Quick Takes

More Secrets, and asteroids, coming soon to PBS

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PBS has commissioned Britain’s Pioneer Productions for a six-part series and a Nova special, reports Televisual, a British-based news site that covers the business of television. The Secrets series continues Pioneer’s Secrets of the Manor House, looking inside additional British institutions including the Tower of London, the high-end department store chain Selfridges and Scotland Yard. Asteroid: Doomsday or Payday? is a one-hour special for Nova that explores “the earth’s violent and increasingly interesting relationship with the asteroid,” as Televisual said.

System/Policy

Greater Public, iMA announce merger

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Greater Public, formerly DEI, and Integrated Media Association (iMA) announced today that the organizations had merged as of the end of August. Atlanta-based iMA will keep its name and website for the next year to ease the transition, but its board of directors is in the process of dissolving. Ultimately, the 10-year-old organization will function more as a new division within the Minneapolis-based Greater Public, with iMA Executive Director Jeannie Ericson heading up the tentatively named Digital Services unit from Atlanta. “Digital innovation has become increasingly cross-disciplinary and integral to everything we do, which is very positive for public media,” Ericson said in a statement. “This merger is a natural evolution as iMA and Greater Public see their futures intertwined.

Programs/Content

Second American Graduate Day to raise dropout awareness nationwide

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The second American Graduate Day, a live multiplatform “call to action” event focusing attention on high-school graduation rates, hits public TV airwaves Sept. 28. The broadcast from the Tisch WNET Studios at Lincoln Center in New York City will air from noon to 7 p.m. Eastern as part of the CPB-backed initiative American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen. Major partner organizations Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, City Year, Horizons National and United Way will participate, along with nearly 30 other national partners, 14 local organizations and celebrity guests involved in education and youth-intervention programs.

The program will air as 14 half-hour segments, each of which will accommodate local cutaways for stations to insert locally produced live or pretaped seven-minute segments on organizations that provide support to at-risk students, families and schools in their communities. Viewers and online users at AmericanGraduate.org can connect with their local pubTV stations and community organizations.

System/Policy

Technical hurdles, unknown costs loom in spectrum repacking

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As the FCC prepares to reshuffle the layout of the nation’s television spectrum for the repacking process, public broadcasters are girding for some difficult choices as they consider how to navigate a complex and potentially expensive transition.

Quick Takes

KOPB-FM’s website tops nation in market penetration, study shows

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The Media Audit reports that the website for pubradio KOPB-FM in Portland, Ore., has the nation’s highest reach into its metro area, according to the Radio and Internet Newsletter. More than 385,000 adults in a market of 2 million have visited its site in the past month — that’s 19.8 percent of that population in Portland. No other single station site exceeded a 6.2 percent penetration. “The latest figures suggest that radio websites are growing in popularity and are becoming more important in defining the overall reach for a radio station or radio group,” the Media Audit also says. Details from the full report here.

Quick Takes

Mashable post contemplates impact of news aggregation apps on NPR

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In a post Tuesday on Mashable.com titled “Will Public Radio Survive Music Streaming Apps?,” Scott Pham, digital content editor for NPR member station KBIA, ponders how news aggregation apps such as Swell will affect public radio stations:
Promising mobile apps like Swell and AGOGO launched this summer, representing a new challenge to legacy media companies like National Public Radio. These apps create new listening experiences for consumers of talk and news because they tie together segments of audio into customizable and curated streams.

AGOGO combines podcasts with segments from NPR, the BBC, audio from videos and text-to-speech versions of newspaper articles. And Swell has been dubbed the “Pandora for news.”

I’m a producer at an NPR member station, and these are frightening words in my world. Pandora dealt a massive wound to our cousins in music radio. The advertising dollars Pandora sucked up will likely never return to the table for terrestrial radio.

Quick Takes

New Sesame Street online hub to focus on math and science skills

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Sesame Workshop will launch a new Sesame Street online hub focusing on science and math on Sept. 24, the New York Times reports. “Little Discoverers: Big Fun With Science, Math and More” aims to go about “teaching nature, math, science and engineering concepts and problem-solving to a preschool audience — with topics like how a pulley works or how to go about investigating what’s making Mr. Snuffleupagus sneeze.”

Programs/Content

OPB courts partners for statewide news network

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Oregon Public Broadcasting has a track record of launching effective news collaborations. Its newest project to create a statewide news network is featured in a recent report from American University’s J-Lab, “News Chops: Beefing up the Journalism in Local Public Broadcasting.”

Quick Takes

Lehrer to premiere biographical play, then assassination novel

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Ex-anchor of the PBS NewsHour, Jim Lehrer, has a play premiering Sept. 12: “Bell,” a one-man show “exploring the curious mind of Alexander Graham Bell.” The show will run eight performances at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., 7:30 nightly plus a matinee at 2 p.m. Saturday. Bell, the inventor of the telephone and advocate for persons who are deaf, was also the society’s second president, and his family remained active in its management for decades. Rick Foucheux, a member of D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre company, will appear as Bell.