Current (https://current.org/tag/journalism/page/6/)
Finding long-term, sustainable funding remains a top concern of the country’s nonprofit news outlets, according to the results of a new study published Monday by the Pew Research Center.
“After Innocence: Exoneration in America” provides an in-depth look at wrongful imprisonment in the U.S.
Republicans in Wisconsin’s state legislature are looking to bar the state’s public broadcasters and biggest university from contributing to an investigative-journalism center that they collaborate with, a move that would severely hinder the site’s newsgathering and educational capabilities.
The recession in Dayton provides the backdrop for ReInvention Stories, a multimedia Localore project that brought together the Association of Independents in Radio, a local NPR station, and a pair of Academy Award–nominated veteran documentary filmmakers.
When Southern country singer Brad Paisley shared his awkward view of race relations in his controversial song “Accidental Racist” last month, the team at NPR’s Code Switch couldn’t have asked for better timing. The unit devoted to multimedia reporting and opinionating on matters of race, culture and ethnicity had just debuted on NPR’s website and social media under the Code Switch banner April 7. Two days later, Paisley’s cringe-inducing tune, which also featured LL Cool J delivering the lines “If you won’t judge my do-rag / I won’t judge your red flag,” whipped up a frenzy of dumbfounded disgust on Facebook and Twitter. “It’s kind of a softball over the plate,” wrote Code Switch blogger Gene Demby in a blogged conversation with Matt Thompson, manager of the Code Switch team. Indeed, Paisley’s song pushed many listeners into the territory that Code Switch calls home — a zone where people of different races and ethnicities try to understand each other and stumble into sometimes uncomfortable conversations along the way.
NPR provided training and support to 17 participating stations, but has dropped plans to expand StateImpact to all 50 states.
Oklahoma has a small but tight-knit pubcasting community, so covering the massive May 20 tornado and its aftermath required everyone on the team to cover for each other.
For more than a decade, pubcasters have debated whether local stations can harness the power of the Internet. There has been no shortage of naysayers in this ongoing exchange, and, for a time, that side of the discussion seemed to be winning, for good reason.
The Center for Investigative Reporting will fold its three different brands under one roof beginning May 29. The CIR moniker will now incorporate the Bay Citizen, which covers local stories in northern California, as well as California Watch, which covers the entire state.
In an extended interview with Current, Frontline creator David Fanning recalls how he came to work at Boston’s WGBH more than three decades ago, and how the show is positioning itself for the future.
The University of Kentucky has sued a reporter at its public radio station, WUKY in Lexington, in an attempt to guard information she had requested about surgical practices at its pediatric hospital. By filing the complaint, UK is challenging the state’s attorney general, who in March endorsed reporter Brenna Angel’s request for documents. UK declined the AG’s request as well, citing state and federal privacy laws. The dispute began in December 2012, when Angel made an Open Records Request to the university regarding the cardiothoracic surgery program at Kentucky Children’s Hospital in Lexington. The program has been suspended pending an internal review, according to local media reports.
NPR and Miami’s WLRN are collaborating to boost coverage of Latin America, with NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro assigned to a new foreign desk in São Paulo. In addition to Garcia-Navarro, the team of journalists includes Tim Padgett, a longtime reporter on Latin America and the Caribbean who previously wrote for Time and Newsweek and recently joined WLRN. Padgett’s primary task will be to coordinate coverage from Miami. Four reporters on the staff of the Miami Herald and its sister Spanish-language publication, El Nuevo Herald, will also contribute. WLRN and the Herald have collaborated on news coverage for a decade.
Edgar B. Herwick III, a features reporter for WGBH, was enjoying his field assignment on that cool, sunny Monday, interviewing runners as they triumphantly crossed the finish line of the April 15 Boston Marathon.
A crowdfunding campaign launched April 15 by Public Radio International seeks $25,000 for a “Global Stories Fund” that will support 11 international stories to be presented on PRI’s The World and other news programs.
Tonight’s special edition of Greater Boston from WGBH, focused on the shocking bomb blasts at Monday’s Boston Marathon, will be distributed nationally on the World Channel, the public TV multicast service produced by WGBH and distributed by American Public Television. WGBH spokesman Michael Raia told Current the 30-minute show will extend to an hour and begin airing at 9 p.m. Eastern time on World. In Boston, the show will be broadcast on WGBH’s primary TV station at 7 p.m., its regular timeslot. Planned guests include terrorism expert Jim Walsh, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program; Jarrett Barrios of the Red Cross, who took part in the race; and Haider Javed Warraich, a resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who wrote an op-ed in today’s New York Times about his experience growing up amid explosions in Pakistan. WGBH staffers producing segments for the Greater Boston special include host and executive editor Emily Rooney, who lives three blocks from the explosion site and will provide a first-hand perspective on the still-unfolding story; Jared Bowen, who is covering the law enforcement investigation; and Adam Reilly, reporting from Logan Airport with reactions from runners.
Milwaukee Public Radio host Mitch Teich could have predicted a few outcomes from his decision to take up speedskating — sore muscles, bruises from the occasional spill on the ice at high speed — but probably not the biggest story of his journalism career.
A recent Nova documentary about unmanned aerial drones sparked a flurry of complaints from viewers upset by what the program’s producers didn’t say about development of the technology for military and other purposes: that Lockheed Martin, series underwriter and one of the country’s largest military contractors, is a developer of drone technology.
Audiences for public radio and television news continue to spend less time with legacy broadcast platforms as they transition to digital listening and viewing, according to the State of the News Media study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, released today. The 10th annual report examines all broadcast, digital and print media. NPR’s average weekly broadcast audience fell 3 percent from 2011 to 2012, dipping to 26 million from 26.8 million, according to the report. The weekly number of listeners to American Public Media programs also shrank 2 percent, to 15.2 million. (The report did not detail specific numbers for another major pubradio distributor, Public Radio International.)
On television, the broadcast audience for PBS NewsHour, public TV’s weeknight program, dropped 8.4 percent over the last season to an average of 977,000 nightly viewers — its lowest number since 2008
But both outlets saw lots of action in the digital realm.
Delays in conferring 501(c)3 status to startup nonprofit news organizations have stymied development of new models for producing community-based journalism, exacerbating the shortage of locally produced news coverage, according to a report released March 4 by the Nonprofit Working Group of the Council on Foundations. The group was created by the Council on Foundations with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study the impact of the Internal Revenue Service’s approach to granting nonprofit status to media organizations. The report described the IRS’s methods of granting tax-exempt status as outdated and criticized the agency for hobbling efforts to establish new local newsrooms.
“Our main finding is that the IRS is relying on antiquated rules — rules that were created in the 1960s and 1970s to determine whether groups should be given tax-exempt status,” said Steven Waldman, chair of the Nonprofit Media Working Group. “Not surprisingly, they don’t match modern realities.”
The group recommended several fixes to the IRS, including that it revise its criteria determining nonprofit status to qualify news and journalism as “educational” under tax-exempt rules. It also recommended that the IRS prohibit nonprofit news organizations from sharing ownership with shareholders or investors.
Taking too long to confer 501(c)3 status to startup nonprofit news organizations not only undervalues journalism but also has stymied new approaches to community journalism when they are needed most, according to a report released today by the Nonprofit Working Group of the Council on Foundations. The group was created by the Council on Foundations with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study the impact of the IRS’s recent approach to granting nonprofit status to media organizations. The report cites the IRS’s “antiquated” methods of granting tax-exempt status as hobbling efforts to create new media outlets. “Over the last several decades, accountability reporting, especially at the local level, has contracted dramatically, with potentially grave consequences for communities, government accountability, and democracy,” said Steven Waldman, chair of the Nonprofit Media Working Group, in a prepared statement. “Nonprofit media provides an innovative solution to help fill this vacuum, but only if the IRS modernizes its approach.”
The group pointed out five problems with how the IRS currently handles tax-exempt requests, including taking too long, undervaluing journalism and failing to “recognize the changing nature of digital media.”
The group recommended that the IRS address the problems by counting news and journalism as “educational” under tax-exempt rules.