Programs/Content

Study of engaging digital stories helps stations’ newsrooms set priorities

By |

A new vocabulary is emerging in public radio newsrooms to help journalists communicate and make decisions about online coverage that attracts and builds digital audiences. Developed through the Local Stories Project, an NPR Digital Services initiative that began as a geotargeting experiment on Facebook, the vocabulary includes phrases like “topical buzzer” — a story that provides a unique take on a subject that everyone is talking about — or  “curiosity stimulator,” for a piece with a science or technology angle. The concepts are explained in this blog post, “9 Types of Local Stories that Cause Engagement.” As newsrooms around the country adjust to the demands of producing distinctive coverage within their local markets, reporters increasingly are required to serve two news platforms, each with a different audience, without spinning their wheels. “It’s like growing a new arm, while your other arms are busy doing what you do.

Tech

“Evolution and revolution” coming as ATSC readies new broadcast standard

By |

Five years after pubcasters switched off the last of their analog TV transmitters and advanced into an all-digital world, planning is underway for the next generation of digital TV. The ATSC 3.0 standard has been years in the making, and years of work and many questions remain before pubcasters are ready to put it on the air. ATSC is the Advanced Television Standards Committee, an international nonprofit comprising broadcasters, regulators, consumer electronics manufacturers, broadcast equipment companies and other experts. It developed the ATSC 1.0 standard that was adopted for broadcast digital TV in the early 2000s and is now charged with replacing that standard to keep up with rapid advances in the technologies used in broadcast TV. ATSC is working on two sets of standards.

System/Policy

Auction delay allows time to think hard about selling spectrum

By |

Selling or keeping spectrum is perhaps the most consequential decision that the current generation of public television station executives and their boards will ever make about the future of public media, not just in their communities but the nation as well. The FCC chairman’s postponement of the spectrum auction until at least 2016 is an opportunity for greater scrutiny of that weighty decision. Pitches from speculators and their FCC allies have focused on the one-time financial windfall to local licensees from selling noncommercial spectrum. However, balanced deliberation requires examining some key issues. Here’s my own short list:

Know when to hold ’em: Next-generation broadcasting technology will open up important new revenue streams for public and commercial stations.

Car Talk

Remembering Tom Magliozzi’s ‘bright light’

By |

Tom Magliozzi, co-host of public radio’s wildly popular Car Talk, died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease Nov. 3. He was 77. Magliozzi was born in East Cambridge, Mass., in 1937 and co-hosted Car Talk with his brother, Ray, from the show’s inception as a local broadcast of WBUR in Boston through a 25-year run as one of the top draws for public radio listeners on weekends. The show ended original production in 2012 due to Magliozzi’s declining health, yet it continues to attract large audiences for local stations while airing in repeats.

System/Policy

Incoming Republican chairs include ‘powerful friends’ of public broadcasting, says APTS president

By |

SAN DIEGO — Patrick Butler, public television’s chief advocate on Capitol Hill, wants to reassure broadcasters who are nervous about the incoming Republican majority, particularly on the powerful Senate side. In a speech at the annual American Public Television Fall Marketplace, Butler said that he “detected some anxiety in the public television industry that we will be going to hell in a handbasket now that Republicans control the entire Congress” after this month’s midterm elections. “I’ve come to San Diego to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so.”

Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, reminded the crowd that GOP support for pubcasting goes back even to Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater — known as “Mr. Conservative” — who helped Joan Ganz Cooney, the niece of a friend, get the first $1 million to create Sesame Street in the 1960s. And even now, Butler noted, “public broadcasting does have powerful friends among Republicans in the Senate.”

One is Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, new chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. His father was the first chair of the Mississippi Public Broadcasting Commission in the late ’60s, Butler said.

Programs/Content

PBS to test whether core series can bring in pledge dollars

By |

PBS has set the lineup for an upcoming fundraising test that will use a full week’s schedule of first-run National Program Service shows. Seventeen stations will take part in the experiment, running Nov. 28 through Dec. 5. PBS is trying to determine whether using core series, rather than pledge specials that veer from the regular lineup, will lead to a more stable member and donor base and perhaps even prompt more major gifts.