Engineers at public TV stations in the Mountain West are still coping with wintry weather as they try to complete their pieces of the national conversion of translators to new channels.
Veteran pubcaster James Morgese will take over Dec. 1 as GM of KUED-TV in Salt Lake City. Morgese has more than 30 years of experience in public broadcasting management, programming, production, engineering, development and community outreach. In October 2012 he signed on as g.m. of dual licensee WKYU in Bowling Green, Ky. Previously he worked at Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver, Idaho Public Television and WUFT in Gainesville, Fla.
John Howe, senior producer of the Salt Lake City–based station operated by the University of Utah, won four of KUED’s Emmys: three for Five Rivers Five Voices (environment program/special, photographer and writer) and one for Horses of the West: America’s Love Story (director). Nancy Green, Joe Prokop and Cheryl Niederhauser were honored in the historical documentary category for Utah’s Freedom Riders, while producer Carol Dalrymple won for Climb for Life: A Legacy in the public/current/community affairs program/special category. William Montoya, Bill Gordon and Kevin Sweet received Emmys for audio for Utah Vietnam War Stories: Escalation, while Navigating Freedom, produced for KUED by students from Spy Hop, was tops in the student long form category. Producer Mitchell Riley of KUAT-TV, the Arizona Public Media station based in Tucson, won two Emmys for “The Zoppe Circus” (arts/entertainment program feature segment and editor non-news program). The same program earned videographer Cooper James an award for photography.
Translators — the lonely relay-runners of broadcasting — are a rural institution under siege. While pubcasters use hundreds of them to reach remote pockets of their audience, they are being bumped off, one by one, by competitors for the frequencies that they use. In both radio and TV — particularly radio — they’re sitting ducks, vulnerable to being shoved aside by any applicants for full-service stations on the same frequencies. And religious broadcasters are filing apps by the hundreds. In TV, many translators will soon be knocked off the air as sheriffs, fire companies and DTV stations start using the UHF channels the FCC has given to them.