Current (https://current.org/tag/journalism/page/12/)
Those calling for more local news from public media — and those experimenting with new ways to provide it — should examine a business model devised for commercial television more than 30 years ago. PM Magazine was an evening primetime news and entertainment show …
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.
A multimedia news organization committed to public service journalism will begin producing regional coverage of the Chicago area and Illinois for The New York Times next month.
Citing public broadcasting’s “mixed history” in providing local news and information, a blue-ribbon panel has called on the field to “move quickly toward a broader vision of public service media.”
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.
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.
Tom Bettag, the former ABC Nightline and CBS News producer, says he’s “on a very fast timeline” to report to PBS by June 15 [2009] about what public TV’s separate and unequal newsgathering units could and should do by collaborating online….
A new journalism training program offered by NPR News and funded by CPB will train 22 public radio reporters from 19 states to cover business and economics in their communities.
PBS will go public Wednesday with discussion of its News & Public Affairs Initiative — an ongoing study that’s weighing options for cooperation and online collaboration among its news units and with those of public radio. Journalists from public TV and radio have had their “first sit-downs about what might be possible in the syncing of radio and television,” says Tom Thomas, co-c.e.o. of the Station Resource Group. Appearing with PBS officials in a PBS Showcase session, 11 a.m. May 13, will be project facilitator Tom Bettag, former ABC Nightline e.p. The initiative is funded by a Pew Charitable Trusts grant to the public TV network. Reps from the NewsHour, Frontline and other PBS public-affairs units and from NPR and other public radio news units have been invited to meet for discussions the day before. PBS asked Bettag to consider how public TV can reinvent its public affairs offerings, and Bettag has been quizzing leaders of news units, according to David Fanning, e.p. of Frontline.
“News this good isn’t free.” I find myself delivering some variation on that remark during every single public radio pledge break on WNPR this spring. We’ve been saying this in Connecticut for years: “Despite the fact that you don’t have to pay for public radio news, you can’t expect to just keep getting stories about the Mexican drug war from John Burnett … or Anne Garrels reporting from an unstable Pakistan for nothing.” Right? We tell our listeners all the time that their contributions make our high-quality journalism possible, and without their help, it could all go away. So it’s understandable that newspaper people might have been a little piqued by the memo leaked to Jim Romenesko’s Poynter.org blog this month.
NPR programming on public radio stations topped its previous audience record by reaching 27.5 million listeners a week during Arbitron’s fall 2008 survey period. The weekly cume audience for all NPR programs and newscasts, Sept. 10 to Dec. 10, beat the previous high of 26.4 million set last spring. It is one of several ratings gains announced March 23 by NPR Research:
Measuring audiences for non-NPR as well as NPR programs on those member stations, the weekly cume hit another all-time high, 32.7 million, 6 percent larger than fall 2007.
Groundbreaking collaborations are beginning to surface as public broadcasting stations partner with laid-off print journalists to bolster multiplatform local and regional reporting.
“Being in Baghdad is a narrow escape every day,” says Loren Jenkins, NPR foreign editor, reflecting on the dangers surrounding the network’s team of reporters and Iraqi employees who have covered the Iraq War and occupation for five years.
NPR’s next president made one giant leap in the news business two years ago when she moved from long-form documentary production into digital media for the New York Times Co., but it wasn’t the first or the last of Vivian Schiller’s career.In the early 1980s, Schiller was living in the Soviet Union, working as a translator and guide for professional groups touring the country, when she was hired as a “fixer” for the Turner Broadcasting System. The job required her to do everything from translating during negotiations for TV productions to making dinner reservations, and it gave her an entrée into television. “I fell in love with media,” she said. Schiller rose from entry level to executive v.p. of CNN Productions, an award-winning documentary unit. Her predecessor in the job was Pat Mitchell, who left CNN in 2000 to become PBS president.
Posted in Current’s former online forum, DirectCurrent, by moderator Steve Behrens on July 17, 2008 at 12:28pm
Last year, public radio’s Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group predicted (see page 10) that freeing content could result in mashups such as “a Hidden Kitchens regional food content site that mashes up DDC audio and video content with Google Maps and Flickr photos about local restaurants and food events; a Science Talk site that draws on DDC science content combined with selected blog posts on related topics.” And there probably will be much more significant unforeseen innovations, as the DDC authors would probably agree. But to media traditionalists, freeing content also rips it from a relatively concrete “place” (radio station or website) that carries underwriting and is clearly associated with an institution that seeks to generate good will and membership, subscription, foundation or taxpayer support. Thus the freed content gets much-improved distribution, and probably added value from the mashing-up. But the institutions best positioned to reap revenue are companies like Google that put relatively little money into generating content themselves.
It was purely by chance that a team of veteran NPR journalists was working in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, on May 12 [2008] when the destructive force of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, its epicenter just 50 miles away, killed some 70,000 people and left millions homeless. “You never want to feel you’re lucky to be somewhere when a huge disaster strikes,” said Andrea Hsu, the All Things Considered producer who managed advance logistics for ATC’s first weeklong broadcast from a foreign country. Hsu was one of four NPR journalists in Chengdu when the earthquake struck, turning the tiny news operation she had set up in a Sheraton hotel into the only Western broadcast news source for coverage of the disaster. After a scouting trip in February, ATC chose Chengdu as its home base for a week of special broadcasts, May 19-23, intending to introduce listeners to a region of China rarely covered in Western media. The city was more ethnically diverse than most and boasted an interesting cultural history, and local officials seemed open-minded about granting access to NPR’s journalists, Hsu recalled. Plus, the local food was really good.
There was no single reason why the NPR Board ended Ken Stern’s 18-month run as chief executive officer — or at least none that any participant in the decision would describe publicly after Stern’s abrupt exit March 6 [2008]. Judging from what board members, station execs and other observers are willing to say, it came down to a lack of confidence in Stern’s ability to lead the organization in directions that public radio’s various stakeholders — especially NPR stations — could embrace. “I can’t comment on the nature of that decision,” said Dennis Haarsager, a longtime station leader now serving as interim c.e.o., “except to say that it was more forward-looking as opposed to backward. No malfeasance should be imputed from this.”
Indeed, Stern’s fans and critics alike say he contributed significantly to strengthening NPR’s financial standing and positioning it as a news organization capable of global coverage. Stern did not respond to Current’s interview request through NPR’s spokesperson.
“Let’s face it,” writes a prominent pubradio station news director, “despite 40 years of evolution, we have produced a lot of journalism, but we still lack full commitment. Especially local news commitment.”
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler thought several of the America at a Crossroads films were excellent and described one in particular, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, as “one of the most gripping hours I’ve spent in front of the tube in quite a while.” But he also agreed with critics and viewers who blasted PBS for giving an hour to neocon adviser Richard Perle during the series. The decision to re-present the initial case for a war “that has, at the very least, gone badly” instead of examining what went wrong and where the powers that be should go from here represents a “stunning avoidance of the real crossroad that we are at,” Getler wrote. He also criticized the series’ lack of substantive discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ellen Weiss, an award-winning producer and editor in NPR’s news division over 25 years, will become its leader, the network announced last week. She is the newsroom’s first homegrown journalist after three veeps who established their journalistic credentials elsewher
Weiss, who had been interim news v.p., moves up from her previous job as senior editor of the national desk to succeed Bill Marimow, who became editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Marimow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning print reporter, was credited with strengthening NPR’s investigative reporting during more than 2½ years at NPR, including eight months as top news executive. The announcement to the NPR News staff capped an exceptional week for Weiss, who was offered the promotion April 3 and learned the next day that she would share a Peabody Award. Weiss and two colleagues — correspondent Daniel Zwerdling and producer Anne Hawke — won a Peabody for December’s investigative report on the military’s treatment of soldiers returning from war with emotional wounds (story).