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The University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents has returned a construction permit for a new Wisconsin Public Radio station in Niagara that would have extended the network’s reach to 39,000 additional people.
Activists on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques have renewed hope for launching a community radio station after getting a fundraising boost from allies in their community and on the U.S. mainland.
Audiences for news and talk stations delivered more than half of public radio’s listening in 2012, according to Arbitron’s annual study on public radio audience trends. The average quarter-hour (AQH) share, an Arbitron term describing the percentage of public radio listeners who tune to a specific format, hit 51.7 percent for pubradio news and talk stations last year, an 2.7 percent increase from 2011 and a precedent for the growth of public radio’s most powerful format, according to Arbitron’s “Public Radio Today 2013.” The study, which looked at audience trends across all stations and formats in 2012, found that public radio’s total audience remained at 32 million, or 12 percent, of all radio listeners. The number of weekly listeners grew by 7.5 percent, or 1.2 million, to a total of 18 million. Triple-A stations contributed to the gains by boosting the format’s weekly cume to 3.4 million listeners, an increase of 8.7 percent.
Frontline and PRI’s The World reporter Arun Rath will join NPR in late September to host Weekend All Things Considered, which is relocating to NPR’s Los Angeles studios. Rath currently covers national security and military justice for Frontline, where he has worked since 2005. He wrote and produced three films for the doc series, with the most recent looking into war crimes allegedly committed by U.S. Marines in Iraq. Rath also reports on music for the PBS series Sound Tracks. Before joining Frontline, Rath worked as a producer for NPR’s On the Media and was a senior editor for Public Radio International’s Studio 360.
Los Angeles radio station KCRW is offering special programming and music downloads in conjunction with the Latin Alternative Music Conference in New York City, July 9–13. DJ Raul Campos, host of a weeknight show on KCRW, will broadcast from New York July 11 and 12, bringing “the sights and sounds of New York” to his listeners. The LAMC, he said, “is where it’s at” for people who enjoy Latin alternative music. The LAMC has grown since it started 14 years ago, according to Campos. “It’s getting bigger, stronger, more diverse,” he said.
Three North Carolina radio stations that serve African-American listeners are collaborating to create a statewide jazz service and drive-time news and public affairs programs in a bid to boost audience while sharing costs and resources. The National Federation of Community Broadcasters is facilitating the project, which includes WFSS in Fayetteville, WNCU in Durham and WSNC in Winston-Salem. The stations currently air dual formats of jazz with news/talk during drive time, and all are licensed to historically black schools — Fayetteville State University, North Carolina Central University and Winston-Salem State University. “We’re all located on HBCU [historically black colleges and universities] campuses, and we have very similar offerings,” says Elvin Jenkins, g.m. of WSNC. “So it just made sense.” Discussions among NFCB and the stations began in October 2012.
More than 100 public radio stations have picked up the midday NPR news show Here & Now with its expansion to two hours July 1, many of them to fill the void left by the cancellation of NPR’s long-running call-in show Talk of the Nation.
Republican Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn today reintroduced legislation to kill federal funding for NPR. Its language is identical to his bill that passed the House in 2011, which prohibited stations from using CPB funds to acquire programming or pay NPR dues. That bill never made it to the floor of the Senate. “At a time when millions of federal works are being furloughed, schoolchildren are barred from visiting the White House, and many military training flights are grounded to save money, it is unacceptable that taxpayers are still on the hook for millions of dollars each year to subsidize National Public Radio,” he said in a statement. “Additionally, it was highly inappropriate for NPR to move into a lavish new headquarters building partly paid for by taxpayers, many of whom continue to struggle under the worst economy since the Great Depression.”
J.J. Yore, a veteran producer credited as a creator of the public radio show Marketplace, was one of three senior executives riffed June 17 from American Public Media, the Minnesota-based company that produces the series. Yore, who rose up through the production ranks two years ago to become v.p. and g.m. of the weeknightly business and economics show, will be succeeded by Deborah Clark, e.p. who steps into the role of v.p.
Clark has worked for Marketplace over two stints since 1995, and APM expects her to move the show forward “business as usual,” Mardi Larson, spokesperson, wrote in an email confirming the layoffs. “We thank J.J. for his valuable and lasting contributions to our company’s mission and audience service, and we wish him well in his next career opportunity.”
“I am disappointed, and I’m surprised, but I’m not angry,” Yore said in an interview last week. “This is the thing I’ve been associated the longest with in my life. But I am now looking forward to figuring out what will come next.”
APM also eliminated the positions of Mary Pat Ladner, v.p. of marketing, and Kathy Golbuff, v.p. of underwriting.
Crisis coverage will stress several layers of a public station’s operating systems — from newsroom layout to editorial decision-making; from the flexibility of web-hosting services to interpersonal relationships among key staff members, each of whom will be asked to step up and work under conditions they have never faced.
Salt Lake City pubcaster Wasatch Public Media, licensee of KCPW-FM, will drop all NPR programs June 24, a schedule change intended to save money and differentiate its service from other pubcasters in the market. “A lot of the decision just came down to sheer economics – NPR is just getting more and more expensive,” said Wasatch C.E.O. Ed Sweeney. “And, when you already have NPR in the market with other stations, it just gets harder and harder to set yourself apart when pitching to sponsors and underwriters.” The University of Utah’s KUER-FM is KCPW’s primary competitor for NPR news listeners. “We were just looking more and more alike, and you can’t stay in business doing that,” Sweeney said.
J.J. Yore, a veteran producer credited as a creator of the public radio show Marketplace, was one of three senior executives riffed June 17 from American Public Media, the Minnesota-based company that produces the series. Yore, who rose up through the production ranks to become v.p. and g.m. of the weeknightly business and economics show two years ago, will be succeeded by Deborah Clark, executive producer who steps up into the role of v.p.
APM also eliminated positions of Mary Pat Ladner, v.p. of marketing, and Kathy Golbuff, v.p. of underwriting. An APM spokesperson described the restructuring as a move to eliminate layers of management and organize the company around an “Audiences First” strategy. Clark has worked for Marketplace over two stints since 1995, and APM expects her to move the show forward “business as usual,” Mardi Larson, spokesperson, wrote in an email confirming the layoffs. “We thank J.J. for his valuable and lasting contributions to our company’s mission and audience service, and we wish him well in his next career opportunity.” Yore’s departure is the third set of job cuts to hit Marketplace’s staff since last July.
Fresh Air will air during daytime hours on MPB’s Think Radio network for the first time since 2010, when the network’s then–Executive Director Judith Lewis took the interview show off the air, citing concerns about host Terry Gross’s discussion of sex with her guests.
The ombudsman for America Abroad, a monthly public radio show covering foreign policy and international affairs, has responded to criticism from the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting regarding a recent show about developments in energy technology. In a May 31 blog post, FAIR said that the April episode of America Abroad “sounded like an infomercial” for fracking, the hydraulic fracturing process used in natural gas production. FAIR pointed out that the show was funded by the Qatar Foundation International, a philanthropy funded by the royal family of Qatar. Qatar is a leading exporter of natural gas — in 2011, it was the world’s top exporter, according to the International Gas Union. FAIR also took issue with the appearance on the show of Henry Jacoby, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor involved with a study about the future of natural gas. The MIT Energy Initiative, which produced the report, includes oil and gas companies as members, and the study’s advisory committee included representatives from natural-gas industry groups.
“After Innocence: Exoneration in America” provides an in-depth look at wrongful imprisonment in the U.S.
Boston’s news radio stations saw sharp increases in listening in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings April 15, a finding highlighted by a new analysis of Arbitron Portable People Meter data by the Radio Research Consortium. Listening to public radio news stations WBUR and WGBH, as well as commercial WBZ, was higher than average throughout much of the week, peaking on April 19 — the day a manhunt for bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shut down the city. On that day, about 1 in 4 Boston residents tuned into one of the three stations, a 53 percent increase above the stations’ average combined cume for April. Average–quarter-hour listening to WBUR and WGBH jumped 50 percent higher than their combined average for the entire month, according to RRC. Commercial WBZ outperformed its noncommercial competitors and saw a larger jump in audience from April 18 to April 19.
Beginning July 1, the BBC’s Newshour will alter its show clock, ceding 4.5 additional minutes from its newscast for local cutaways. The change boosts the total allowance of local minutes within each Newshour broadcast to 16.
WJFF Radio Catskill runs on hydroelectric power and the passion of its volunteers, who recently rallied to force a change in leadership.
NPR provided training and support to 17 participating stations, but has dropped plans to expand StateImpact to all 50 states.
Using a $60,000 grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the Futuro Media Group has added a segment to its NPR-distributed program Latino USA encouraging critical thinking about news coverage.