Current (https://current.org/tag/journalism/page/7/)
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.
Latitude News, an online news outlet exploring world events and their reverberating effects in local U.S. communities and vice versa, surpassed the fundraising goal of its Kickstarter campaign to launch a new podcast. As of Feb. 14, 307 backers had pledged $46,200 towards a goal of $44,250. The newsroom currently produces an eponymous monthly 15-minute podcast distributed by Public Radio Exchange; it now will expand its output by introducing “The Local Global Mashup Show,” a weekly 30-minute podcast. Latitude News will use its Kickstarter contributions to fund the first three months of the program and hire a business development staffer to develop a paid subscription model for the podcast. Latitude News, which is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., also plans to explore offering “The Local Global Mashup Show” for public radio broadcast, founder and editor Maria Balinska told Current.
The latest merger agreement from Denver combines three different breeds of public media — flagship pubTV station Rocky Mountain PBS, community-licensed jazz broadcaster KUVO-FM and investigative digital news outlet I-News Network — in a consolidation that aims to build strength through diversity.
New York’s WNYC has released for the first time recordings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. interviewed on several occasions in the 1960s by Eleanor Fischer, a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who later worked for NPR. The interviews capture King discussing a wide range of subjects, including his childhood, his adoption of nonviolent resistance tactics, and the Montgomery bus boycott. The recordings were among tapes given to WNYC’s archive in 2008 after Fischer passed away. “We are a rich archive in content but not a huge staff of people and we have received many collections,” wrote Archive Director Andy Lanset in an email to Current.
Did NPR’s tweeter extraordinaire Andy Carvin go overboard during the media frenzy surrounding the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown, Conn.? Michael Wolff made that argument in a column for the Guardian newspaper, accusing Carvin of becoming “a fevered spreader of misinformation.”
Carvin, who gained widespread recognition for his tweeting during the Arab Spring, sent out more than 300 tweets following minute-by-minute developments in the Newtown shooting. The tweets included “a rather broad range of bollocks,” Wolff wrote, citing in particular a retweet about a purple van that was later abandoned as a lead, and a few other instances. “While the guise is to retweet in order to verify, the effect is to propagate,” wrote Wolff, whose objections went beyond inaccuracy to what he sees as Carvin’s “self-righteousness” and “self-dramatizing.”
In response to a question from Current, Carvin reviewed his tweets and replied as follows:
If I had to do it all again, I would still tweet all of them.
A new round of layoffs at Nightly Business Report, initiated last week, pared full-time staff to 22, down by half from two years ago. Cutbacks included shuttering the show’s Chicago bureau, where chief correspondent Diane Eastabrook has worked for the weeknight financial show since 1993. Also gone is Michele Molnar, a New York–based photography editor since 1996, and Johnnie Streets, longtime senior stocks producer at headquarters in Miami. In all, six positions were eliminated. “We had to do this streamlining on behalf of our investor,” Rick Ray, NBR chief exec, told Current.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science singled out the first of four BURN documentary specials, “Particles: Nuclear Power After Fukushima,” which aired March 11, 2012, the first anniversary of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. The series was produced by SoundVision Productions in partnership with American Public Media’s Marketplace and distributed by APM. The award citation recognizes SoundVision Executive Producer Bari Scott, Host Alex Chadwick, Managing Producer Mary Beth Kirchner, Senior Producer/Editor Robert Rand and Technical Director/Mix Engineer Robin Wise. AP science reporter Seth Borenstein, a judge in the competition, called the broadcast “gripping, informative and thorough — radio science journalism at its best.” Larry Engel, an associate professor in the American University School of Communication, praised its “excellent combination of story reporting, writing, character development, and sound recording and editing.”
The award was announced Nov. 14, and the winners will receive $3,000 and a plaque at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston in February 2013.
Public radio is adapting too slowly to the competitive challenges it faces from Internet-based media platforms, and the pace of change must increase if local stations are to thrive in the years ahead. It’s a warning that public broadcasters have heard many times before, and research that I conducted this fall revealed that a large majority of radio station leaders have absorbed and begun acting on it. What were the most important changes you made in the last three years? Changes cited among
the 89 managers surveyed
How many cited this
Added news programming
65
Made organizational changes, including replacing a ce.o. or developing a new strategic plan
65
Invested in new media and or planned for digital convergence
39
Developed major-gift and other fundraising activities
38
Made non-news program changes
20
Took steps to “go local”
19
Developed new facilities
20
Expanded broadcast range or acquired new signals
13
Undertook promotional and community engagement activities
4
Invested in social media
3
Found and developed community partners
4
Source: Public Media Futures, November 2012 survey
In an online survey initiated in collaboration with Public Radio Regional Organizations, nearly three-quarters of 96 respondents, mostly general managers and chief executives, agreed that public radio must adapt more quickly to shifts in media consumption. Most station leaders see the expansion of local newsgathering capacity as the best strategy for bolstering their value to local listeners.
A four-year-old nonprofit news service established by two professors at Youngstown State University is taking on an expanded role in investigative news reporting and journalism training in northeast Ohio and beyond.
The News Outlet and its website, TheNewsOutlet.org, recipient of a two-year $302,000 matching grant in July from the James L. Knight Foundation and Cleveland-based Raymond John Wean Foundation, will increase its news coverage on the effects of the increase of oil and gas drilling in Ohio, Pennsylvania and western New York.
Are small, nimble flying robots the next newsgathering tool for public broadcasters?