Fans of Bryant Park Project, NPR’s web-based morning news service for younger audiences, are describing the show’s pending cancellation as evidence that public radio is: (a. only interested in serving wealthy old fuddy-duddies; and, (b. doesn’t have the stomach for experiments with new media. “NPR isn’t giving up on the Web. It’s just giving up on its younger audience members, the ones who don’t have Scrooge McDuck-size moneybins they can dig into come pledge time,” writes Daniel Holloway, a film critic who appears regularly on BPP, on Huffington Post. New York-based Globe and Mail correspondent Simon Houpt observes: [M]ember stations had no interest in ditching .

Blair Feulner, founder and longtime manager of KPCW in Park City, Utah, may have talked himself out of a job. During a July 15 on-air sign-off, Feulner told listeners he was taking a six-month sabbatical. The announcement took trustees of KPCW licensee Community Wireless of Park City by surprise, according to a report posted on KPCW’s website. Feulner and his board have been in a stand-off over his demands for a renewed employment contract since March, and the Park Record reports that the board appears to be split over what to do about him. Joe Wrona, the Community Wireless executive committee member who handled negotiations over the pending sale of Salt Lake sister station KCPW, told the press that Feulner’s leave of absence is unauthorized and the board is “struggling to try to make decisions that are in the best interest of Community Wireless, and that do not constitute a betrayal of the trust that Community Wireless listeners, donors and employees have placed in the board of trustees.”

There’s been no shortage of dismissive reviews of Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns, the animated Car Talk spin-off PBS launched July 9. Now viewers weigh in, and it’s not much prettier. “Click and Clack? Surely, you jest!” Mary Sykes of Raleigh, N.C., wrote to PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler. “That you who preach journalistic integrity would subject your viewership to such dribble on such a class act station is almost beyond repair.”

CPB announced yesterday its My Source Radio Testimonial Awards, given to three public radio stations and the listeners who recorded promotional spots about the roles the broadcasters play in their lives. The winners were Vermont Public Radio, KWMU in St. Louis, and WBGO in Newark, N.J. “Through the My Source testimonials we are hearing directly from the people who use and value public radio and the important role it plays in their lives,” said CPB President Pat Harrison at the Public Radio Marketing and Development Conference in Orlando.

Boston’s WGBH will temporarily shut down its huge electronic screen, visible to drivers on the Massachusetts Turnpike, reports the Boston Globe. LEDs in the screen are turning off due to overheating, and the station plans to fix the problem. (Story in Current about the screen and WGBH’s new headquarters.)

Rob Paterson reports on the first town hall meeting held as part of the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project at St. Louis’s KETC-TV. “St. Louisans could see the enormous amount of help that was there for them,” he writes on the FASTforward blog. “They could hear stories of all the things that could happen for bad or good. They could feel hope.” (Coverage in Current.)

The former president of KPCW in Park City, Utah, unexpectedly left his morning show Tuesday to go on sabbatical, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Blair Feulner, who started the station in 1980, cited a dispute with the station’s board. “The board of trustees will have to meet to determine whether we want to revisit Blair Feulner’s employment status,” said a board member. (Via the PRPD blog.)

An upcoming revamp of Sesame Street’s website will feature a live-action Muppet guide and an option that can help prevent children from straying to other websites, reports the New York Times. Sesame Workshop is taking the site seriously. “We view this as really the future of the workshop, as becoming the primary channel of distribution down the line,” Gary E. Knell, president, told the paper.

Todd Mundt takes note of SnagFilms, a site for viewing documentaries online that has PBS as a partner. “PBS has made a few moves like this — each of them smart,” he writes. “I’m watching less over-the-air public TV than ever, despite having four multicast channels on my TV, but I’m watching more PBS than in years, on other platforms that I use a lot — from Netflix (”Napoleon” was this week’s home viewing) to iTunesU and now SnagFilms.”

Wednesday’s PBS debut of Tom and Ray Magliozzi in animated form gets a mixed review from the New York Times‘s Ginia Bellafante, who calls As the Wrench Turns “indisputably adorable” but says, “A television program with scripts and scene boards and illustrators doesn’t merely impede their spontaneity. It also carries the vague hint of ambition, and the Magliozzi brothers have built a career relishing in the joys, essentially, of just sitting around.” (Earlier Current article.)

Laura Walker, president of WNYC, is this year’s recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award, CPB announced today. “Her creativity and willingness to take risks have made WNYC one of the foremost radio stations in the country,” said CPB President Patricia Harrison. In her 11 years there, the station bought its freedom from the city government, launched Studio 360, On the Media, Radio Lab and The Takeaway, among other national programs, and last month moved into a new home [New York Times story] outside of the city’s municipal building, where it operated 84 years. [Current feature on Walker, 2004.]

Posted in Current‘s former online forum, DirectCurrent, by moderator Steve Behrens on July 17, 2008 at 12:28pm Last year, public radio’s Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group predicted (see page 10) that freeing content could result in mashups such as “a Hidden Kitchens regional food content site that mashes up DDC audio and video content with Google Maps and Flickr photos about local restaurants and food events; a Science Talk site that draws on DDC science content combined with selected blog posts on related topics.” And there probably will be much more significant unforeseen innovations, as the DDC authors would probably agree.

NPR today invited Internet techies to take custom feeds of NPR text and audio– 250,000 stories going back to 1995 — and mash their own combinations for personal noncommercial or nonprofit use. It’s “the beginning of what could be some really cool stuff,” predicted Todd Mundt of Louisville Public Media, who said the idea was endorsed by public radio’s Digital Distribution Consortium. The network released an application programming interface (API) that tells techies how to play selected material in widgets and other Internet-fed outlets. A query generator spits out a section of code for selecting material by topic, program and date from NPR’s database.

From the Top has announced dates and sites for its radio and TV tapings. Radio tapings are set between Aug. 10 (Aspen, Colo.) and next May 22 (Omaha, Neb.). Prodigies will hit the road for San Antonio and Lubbock, Texas; Northfield, Mass.; Cincinnati; Mesa, Ariz.; Indianapolis; Mobile, Ala.; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plus two shows at home in Boston. The TV version will be taped in New York’s Carnegie Hall May 27-31 and June 27-July 1.

Readers of Edutopia magazine learned that Garrison Keillor was inspired to invent his daily short, The Writer’s Almanac, by a good experience at the Minnesota State Fair in 1993. Instead of holding a trivia contest, as planned, Keillor walked into the crowd and asked fairgoers to recite favorite poems. Which they did. The article also reports that Norwegian radio NRK has picked up the show. [NRK announcement translated from Norwegian by Google.]