Programs/Content

StateImpact pilot begins scrutiny of government in eight states

By |

Pubcasters in three states have started airing reports and posting stories online as the first participants in StateImpact, a large-scale project spearheaded by NPR that could unite the member stations and the network for an unprecedented level of collaborative newsgathering. The objective: to strengthen coverage of state government in all 50 states in coming years. Visit stateimpact. npr.org and you’ll see a map of the United States with three states highlighted in green — Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Stations in these states have gone live with their own StateImpact sites, with links from the national site.

System/Policy

‘Required’ station fees for web services are just a ‘proposal,’ says NPR Board chair

By |

Plans to restructure NPR’s digital services to pubradio stations, in the works for months, have finally gotten down to specifics: what NPR will offer, what it will cost and who will pay. Based on prices that NPR has proposed — between $1,800 and $100,000 a year — some stations are now experiencing a new virtual variety of sticker shock. In round robin meetings that began in April, NPR execs have been briefing station leaders on their planned offering, a comprehensive package of technology support, training and content, but some station leaders reacted angrily after a May 12 NPR memo said all member stations would be required to pay fees for the services. Joyce McDonald, v.p. for member and program services, notified top stations execs — the so-called “authorized representatives” who speak and vote on behalf of their stations — of NPR’s plan to begin phasing-in new required digital services fees. The memo coincided with the NPR Board’s May 12-13 meetings in Washington, D.C.

Many misunderstood the message as a statement of board policy and a done deal, when McDonald intended to give station execs advance notice of proposed dues increases for next fiscal year, according to NPR. Reactions posted on the A-Reps message board prompted NPR’s top leaders to backpedal, reassuring stations that no decisions had been made.

Programs/Content

Deep chat: ‘Kudos to NPR for the 11 percent. My focus is serving the other 89 percent’

By |

For more than 20 years, public radio has followed a winning formula that is often summarized as “super-serve the core.” That is, a station will be most successful with listeners if it picks a specific type of listener — the core audience — and plans its schedule to attract and hold that type throughout the day and the week.Critics of the core audience strategy object that public radio ends up serving only a well-educated and middle-aged slice of the public — recently a cume audience of 11 percent of the population within a week, which is still a large audience by many measures.At a recent NPR Board meeting, Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio, made an eloquent plea for public radio leaders to think beyond the current set of program strategies [edited remarks]. To pick up where Schardt left off, Current contributing editor Mark Fuerst pulled together this phone chat among noted producers and programmers who have done their bit to expand the public radio audience. This is an edited transcript. MARK: I’m going to start with one fact, drawn from the headline on Sue’s piece from the March 7 [2011] edition of Current: Public radio is reaching 11 percent of the audience, the American public.

Development

STING: The Right jabs pubradio with NPR fundraiser’s words

By |

Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there. The two NPR fundraisers didn’t get the $5 million donation that was discussed by their lunch partners, and the president of NPR didn’t pose for a photo accepting a phony check, but those were the better results of the lunch meeting. They couldn’t have expected that a hidden-camera recording of their talk with two prospective donors would cost Schiller his next job, put Liley on administrative leave, trigger the ouster of NPR’s president and severely undercut support for federal aid to public broadcasting. Two weeks later, March 8, the consequences began tumbling into sight as right-wing activist James O’Keefe’s video of their lunch meeting spread virally on the Web.

People

NPR loses c.e.o., its third exec swept away by political tornado

By |

One day after denouncing her top fundraiser and nine weeks after asking her news chief to resign, NPR President Vivian Schiller stepped down today at the request of the NPR Board. She fell victim to a series of executive mistakes and mishaps that muddied NPR’s reputation in a poisonously partisan runup to key federal budget votes affecting public broadcasting. Schiller, who made extraordinary progress in crafting a digital service strategy for NPR and its local stations since arriving in January 2009, ultimately took the fall for her management team’s political errors during an unaccustomed moment of scrutiny. After the controversial firing of former news analyst Juan Williams last fall, Schiller seemed to recover from the missteps that put public radio in the crosshairs of Republicans who went on to take the House majority in November. She and other public radio leaders may not have seen the Williams firing fiasco as a warm-up for a protracted, no-holds-barred fight.

AIR

Are we here for 11% of the public or for all of it?

By |

Usually the only speakers in the “public comment” period after an NPR Board meeting are several regional reps of stations, but they were joined Feb. 25 by Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio. Schardt spoke extemporaneously to the board and NPR execs about how public radio could address criticism that has undercut its case for continued federal aid. This is an edited transcript. I speak as someone who has 23 years of experience in the industry.

APTS

Public Media Association: NPR and APTS form ‘unified’ lobbying effort during NPR’s troubles, February 2011

By |

Memos to public radio stations’ Authorized Representatives (AReps) from NPR and APTS about the Public Media Alliance, a new combined TV and radio lobbying effort, Feb. 15, 2011
From NPR’s chair and president
To: AREPS
Fr: Dave Edwards, NPR Board Chair
Vivian Schiller , NPR President & CEO

As you well know in light of this weekend’s news from the House Appropriations Committee, the elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting is a serious threat to the future of over 900 locally run radio stations and 360 television stations — and to the entire public broadcasting economy. To succeed in the face of this challenge we need to make our case forcefully, and use our limited resources wisely. Over the past several weeks, NPR and APTS executives and board members have discussed how we might mount an even stronger advocacy effort. We’ve concluded that our interests and those of the 170 million Americans that rely on public broadcasting each month will be best served by joining forces.

Quick Takes

Fight over NPR funding: is it a “culture war,” or principled debate?

By |

What’s really at stake in the battle over federal funding to NPR, and how can the field’s advocates make the best case for continued support? Public broadcasters began speaking out last week in friendly venues, testing their message points and strategizing about whether and how to mount a more aggressive campaign to enlist broad public support. At yesterday’s Public Media Camp in Washington, D.C., attendees discussed the political attack with Jay Rosen, press critic and j-school professor at New York University, who participated via Skype in a session on the response to the “culture war.” Rosen, who described himself as sympathetic to the fight to preserve federal funding, called for a blogger — one who works independently and outside of NPR and PBS — to report on the debate, critique press coverage of it, and call out the “most outrageous statements” from the field’s partisan critics. “A blogger’s job is to intervene in public debate and make it smarter,” Rosen said.

CPB

Knives sharpened for renewed assault on CPB

By |

Bills to defund public broadcasting, or at least any radio network that fired Juan Williams, are beginning to seem like a real threat since the Nov. 2 midterm election gave Republicans a 60-plus majority in the House and a mandate to take huge bites out of federal spending. Last week the co-chairmen of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — assigned to suggest ways to reduce the $13.7 trillion deficit — advised dropping CPB from the budget, along with some vastly bigger federal expenditures that have even sturdier support in Congress (separate story). For conservative talking heads, ending aid to pubcasting would be a high-profile get-tough symbol. And for liberals, giving up CPB could be an attempt to avoid other more widely unpopular cuts.

Programs/Content

Local, online, news, profitable, sustainable — Which word does not belong with the others?

By |

“The big opportunity — and where the most disruption is — is in local media.”—Vivian Schiller, president, NPR

“I have little doubt in my mind that, whether it’s us or somebody else, [local news] is going to be a very big space in the future.”—Tim Armstrong, chair and c.e.o., AOL

In the front of the room, NPR President Vivian Schiller and AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong are laying out their corporate strategies to almost a thousand online journalists. It’s the lunchtime general session of the Online News Association (ONA) Conference, and the topic is one of the principal challenges for American journalism: how to provide and sustain local news. The distinction between national and local news often gets lost among the gloomy statistics that surface in so many discussions of the news business. Local newspapers have been folding, probably at a faster rate than many people realize. According to Paper Cuts, 171 local newspapers have closed in the three years 2008-2010, resulting in the loss of 2,800 jobs, not counting early retirements. Locally is where disruptive technology has been the most profoundly disruptive.

Programs/Content

New NPR Chair Dave Edwards to name panel on improving net’s services for radio

By |

Dave Edwards, g.m. of Milwaukee Public Radio (WUWM) for 25 years, who took over this month as chair of the NPR Board, announced a task force that will consider “how we serve the audience through radio programming as well as digital.” The move responds to station leaders’ concerns that NPR’s focus on digital advances has meant that it’s “not spending as much time on radio as we should,” Edwards said. Task force members will “examine the economics of the programming landscape and articulate the role that NPR should play in that space,” he said, building on the recommendations from Station Resource Group’s “Grow the Audience” report and a recent audience study commissioned by NPR Research. “We do a disservice to this work and the American people if we don’t pay attention to that research,” he said at the board meeting. The new chair is recruiting a representative task force, including NPR insiders and outsiders.

Public Media Policybase

Schiller discusses Juan Williams affair in remarks to NPR Board

By |

NPR President Vivian Schiller’s remarks near the end of NPR Board meeting, Nov. 12, 2010. Over the last three weeks, I’ve heard from a lot of people — we all have — challenging what NPR is, what it does, and why we’re here. We’ve heard assaults on our programming, and on our objectivity. We’ve read some critical listener letters  and comments posted on NPR.org and elsewhere.

Programs/Content

NPR sets a goal: add 100 reporters to statehouse beats

By |

A multiyear initiative led by NPR, Impact of Government, eventually will put two additional state-level reporters to work in each of the 50 states, along with a small team of editors and data analysts at the network. Pilot coverage in eight states will begin in March [NPR request for proposals]. The $1.8 million kickoff grant from the Open Society Foundations, founded and chaired by financier George Soros, will cover planning and part of pilot costs, but launching the full project will require $17 million, and sustaining it will cost $18 million a year, according to Ron Schiller, NPR senior v.p. of fundraising and president of the NPR Foundation. The project, developed during strategic planning talks over the past 18 months, is public radio’s first major effort to make a fundraising case for a combined local/national project. NPR will join stations in asking funders to back their aspiration to take up enterprise and long-form reporting on a beat once dominated by daily newspapers — state government and public affairs — that public radio most often covers as daily spot news.

Programs/Content
O'Reilly and Williams on O'Reilly's Fox News program

Under-explained firing makes NPR an issue just in time for election

By |

Top NPR officials may have thought their Oct. 20 decision to dismiss veteran journalist Juan Williams was about journalistic objectivity, but to many outsiders it sounded more like a story of arrogant lefty political correctness. That narrative opened up public radio — and all of public broadcasting — to a political attack that may help the candidates of Fox News and the Republican Party rally their conservative base for the midterm elections Nov. 2. Criticism of the firing was not limited to the partisan right.

Public Media Policybase

Schiller apologizes to pubradio colleagues for handling of Williams firing

By |

NPR President Vivian Schiller dispatched this apology Sunday evening, Oct. 24 [2010], six days after the network set off a pre-election political firestorm with its firing of news analyst Juan Williams. She stands by the decision but not the way it was handled. Dear Program Colleagues,

I want to apologize for not doing a better job of handling the termination of our relationship with news analyst Juan Williams. While we stand firmly behind that decision, I regret that we did not take the time to prepare our program partners and provide you with the tools to cope with the fallout from this episode. I know you all felt the reverberations and are on the front lines every day responding to your listeners and talking to the public. This was a decision of principle, made to protect NPR’s integrity and values as a news organization.

Quick Takes

NPR fires news analyst Juan Williams

By |

NPR fired news analyst Juan Williams late yesterday over comments he made about Muslims during an Oct. 18 appearance on Fox News. Williams, a news pundit and commentator who had contracts with both networks, was reacting to remarks by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly when he said: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.