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Minnesota Public Radio News will look for solutions to the world’s pressing problems at its first Top Coast Festival, a three-day conference bringing together more than a dozen academics and media personalities.
One of the films, Brooklyn Castle, looks at a junior-high chess squad that has won more than 30 national championships, more than any other team in the country, yet most of its students live well below the poverty line.
After two decades as a weekly NPR program, the 22-year-old Science Friday is preparing to shake things up. With its move to Public Radio International distribution on Jan. 1, the talk show has ambitious plans to put its content into wider distribution through collaborations with PRI series such as The World and The Takeaway as well as with the PBS science program Nova. WGBH in Boston, which acquired PRI in 2012, is involved in production of all three major series, opening new cross-platform distribution and branding opportunities. A new educational specialist is working to turn more of Science Friday’s content into curricular materials, and PRI is exploring ways to offer its programming through PBS Learning Media, the online resource providing free media and lesson plans to K–12 educators.
A new survey of more than 460 community partners in CPB’s American Graduate project found enthusiasm for the station-based dropout-prevention initiative as well as challenges to overcome. The 66-page report, produced by the Civic Enterprises public-policy consulting firm and the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, found that 74 percent of 145 responding partner organizations indicated their belief that public media “provided opportunities that will have a lasting effect on youth” through the initiative. Eighty-five percent said that public media will help tackle the problem in their community in the future by building “knowledge, capacity and engagement.”
The online survey was developed by the Hopkins center, CPB and Nine Network of Public Media, a lead station in the multi-year initiative. Participating stations located in high-need communities where dropout rates are critical identified partners to be included in the survey sample. The research concluded in August.
A new documentary airing on Maryland Public Television this month incorporates high-tech cinematography to offer a fresh new take on the 150-year-old story of the Battle of Gettysburg.
WEDU’s Too Close to Home, which was previewed to a packed theatre before its Sept. 26 broadcast debut, reports personal stories behind a troubling trend in the Sunshine State: Florida has become a huge destination state for human trafficking, ranking third in the nation.
PBS LearningMedia, a digital classroom resource for K–12 educators, topped more than 1 million registered users this month. Operated through a partnership of PBS and the WGBH Educational Foundation, the website offers more than 30,000 pieces of content to its users. The site is also rolling out a new premium tier with enhanced features; that service is now distributed statewide in Kentucky, New York and South Carolina. As part of its ongoing effort to promote classroom use of digital technology and build its user base, PBS LearningMedia launched “Get Your Tech On,” offering free access to its webinars and how-to guides through Nov. 1.
American Public Media has updated its popular online game Budget Hero to reflect the ongoing battle over sequestration cuts in Congress. This fifth version, backed by funding from CPB, also includes updated cost projections for federal spending in 2014 and new policy options to overhaul immigration policy, expand states’ Medicaid programs and reverse the effects of sequester cutbacks on defense and non-defense spending. The original game came out in 2008. Budget Hero currently gets some 40,000 plays a month, according to Linda Fantin, who heads APM’s Public Insight Network and oversees development of the game. The game has been played more than 1.7 million times, according to Diane Tucker, director of the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative and APM’s partner.
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.
Michelle Obama is kicking off a special event hosted by Wisconsin Public Television this morning. Appearing in a pre-recorded video, the first lady is welcoming children and parents to the network’s 15th annual PBS Kids Get Up and Go! Day. The event promotes family-friendly ideas on how to stay active, healthy and enjoy the outdoors. “Hi everyone!
Sesame Workshop and Ape Entertainment released the first comic book featuring the cast of Sesame Street May 4, to coincide with national Free Comic Book Day.
Twin Cities Public Television describes its new Open Air programming and promotional initiative as “tailor-made to meet the demands of a new Minnesota public TV audience.”
The Ready to Learn program backing educational media and outreach for children ages 2 to 8 is making digital learning through community engagement a priority, a change that will affect which stations participate in the program.
NPR Generation Listen, the network’s new outreach effort for millenials, sees one-on-one interaction as the key to cultivating its younger fanbase.
TED, the nonprofit behind the high-profile conferences about ideas in technology, entertainment and design (as well as NPR’s new weekend series), and WNET will co-produce TED’s first original television show this spring. TED Talks Education will tape before a live audience Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The New York City station is partnering with PBS and CPB for the hourlong program of short talks by education advocates on the theme of teaching and learning. TED Talks Education will air nationally May 7 on PBS as part of CPB’s American Graduate high-school dropout initiative. Musician John Legend will host.
Public television’s strongest case for preserving tax-based support for stations and CPB centers on informing political leaders about the full range of public-service work that stations deliver to local communities, particularly in the field of education, according to the field’s lead advocates in Washington, D.C.
Hear Here launched last spring as an experiment testing new ways to collect and distribute hyperlocal stories. About twice a month on both sides of the San Francisco Bay, KALW producers pop into local libraries and set up an impromptu studio.
Public broadcaster Tavis Smiley is co-sponsoring a daylong symposium for discussion of issues of importance to the Latino community, modeled on his State of the Black Union gatherings. The April 6 event at Chicago State University, “Latino Nation: Beyond the Numbers,” is the first time that “such a diverse and representative group of Latinos discusses its broad agenda on a national stage,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the co-sponsoring William C. Velásquez Institute, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Smiley said that the “exponential growth” of the Latino community “demands that we re-examine the assumptions we hold to create new ideas and possibilities for a better, more united tomorrow.”
Agenda topics include health care, climate change, education, jobs and immigration. The participants, still being finalized, feature Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Margaret Moran, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and actress Eva Longoria. Smiley had sponsored State of the Black Union gatherings nationwide for 10 years, calling them “a pulse check on how African Americans were fairing economically, politically and socially.” He ended the events in 2010, saying that communication and activism on the Internet reduced the need for an annual in-person meeting.
AUSTIN, Texas — Former All Things Considered co-host Michele Norris discussed details of her Race Card Project during a March 9 panel at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. The project, which began during a 2010 book tour promoting her memoir The Grace of Silence, is a conversational tool in which Norris facilitates an ongoing dialogue about race. She distributes physical “race cards” to participants, who are asked to write their thoughts on race in six words or fewer and mail the cards back to Norris (whose parents were both U.S. postal workers). Norris then compiles the responses onto a website. Norris initiated the project as she was traveling the country to promote her book and found herself discussing highly charged moments of her family’s history in front of audiences.
During a conference at the U.S. Institute of Peace Feb. 28, the makers of human rights documentaries discussed the techniques and challenges of using modern technology to gain a following for a cause.