Quick Takes
Nonprofit news sites win grants for collaborative projects
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Investigate West, Texas Tribune and KCPT in Kansas City, Mo., are the nonprofit and public broadcasting organizations receiving grants from the Center for Cooperative Media.
Current (https://current.org/tag/texas-tribune/)
Investigate West, Texas Tribune and KCPT in Kansas City, Mo., are the nonprofit and public broadcasting organizations receiving grants from the Center for Cooperative Media.
Other winners include “This American Life” and ProPublica.
Two winning reports aired on public radio’s “Reveal” and “Marketplace.”
NPR, The Texas Tribune and Missouri’s KBIA-FM were among the public media winners at the ceremony in Los Angeles Saturday.
Executives shared tips about growing income through membership, advertising and live events.
Plus: CPB offers funds for spectrum auction planning.
Plus: Texas Tribune looks to the next five years, and the FCC fines a Massachusetts college.
• The broadcast tower of St. Louis’s Nine Network picked up an unexpected Halloween decoration Thursday night: a parachutist who was stuck for two hours about 120 feet off the ground, reports KMOV-TV. Firefighters rescued 27-year-old Timothy Church after he attempted to jump off the tower. The illicit leaper and an accomplice were charged with trespassing. https://twitter.com/CoryStarkKMOV/status/528035355585695744/
• Elsewhere on the crime beat, a former finance manager for WFWA-TV in Fort Wayne, Ind., pleaded guilty Thursday to embezzling money from the station in July 2010, according to the News-Sentinel.
ADDISON, Texas — More than one-third of the roughly 300 attendees at the annual National Educational Telecommunications Association’s professional development conference this week are first-timers, making for one of the most crowded Newcomers Welcome sessions in years. And those newbies have plenty of sessions to choose from at the conference, which runs through Wednesday at the Hotel InterContinental in this Dallas suburb. Topics include development, collaborations, marketing, community engagement, FCC regulations, education, promotion — one session even analyzes the “complex, arcane” structure of the public broadcasting system. The conference opened Monday with keynote speaker Evan Smith, editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune, addressing the power of public conversation. The nonprofit newsroom in Austin, which celebrates its fifth anniversary in two weeks, was “invented more or less on the fly,” Smith said, as newspapers in the state withered.
An Oregon Public Broadcasting journey through the Glacier Caves was among the winners.
DENVER — A public radio station’s foray into native advertising, which seamlessly integrates paid content into a website’s editorial fare, stirred strong opinions at a July 10 session at the annual Public Media Development & Marketing Conference. Attendees packed the room to hear about plans for native advertising on the site of Southern California Public Radio in Pasadena, Calif. The broadcaster received a $33,000 grant in April from the Investigative News Network and the Knight Foundation to experiment with native advertising, also known as sponsored content. Over the six-month pilot stage, which ends in December, SCPR will develop a native-advertising framework for online and mobile platforms. “SCPR believes that the framework emerging from this grant will map out the common ground between the interests of its audience, underwriters, and journalistic principles,” INN said in a statement about the grant when it was announced. “At its conclusion, the organization will be much closer to determining whether sponsored content is a viable revenue stream for mission-driven, nonprofit content producers.”
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, native advertising encompasses “paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong.”
In experimenting with native advertising, SCPR joins nonprofits Voice of San Diego and the Texas Tribune, which began placing native ads on their websites this year.
Plus: The University of Missouri’s j-school welcomes “institutional fellows,” and Bill Buzenberg steps down from the Center for Public Integrity.
Plus: Celeste Headlee tells Current about plans for Middle Ground now that she has a new job.
• The Women’s Media Center, an advocacy group for women in media, has released a report about gender inequality in media. It found that on TV news, men still report the majority of news — even on PBS’s NewsHour, which features two women as co-anchors. WMC found that 57 percent of news on the NewsHour is still reported by men, despite the show’s appointment of Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff as co-anchors in August 2013. The study reviewed reports made between Oct. 1 and Dec.
A key role in covering a Texas lawmaker’s 2013 filibuster led to an expanded focus on video for the nonprofit news organization.
Public radio reporters took all nine awards for radio reporting in this year’s Sigma Delta Chi Awards, which recognize outstanding reporting on radio, TV and the Web by national and local news organizations. NPR’s Ina Jaffe, Quinn O’Toole and Steven Drummond won for breaking news reporting (network syndication) for “Los Angeles VA Has Made Millions on Rental Deals.” For investigative reporting, John Ryan and Jim Gates of KUOW in Seattle were cited among stations in markets 1–100 for “Shell’s Arctic Oil-Spill Gear ‘Crushed Like a Beer Can,’” while Sandy Hausman of WVTF and Radio IQ in Roanoke, Va., won in the 101+ market category for “Naming the Fralin,” about naming the University of Virginia Art Museum. In the feature categories, Linda Lutton, Cate Cahan and Sally Eisele of Chicago’s WBEZ won for “The weight of the city’s violence, on one school principal,” and Lance Orozco of KCLU in Thousand Oaks, Calif., for “My Cancer.”
NPR’s State of the Re:Union, co-distributed by Public Radio Exchange, won the syndicated documentary award for “As Black as We Wish to Be,” which explored an Appalachian foothills town in Ohio where residents who look white identify as African-American; it was reported and produced by Lu Olkowski, Laura Spero, Taki Telonidis and Al Letson. Alabama Public Radio’s “Winds of Change,” coverage by Pat Duggins, Ryan Vasquez, Maggie Martin and Stan Ingold of a Tuscaloosa tornado, won for smaller-market documentary. The public service in radio journalism winners were “If it’s legal: Five ways legal pot could affect your life,” by the staff of Seattle’s KPLU (markets 1–100); Charles Lane and Naomi Starobin of WSHU in Fairfield, Conn., for “State struggled at fire prevention ahead of Manorville blaze.”
In the television categories, San Francisco’s KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting won for large-market (1–50) documentary for “Heat and Harvest,” a report on the effect of climate change on California agriculture by Mark Schapiro, Serene Fang, Gabriela Quiros and Craig Miller.
The Texas Tribune, the nonprofit public policy journalism website that recently received a $1.5 million Knight Foundation grant, is the subject of an extensive piece published April 15 in the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Texas Tribune, an online news nonprofit that produces in-depth stories about Texas government and policy, received $1.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation April 14 to explore new revenue models for local journalism.