Programs/Content

Pubradio, artists pair up to promote music radio

By |

Public radio stations and NPR are promoting April as Public Radio Music Month, a campaign designed to raise awareness of the cultural contributions of pubradio’s music stations and the role federal funding plays in keeping those outlets on the air. Stations that broadcast classical, jazz and contemporary music formats have scheduled special concerts throughout the month to highlight the diversity of programming and the field’s commitment to presenting new artists. Musicians themselves are participating — and not just by performing at station events. Nearly 130 artists — including the Black Keys, the Decemberists, My Morning Jacket and the Roots — signed a “love note” to public radio, expressing thanks to local stations that play their music. NPR calculates that more than 180 public radio stations are devoted to noncommercial music formats such as classical, jazz, blues and bluegrass, and another 480 include music in their programming lineups.

Programs/Content

Output: BackStory with the American History Guys scales up to weekly

By |

Produced as a series of monthly specials since 2008, the show will relaunch in May with new segments exploring historical themes suggested by the week’s news events. With three historian hosts billed as “the American History Guys,” BackStory makes a nod towards the wisecracking Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk, known to public radio listeners as “the car guys,” and there’s certainly joviality to their banter with each other and listeners who call in. But BackStory takes its history seriously. Andrew Wyndham, executive producer and media director for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, prefers an analogy made by a station program director who said BackStory could “do for history what Carl Sagan did for science.”

Each of the show’s hosts brings special expertise to the subject: Peter Onuf, a professor at the University of Virginia, specializes in 18th-century American history, and Brian Balogh, also of U-Va., is an expert on the 20th century. Ed Ayers, a history professor and president of the University of Richmond, covers the gap between them, 19th-century America.

Programs/Content

Simple Googling dug up what Daisey had hidden

By |

Within a few hours of phoning the translator who refuted key details in a This American Life show about factories that manufacture Apple products in China, Marketplace correspondent Rob Schmitz was on a plane to meet her…

Programs/Content

APM displaces PRI as BBC World Service distributor

By |

American Public Media will begin distributing the BBC World Service to U.S. pubradio stations July 1 [2012], ending the British network’s 26-year distribution relationship with Public Radio International. A five-year BBC-PRI contract is expiring, but the two networks will still collaborate on their co-productions such as The World and The Takeaway. Portions of the World Service air on 521 stations in the U.S.

“BBC World Service radio has been enjoying record audiences in the U.S., and we are delighted to be working with American Public Media to ensure that more U.S. listeners have access to the BBC’s impartial international journalism and programming across public radio,” said Richard Porter, controller, English, for the BBC, in a statement to Current. APM declined comment.  

Programs/Content

Ombudsman seeks details on WAMU ‘meet the producers’ event

By |

CPB ombudsman Joel Kaplan has urged WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., to release more information about a gathering of major donors and station journalists that prompted the Feb. 22 resignation of WAMU News Director Jim Asendio. The “Meet the Producers Breakfast” featured a panel discussion among WAMU reporters and producers for an audience of about 30 donors who had recently increased their annual contributions to at least $1,000. Asendio said he resigned because he believed the event had breached an ethical firewall insulating station journalists from funders. In Kaplan’s comments, posted March 2 on CPB.org, the ombudsman did not explicitly condemn the event but wrote that the issue “goes to the heart of the station’s ethics.”

“The public deserves more from WAMU,” Kaplan wrote.

People

Alex Chadwick: Recharged to cover an energetic beat

By |

Alex Chadwick was lost. It took a journey to an unlikely place — the whitewater rapids of a Utah canyon — for him to find his way back to radio. In 2008, Chadwick found himself absent from the airwaves for the first time in decades. He had stepped down as host of the NPR show Day to Day to return to reporting, only to be laid off a month later, an unceremonious end to 31 years at the network. He then devoted himself to caring for his wife and partner in broadcasting, Carolyn Jensen Chadwick, who was battling multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood cells.

Programs/Content

Adapting Daisey’s staged monologue for radio: less shouting, more intimacy

By |

Update: On March 16, This American Life retracted “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” its Jan. 6 broadcast that adapted monologist Mike Daisey’s story about working conditions in Chinese gadget factories. Read more. Crunching a two-hour stage monologue into a 39-minute radio piece was a huge challenge for Ira Glass, e.p. and host of This American Life. Glass decided to adapt The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs after seeing monologist Mike Daisey perform the show that skewers Apple and Jobs for the harsh working conditions in factories where adored Apple products are assembled.

Programs/Content
Ira Glass

Glass & Co.: Emboldened to tell hard-news stories

By |

Update: On March 16, This American Life retracted “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” its Jan. 6 broadcast that adapted monologist Mike Daisey’s story about working conditions in Chinese gadget factories. Read more. For 16 years, public radio host Ira Glass has charmed listeners with offbeat, quirky stories that captivated minds and won awards. Lately, he’s also been kicking butt, taking names and making a difference. It’s not quite that aggressive.

Programs/Content

APMG’s Florida classical station grows west with new FM

By |

Miami-based Classical South Florida, an affiliate of American Public Media Group, is expanding its service to the state’s western coast with the $4.35 million purchase of WAYJ-FM, a 75,000-watt station that broadcasts to a potential audience of nearly 1 million listeners in Fort Myers and beyond. The purchase, announced Feb. 14, is part of a three-way transaction with seller WAY Media, a religious broadcasting network that’s moving its Christian pop music service and its call letters to 89.5 MHz in Naples, a 100,000-watt station, formerly WSRX-FM. Though the Naples station broadcasts at a higher effective radiated power (ERP), Classical South Florida’s new station has the better signal, with a higher antenna and larger potential audience. It covers a population of 991,520, compared with 340,913, according to Tom Kigin, executive v.p. for Minnesota-based APMG.

Programs/Content

Keillor’s fundraiser for Obama revives complaints of bias

By |

Like many entertainers, Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor has never tried to hide his liberal political leanings, but his decision to host an Obama re-election fundraising party in his Minnesota home last week worked the conservative blogosphere into a lather about NPR’s political bias. Yet NPR has no control over Keillor or his nationally syndicated weekly program. And there’s no guarantee that his program’s distributor, the Minnesota-based American Public Media Group, could heel its star vaudevillian if it tried to neutralize him politically. Keillor owns his production company and is responsible for the show’s content. APMG took a measured stance by endorsing Keillor’s First Amendment rights as an individual.

Programs/Content

Unvetted war story slips past producers

By |

A commentary created through an experimental radio project of the New America Foundation turned a harsh spotlight on the editorial vetting process at Marketplace, which broadcast a first-person account Jan. 30 [2012] of a man who falsely claimed to be a heroic Army sniper. Whatever the editorial process at Marketplace missed, there were similar shortcomings at San Francisco’s KQED-FM, which also aired the piece, and at the big liberal foundation, whose media project was focused on inclusivity rather than excluding fakers. The two-minute piece by a man named Leo Webb, part of a commentary series titled “My Life Is True,” turned out to be largely untrue. As soon as it aired, the first-person commentary sounded like a load of bull to readers of This Ain’t Hell, a blog that critiques media coverage of the military and takes special glee in exposing phony war stories.  It took only some basic fact-checking and a sharply worded blog post to set off an online spanking for producers of Marketplace, American Public Media’s flagship drivetime broadcast, and KQED, one of pubcasting’s top news stations.

History of public media

CPB will seek operator to develop American Archive; director leaves project

By |

Having lost its digital projects fund last year, CPB lacks the money to develop the American Archive much further, according to Mark Erstling, senior v.p. The next step is to find an outside institution to adopt and support creation of the proposed archive of public stations’ historic audio, video and films.

That helps explain why professional archivist Matthew White left CPB Jan. 13 after two years as executive director. “It was very clear to him that things were going to change significantly,” Erstling says, and White accepted an offer to lead a “significant” archiving project abroad. White could not be reached for comment. CPB declined Current’s multiple requests for interviews with White over the previous two years.

Programs/Content

Sports: a real community that some stations join

By |

There’s a new game in town — relatively new to public television, anyway. Blessed with digital multicast channels and eager to attract new viewers, PBS stations are finding success with high-school football and other sports as varied as NASCAR and Special Olympics on their schedules. Station execs concede that airing more sports can mean preempting PBS program staples — maybe exchanging Frontline for field goals. They can also face questions about the propriety of carrying women’s basketball in place of Washington Week in Review. Still, they insist, gains in viewer interest, the opportunity to promote other shows during game broadcasts, and the positive vibes of bringing communities together more than justify any inconvenience or criticism.

Programs/Content

Closing of news bureau leaves regrets, questions

By |

There was no shortage of ideas for keeping Capitol News Connection afloat. CNC’s stock in trade was chasing down politicians for local legislators’ take on the day’s developments in Congress. Before it was shuttered in September, public radio’s little nonprofit news bureau on Capitol Hill tried expanding into online news reporting, revising fees, selling localized coverage of Congress to newspapers and TV stations as well as pubradio, and developing widgets and apps to boost its income. As founder and CEO Melinda Wittstock worked relentlessly against recession economics to save the cash-strapped newsroom, she turned to a dot-org hope. Her conception for NewsIt, a crowdsourced social-media news platform, was perhaps her biggest idea to date.

Programs/Content

Colorado net assigns idle AM to Triple A duty in Denver

By |

Colorado Public Radio has found a new use for the spare AM frequency that it couldn’t sell. OpenAir 1340 took to the air last month, bringing the Denver area a Triple A–format station featuring rock, folk and indie music ranging from the present day to rootsy influences. The station signed on Oct. 31 with the song “Colorado” by Denver band Paper Bird, an early indicator of OpenAir’s commitment to showcasing local music. CPR has already recorded more than a dozen local bands in its studios for broadcast on OpenAir.

People

Norman Corwin, auteur of radio’s golden years, 101

By |

Norman Corwin, a radio writer and producer whose pioneering programs made him one of the most renowned creators of shows during radio’s Golden Age, died Oct. 18 [2011] of natural causes. He was 101. Corwin’s name may be unfamiliar to most people today, but during the 1940s his productions for CBS drew huge audiences and influenced a generation of writers and directors in all media. He wrote on a wide range of subjects in a ringing, poetic tone that had few parallels in its time and would be almost unheard of on today’s airwaves, even in public radio.

Programs/Content

Simeone’s activism prompts inquiry into ethical standards for pubradio freelancers

By |

Public radio is once again struggling to define the line between on-air talent who report as ethically bound journalists and those personalities who are permitted to express opinions. Freelance radio broadcaster Lisa Simeone, a veteran host of public radio documentary and music programs, was fired late Oct. 19 from Soundprint, the independently produced long-form doc series, for violating NPR’s ethics code. Her role as spokesperson for “October 2011,” an anti-war group aligned with the Occupy Wall Street movement that has staged protests in Washington, D.C., put her longtime affiliation with public radio in jeopardy. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call first questioned whether Simeone’s activism violated journalistic ethics in an Oct.