Development

Show is kaput, but lessons from host flap resound

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Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.”

The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican in the Senate Finance Committee, which has been investigating the lack of financial transparency in medicine.

Programs/Content

Pharma fees to ‘Infinite Mind’ doctor call attention to conflict-of-interest issues

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Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.”

The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican in the Senate Finance Committee, which has been investigating the lack of financial transparency in medicine.

Programs/Content

50 miles from epicenter

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It was purely by chance that a team of veteran NPR journalists was working in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, on May 12 [2008] when the destructive force of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, its epicenter just 50 miles away, killed some 70,000 people and left millions homeless. “You never want to feel you’re lucky to be somewhere when a huge disaster strikes,” said Andrea Hsu, the All Things Considered producer who managed advance logistics for ATC’s first weeklong broadcast from a foreign country. Hsu was one of four NPR journalists in Chengdu when the earthquake struck, turning the tiny news operation she had set up in a Sheraton hotel into the only Western broadcast news source for coverage of the disaster. After a scouting trip in February, ATC chose Chengdu as its home base for a week of special broadcasts, May 19-23, intending to introduce listeners to a region of China rarely covered in Western media. The city was more ethnically diverse than most and boasted an interesting cultural history, and local officials seemed open-minded about granting access to NPR’s journalists, Hsu recalled.  Plus, the local food was really good.

Programs/Content

Stern’s latest credit: completing the search for NPR’s future home

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In 2012, when NPR moves to its recently acquired headquarters site seven blocks east of its present home, it will have much more room for growth than it had after its last move, with as much as four times the floor space. In 1994, when the network moved into its present home, 635 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., it had about 400 employees. The building, with less than 150,000 square feet, could accommodate just 480, NPR said at the time. The space was soon outgrown.

Programs/Content

It’s public radio, but with nearly everything different, including the name

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On June 4, Chicago Public Radio, news and information WBEZ-FM 91.5, will launch a new radio station by splitting off one of its repeaters, WBEW-FM 89.5 in Chesterton, Ind., just southeast of Chicago by Lake Michigan. This new radio station will refashion WBEZ’s public radio mission to a target audience formerly unreachable by WBEZ. This new station will be built on community radio sensibilities but without the characteristic schedule of special-interest shows. In fact, it will have no shows at all. It will air a continuous, seamless talk-based stream completely devoted to Northwest Indiana and Chicago metropolitan area culture, issues and selected music.

Programs/Content

Media veteran brings wary revolution to a fortress of tradition

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In the 1980s, Peter Gelb produced 25 Metropolitan Opera broadcasts for PBS. Now, as the Met’s general manager, he runs the red-carpeted center of the opera world. The first media guy to run the hallowed New York institution has begun an ambitious but carefully modulated makeover of the Met. He’s putting its operas on more media platforms than ever before but using electronic media to reproduce the gilded in-theater experience. He’s bringing in a new breed of directors for fresh staging but relying largely on the beloved music of the past.Hired two years ago, Gelb was off to a running start in August when he took charge.

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
Ed Asney in staging of Monkey Trial transcript

Monkey trial still timely for tour of radio docudrama

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Ed Asner takes the role of Bryan, not Darrow, in LATW’s drama based on the Scopes transcript. John de Lancie, at right, plays Darrow. Susan Loewenberg chose a radio play about the Scopes trial for L.A. Theatre Works’ 2005 national tour because it’s the one that teachers request most from the company’s catalog of more than 200 recorded plays. The teachers seemed to be saying the evolution/creation fight is an enduring topic in our national life and not just a quirky little philosophical eruption that excuses a quick revival of The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial. Indeed, as Ed Asner started off the tour last week as William Jennings Bryan, defender of creation, in Arcata, Calif., a new evolution trial was under way in court in Dover, Pa.

Programs/Content

Native radio: at the heart of public radio’s mission

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Ride the school bus on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona and you’ll hear Shooting Stars, a program for kids produced mostly by volunteers at KUYI, the three-year-old public radio station on the reservation. Tune in during the day and you’ll hear an update on living with diabetes or asthma. Keep listening and you’ll hear junior- and senior-high school interns reading the news. Stop to chat with someone on the reservation about what they’ve heard on the radio. Everyone knows you’re talking about the same station.

People

Grammy academy salutes McPartland for ‘timeless legacy’ of music

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The Recording Academy presented a 2004 Trustees Award to jazz pianist and public radio host Marian McPartland. The award recognizes “music people who have made the greatest impact on our culture,” said Neil Portnow, president of the Academy. “Their outstanding accomplishments and passion for their craft have created a timeless legacy that has positively affected multiple generations and will continue to influence generations to come.” Through her public radio series Piano Jazz, McPartland has introduced generations of listeners to the genre. The series, which received a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, celebrates its 25th anniversary this spring.

Programs/Content

Triple-A strikes chord with disenchanted listeners

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One musical voice gaining ground on public radio sounds a little scruffier than the rest. Rather than a viola or sax, it bears a six-string axe and a heavier backbeat than your average chamber ensemble. Triple-A, an eclectic format that blends rock, folk, blues, world music and other genres, has already proven popular and lucrative for stations such as New York’s WFUV, Philadelphia’s WXPN and southern California’s KCRW. But smaller stations in fly-over country, inspired by the format’s major-market success, are also displacing jazz and classical music for newer musical genres that carry themselves like outsiders. As a result, listeners may be tuning in to the sultry lilt of young chanteuse Norah Jones or the twang of O Brother blues rather than Mozart and Gershwin.

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

Friction and smoke at Whiteriver

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The internecine warfare at KNNB, the public radio station on the White Mountain Apache reservation in east central Arizona, seems insignificant now, dwarfed by the terrifying Chediski-Rodeo wildfire that roared through the beautiful forests in June. The fire, which destroyed hundreds of homes in Arizona, blackened nearly a third of the 1.6 million-acre Fort Apache Reservation, burning Ponderosa pine destined for the tribe’s sawmills and killing the elk and deer that bring it at least $600,000 a year in hunting licenses. Before the fire, the 20-year-old station in Whiteriver was a focal point of power struggles among factions and tribal leaders. But when the largest wildfire in Arizona history struck the reservation, Apaches put aside those disputes and KNNB focused on essentials: telling listeners how to survive and how to help. They interrupted regular programming with evacuation orders, emergency plans and information about relief and rescue efforts for the more than 20,000 residents in KNNB’s broadcast area.

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.

People

Record-breaking deejay shift: 100 hours in Jersey City

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The 100 hours that made Glen Jones famous started and ended with a dream. To be precise, they started with “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha and ended with a wistful ballad, Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream.” In between, Jones, who hosts a weekly show on WFMU in Jersey City, N.J., weathered extreme fatigue and, if his feat is verified, broke the Guinness world’s record for most continuous hours of deejaying. Actually, “broke” is not strong enough — he spun records and interviewed guests for a whole extra day longer than the former record of 73 hours and 33 minutes, set last September by a British deejay. [The publishers of The Guinness Book of World Records verified the record later in the year, according to WFMU.]

His marathon featured a comprehensive mix of American pop music, everything from classic rock to big band to show tunes.