Programs/Content

Weiss makes v.p. with endorsement of NPR newsroom

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Ellen Weiss, an award-winning producer and editor in NPR’s news division over 25 years, will become its leader, the network announced last week. She is the newsroom’s first homegrown journalist after three veeps who established their journalistic credentials elsewher

Weiss, who had been interim news v.p., moves up from her previous job as senior editor of the national desk to succeed Bill Marimow, who became editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Marimow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning print reporter, was credited with strengthening NPR’s investigative reporting during more than 2½ years at NPR, including eight months as top news executive. The announcement to the NPR News staff capped an exceptional week for Weiss, who was offered the promotion April 3 and learned the next day that she would share a Peabody Award. Weiss and two colleagues — correspondent Daniel Zwerdling and producer Anne Hawke — won a Peabody for December’s investigative report on the military’s treatment of soldiers returning from war with emotional wounds (story).

Programs/Content

NPR announces Working Group to consider Digital Distribution Consortium, 2006

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NPR exec Ken Stern sent this memo to public radio stations’ Authorized Representatives as a followup to the New Realities Forum in May 2006. News from Ken Stern – Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group
June 6, 2006

Dear Colleagues:

Last month, about 300 of our colleagues gathered at the New Realities National Forum in Washington. We discussed the future of public radio and our service, and envisioned the benefits of working together differently in the future. It was an exciting and motivating session and we’d like to extend our thanks to all who participated in the forum and the retreats leading up to it. Many retreat discussions and more than a dozen forum breakouts explored the shared notion that we have yet to seize the opportunities of the digital age.

People

Paths to pubradio stardom: drifting, struggling and on a beeline

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Lisa A. Phillips has just started appearing in bookstores to promote her newly published Public Radio Behind the Voices (CDS Books, 334 pages), which profiles 43 national program hosts and other stars. To be ready in case she’s interviewed, Phillips has virtually memorized her book. Quick! Who had accountants for fathers? She ticks them off: Ira Glass, Michael Feldman and Bob Edwards.

Programs/Content

NPR’s reassignment of Bob Edwards shocks, explanations befuddle

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The cry from a distraught public rang out: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” After announcing the reassignment of Morning Edition host Bob Edwards
March 23, the network struggled to explain itself amid a coast-to-coast
NPR-bashing in the media and a record influx of listener complaints. Some public radio managers joined the attack on NPR brass. Even those who
supported the network’s aim — to strengthen Morning Edition with
a two-host setup — criticized it for poor timing and lack of public-relations
finesse. Many stations were scheduled to begin on-air fund drives shortly
after the announcement and feared repercussions.

People

‘Piano Jazz’ host Marian McPartland, a dame at jazz crossroads

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Piano Jazz hits its silver anniversary in April, a landmark that surprises nobody more than venerated host and pianist Marian McPartland. “It’s kind of amazing that we’ve managed to be on the air for 25 years and no end in sight,” she says with a laugh. “I sort of envisioned doing it for a few months, or at the most a year. It never occurred to me that people would like it as much as they do.” Today it ranks among public radio’s most popular music programs, airing on 241 stations and reaching almost 400,000 listeners a week.

NPR

‘Day to Day’ debuts to high expectations

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Any pressure the producers of Day to Day might feel is understandable. The new show’s selling points read like a wish list compiled by someone burping
up buzzwords from pubradio confabs. NPR pitches the newsmag — its first since
Weekend Edition Sunday, 16 years ago — as a midday show newsy enough
to draw listeners on lunch breaks back to NPR, but zesty and offbeat enough
to pepper the schedule with diversity and youthfulness. Not only that, but stations are looking to Day to Day to lift ratings
between their towering drivetime tentpoles, Morning Edition and All
Things Considered. Further, as pubcasters hunt high and low for partnerships, Day to Day
builds off an editorial and promotional relationship with Microsoft’s online
magazine Slate — a pairing that has alarmed a few media watchdogs.

System/Policy

Zwerdling remains at NPR in new job; tensions still run high

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NPR has promised veteran reporter Daniel Zwerdling another year
of work, but colleagues are still asking what management’s decision
to eliminate his old job signals about the network’s journalistic
priorities. Zwerdling will contribute NPR reports to PBS’s Now with Bill
Moyers, taking a job previously held by Emily Harris. Harris
is NPR’s new Berlin correspondent. Zwerdling can move into another
job if the Now partnership ends, but he says the grant-funded
Science Desk opening pays 25 percent less than his current salary. NPR’s Oct.

System/Policy

NPR asks porn entrepreneur to drop KCRW from hold music

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It was almost a landmark case: NPR vs. The World’s Most Downloaded Woman. The woman is Danni Ashe, a web-porn entrepreneur whom public TV viewers might remember from Frontline’s “American Porn” documentary. Her image has been downloaded from her subscription website over 1 billion times, earning her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Her expertise on matters pornographic recently landed her in a Slate article, which let drop that callers to her Los Angeles office who get put on hold hear KCRW, a local NPR affiliate.

Programs/Content

Furlaud ornaments do float away — into listeners’ fond memories

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I know more than a few public radio listeners who, while admiring the news reports on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, reserve their most ardent enthusiasm for what Bob Edwards once called “ornaments” — short, revealing commentaries scheduled between the “important” stories. A master of the form, Alice Furlaud, has been supplying commentaries for nearly as long as NPR has been broadcasting, first from Paris and more recently from her home on Cape Cod. Like another of my favorite NPR commentators, the psychiatrist Elissa Ely, Furlaud is a uniquely gifted, acerbic writer with a New England plainspokeness that adds considerable authority to what she says. Furlaud and Ely make no effort to disguise their exceptional intelligence. If you believe, as I do, that intelligence adds abundantly to attractiveness, you may concur that they are very sexy stylists.

Programs/Content

Content Depot: Getting audio gets flexible

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This summer public radio will get a taste of an impending change in the technological status quo: the Content Depot. This far-reaching set of upgrades and innovations in the field’s means for moving audio around the country will streamline how producers and stations select, send, acquire and automate programming. In particular, the Content Depot standardizes how the NPR-operated Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) stores programming and feeds it to stations. Today the process relies on a hodgepodge of media on both ends of the transfer. PRSS stores programming in forms including analog tape and compact disc, while stations download it from a PRSS satellite and save it on hard drives and other media before broadcasting it.

Programs/Content

‘The Tavis Smiley Show’: created for a black audience, but all are welcome

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There’s a burden resting on the broad shoulders of this man who’s bopping
his head to a funky beat, tongue out in a soulful pout, enjoying himself
before launching into the next segue. Tavis Smiley is at a studio mike, grooving to bumper music between
segments on a recent installment of his morning show, broadcast today
from NPR’s Washington headquarters instead of his Los Angeles digs,
because he’s in town for the Public Radio Conference. Smiley has polished off a double interview about U.S. policy on Cuba. Coming up, he’ll elicit a string of outrageous jokes from comedian Dick
Gregory in a comedy feature that’s a regular part of his Friday shows. “Back by popular demand, Dick Gregory,” he reads in a practice run,
then pauses.

Programs/Content

‘It’s going too fast’

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“I don’t remember talking to you before. I can’t remember yesterday. Tomorrow I won’t remember this. It’s not there.” “Is that distressing?”

Tech

LPFM rules still disputed; Congress may act

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Applicants for low-power FM (LPFM) stations range from mundane (Sacramento’s Sutter Middle School) to exotic (the Women on Top Awareness Series of Norcross, Ga.), and an equally mismatched bunch is debating their future. What else could draw one-time radio pirates to an NPR Board meeting, get network chief Kevin Klose on a Pacifica talk show, or bring together Republican senators and advocates for the blind? Since the FCC began accepting applications for the tiny noncommercial stations in January, the agency has received more than 1,200 from groups in 22 states and territories. Meanwhile, NPR, politicians, commercial radio interests and others have pushed bills to delay, weaken or defeat the new service, citing fears that LPFMs could interfere with existing full-power stations. LPFM’s supporters dismiss those concerns, and now find themselves in an odd position: fighting bitterly with a public broadcaster whom they ordinarily respect and often support.

System/Policy

NPR asks FCC to delay, rethink low-power FM

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NPR took a different tack March 16 in the ongoing assault on the FCC’s controversial plan to license low-power FM (LPFM) stations. Lawmakers and the National Association of Broadcasters have opposed the measure outright, but in a petition for reconsideration and a motion for stay, NPR asked the agency to take another look at some aspects of LPFM and delay implementing the proposal until July 15. Specifically, NPR requested greater protections for translators, radio reading services, full-power stations on third adjacent channels from LPFM stations, and potential digital radio technology. The network says the motion for stay would allow more time for NPR and FCC lab and field tests of interference expected to be caused by LPFM stations. On Feb.