Programs/Content

Editorial integrity panel says the time’s right to think about principles

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Now might not seem like the best time for the public broadcasting system to be pondering philosophical questions of identity and purpose, since its unwanted promotion to high-profile partisan punching bag in Congress. The official ponderers of the system’s Editorial Integrity for Public Media initiative beg to disagree. Now more than ever, they say, public broadcasting must make its case by defining its purpose and identity to the larger world — because if it doesn’t, its critics will. “In this political environment there’s a lot being thrown around about integrity, bias, and ‘just who are these public broadcasting guys, anyway?’” said Tom Thomas of the Station Resource Group, co-director of the editorial initiative. “We should be able to say, here’s how we do our work, here’s the way in which we make decisions, here’s what money we take or not, here’s how we balance funding and content.”

“In the work I’ve done, facilitating Dynamic Inquiries and Round Robins, one of the key things that comes up is, we don’t have an articulated vision for public broadcasting — and, frankly, that has gotten louder,” said Ted Krichels, director of Penn State Public Broadcasting and chair of the Editorial Integrity project’s 20-member steering committee.

Development

STING: The Right jabs pubradio with NPR fundraiser’s words

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Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there. The two NPR fundraisers didn’t get the $5 million donation that was discussed by their lunch partners, and the president of NPR didn’t pose for a photo accepting a phony check, but those were the better results of the lunch meeting. They couldn’t have expected that a hidden-camera recording of their talk with two prospective donors would cost Schiller his next job, put Liley on administrative leave, trigger the ouster of NPR’s president and severely undercut support for federal aid to public broadcasting. Two weeks later, March 8, the consequences began tumbling into sight as right-wing activist James O’Keefe’s video of their lunch meeting spread virally on the Web.

Programs/Content

Panel to NPR: Rein in punditizing

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NPR should have its journalists phase out any long-term contracts for appearances on other media outlets, monitor those appearances more carefully and make clearer distinctions between reporting, analysis and commentary in its programming, the network’s ethics-policy task force advised Feb. 25 [2011]. Bob Steele, head of the task force, presented recommendations for revising the ethics code to the NPR Board last month. Steele, director of the Prindle Institute for Ethics and distinguished professor of journalism ethics at DePauw University and a journalism values scholar with the Poynter Institute, was retained by NPR President Vivian Schiller to head the task force. The 13-member task force included NPR employees, outside journalists and citizens at large.

Programs/Content

Local, online, news, profitable, sustainable — Which word does not belong with the others?

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“The big opportunity — and where the most disruption is — is in local media.”—Vivian Schiller, president, NPR

“I have little doubt in my mind that, whether it’s us or somebody else, [local news] is going to be a very big space in the future.”—Tim Armstrong, chair and c.e.o., AOL

In the front of the room, NPR President Vivian Schiller and AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong are laying out their corporate strategies to almost a thousand online journalists. It’s the lunchtime general session of the Online News Association (ONA) Conference, and the topic is one of the principal challenges for American journalism: how to provide and sustain local news. The distinction between national and local news often gets lost among the gloomy statistics that surface in so many discussions of the news business. Local newspapers have been folding, probably at a faster rate than many people realize. According to Paper Cuts, 171 local newspapers have closed in the three years 2008-2010, resulting in the loss of 2,800 jobs, not counting early retirements. Locally is where disruptive technology has been the most profoundly disruptive.

Programs/Content

NPR Board hires counsel to probe what went wrong

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Reacting to NPR’s abrupt image makeover — from ascendant news organization to partisan punching bag  — the network’s board last week hired an outside firm to investigate the decisions that invited the comedown, the dismissal of news analyst Juan Williams.Dave Edwards, the board’s new chair, announced that Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a 20-office multinational law practice, is leading the internal review initiated last month. Weil is “highly regarded with considerable expertise in governance issues,” Edwards said, shortly after the board unanimously elected him as its new leader.Security guards with metal detectors checked the unusually large number of onlookers at the Nov. 11 meeting at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. A public session preceded nearly a full day of closed-door board meetings. Just two weeks earlier, after NPR’s dismissal of Williams prompted a display of outrage at Fox News, the network received a bomb-threat letter and turned it over to law enforcement (Current, Nov. 1).

Programs/Content

NPR sets a goal: add 100 reporters to statehouse beats

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A multiyear initiative led by NPR, Impact of Government, eventually will put two additional state-level reporters to work in each of the 50 states, along with a small team of editors and data analysts at the network. Pilot coverage in eight states will begin in March [NPR request for proposals]. The $1.8 million kickoff grant from the Open Society Foundations, founded and chaired by financier George Soros, will cover planning and part of pilot costs, but launching the full project will require $17 million, and sustaining it will cost $18 million a year, according to Ron Schiller, NPR senior v.p. of fundraising and president of the NPR Foundation. The project, developed during strategic planning talks over the past 18 months, is public radio’s first major effort to make a fundraising case for a combined local/national project. NPR will join stations in asking funders to back their aspiration to take up enterprise and long-form reporting on a beat once dominated by daily newspapers — state government and public affairs — that public radio most often covers as daily spot news.

Programs/Content
O'Reilly and Williams on O'Reilly's Fox News program

Under-explained firing makes NPR an issue just in time for election

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Top NPR officials may have thought their Oct. 20 decision to dismiss veteran journalist Juan Williams was about journalistic objectivity, but to many outsiders it sounded more like a story of arrogant lefty political correctness. That narrative opened up public radio — and all of public broadcasting — to a political attack that may help the candidates of Fox News and the Republican Party rally their conservative base for the midterm elections Nov. 2. Criticism of the firing was not limited to the partisan right.

Programs/Content

Instructional TV sales exec moves to NBR’s bigger league

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In his career in the media niche of instructional television, Mykalai Kontilai worked with several respected names in public broadcasting as well as parts of Scholastic Inc., one of the world’s largest producers of educational materials for children and classrooms.
Two of these key relationships for Kontilai or Teacher’s Choice, the ITV sales company where he was a major marketing presence, fell apart abruptly and after a matter of months — those with a past education chief of NETA and a former CPB finance exec. Kontilai finally left the ITV field after Scholastic ended its business relationship in 2006 because, a spokesperson told Current, the company was “dissatisfied with Mr. Kontilai as a distributor of Scholastic product.”

Some of his ITV customers remain strong supporters, nevertheless, while others cut ties with him. Two station executives said they dissolved contracts with Teacher’s Choice early. Leaving the cloistered and shrinking ITV world opened new opportunities, however, culminating thus far in the announcement Aug. 13 that the for-profit company NBR Worldwide, with Kontilai as c.e.o. and partner Gary Ferrell as c.f.o., had purchased Nightly Business Report, a well-established weeknight show trusted by millions of PBS viewers to provide investment news and advice (Current, Aug.

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.

Development

Buyer will take Nightly Business Report to ‘a new level’

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WPBT sells to entrepreneur with history of legal disputes: Mykalai Kontilai, whose NBR Worldwide this month purchased Nightly Business Report, a staple of public TV carried five nights a week on 250 stations, talks about how his years as an instructional television distributor gave him a strong sense of public broadcasting values. ¶ He talks about how he’ll use that background to develop an educational outreach using the show to teach real-world financial responsibility. He talks of his plans to bring NBR to international audiences. ¶ What he doesn’t want to discuss are more than 20 lawsuits from 1999 through 2010 filed in San Diego County Superior Court against him or his companies — including five alleging breach of contract.

Programs/Content

UNC-TV lays down its press shield

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Is a public TV station licensed to a state university system an agency of the state if a legislative committee says so? Attorneys and management at North Carolina’s UNC-TV network conceded that it is, and earlier this month obeyed a General Assembly committee’s demands that it turn over reporting materials from a journalist’s investigation into the licensing of hydroelectric dams by aluminum giant Alcoa.

Collaboration

Shared reporting planned for Ohio Basin ecosystem

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If any news subject lends itself to coverage by multistation collaborations, it’s the environment of places like the Ohio River Valley, a region of 25 million people who share the river’s assets and liabilities.
Louisville Public Media’s WFPL is leading plans to build a pubradio reporting consortium for the region, starting with a public conference this month.

Programs/Content

For NewsHour, one staff is stronger than two

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They busted down newsroom walls, adding some space but much more humanity, doubling the number of desks, adding new editing stations and a fixed camera for quick shirt-sleeves standups. The broadcast and website now carry the PBS NewsHour title and they come from the same combined staff.

Development

To save journalism, click ’n’ donate?

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Now a dot-com called Kachingle is starting to roll out an online service designed to make voluntary support easy for even the most Internet-dazed, pledge-averse, marginally committed and low-budgeted Medici to virtually toss coins, or dollars, to reward the online media they love and appreciate.

Programs/Content

Clash at Crossroads

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Could CPB have avoided the public collision of wills over one of the America at a Crossroads documentaries that tainted its $20 million project in 2007 about the post-9/11 world? Determining that, in effect, was the assignment that Cheryl Halpern, then chair of the CPB Board, gave more than two years ago to the corporation’s semi-autonomous inspector general, Kenneth Konz. Back then 10 members of Congress also had asked CPB and its IG to determine what kept the program, Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center, from airing among the first batch of Crossroads shows on PBS. The lead producer of the film, Frank Gaffney, a defense think-tank president and former Pentagon official, had gone public with his dispute.

Programs/Content

Timeline: Crossroads and context

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The America at a Crossroads series and the 2007 standoff and furor over one of its documentaries, Islam vs. Islamists;, had its roots in the period of Republican dominance of the CPB Board. See related story. 2003
February 2003
CPB President Bob Coonrod names Michael Pack as senior v.p. for TV programming without search or usual hiring process. September 2003
Staff briefs CPB Board on America at a Crossroads idea.