Shutdowns of a show and a reporting project at NPR have prompted the departure of “Political Junkie” Ken Rudin, who has worked at the network since 1991. Rudin appears weekly on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, which is ending production this month. He also served recently as editorial coordinator for StateImpact, a collaborative reporting project with stations that NPR is exiting. “With the combination of Talk of the Nation and StateImpact ending, there wasn’t really a place for me,” Rudin says. “It didn’t come as a surprise.” He will leave NPR at the end of September.
Salt Lake City pubcaster Wasatch Public Media, licensee of KCPW-FM, will drop all NPR programs June 24, a schedule change intended to save money and differentiate its service from other pubcasters in the market. “A lot of the decision just came down to sheer economics – NPR is just getting more and more expensive,” said Wasatch C.E.O. Ed Sweeney. “And, when you already have NPR in the market with other stations, it just gets harder and harder to set yourself apart when pitching to sponsors and underwriters.” The University of Utah’s KUER-FM is KCPW’s primary competitor for NPR news listeners. “We were just looking more and more alike, and you can’t stay in business doing that,” Sweeney said.
As public and for-profit media companies come under new scrutiny for compensation of interns, public media executives debated how decisions to pay — or not pay — young talent support efforts to cultivate the next generation of system leaders.
Fresh Air will air during daytime hours on MPB’s Think Radio network for the first time since 2010, when the network’s then–Executive Director Judith Lewis took the interview show off the air, citing concerns about host Terry Gross’s discussion of sex with her guests.
In a single video, for the song “All Is Not Lost,” rock band OK Go performed both the last-ever Tiny Desk concert at the former NPR headquarters and the first-ever concert at its new building. As Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton, Carl Kasell and others packed up and moved equipment from one location to another, the band played continuously (with the help of some creative editing) and even worked in some public radio–specific lyrics. OK Go, whose bandleader Damien Kulash formerly worked as an engineer for Chicago Public Radio, filmed the bit over two days in late March during NPR’s actual crosstown move. It took the crew 223 takes and six separate assemblies and disassemblies of the titular desk, according to Boilen. To all future Tiny Desk performers: The bar has been raised.
Public radio reporters took all nine awards for radio reporting in this year’s Sigma Delta Chi Awards, which recognize outstanding reporting on radio, TV and the Web by national and local news organizations. NPR’s Ina Jaffe, Quinn O’Toole and Steven Drummond won for breaking news reporting (network syndication) for “Los Angeles VA Has Made Millions on Rental Deals.” For investigative reporting, John Ryan and Jim Gates of KUOW in Seattle were cited among stations in markets 1–100 for “Shell’s Arctic Oil-Spill Gear ‘Crushed Like a Beer Can,’” while Sandy Hausman of WVTF and Radio IQ in Roanoke, Va., won in the 101+ market category for “Naming the Fralin,” about naming the University of Virginia Art Museum. In the feature categories, Linda Lutton, Cate Cahan and Sally Eisele of Chicago’s WBEZ won for “The weight of the city’s violence, on one school principal,” and Lance Orozco of KCLU in Thousand Oaks, Calif., for “My Cancer.”
NPR’s State of the Re:Union, co-distributed by Public Radio Exchange, won the syndicated documentary award for “As Black as We Wish to Be,” which explored an Appalachian foothills town in Ohio where residents who look white identify as African-American; it was reported and produced by Lu Olkowski, Laura Spero, Taki Telonidis and Al Letson. Alabama Public Radio’s “Winds of Change,” coverage by Pat Duggins, Ryan Vasquez, Maggie Martin and Stan Ingold of a Tuscaloosa tornado, won for smaller-market documentary. The public service in radio journalism winners were “If it’s legal: Five ways legal pot could affect your life,” by the staff of Seattle’s KPLU (markets 1–100); Charles Lane and Naomi Starobin of WSHU in Fairfield, Conn., for “State struggled at fire prevention ahead of Manorville blaze.”
In the television categories, San Francisco’s KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting won for large-market (1–50) documentary for “Heat and Harvest,” a report on the effect of climate change on California agriculture by Mark Schapiro, Serene Fang, Gabriela Quiros and Craig Miller.
NPR stations won 82 large-market regional Murrow Awards, while small-market pubcasters captured 91. Among all stations, WLRN in Miami topped public radio’s regional winners by taking 11 awards in 13 Murrow categories: overall excellence, breaking news, continuing coverage, feature reporting, investigative reporting, news documentary, new series, hard-news reporting, use of sound, writing and website. “We feel thrilled and humbled by the honor,” said Dan Grech, news director. “I couldn’t be prouder of the team.”
Four additional large-market pubcasters each won six Murrows: KQED in San Francisco, WBEZ in Chicago, KUT in Austin and WBUR in Boston. And four large-market stations each won four Murrows: KUOW in Seattle; St.
NPR and the Association of Independents in Radio have launched the Freelance and Station Contributor Resource Site, an online repository of information for reporters interested in filing stories with the network. “This first of its kind site includes Ethics Guidelines, examples of good freelance/station producer stories, ‘how stories go from idea to air,’ key editorial contacts, FTP filing guidelines, the most current AQH audience data for producers airing features on NPR programs, and more,” wrote AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt in an email announcing the site. Freelancers who want to sign up should go to nprstations.org and fill out the registration form, selecting “AIR” under “Station Where You Work.” Non-AIR members are also permitted to join by using the organization’s name. Schardt noted that many of AIR’s newest members are under 34 years old and have never worked with NPR. The site is dedicated to Bill Siemering, NPR’s first program director and a longtime AIR member.
Three NPR journalists will start academic fellowships starting this fall, with Dina Temple-Raston and Alison MacAdam joining the Nieman program at Harvard, and Louisa Lim attending the University of Michigan as a Knight-Wallace fellow. Temple-Raston, who covers counterterrorism for the network, will study the use of big data in intelligence gathering. MacAdam, a senior All Things Considered editor, will study the business of the art world. In Michigan, Lim will study the sustainability of China’s current political structures. She currently reports from Beijing.
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.
Beginning May 6 on NPR’s All Things Considered, listeners will hear five voices from the past that may have a familiar ring. They’re a bit weathered with age but still share personal stories about navigating extraordinary twists in their lives.
NPR launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign backing a special investigative project by Planet Money, its reporting unit that produces multi-platform economics coverage.
Marketing consultant John Sutton has been forecasting what public radio will look like in 2018, and his predictions, published on his blog RadioSutton since February, have been provocative. Sutton is among the pubradio analysts who believe that federal funding “will be sharply reduced or gone in five years.” He also believes that digital listening will fragment the audience enough that eventually NPR will have to raise money directly from listeners or the current public radio economic model will collapse. Below, he lays out a proposal for overhauling public radio fundraising and how it makes both dollars and sense. Imagine a future in which listeners donate 26 percent more money to public radio at half the cost. Imagine that NPR has nearly $60 million more to invest annually in world-class journalism and development of new programs.
Is this imaginative exercise making you uncomfortable?
Late at night on April 15, NPR.org and several NPR-affiliated Twitter feeds were hacked into by an online Syrian counter-revolutionary movement, which vandalized the homepage and posted fake articles in protest of the network’s ongoing coverage of the Syrian civil war.
The Public Radio Program Directors Association will expand its training programs for stations this year and continue its Sense of Place studies of local audiences, with funding from NPR and the Millstream Fund. PRPD will offer three workshops based on the Morning Edition Grad School classes that it has offered in recent years. “New MEGS” will extend training to all newsmagazines, including All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, and is designed for hosts, news directors and program directors. The first workshop will be offered May 18 in Charlotte, N.C.
“JMEGS” (MEGS for Journalists) applies MEGS principles to journalism, focusing on selecting stories, interviewing, writing, planning newscasts and promoting news reports. JMEGS was piloted in 2009 but has not yet been implemented.
