Quick Takes

Friday roundup: PMP finds a home in ‘The Barn,’ Keillor talks books

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• The Public Media Platform is showing more signs of life. A blog post last week on PMP’s site describes how American Public Media has been testing the platform’s features with its regional stations, uploading content into the PMP for stations to pull. But APM’s content partners, including Minnesota Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio and Classical South Florida, each use a different content management system, so APM built a centralized data hub called “The Barn” to funnel content through before it reaches the PMP. • Garrison Keillor talked to the New York Times Book Review about his literary adventures, favorite authors and the worst thing about running his own bookstore, Common Good Books. (He doesn’t get a 10 percent discount.)

• The Princeton Review is out with its annual Most Popular College Radio Stations list, notes Radio Survivor.

Programs/Content

Keillor’s fundraiser for Obama revives complaints of bias

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Like many entertainers, Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor has never tried to hide his liberal political leanings, but his decision to host an Obama re-election fundraising party in his Minnesota home last week worked the conservative blogosphere into a lather about NPR’s political bias. Yet NPR has no control over Keillor or his nationally syndicated weekly program. And there’s no guarantee that his program’s distributor, the Minnesota-based American Public Media Group, could heel its star vaudevillian if it tried to neutralize him politically. Keillor owns his production company and is responsible for the show’s content. APMG took a measured stance by endorsing Keillor’s First Amendment rights as an individual.

A Prairie Home Companion

One of life’s persistent questions: Will Keillor really let himself retire?

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Did Garrison Keillor, that red-sneakered, 68-year-old host of A Prairie Home Companion, really announce his retirement plans in an interview published last week? You decide. Here are your clues:

On March 16, AARP issued a press release, “Public Radio Legend Garrison Keillor Announces Retirement in AARP Bulletin Exclusive Interview.”
In the question-and-answer dialogue on AARP’s website, Keillor said, “I am planning to retire in the spring of 2013, but first I have to find my replacement.”
Soon after AARP’s piece appeared online, his longtime broadcaster and distributor, Bill Kling, president of American Public Media, told an MPR blogger that “Garrison has been talking about things like this for the last couple of years and when Garrison says it, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that morning’s musings.”
Later that same day, an APM memo to client stations tried to reassure them: “Garrison has been open in talking about his own future and in working out ways for A Prairie Home Companion to continue for many years to come. . .

Programs/Content

We get Keillor’s take on Keillor, but who’s complaining?

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The series title means something, says arts documentarian Peter Rosen. If your film runs under the American Masters umbrella, it’s about an artist worth honoring.His film, “Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes,” aired in the series last week [July 1, 2009]. But Rosen would have given Garrison Keillor an admiring portrait anyway. “I’ve always thought we have a Mark Twain among us,” he says. With good access to Keillor, Rosen delivers a more detailed picture of Prairie Home Companion’s workings and the star’s personality than did the late Robert Altman’s earlier movie, which contrived to shoehorn a very successful real-life radio show into a plot about an unsuccessful one. Variety critic Dennis Harvey commented: “Portrait captures the charm of A Prairie Home Companion and its creator considerably more than Robert Altman’s star-heavy 2006 feature of the same name.”