People

CPI hires four, Abumrad gets $500K MacArthur fellowship, three join FCC panel, and more…

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Ellen Weiss, the NPR News chief who took the network’s blame for the Juan Williams affair, has joined the Center for Public Integrity as its executive editor as of Oct. 3, the watchdog newsroom announced. The center is headed by one of her predecessors at NPR, Bill Buzenberg. “Ellen Weiss is one of the best and most creative news executives in the business,” he said in a news release. CPI hired three other top editors, including Christine Montgomery, the center’s new chief digital officer, who was managing editor of PBS.org for two years while it expanded and then sharply reduced its online-news plans.

Quick Takes

NPR back as a House target: Draft bill seeks ban on aid

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The draft for the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal year 2012 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill, introduced Sept. 29 by subcommittee Chair Denny Rehburg (R-Mont.), would prohibit CPB from funding NPR and requests a report from CPB on how to remove NPR totally from federal funding by 2014. Under the bill, CPB would receive the already-appropriated amount of $445 million for that year, including $6 million for digital projects. Other agencies in the draft bill would fare worse for the year that began Oct. 1.

Tech

CPB to equip 2 pubTV facilities as multistation master controls

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By having two or three big master-control facilities oversee the digital assembly and transmission of broadcast schedules for all of the nation’s public TV stations, the field could save tens of millions of dollars a year, according to Mark Erstling, CPB senior v.p., system development and media strategy. CPB will cover a big part of the costs of public TV’s first two “centralcasting” setups this year, Erstling says. On Sept. 19, the CPB Board approved a $6.6 million grant to equip a centralcasting facility in Syracuse, N.Y., for all nine pubTV stations in New York State plus New Jersey’s four-station network. The grant covers about 90 percent of the cost of the project, to be located in the new home of WCNY-FM/TV in downtown Syracuse.

System/Policy

On the beat in Juárez, you listen with your gut

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As a reporter for the multistation “local journalism center” Fronteras: The Changing America Desk, I am surrounded by borders. I live in Texas, work in New Mexico and regularly report in Mexico. In a 15-minute drive, I can be in a different state or a different country. It’s a tricky but fascinating work environment that’s further complicated by the drug war next door. The toughest but most compelling stories that we cover come from Mexico.

Quick Takes

Pittsburgh’s all-news startup gets an assist from CPB

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CPB is backing development of Essential Public Media, the nonprofit whose purchase of Pittsburgh’s WDUQ is pending before the FCC. At the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference July 14, CPB President Patricia Harrison announced a $250,000 grant to help Essential establish its digital journalism newsroom. “We are confident this will be a model for public media news operations across the country,” she said. Essential began managing day-to-day operations of WDUQ July 1, adopting an all-news format and reducing jazz programming to a six-hour weekend slot on its FM channel while it plays its syndicated service JazzWorks full-time on the Web and on an HD Radio digital multicast channel. The station’s editorial team has begun exploring possible editorial collaborations with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and PublicSource, an investigative-news startup that launched with foundation backing this spring, according to Lee Ferraro, manager of Pittsburgh’s WYEP, a partner in the repurposed WDUQ.

Programs/Content

Life without CPB aid scary to LJC startups

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The seven Local Journalism Centers that launched with major support from CPB have suddenly found themselves on a short timeline to find ways to earn more of their keep. So far, CPB has committed only the two-year sums announced at the initiative’s launch last year and has told some grantees to expect smaller amounts for 2012. Uncertainties over future CPB aid — as well as problems with the diffuse management structures that cloud decision-making and fiscal accountability for at least one LJC — have complicated plans to keep the regional news collaborations going, according to news directors who participated in a June 24 panel at the Public Radio News Directors conference in Arlington, Va. Station execs behind Changing Gears, the LJC that staffed up last August to cover efforts to revive manufacturing in the Upper Midwest, have begun making contingency plans to continue the work if CPB aid ends, said Torey Malatia of Chicago’s WBEZ, one of three stations behind the center. “We’re committed to keeping it going in some form,” he said.

Programs/Content

Life without CPB aid scary to Local Journalism Center startups

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The seven Local Journalism Centers that launched with major support from CPB have suddenly found themselves on a short timeline to find ways to earn more of their keep. So far, CPB has committed only the two-year sums announced at the initiative’s launch last year and has told some grantees to expect smaller amounts for 2012. Uncertainties over future CPB aid — as well as problems with the diffuse management structures that cloud decision-making and fiscal accountability for at least one LJC — have complicated plans to keep the regional news collaborations going, according to news directors who participated in a June 24 panel at the Public Radio News Directors conference in Arlington, Va. Station execs behind Changing Gears, the LJC that staffed up last August to cover efforts to revive manufacturing in the Upper Midwest, have begun making contingency plans to continue the work if CPB aid ends, said Torey Malatia of Chicago’s WBEZ, one of three stations behind the center. “We’re committed to keeping it going in some form,” he said.

Public Media Policybase

CPB charters a single ombudsman

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CPB’s website, as of February 2013, carries this document, “Revised February 1, 2011,” redefining the assignment of its ombudsman. Kenneth Tomlinson, past chair of the CPB Board, had prompted controversy by hiring two ombudsmen in April 2005. Charter Establishing the CPB Office of the Ombudsman

The founders of public broadcasting saw a clear need for a “system-wide process of exerting upward pressure on standards of taste and performance.” (The 1967 Carnegie Commission Report, p.36) In addition, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was expected to become the “center of leadership” with a “primary mission…to extend and improve . . .

CPB

Knives sharpened for renewed assault on CPB

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Bills to defund public broadcasting, or at least any radio network that fired Juan Williams, are beginning to seem like a real threat since the Nov. 2 midterm election gave Republicans a 60-plus majority in the House and a mandate to take huge bites out of federal spending. Last week the co-chairmen of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — assigned to suggest ways to reduce the $13.7 trillion deficit — advised dropping CPB from the budget, along with some vastly bigger federal expenditures that have even sturdier support in Congress (separate story). For conservative talking heads, ending aid to pubcasting would be a high-profile get-tough symbol. And for liberals, giving up CPB could be an attempt to avoid other more widely unpopular cuts.

History of public media

Adrift, mute and helpless

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Why everyone but public broadcasters is making federal policy for public media

The FCC’s recent National Broadband Plan and its Future of the Media initiative have highlighted a chronic problem in U.S public broadcasting: The system has no long-term policy planning capacity, and therefore it always has had great difficulty dealing with the periodic efforts by outsiders to critique and “reform” it. Public broadcasting ignores most media policy research, whether it originates in academia, think tanks or federal agencies, and it often seems out of touch with major national policy deliberations until too late. That disengagement is highly dangerous because it allows others to set the national legal and regulatory agenda for communications without assuring adequate policy attention to public-service, noncommercial and educational goals. Such policy initiatives also can negatively affect the funding and operating conditions of every public licensee. This article, the first of two, examines the history and recent serious consequences of that disengagement.

Programs/Content

Journalists counted: 3,200 pros; 6,000 total

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Public broadcasting has 3,224 professional journalists plus 2,770 nonprofessionals contributing to its reporting, making a total of nearly 6,000, according to a census by a team from Public Radio News Directors Inc. that was commissioned by CPB. Three-quarters appear to work in radio. Almost 80 percent of the professionals are full-timers, according to preliminary figures. The pros would amount to about one in six of total public broadcasting employees, based on the 20,000 total estimated for January in a CPB report. The nonprofessionals are roughly equally split between students and volunteers, according to early figures.

CPB

CPB budget allocation formula, 1981

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In 1981, Congress significantly restricted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s decision-making on spending, funneling fixed percentages of CPB’s federal appropriation to specific spending categories and types of grantees. Before then, CPB had faced repeated struggles, including a rift between TV and radio. In 1981, Congress imposed a formula proposed by Rep. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.), then chair of the House telecommunications subcommittee. The 75-25 split between TV and radio was based on experience. Robben Fleming, then president of CPB, complained that the formula “emasculates” CPB, and his successors periodically have objected to their loss of discretion over spending.

CPB

‘Snap Judgment’: latest in harvest from ’07 Talent Quest

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Snap Judgment, one of three new shows conceived from the CPB-backed Public Radio Talent Quest, has become a whirlwind of multimedia production with the launch of its weekly radio programs in July, live stage shows, and television piloting. “We kind of just go-go-go all the time,” says Mark Ristich, co-executive producer with Glynn Washington, a Talent Quest winner who is host and creator of the series. “We’re going to try to keep the content as fresh as possible, because we’ll lose people if we don’t.”

The small production team is busy creating 26 weekly radio episodes and a series of live storytelling performances, the first of which was recorded in June at San Francisco’s Brava Theater. The performances will be adapted for radio and television programs.

Public TV’s World multicast channel, now in redevelopment at Boston’s WGBH, is considering picking up the TV pilots, which mix segments from the live shows with short films and animations. “We’re going to rock the small screen with the same intensity as we’re rocking the radio,” says Washington, who was one of three contestants who won pilot funding and a shot at public media stardom through Public Radio Exchange’s online talent contest in 2007.

History of public media

Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

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Public Law 90-129, 90th Congress, November 7, 1967 (as amended to April 26, 1968)
This law was enacted less than 10 months after the report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Broadcasting. The act initiates federal aid to the operation (as opposed to funding capital facilities) of public broadcasting. Provisions include:

extend authorization of the earlier Educational Television Facilities Act,
forbid educational broadcasting stations to editorialize or support or oppose political candidates,
establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and defines its board,
defines its purposes,
authorize reduced telecommunications rates for its interconnection,
authorize appropriations to CPB, and
authorize a federal study of instructional television and radio. Title I—Construction of Facilities
Extension of duration of construction grants for educational broadcasting

Sec. 101.

Programs/Content

CPB/PBS Diversity and Innovation Fund weekly series RFP

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Three years after Latino activists bitterly criticized Ken Burns’s The War for omitting interviews with Hispanic soldiers and sailors, CPB and PBS concluded negotiations to create a Diversity and Innovation Fund to seed new productions, Current reported. PBS issued this RFP on its website. CPB/PBS Diversity and Innovation Fund
Request for Proposals
Weekly, Primetime Television Series
Objective
This RFP, the first from the Diversity and Innovation Fund, is designed to solicit proposals to provide the NPS with a new, weekly, primetime series – content that will expand viewership and usage, reaching an adult audience on-air and online that reflects the diversity of the 40-64 year old US population. Specifically, the DI Fund seeks to:

Diversify the NPS by attracting more racially and ethnically diverse viewers and Web visitors within the target demographic;
Expand the current NPS audience through the increased use of content created by a diverse group of producers and through the effective use of new and emerging technologies;
Leverage the talent and creativity of executive producers and producers from minority and underserved communities;
Build capacity for the public media system from within those communities; and
Encourage innovation in the planning, production and distribution of public media content. The content should be conceived and budgeted with multiple-platform use (broadcast, VOD, Internet, mobile, DVD, etc.) in mind from the outset.  As producers develop their proposals and ultimately their pilot programs, they should consider not only the traditional broadcast components but also the digital strategy which may include web presence, mobile applications, social media, inclusion in the Digital Learning Library and/or PBS Teachers, etc.

Programs/Content

Incentives for ‘diversity, innovation’ come with big CPB grant to PBS

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CPB and PBS are completing an agreement that may lead to the agency’s first annual grants for the PBS National Program Service based on measures of diversity and innovation in programming and related projects. Sources tell Current that this funding method would be one of the strongest attempts to encourage diversity and innovation in pubcasting so far, influencing the allocation of $14 million or more over the two-year contract. [Update: The final amount, CPB announced May 13, will be $20 million over two years. PBS request for proposals.]

CPB President Pat Harrison announced to the Board at its January meeting that the two had “reached a signed agreement,” but since then CPB has declined to provide specifics. “Yes, CPB and PBS have a signed agreement that commits funding to projects that emphasize diversity and innovation,” CPB spokesperson Louise Filkins told Current in an e-mail.

Programs/Content

Project for L.A.’s youth of color still lacks FM channel

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The masterminds of efforts such as NPR’s Bryant Park Project and Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo know well the difficulties of cultivating new, younger and more diverse audiences for public radio. Now imagine giving it a go in one of the country’s most competitive media markets, Los Angeles. That is the assignment from CPB accepted by L.A. Public Media, a multiplatform service managed by Fresno-based Radio Bilingüe and tailored for younger listeners of color. Imagine further, eight months after taking the assignment and a $2 million grant, there’s still no FM channel to use. LAPM is preparing to launch in July, but probably online instead of on the air.