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Project Core: A vision for scale and growth

Over the past three years, CentralCast has been hard at work implementing critical upgrades that lay the foundation for a more resilient and advanced future. And now, the culmination of these efforts is taking shape in our most ambitious initiative yet: Project Core.

Quick Takes

MacArthur Foundation grants $2 million to documentary projects

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The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today $2 million in new grants to 18 documentary film projects, including some from frequent collaborators with public TV. Individual grant amounts range from $50,000 to $225,000. The latter amount goes to the film 500 Years, which follows the genocide trial of former Guatemalan President General Efraín Ríos Montt. The film is a follow-up to co-director Pamela Yates’s previous film about the Guatemalan genocide, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, which became a 2012 episode on PBS’s POV. A couple of the projects incorporate multiplatform outreach, according to the release: Immigrant Nation is “a multi-platform project that explores the interconnectedness of U.S. immigrants, past and present,” while the team behind Map Your World will build an “interactive web platform enabling global youth to map their communities’ assets and challenges and create media to catalyze positive change.”

Among the other grantees:

In the Game, a documentary about Latina adolescents and soccer from pubTV producer Kartemquin Films;
Hazing, a film about “the cultural practices of hazing,” from director Byron Hurt, who also made the 2006 Independent Lens episode Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes;
Freedom Fighters, a film about exonerated men who start a detective agency, from director Jamie Melzer, who directed the 2003 Independent Lens episode Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story; and
The Arrivals, a story about two undocumented immigrants from director Heidi Ewing, whose PBS credits include The Boys of Baraka and an episode of the now-defunct Now on PBS.

Tech

“f gwenifill”? Former pubmedia consultant’s Twitter mistake results in bizarre messages

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Several news organizations’ Twitter accounts, including some public media accounts, emitted a deluge of cryptic messages reading “f gwenifill” today. The tweets trace to social media strategist Kate Gardiner, who has consulted for public media and nonprofit news organizations and has access to many of their Twitter accounts through TweetDeck, a Twitter client. Gardiner initially tweeted that she had been hacked but told Current that the tweets were a mistake on her part, caused when she was “cleaning up” her TweetDeck account. “f gwenifill” was a test tweet she had created for PBS NewsHour when she worked for the program as its first social media desk assistant, and she accidentally sent it via all the accounts she still has access to. In Twitter’s early days, mobile phone users typed “f” to follow another user. Affected accounts included that of New York’s WNYC and several of its individual programs,  the NewsHour and its specialized Twitter feeds, and the Poynter Institute.

People

Love of cheese leads to new career for former pubradio exec

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Chris Kohtz is no longer in a position to tell you about portfolios of programs available for airing on public radio stations. But he’s definitely your guy if you’re craving a good cheddar or Camembert. After 25 years in broadcasting, Kohtz has shifted careers to pursue his dream of opening a cheese shop. The Wedge & Wheel opened for business Jan. 2 in Stillwater, Minn., on the outskirts of Minneapolis, offering a selection of domestic and foreign-made cheeses to an enthusiastic bunch of cheese connoisseurs.

Quick Takes

Curious City expands beyond Chicago with WYSO Curious

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A localized version of Curious City, the Localore-backed participatory journalism initiative that assigns reporters to research questions submitted by listeners, launched at WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio, last month. WYSO Curious is the first version of the multimedia project to launch beyond its home station, Chicago’s WBEZ. In its new incarnation, listeners submit questions online, and WYSO produces stories each month about the answers. Curious City and its project manager, Jennifer Brandel, began developing an open-source platform that could be replicated at other stations with the help of a June 2013 prototype grant from the Knight Foundation. Lewis Wallace, a reporter at WYSO, interviewed Brandel and Curious City editor Shawn Allee at the launch of WYSO Curious in December.

Quick Takes

Second member resigns from Vermont PTV board

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A second member of the Vermont Public Television board has resigned. VPT remains under investigation by the CPB Inspector General’s office after an anonymous complaint that the board broke CPB’s open-meetings rules. The board accepted Jim Wyant’s resignation after a Jan. 8 meeting. Wyant continues as chair of the Montreal-based Public Television Association of Quebec, a Canadian nonprofit that supports VPT.

Programs/Content

NPR drives forward with dashboard delivery

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Having faced the disruptive threats posed by cassette tapes, CDs, satellite radio and even the iPod, public radio strategists are increasingly looking for a beachhead into the emerging “connected car” and its Internet-powered suite of entertainment options. Gains in auto technology were a highlight of last week’s 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: Carmakers, including General Motors, Jaguar, Tesla and Audi, unveiled new or beefed-up versions of dashboards that use broadband Internet to power apps offering news, music, weather and other services to motorists. Both NPR and American Public Media announced new partnerships that will get their content into these “connected cars.”

“This is huge, and it’s essential for radio broadcasters to be players in this space,” said Fred Jacobs, longtime radio researcher and analyst who’s now in the business of developing apps for the digital dashboard. He has followed the development of connected car technologies and documented its growth through his research projects, including the Public Radio Technology Survey. For decades, radio operators could throw up a tower and launch a broadcast service confident that listeners would be tuning in from their cars.

Quick Takes

Brand’s new KCRW show has name, launch date

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Former KPCC host Madeleine Brand’s new show on competitor KCRW in Los Angeles now has a name and launch date, according to the blog LA Observed. The blog reported that Brand’s new show, Press Play, will debut Jan. 27. It will air from noon to 1 p.m., which means that it will not air opposite Take Two, the successor to Brand’s former KPCC show. Brand left KPCC in September 2012 and started developing her new KCRW show in September 2013.

Programs/Content

Supreme Court to decide fate of Aereo’s Internet broadcasting service

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Television broadcasters, commercial and noncommercial, succeeded in securing a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court in their bid to strike down Aereo, the startup service that allows subscribers to view and record television broadcast programs via the Internet. The court will hear the case later this year after granting a writ of certiorari Friday in the case of American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., et al., v. Aereo, Inc. To date, broadcasters have been unable to secure an injunction against the company that uses banks of dime-sized antennas to capture broadcast signals and convert them into streaming video distributed over the Internet. Subscribers “rent” the antennas and have the option to watch TV programs live or on demand via a device similar to a digital video recorder. Broadcasters appealed to the Supreme Court after the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request in July 2013 to revisit its earlier decision not to impose an injunction on Aereo. In April 2013, the 2nd Circuit upheld a lower court’s July 2012 decision to allow Aereo to continue operating despite the pending litigation.

Programs/Content

Stations’ concerns prompt Metropolitan Opera to sanitize airing of Die Fledermaus

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The Metropolitan Opera agreed to tone down indecent language in its Jan. 11 broadcast after radio station leaders warned that they would not risk airing a performance that would violate FCC standards. Met staffers informed stations in a Jan. 7 email that Saturday’s broadcast of Die Fledermaus would contain profanity. An off-stage tenor, singing in his jail cell, would prompt a jailer to answer, “No opera!