 16 at his home in Virginia. He was 85. As the host who inaugurated broadcast of NPR’s afternoon newsmagazine on May 3, 1971, Conley eschewed written scripts and delivered off-the-cuff intros to stories, while maintaining an air of professionalism. During ATC’s debut, Conley filled around six minutes of airtime while producers scrambled to bring a story on Vietnam War protests to the control room.

People

Lydon returns to Boston’s WBUR with new weekly show

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Boston’s WBUR announced today that Christopher Lydon will rejoin the station to host and produce a weekly hourlong show, Open Source with Christopher Lydon. Bostonians last heard Lydon on WBUR when he hosted The Connection, a nationally syndicated interview show, from 1994 to 2001. He and much of his staff left WBUR in a bitter public dispute over ownership of their show, and Dick Gordon replaced him in the host’s chair. Lydon returned to the airwaves in Boston earlier this year as a contributor on WGBH. The new WBUR program will launch in January, airing Thursdays at 9 p.m. and with a repeat broadcast on weekends.

Quick Takes

Sesame Workshop to get $20 million for worldwide financial education from MetLife

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MetLife Foundation has pledged $20 million over the next five years to Sesame Workshop, the two announced today, to create financial educational content for low- and moderate-income families with young children around the world through digital media, broadcast, community outreach local events and seminars. World Bank research shows that more than 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day, most lacking access to basic financial services that could be the key to a more hopeful future. The two organizations will build a coalition of local partnerships worldwide to help deliver the content. The new initiative is planned to reach up to 10 countries and is expected to launch in 2014 in Brazil, China, India and Mexico, expanding later to Europe and the Middle East. “We see our partnership with Sesame Workshop as a powerful way to advance our new vision for financial inclusion throughout the world,” said Dennis White, president of the MetLife Foundation, “and we look forward to collaborating over the next five years to help more families prepare for their futures.”

The two collaborated in the past on initiatives involving health and emergency crisis response, among other issues.

Quick Takes

PBS streaming app now on Apple TV

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Apple has signed PBS to create an app for its Apple TV set-top box service, AllThingsD reported Nov. 19. The app will allow Apple TV users who sign in through Facebook, Google+ or PBS’s own registration system to access the pubTV network’s digital library of on-demand programs.

Previous seasons of Downton Abbey will be largely unavailable due to Amazon’s acquiring of exclusive on-demand rights to the program in June. But Apple TV users will be able to watch recent episodes of the show within a short window of their airing on PBS, including station reairings of the second and third seasons between now and December, a PBS spokesperson told AllThingsD. The Apple app is PBS’s latest expansion into set-top content streaming.