The buzzword “social capital” has acquired lots of different meanings within public television as PBS and its member stations speculate whether and how they will be viable in the digital media environment. What will it really mean for public television to “build social capital,” as system leaders propose, by producing certain kinds of local programs and services? Before Robert Putnam’s 1995 article and subsequent book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, social capital was largely an academic term for the social connections between individuals that prompt activism and confer benefits on their communities. Putnam’s description of our country’s eroding civic life resonated so broadly that “social capital” has become something of a catch-all phrase for what we’re missing.

Facing the first major station struggle of her 16 months as PBS president — over the perennial public TV issue of common carriage — Pat Mitchell introduced a “Declaration of Interdependence” at the network’s annual meeting June 14, 2001. The document summarizes major public TV objectives, gives a deep bow to stations’ local role and refers to a recent refinement: the aim to build “social capital” in American communities. See also Current coverage of the 2001 meeting. There comes a time in the history of public television, when the people we serve demand of us something more; Because, they hold these truths to be self-evident: Americans are first and foremost citizens, not consumers.

An educational experience 4.6 billion years in the making,” says the clever tagline for WGBH’s big September series Evolution. The way the Boston producers have been preparing for the reaction from creationists, you’d think they expect the controversy surrounding it will last almost that long. “Evolution is two steps away from abortion,” said Anne Zeiser, director of national strategic marketing for WGBH, placing the flash point at which evolution ignites fundamentalist outrage. Recent polls show that 45 percent of Americans say they believe in creationism, and many Christians view Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as an assault on their faith.

On Jan. 22, 2000, NPR President Kevin Klose asked me to become NPR’s first ombudsman for the listeners. I remember the date because Kevin’s idea was — to me — shocking at first. I had been a news manager for 17 years and for the last three, v.p. of news at NPR. Give up the cut and thrust of management? Return to being essentially a reporter (and a solitary one at that), and to report on NPR? What an idea! But I had been urging NPR News staffers to try new roles and new ideas, so I had to start somewhere.

Can you remember when you first heard the word “paradigm”? All of sudden everything was “paradigms” — shifting, evolving or disappearing . . . paradigms. Well, “social capital” is in much the same state these days. Everybody is using the term, and its meaning seems to be intuitive. When Bob Putnam penned his now-famous “Bowling Alone” article (and later a book), it resonated with many different people — politicians, pundits and preachers — because it named something that many had felt and experienced, such as the decline in voting or the disappearance of neighborliness. As you would expect, with such a concept there are many different definitions, mostly depending upon who is doing the defining (sociologists, political scientists, educators or economists, to name but a few).

The 100 hours that made Glen Jones famous started and ended with a dream. To be precise, they started with “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha and ended with a wistful ballad, Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream.” In between, Jones, who hosts a weekly show on WFMU in Jersey City, N.J., weathered extreme fatigue and, if his feat is verified, broke the Guinness world’s record for most continuous hours of deejaying. Actually, “broke” is not strong enough — he spun records and interviewed guests for a whole extra day longer than the former record of 73 hours and 33 minutes, set last September by a British deejay.

Famous or obscure, the dancers, painters, musicians and others who appear on “Studio 360” speak first as people, then as professionals.

ITVS, the CPB-funded organization operating in the tricky middle-ground between independent filmmakers and public TV stations, has appointed a leader in the San Francisco indie community as its next chief executive. [She succeeded James Yee, who died in March 2001.] Sally Jo Fifer, executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition since 1992, will join the Independent Television Service as its top executive in August. BAVC grew explosively under her leadership — through partnerships with Silicon Valley companies during the soaring tech boom and through job-training contracts with federal, state and local government agencies. The ITVS Board sought an executive with entrepreneurial skills and a proven ability to “raise money and think creatively,” says Mark Lloyd, chairman of ITVS and president of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy.

CPB broke format in May 2001, giving its top radio honor, the Edward R. Murrow Award, to one of its own employees, Rick Madden, its v.p., radio. Madden delivered this acceptance speech during the opening session of the Public Radio Conference in Seattle on May 17, 2001. I first walked into noncommercial radio at the University of Notre Dame as a freshman and never walked out. That was in 1963, four years before the Carnegie Commission labeled us public radio. My radio passions ran contrary to my father’s notions of what my interests should be. In my sophomore year, he wrote with a different view: “I’m not overly happy about what seems to me, mistakenly I hope, a changing attitude you have towards school, classes and grades.

With this year’s Edward R. Murrow Award, CPB not only honored Richard H. Madden as key leader in public radio, but also affirmed a set of ideas closely identified with him, which he helped move from the edge to the center of thinking in the field. During Madden’s three decades in the field, and especially his 18 years at CPB, public radio had overcome its earlier aversion to ratings data, allowed numbers to enter its objectives and learned how to build a focused format and a larger, appreciative audience. “We’re not a ‘smaller is better’ enterprise anymore, and none of us can think with that mindset,” Madden said in his acceptance speech May 17 during the Public Radio Conference in Seattle.

About a year and a half ago, we were getting ready to launch a new public radio service here on Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. I asked for advice from colleagues: How would you make them special? What would you put on the clean canvas of a brand new public radio station, the first one of the new millennium? Dozens of people took the time to respond, and we excerpted their advice in Current (Sept. 20, 1999), much of which was about how to be local, how to sound different. “Let the listeners broadcast to the station.

If Frederick Wiseman’s High School works like a time machine, transporting viewers back to their own coming of age experiences in this quintessential American institution, the journey will be bittersweet for alumni of Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, where the landmark documentary was shot. Most alums have never seen the documentary, but they remember the local controversy over how it depicted their alma mater. Threatened with what he describes now as “vague talk” of a lawsuit, Wiseman in 1968 agreed not to screen High School within miles of the city. More than three decades later, the documentary has achieved classic status among independent films.

... David Isay, along with a growing number of gifted documentary-makers, are now experiencing the satisfaction of creating serious inquiries into contemporary events and, especially, human nature....

In the long ago 1950s, a friend of mine, the gifted writer Marya Mannes, composed short features for a lively magazine called The Reporter. Each was a fictional profile of some recognizable personality, a “type” that most of us encounter in life’s daily round: a nervous business executive, the owner-manager of a small restaurant, a bag lady picking her way daintily through the damp contents of a public trash basket. The column was called “Any Resemblance?” and it persuaded most readers that they, along with Ms. Mannes, were splendidly perceptive. I often think of these descriptions when listening to David Isay’s radio documentaries, most of them concerning mildly eccentric persons from, as he says, “the margins of society.”