Nice Above Fold - Page 1010

  • NPR listeners have launched an Internet campaign to “Bring Back Linda” Wertheimer.
  • Hardball host Chris Matthews has apologized for dissing Jim Lehrer.
  • Glenn Heller, a devoted critic of Albany’s WAMC-FM, maintains an extensive collection of articles about the station at wamc.net. (Note: the enterprising Heller also owns the domains wgbh.net and wqed.net!)
  • The Berkshire Eagle has picked up Current‘s Feb. 25 story about the public TV series Visionaries.
  • Want to see how multi-channel digital terrestrial radio could work–if it ever becomes a reality? (As it stands, NPR is one of the few broadcasters pushing for the standard to include multicasting.) NPR commissioned Impulse Radio to create this demo to show how a listener could select either a music or talk stream on a digital radio. Clicking the link launches a download of the file.
  • Has NPR adequately addressed complaints over a report on anthrax investigations that mentioned the Traditional Values Coalition? NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin weighs in.
  • There’s now a website for the Public Radio Collaboration, formerly known as the Mega Project. This year’s collaboration will focus on the events and aftermath of September 11.
  • The latest Harper’s features an article by independent public radio producer Scott Carrier about post-Taliban Afghanistan, and Hearing Voices adds to it with pics and audio. (Warning: the first picture displayed depicts a dead man.)
  • Minnesota Public Radio responds to a snarky take on it in the Feb. 20 City Pages.
  • Over the weekend the Washington Post and New York Times both ran articles about public radio’s “Yiddish Radio Project,” which starts tomorrow on All Things Considered.
  • Former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno is collaborating with George Mason University, where he recently accepted a teaching position, and WETA-TV on developing a weekly local public affairs series.
  • The University of Kansas has withdrawn an invitation to have historian and NewsHour contributor Doris Kearns Goodwin speak … (Topeka Capital-Journal)
  • Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

    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. Colleagues throughout public radio grieved his loss and lauded CPB’s radio v.p. as a passionate public servant who advocated sweeping ideas and took deep personal responsibility for the health and growth of both the system and its people. During his time at CPB, pubradio’s average quarter-hour ratings more than doubled, and he consistently urged programmers to set the bar even higher.
  • Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

    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. Colleagues throughout public radio grieved his loss and lauded CPB’s radio VP as a passionate public servant who advocated sweeping ideas and took deep personal responsibility for the health and growth of both the system and its people. During his time at CPB, pubradio’s average quarter-hour ratings more than doubled, and he consistently urged programmers to set the bar even higher.
  • Convict free after Bikel’s latest doc

    Frontline knows how to shake things up in North Carolina. Last week, less than a month after the series aired Ofra Bikel’s 90-minute documentary “An Ordinary Crime,” about 21-year-old Terence Garner, a state court granted Garner’s motion for a new trial. He posted bond and went home with his mother and family for the first time in more than four years. Garner had been serving a sentence of 32-43 years for robbery and attempted murder—the “ordinary crime” he insisted all along he had no part of. Bikel—whose award-winning trilogy “Innocence Lost” led the state to drop charges in 1997 in a major child abuse case in Edenton, N.C.—again