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Tavis Smiley is defending the tone and content of his weekly public radio show Smiley & West after Chicago’s WBEZ became the latest and largest-market station to drop it from its schedule.
Philadelphia’s WXPN began independent syndication of XPoNential Radio, its 24-hour stream of Triple A music programming, after NPR discontinued its service providing packaged HD Radio feeds to member stations. XPoNential Radio offers a blend of “blues, rock, world, folk and alternative country,” according to a news release announcing the new syndication offer. WXPN General Manager Roger LaMay said about 20 stations already subscribed to the stream. “With XPoNential Radio being the most popular of the HD streams NPR offered, we decided to offer it on our own,” LaMay said. “It’s a 24-hour, plug and play stream that can be used on an HD2, HD3 or for streaming on the Internet.”
The stream, which is priced at $3,000 a year, is an inexpensive way to bring the music to NPR news stations, LaMay said. Subscribers have the option of picking up the stream via Content Depot or via satellite.
The Public Radio Program Directors Association gave its 2012 Don Otto Award to audience researcher Peter Dominowski, who co-founded PRPD in 1987. PRPD bestowed the award Sept. 13 in Las Vegas, where it observed its 25th anniversary as an organization. Dominowski is president of Market Trends Research, a market-research company based in Matheson, Colo. In presenting the award, Jeff Hansen, p.d. at Seattle’s KUOW, cited Dominowski’s many focus groups and research studies, and his work with the Morning Edition Grad School training sessions for stations and as a member of the Strategic Programming Partners consultancy.
KPCC’s ambitious three-year, $10 million project to fortify its newsroom and serve more people of color has created an unintended casualty: The Los Angeles station lost the popular namesake of its top-rated morning news magazine, The Madeleine Brand Show, after changes that included a new co-host.
An analysis recommends that the Salisbury University Foundation negotiate with another pubcaster to operate its two Delmarva Public Radio outlets as music stations.
The “Swing State Radio Network” launched by New York’s WNYC is returning for the upcoming presidential and vice-presidential debates. WNYC public affairs host Brian Lehrer will anchor pre-debate call-in shows that will air in New York as well as on WUSF in Tampa, Fla.; WMFE in Orlando, Fla.; WDET in Detroit; WFAE in Charlotte, N.C.; WOSU in Columbus, Ohio; WCPN in Cleveland; Wisconsin Public Radio; and New Hampshire Public Radio. The coverage will also feature a live chat with a video feed hosted on WNYC’s political site, ItsAFreeCountry.org. WNYC political reporter Anna Sale will participate in the chats. The impromptu Swing State network began with coverage of the party conventions.
Now that Arbitron’s new ratings methodology is providing consistent and crunchable year-to-year data on radio listening, public radio programmers and producers are getting a clearer picture of listening trends — and it’s not a cheerful one. Cume and average–quarter-hour audience for NPR News stations has been falling for a year, according to NPR data. AQH began falling in 2008, after stations in the top 48 markets began the switch from diary to Portable People Meter ratings. Weekly cumes remained relatively consistent through spring 2011, then began a sharp decline. The slides have been driven in part by a fall-off in drivetime listening.
An audit by the CPB Inspector General’s Office of Pundit Productions, the nonprofit that operated a public radio news bureau on Capitol Hill until its shutdown last fall, found violations of several CPB grant requirements and recommended that Pundit return more than $35,000 in grant monies. At CPB management’s request, the IG examined how Pundit spent a $300,000 grant provided by CPB in 2011 for a “transition project” intended to develop a long-term business plan and pricing model. The nonprofit bureau, run by Melinda Wittstock, relied heavily on CPB’s assistance, receiving grants totalling $2.3 million since its start-up in 2003. For the 2011 grant, CPB covered slightly less than half of the $688,036 budget for the business planning. The IG spotted violations with $81,013 in expenses, ranging in scope from more than $40,000 in depreciation charges to payments of $285 that covered reporters’ parking tickets.
When Public Radio Program Directors Association was formed 25 years ago, the idea that programmers should do things for an audience “felt like a complete revolution,” says Marcia Alvar in a Q&A with three of the founders.
With national producers offering new programs and the Magliozzi Brothers retiring from Car Talk, program directors at public radio stations may have an opportune moment to update strategies for weekend programming. Yet with no surefire hits available beyond the familiar warhorses, there’s no easy formula for success when Saturday rolls around.
Once thought to have been left for dead after the vaudeville era, variety shows have re-entered the public radio reinvention conversation — and it doesn’t take Guy Noir to find out why.
NPR is teaming up with New York’s WNYC to make its trivia and quiz show Ask Me Another into a weekly offering, starting in January. The show’s 13-episode pilot season has aired on 150 stations since its launch in May. As a new co-producer, WNYC will contribute to shaping the show’s creative direction. Taping of 25 new episodes will start in November at the Bell House in Brooklyn, where the first season was recorded in front of sold-out audiences. Ask Me Another will also travel to five cities yet to be determined for additional tapings.
NPR’s All Things Considered now comes with a monthly dose of poetry, courtesy of poets who embed themselves among the network’s journalists…
‘Sleepwalk With Me,’ is the program’s latest (and biggest) attempt to break into the movie business.
WGBH’s acquisition of Public Radio International, announced July 26, positions the station and network to step up their longtime collaboration as co-producers.. PRI will remain operationally independent … and be responsible for raising its own revenue…
…Like Planet Money, the as-yet-unnamed unit will establish its brand on multiple platforms, through reports for NPR’s radio shows, a blog and other facets…
One of public radio’s biggest split-format stations, Austin’s KUT, is pursuing a signal expansion that follows a familiar playbook for strengthening audience service: buying a new channel to air music while dedicating its flagship signal to news programming. But for this station serving a city that makes weirdness a point of civic pride, there’s a distinct difference to its ambitions to become a dual-station operator. It will put rock and alternative music, not classical, on its new signal; 90.7 MHz, the FM channel that has served KUT’s news and music audiences for decades, will go all-news. That’s if and when the University of Texas Board of Regents, the governing board of KUT’s licensee, approves the proposed $6 million purchase of 98.9 MHz, a commercial frequency that’s now broadcasting classic rock hits under the call letters KXBT. The regents took only five minutes to discuss the purchase during their July 11 meeting, then postponed a vote that would have cleared the way for KUT to seal the deal.
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.
“There is no objective, journalistic version of the show,” Daisey said. “I will be, always, making constant lies of omission by leaving out tons and tons and reams and reams of details.”
Decades ago, a teenaged Raquel Bitton locked herself in her San Francisco bedroom, suffering miserably from her first broken heart. Her only comfort was an album by Edith Piaf, the diminutive French chanteuse known as “the Little Sparrow.”
“It is the love that you love,” Piaf sang in “C’est L’amour.” “It is love that makes you dream. It is love that wants love. It is love that makes us cry.”
“I listened to it all and came out of my room with a decision to get onstage and sing — and to love again,” Bitton said. “I put together a little revue singing Piaf’s songs, telling pieces of her stories.