Current (https://current.org/tag/radio-programs-content-news/page/8/)
Matt Miller, host of KCRW’s weekly news-analysis show Left, Right & Center in Santa Monica, now also hosts the biweekly This . . . Is Interesting, 15 to 20 minutes of conversations with thinkers and public figures about ideas in politics, economics and culture.
New York Public Radio has applied to the FCC to acquire 90.3 FM in Ossining, N.Y., from community licensee Hudson Valley Community Radio for $400,000. The broadcaster plans to use the new signal as a repeater for WQXR, its classical music station airing on 105.9 FM in New York City. Ossining is about 40 miles north of the city, on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. The addition of 90.3 FM would expand WQXR’s reach to areas of Westchester County that were within its coverage area when it was owned by the New York Times. NYPR’s 2009 purchase of WQXR was a three-way transaction with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision that involved moving the classical station to a weaker signal.
Two of public radio’s three biggest distributors launched major crowdfunding experiments in the past month, with wildly different results.
The WFMT Radio Network has unveiled a premium subscription service that provides access to hundreds of hours of archived programs from Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin. The internationally syndicated classical music series airs on 55 stations and draws a weekly audience of more than 400,000 listeners. “It’s a unique show and Bill is a great host,” said Steve Robinson, g.m. of the Chicago-based WFMT Radio Network and WFMT-FM. “Since the show started we’ve gotten something like 10,000 emails and this has been one of the things people have repeatedly asked us to do.”
At launch, the new streaming service offers 500 hours of content selected from the show’s 10-year archive. More programs will be added weekly until all 850 hours of Exploring Music are available.
Beginning May 6 on NPR’s All Things Considered, listeners will hear five voices from the past that may have a familiar ring. They’re a bit weathered with age but still share personal stories about navigating extraordinary twists in their lives.
The competition for midday timeslots on public radio stations is heating up, as Public Radio International and producers of its news programs unveiled plans to experiment with new approaches for combining national and local content to give stations more control over what their local listeners hear during the middle of each weekday.
NPR launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign backing a special investigative project by Planet Money, its reporting unit that produces multi-platform economics coverage.
Listeners to WPPB in Long Island, N.Y., can listen to Morning Edition or the BBC Newshour if they want to know what’s happening now. But if they’re looking for an inkling of what’s going to happen, they can ask McMahon.
The latest package of public radio fundraising premiums allows devout listeners to temporarily brand their passion for their favorite shows on their forearms — or elsewhere. A set of eight rub-on tattoos in colorful vintage designs tout the titles On the Media, Fresh Air, Morning Edition, All Things Considered and This American Life. They’re offered to stations by longtime pubcasting premium distributor VisABILITY in Lyons, Colo. The temporary tattoos are the second to be created for listeners who want to express their support for public radio through body art. Ira Glass, whose cleverness in creating pledge-drive premiums helped to build station carriage for This American Life when it was a new public radio series, first approached VisABILITY owners Janice Gavan and John Burke about pubradio tattoos in 1998.
A crowdfunding campaign launched April 15 by Public Radio International seeks $25,000 for a “Global Stories Fund” that will support 11 international stories to be presented on PRI’s The World and other news programs.
The music world of Austin, Texas, is now being shared with a global audience thanks to Austin Music Map, a website developed by the city’s public radio station, KUT.
In a post on his website, actor Harry Shearer describes how he learned about the cancellation of his long-running show on KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif. On Monday, KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro told Shearer that “Le Show was being cancelled from the airwaves.” Shearer had suspected that Ferro was preparing to end the weekly program’s run on KCRW, but he was surprised by the timing, which was “‘effective immediately,’” he wrote, quoting Ferro. “Thus does public radio, in one more small way, come to resemble ever more closely commercial radio’s way of doing business,” Shearer commented. The station announced the cancellation April 15 as part of an overhaul of its weekend schedule.
Tonight’s special edition of Greater Boston from WGBH, focused on the shocking bomb blasts at Monday’s Boston Marathon, will be distributed nationally on the World Channel, the public TV multicast service produced by WGBH and distributed by American Public Television. WGBH spokesman Michael Raia told Current the 30-minute show will extend to an hour and begin airing at 9 p.m. Eastern time on World. In Boston, the show will be broadcast on WGBH’s primary TV station at 7 p.m., its regular timeslot. Planned guests include terrorism expert Jim Walsh, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program; Jarrett Barrios of the Red Cross, who took part in the race; and Haider Javed Warraich, a resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who wrote an op-ed in today’s New York Times about his experience growing up amid explosions in Pakistan. WGBH staffers producing segments for the Greater Boston special include host and executive editor Emily Rooney, who lives three blocks from the explosion site and will provide a first-hand perspective on the still-unfolding story; Jared Bowen, who is covering the law enforcement investigation; and Adam Reilly, reporting from Logan Airport with reactions from runners.
The April 13 broadcast of Weekend Edition Saturday was the first to originate from NPR’s new $201 million headquarters.
WESAT from the new NPR headquarters, a set on Flickr. Current was on hand April 13 when Weekend Edition Saturday launched the first broadcast from NPR’s new $201 million headquarters on North Capitol Street in Washington, D.C. Click here to view as a slideshow.
The Association of Independents in Radio will launch a metasite April 22 that combines its 10 Localore multimedia projects on a single interactive platform, showcasing the results of a yearlong production to develop broadcast and web content in cities across the United States. The website uses a map of the country to direct users to content that public media audiences first discovered on local stations. Designer Drew Schorno chose the map “as a way of representing the U.S. experience” of Localore, he said. A half-hour documentary, This Is Localore, will accompany the launch of the metasite, which will be unveiled during an April 22 event at the Brattle Theater in Boston. Producers from each of the Localore projects will join Sue Schardt, AIR executive director, and Noland Walker, Localore executive editor, in a Q&A session moderated by PBS NewsHour’s Hari Sreenivasan.
The mass shootings last year in Colorado, Wisconsin and Connecticut reawakened Americans to recurring tragedies of gun violence and rekindled a national debate about gun control — one that public radio and television have chronicled and analyzed through ongoing programs and the package of special broadcasts that aired on PBS last month.
Public radio’s American Routes is celebrating its 15th anniversary on the air with a dance and concert in New Orleans and a discount for stations adding the show. The April 19 concert at the New Orleans Rock ‘n’ Bowl will feature the Treme Brass Band, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Irma Thomas, Ivan Neville and other luminaries of the Louisiana and New Orleans music scenes. Sponsored by WWNO-FM in New Orleans, the fundraiser for the music program will be recorded and distributed to stations for broadcast during the week of July 4. Hosted by folklorist and anthropology professor Nick Spitzer, American Routes airs on 260 stations. It has faced challenges to maintain steady carriage as more stations adopt news/talk formats and has “won and lost” some battles in that effort, Spitzer told Current in an email.
Milwaukee Public Radio host Mitch Teich could have predicted a few outcomes from his decision to take up speedskating — sore muscles, bruises from the occasional spill on the ice at high speed — but probably not the biggest story of his journalism career.
Radio for the deaf,” a captioning technology developed and refined through an NPR Labs partnership, is moving into mainstream broadcasting with Latino USA