System/Policy
The Future of Media Leadership: A Storify
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Follow the conversation around the next generation of public media leaders with Current’s Storify of the June 14 forum.
System/Policy
Futures Forum explores pubmedia’s leadership transition
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Upcoming leadership changes in public media will be the focus of Friday’s Public Media Futures Forum in Washington, D.C., the latest in an ongoing series of conversations with luminaries in the field.
About Current
Current transition: Behrens to Everhart
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Karen Everhart, senior editor of Current for 20 years, will succeed founding editor Steve Behrens after this edition. Larry Kirkman, dean of the American University School of Communication, appointed Everhart as interim managing editor. She joined Current in 1992 and covered public TV for 16 years before moving to the public radio beat in 2007. The school, with support from the Wyncote Foundation, took responsibility for publishing Current a year ago. Behrens, 63, gave notice last fall that he’d retire from the position in six months. Before leaving the premises, he will coordinate the relaunch of Current.org this spring, at long last, using WordPress as a content management system.
About Current
Current owner transfers paper to American U.
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Current is likely to have a new publisher in January — the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.
Details of the contract transferring the print/web publication remain in negotiation, but the governing boards of the university and of Current’s longtime publisher, New York’s WNET, have approved the deal in principle. Approval by the WNET Board, Dec. 9 [2010], prompted coverage in a New York Times blog Dec. 12. WNET accepted responsibility for publishing Current in 1983, after the collapse of the paper’s founding parent, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.
Programs/Content
Doc-makers get specific about copyright fair use
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Friday afternoon, things changed for producers who need to use somebody else’s footage and music in their documentaries. Clearing rights may still cost a lot and take too much time, as in the past, but Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi believe producers now have a solid rationale for not paying excessive and confounding fees for copyrighted materials in certain cases. On Nov. 18 [2005], the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the Independent Documentary Association, public TV’s Independent Television Service and the series P.O.V., and other media groups endorsed a Statement of Best Practices defining four kinds of situations when a producer, under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law, need not pay for a film clip, a shot of a painting or a snatch of music. Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University in Washington, D.C., and Jaszi, an intellectual property expert at the university’s law school, convened groups of experienced filmmakers around the country to look closely at the producers’ (and their lawyers’) working definition of fair use.
Programs/Content
What makes public broadcasting ‘public’ is engagement
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The authors head the Public Media ThinkTank at American University in Washington, D.C. With backing from the Ford Foundation they’re working to distill the means and motives of a broader realm of public media, including public broadcasting. This is one of their first efforts. Public engagement is the semisecret success story of public broadcasting, and it shouldn’t be. The many community partnerships that flourished with public TV’s June broadcast of the special on caregiving for seniors, And Thou Shalt Honor, and the amazing insights that Story Corps brings to public radio shouldn’t be heartwarming, exceptional stories. They should be the norm.