In 1998, the FCC addressed a longtime gap in its set of procedures with this rulemaking proposal. See the resulting April 2000 FCC order laying out the new procedure. Before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, D.C. 20554 In the Matter of Reexamination of the Comparative Standards for Noncommercial Educational Applicants, MM Docket No. 95-31 FURTHER NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULE MAKING Adopted: October 7, 1998 Released: October 21, 1998 Comment Date: [45 days after publication in the Federal Register] Reply Date: [65 days after publication in the Federal Register] By the Commission: Commissioners Furchtgott-Roth and Tristani issuing a joint statement 1.

One evening in London, in 1966, Anne Darlington, a Johns Hopkins graduate on a Fulbright Fellowship, was surprised to see Louis Rukeyser, then chief of ABC’s London bureau, on a BBC interview program. She remembered him as a writer for her hometown newspapers, the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Sun. Four years later, in January 1970, Darlington was preparing a TV series on sports fishing for the fledgling Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting when someone at a Baltimore cocktail party suggested that a series on economics and financial management might be more appropriate. One of the Center’s executives scribbled the idea on a piece of paper and gave it to Darlington, adding, “Do you think you can do anything with this?”

Two years after the CPB funding crisis began to subside, public TV’s assigned public-policy representative, the president of America’s Public Television Stations (APTS), was giving variations on this stump speech at meetings of pubcasters. This is an edited version of David Brugger’s remarks to the FirstView instructional TV screening conference in August 1998. One of the important revelations to station professionals and lay volunteers during our last Capitol Hill Day was that their members of Congress often fed back the message they had heard from the more than 85 percent of their constituents in your home towns who said they wanted continued or increased federal funding — this, in many cases, from members of Congress who had been ardent opponents of federal funding just 18 months before.

At first glance, the girding storyline is whether Darrel and Juanita Buschkoetter, a farming couple raising three young daughters in Lawrence, Neb., can realize Darrel's dream of farming his father's land ...

Michael Taylor believed in second chances — he was living proof that they come along. Before the early 1990s, the Los Angeles resident had been an addict, a dealer, eventually homeless. But one day he decided to turn his life around, and achieved the miracle — sobered up, straightened out and found his legitimate passions: community activism and radio. He became a reporter and later an occasional host of public affairs programming on Pacifica station KPFK. So he was a felt presence among Los Angeles’ South-Central community of leftists and grassroots organizers at the time of his cold-blooded murder over nothing more than a low-power radio transmitter, in April 1996.

PBS Online is celebrating its third anniversary this week with a doubled staff, an expanded mission, an upgraded teachers’ service that opens next month, and a much faster connection with the Internet, to be turned on this month. In the three years since PBS launched its site, the Web has grown to 39 million users a week in this country, with online ad sales approaching $1 billion. During the same period, public broadcasting’s largest web site, PBS’s, has built an audience of more than 2 million unique visitors a month, who choose among some 50,000 pages. Things have moved so fast, says PBS Online chief Cindy Johanson, “it seems like it was 10 years ago, not three.”

Which is it? Is the conventional wisdom correct — that one out of every 10 or 12 public radio listeners is a station member? Or is it the more encouraging one-in-three, as found by the Audience 98 research project?The seemingly conflicting estimates flew past each other at last month’s Public Radio Development/Marketing Conference in Washington, D.C., without much elucidation. Now comes an attempt at elucidation. The leading proponents of the 1:12 ratio, Oregon-based fundraising consultants Lewis-Kennedy Associates, reported at the conference that an average of 8.3 percent of stations’ weekly cume listeners can be found as donors in the membership files.

In most sexual abuse cases, it’s one person’s word against another’s. In the Frugal Gourmet’s case, it was his word against 20 or more. Four days before he was to face trial in Tacoma, Wash., Jeff Smith, host of the popular PBS cooking show, agreed July 1 [1998] to pay an undisclosed sum to seven young men who had accused him variously of groping, kissing and raping them when they were teenagers. “Based on my interviews with a lot of the principals involved, I think it would have been pretty ugly,” says Deborah Holton, a Portland Oregonian reporter who has followed the story closely.

The publication last year of a 700-page, hugely detailed biography of Julia Child (Appetite for Life — Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch, Doubleday) has bestirred a Manhattan memory. One evening toward the end of the 1960s, my wife and I were having dinner at La Caravel, a gracious French restaurant in New York. Dining there was a treat; the food was excellent and the service quietly efficient. The place held a special allure for me because it was the site of a superb documentary by Nell Cox, French Lunch. The short film records events in the kitchen from the first luncheon order through a frenetic, almost balletic crescendo of culinary movements at dinnertime — punctuated by the flare of flaming dishes — and finally subsides in a relaxed, post-service meal for the waiters and cooks themselves.

These are the bylaws of APTS, as of June 1998, a District of Columbia nonprofit corporation that represents public TV in Washington. At that point, the group was calling itself  the Association of America’s Public Television Stations, or America’s Public Television Stations for short. ARTICLE I. OFFICES AND REGISTERED AGENT. Section 1. Registered Office. The Corporation shall have and continuously maintain in the District of Columbia a registered office, and a registered agent whose office is identical with such registered office, as required by the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act. The registered office may be, but need not be, identical with the Corporation’s principal office in the District of Columbia.

Believe it or not, there's a stone tablet full of radio principles guiding This American Life. Ira Glass laid them out in a talk ...

The broadcast decision that embroiled Arkansas ETV in a landmark First Amendment struggle ever since 1992 was “a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral exercise of journalistic discretion,” the Supreme Court ruled May 18. The high court’s 6-3 ruling overturned an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in 1996 that the state network had infringed House candidate Ralph P. Forbes’ free-speech rights by refusing to add him to the two major-party nominees in a broadcast debate more than five years ago. “This is a great decision for viewers,” and will let the network continue airing candidate debates, said Susan Howarth, executive director of the five-transmitter state network, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

In a partnership that aims to position educational children’s programs at the forefront of the digital cable movement, Viacom’s Nickelodeon cable network and Children’s Television Workshop last week announced plans to launch a new network for kids, to be called Noggin. The long-anticipated channel will feature programs from each partner’s library, including old episodes of the venerable Sesame Street, to serve both preschoolers and school-aged children. Early plans call for it to run without commercials, drawing revenues solely from cable-operator fees. “In an era when many television networks have abandoned their responsibility to do more than just entertain, we are extremely proud to be joining with the long-standing leader in kids’ educational programming, CTW, to bring Noggin to life,” said Herb Scannell, president of Nickelodeon.

In the first of May in 1971, Michael Ambrosino sat at his desk at 25 Wetherby Gardens in London writing a six-page, single-spaced letter to Michael Rice, vice president for programs at WGBH, Boston. “This project in science,” he wrote, “would begin to fill an appalling gap in PBS service. It would attempt to explain and relate science to a public that must be aware of its impact. “The strand would be broad enough to cover all of science and . . . beyond its normal confines … biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology could all provide program topics.”

New York state’s highest court early this month unanimously upheld WFUV-FM’s right to complete the radio tower on Fordham University’s Bronx campus, despite complaints from the nearby New York Botanical Garden that the tower spoils the skyline. This was the fifth victory in various administrative and court appeals. For nearly four years the tower has remained half-built. The ruling by the New York State Court of Appeals upheld a local zoning ruling that permitted the tower. Remaining federal historic issues are being mediated between the university and the botanical garden.