Nice Above Fold - Page 567
New channel in Pittsburgh: All-pledge, all the time
WQED has come up with an idea that initially might make some public broadcasters cringe: an entire multichannel fully devoted to fundraising. Yes, all pledge shows, running 24/7. That’s exactly what WQED Showcase will be. The Pittsburgh station will debut its fourth channel possibly as soon as November. Station President Deborah Acklin came up with the concept for the potential revenue stream, which appears to be a pubcasting first. She said it seemed to her like “an obvious answer in a very tight revenue market.” Besides, “a lot of people really like pledge programming, and we forget that sometimes,” Acklin said.CPI hires four, Abumrad gets $500K MacArthur fellowship, three join FCC panel, and more...
Ellen Weiss, the NPR News chief who took the network’s blame for the Juan Williams affair, has joined the Center for Public Integrity as its executive editor as of Oct. 3, the watchdog newsroom announced. The center is headed by one of her predecessors at NPR, Bill Buzenberg. “Ellen Weiss is one of the best and most creative news executives in the business,” he said in a news release. CPI hired three other top editors, including Christine Montgomery, the center’s new chief digital officer, who was managing editor of PBS.org for two years while it expanded and then sharply reduced its online-news plans.Ohio’s WYSO to boost signal power, move to better facility
WYSO-FM in Yellow Springs, Ohio, will move to renovated studios and increase its signal strength from 37,000 watts to 50,000 watts before year’s end, thanks to a $1 million grant from its licensee, Antioch University, approved by the school’s board Sept. 23. The upgrade will extend the station’s reach in southwest Ohio and improve signal quality. The FCC has approved the changes, university officials said in a statement. “Fifty thousand watts is a big deal,” WYSO General Manager Neenah Ellis said in the release. “WYSO began with 10 watts in 1958 and we are now the dominant public radio station in the Miami Valley.”
CoastAlaska creates ‘Radio to Go’ kits in case of disaster
In response to media outages after recent disasters elsewhere, the CoastAlaska pubradio group has built two compact portable FM stations for use by pubcasters in the state, called Radio to Go. The nonprofit, which serves seven stations from Juneau, developed the portable kit to go into service within minutes after arriving at a site. The two units, to be stored in separate communities, can be carried by Coast Guard helicopter, commercial flight or ship. Each unit costs about $10,000, including shipping cases, a 150-watt FM radio transmitter, CD players, a digital audio recorder, radio tuner, mixer and microphones, cables, transmitting antenna and mast.Conn. network inks deal with schools for media academy
Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network has signed an agreement with the Hartford public school system to establish at CPBN headquarters a hands-on lab where students will learn how to produce TV, radio and online media. Starting with the 2013–14 school year, 100 seniors in the Hartford Journalism & Media Academy will take all of their classes, including core subjects, in the new Learning Lab. “No other public broadcasting institution in the country is taking a third of its facility and building a school there,” said Jerry Franklin, CPBN president. The net plans to invest $3.5 million to convert 20,000 square feet of space into classrooms and production studios for the lab.Producers invited to crowdsource the translation of their programs
Universal Subtitles, a project of the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, is looking for long-form public media projects to translate into multiple languages through its crowdsourcing network. In January the project worked with the PBS NewsHour and volunteers to produce translations and subtitles of President Obama’s State of the Union address. Within 17 hours, the speech had been converted to nine languages, said Nicolas Reville of PCF. Now Universal Subtitles has partnered with American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, APM said at the PRPD conference. The aim is to extend public media’s reach and value by creating and publishing reports in multiple languages, said Joaquin Alvarado, APM’s digital innovation chief.
NPR back as a House target: Draft bill seeks ban on aid
The draft for the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal year 2012 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill, introduced Sept. 29 by subcommittee Chair Denny Rehburg (R-Mont.), would prohibit CPB from funding NPR and requests a report from CPB on how to remove NPR totally from federal funding by 2014. Under the bill, CPB would receive the already-appropriated amount of $445 million for that year, including $6 million for digital projects. Other agencies in the draft bill would fare worse for the year that began Oct. 1. Discretionary funding in the multiagency bill would shrink 2.5 percent; the sum is 15.2 percent less than President Obama proposed.Mix of local programs gives a pubTV station its ‘secret sauce’
For stations that are revered local institutions with loyal audiences and financial resources, standards for success are higher.CPB to equip 2 pubTV facilities as multistation master controls
By having two or three big master-control facilities oversee the digital assembly and transmission of broadcast schedules for all of the nation’s public TV stations, the field could save tens of millions of dollars a year, according to Mark Erstling, CPB senior v.p., system development and media strategy. CPB will cover a big part of the costs of public TV’s first two “centralcasting” setups this year, Erstling says. On Sept. 19, the CPB Board approved a $6.6 million grant to equip a centralcasting facility in Syracuse, N.Y., for all nine pubTV stations in New York State plus New Jersey’s four-station network.Sesame Workshop names its c.o.o. Ming as new president and c.e.o.
Sesame Workshop’s new president and c.e.o. is H. Melvin Ming, currently the Workshop’s chief operating officer. Ming succeeds Gary Knell, who was just named president of NPR. Ming joined the nonprofit home to Sesame Street in 1999 as chief financial officer, and was promoted to c.o.o. in 2002. As c.o.o. he oversees content, product licensing, distribution, research, communications and business strategies. Prior to joining the Workshop, Ming served as chief financial officer of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York; chief operating officer at WQED in Pittsburgh; and chief financial officer and chief administrative officer at WNET in New York.Two more feeds syndicate jazz to public radio
Public radio stations shopping for a plug-and-play jazz stream now have double the options to consider, with two newcomers to the field offering mainstream jazz services. Last month KPLU in Seattle/Tacoma announced that it will soon offer its Jazz24 stream, which it now broadcasts online and locally on an HD channel, to stations around the country. KPLU says the channel now draws a monthly web audience of 100,000 listeners, 90 percent outside the Seattle area. Meanwhile, some former hosts and creators of JazzWorks, a service that changed hands in May along with Pittsburgh’s WDUQ-FM, are now offering a jazz service under the name of Pubradio Network, competing with their old channel.Public radio ‘dancing at the edge of change’
There’s some heavy-duty soul-searching going on in public radio. The Public Radio Program Directors conference, Sept. 20–23 in Baltimore, sidelined its usual celebrations of pubradio’s audience growth and its journalistic ascendency. Instead, participants grappled with big questions about challenges ahead and wondered aloud about how to move forward after a year of political calamity at NPR. Progress reports about ongoing reforms were freighted with a new urgency: giving exposure to innovative new programs, raising stations’ ambitions for local reporting, opening the field to more diverse voices and listeners. Podium speeches promoting the ideals of creative risk-taking and collaboration generated plenty of conversation among station programmers as well as a big turnout of independent producers — 120 were attracted to this year’s PRPD by discounted admissions and indie-oriented events.Gary Knell, Sesame Workshop c.e.o., hired as NPR president
Gary E. Knell, president and c.e.o. of Sesame Workshop for a decade, will start work Dec. 1 with the same titles at NPR, the network announced today. The NPR Board voted unanimously to hire the widely experienced leader of a comparably prominent, esteemed and successful public media institution who had preparatory stints as a legislative aide and in private media and public TV. An NPR spokesperson said Knell would take a reduction pay. His Sesame Workshop compensation came to more than $746,000, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported today [Mark Memmott’s blog]. Though the production company behind Sesame Street and other children’s shows is a nonprofit, it has benefited from toy licensing and media sales revenues at a private-sector level.Pubcaster elected chairman of Radio Television Digital News Association
Michigan Radio News Director Vincent Duffy is the new chairman of the board of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), the first public media news director elected to the position. Members chose Duffy during the 2011 Excellence in Journalism Conference this week in New Orleans. Here’s a roundup of other news from the meeting.Alvarado, Jackson, Taylor named to FCC Diversity Committee
Three public broadcasters have been named to the Federal Communication Commission’s Diversity Committee (PDF). Joaquin Alvarado, senior vice president for digital innovation for American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio; Maxie Jackson, president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters; and Loris Ann Taylor, president of Native Public Media, will serve on the committee, which advises the commission on policies and practices to enhance diversity in telecommunications. It is chaired by former FCC Commissioner Henry Rivera. The committee’s first meeting will be Dec. 6.
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