Current (https://current.org/tag/news/)
The most transformational leadership program we’ve ever experienced gave public media a boost during one of our industry’s most challenging years. Now, its future is in doubt.
“People understand that things aren’t going to look as perfect, but what’s most important is the information,” said WNET President Neal Shapiro.
After nearly five years as PBS’ VP of news and public affairs, Nelson will work on strategies to attract multicultural audiences to ABC News.
CPB will devote $2.5 million to reporting projects spearheaded by stations and national producers, President Patricia Harrison announced Nov. 12 at the Public Radio Regional Organizations Super-Regional conference in Fort Washington, Md. The funder will provide $1.5 million for the Diverse Perspectives project, an initiative to support reporting from groups of news stations for local, regional and national use. Like the CPB-backed Local Journalism Centers, the stations will focus on particular topics. The number of stations to receive the two-year grants will depend on the range and size of proposals submitted, said Bruce Theriault, CPB senior v.p. of radio, but he estimated that about five groups will receive support.
Freelance radio and print journalist Ashley Milne-Tyte set off a lively exchange of the philosophical differences between radio producers who work under deadlines to produce daily news stories and those who focus on long-form personal narratives that have been popularized by programs such as This American Life and Radiolab. Writing on her personal blog after attending this month’s Third Coast International Audio Festival in Evanston, Ill., Milne-Tyte questioned why so many attendees and presenters seemed to turn up their noses at the prospect of reporting daily news. The vast majority of public radio’s listeners tune in for the news, she wrote, and there’s a lot of skill and discipline involved in producing news spots. Milne-Tyte has produced daily news spots for American Public Media’s Marketplace and has done features for NPR, WNYC and PRI’s The World. “Spots and short features are great instruments through which to hone your writing, and you learn so much doing them,” she wrote.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – At a forum of leading public media professionals, participants expressed mixed feelings about whether public media can, or should, replace newspapers as primary gatherers of news. At the fourth Public Media Futures forum, held Thursday at Bloomberg’s offices in San Francisco, more than two dozen public media professionals debated whether the industry’s non-broadcast capabilities are robust enough to allow it to fill the role of a daily newspaper. In some respects, public broadcasting websites have already moved into the up-to-the-minute newsgathering space. Kinsey Wilson, executive v.p. and chief content officer at NPR, said NPR.org functions much like a newspaper website, with breaking news, a story flow that shifts multiple times a day and large quantities of original content apart from radio pieces rewritten for the Web.
With their new website up, KPLU journalists scrutinized usage and found clues pointing to stories that work online.
A group of public radio partners is preparing to launch a new local journalism nonprofit that will employ upwards of 20 people in a hybrid digital/broadcast newsroom.
NPR is launching a new nonprofit newsroom in New Orleans in conjunction with WWNO, the local public radio station owned by the University of New Orleans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The partners announced the changes today. The new venture, which will include a revamped, local-news–focused WWNO lineup as well as the website NewOrleansReporter.org, is a response to the declining resources of the city’s daily for-profit newspaper, the Times-Picayune. On June 12 the owners of the T-P announced plans to cut 201 personnel, nearly a third of its staff, and cut back print operations to three days a week beginning in the fall. “This is an exciting opportunity to converge digital, mobile and broadcast together in a multiplatform newsroom for New Orleans,” Paul Maassen, g.m. of WWNO, said in an accompanying press release.
Public radio listeners are hearing more local news in Buffalo, where two stations that competed against each other are now operating as one.
David Fanning, e.p. of Frontline, discussed the WGBH program’s evolving use of the Web Aug. 23, 2010, in accepting the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. At the same time, the Center honored the winner and finalists for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. One of the four finalists was a reporting project, including a Frontline doc, “Law & Disorder.” The film about white vigilante activities in New Orleans was prepared in collaboration with ProPublica, the Nation Institute and the New Orleans Times-Picayne.
Ten weeks before the air date of Need to Know, WNET announced the executive producer. Seven weeks before, the producing station named the co-anchors. On May 7 the new public affairs series debuts on PBS. A lot will be riding on the show. For PBS it’s a rare chance to start a potential “icon series” with new styles and substance, demonstrating that folks in “legacy media” can interact and innovate like digital natives.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone who watched, say, the ABC World News in late November and early December would have known that a tiny band of terrorists had come ashore in Mumbai, killing more than 100 Indians and foreign visitors, and that most observers speculated the attack probably came from Pakistan. They would have known that Thai protesters had occupied the Bangkok airport, stranding hundreds of tourists. And they would have known that economic chaos and cholera were descending on Zimbabwe, which President Robert Mugabe held in what was almost literally a death grip. But they would not have known that the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo had been handed over from United Nations forces to those of the European Union. They would not have heard that drugs manufactured around the world were being exported to the U.S. with few, if any, safeguards against accidental or deliberate adulteration.
“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.
Lance Orozco is one of Southern California’s most honored and recognized journalists. Yet he doesn’t work for the Los Angeles Times or a commercial megastation. Orozco has instead landed dozens of awards from area press groups by making an unlikely news powerhouse out of tiny KCLU-FM in Thousand Oaks, a Ventura County suburb northwest of Los Angeles. The station employs just four full-time staffers but has won a flood of praise for the extensive local coverage spearheaded by Orozco, its news director and reporting dynamo. Last month the Associated Press Television and Radio Association of California and Nevada awarded KCLU and Orozco nine of its Mark Twain Awards, including one naming him Radio Reporter of the Year.