Raymond Davis, a veteran broadcaster who influenced and nurtured the bluegrass music scene as a music host for WAMU in Washington, D.C., died Dec. 3 of leukemia. He was 81. Davis capped his 65-year career in radio broadcasting as an afternoon host on WAMU’s all-music station Bluegrass Country. He joined the pubcaster in 1985, when the station split its weekday format between NPR News programs and bluegrass, and retired in 2013.
Longtime Programming Director Mark McDonald and Engineering Director John Holt will be leaving WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., according to the station. McDonald will depart at the end of the year to pursue multimedia opportunities, said WAMU Director of Marketing Kathleen Allenbaugh, and Holt will retire at the end of November after 20 years with the station. McDonald has been programming director at WAMU since 2001. He previously worked for BBC TV and Radio News and was managing editor for WNYC in New York. Holt has been engineering director at WAMU since 1994.
An NPR editor has recommended that network journalists avoid referring to the Washington Redskins by their name and should instead use “Washington” or “the team” as much as possible. Standards & Practices Editor Mark Memmott provided the guidance Oct. 10 amid a growing backlash against a name that is a racial slur. Memmott said he is not calling for an outright ban, but that use of the name should be curtailed under the organization’s policy regarding potentially offensive language. “The team’s name is the name and our job is to report on the world as it is, not to take a position or become part of the story,” Memmott wrote.
WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., will enter the Fredericksburg, Va., market with the pending purchase of 8,000-watt WWED 89.5-FM. WAMU has proposed to buy WWED from the Educational Media Corp., a nonprofit Christian ministry based in Spotsylvania, Va. According to an asset purchase agreement filed with the FCC, WAMU licensee American University will pay $375,000 for WWED and a booster signal in Fredericksburg. WWED and sister station WWEM-FM in Lynchburg, Va., went dark as of Aug. 1, 2013, according to fredericksburg.com.
JJ Yore, co-creator of public radio’s Marketplace and a former v.p. and executive producer with American Public Media, will step into a station leadership role Aug. 1 as g.m. of WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C.
“It feels great to be coming back to Washington,” said Yore, who lived and worked in the area before heading west to start Marketplace. “WAMU is a station I have been close to and listened to since the mid-80s. I was listening to Diane Rehm before she had a national show. I feel like this is a culture I understand deeply.”
Yore served as v.p. and g.m. of American Public Media’s portfolio of Marketplace programming for two years until his job was eliminated in June 2013.
• Less than a week after the maker of the wildly popular mobile game Flappy Bird announced he would pull the plug on his creation, Sesame Workshop has introduced the browser game Flappy Bert. The gameplay, where players control a bird as it navigates Sesame Street’s Bert among obstacles, draws heavily on the original. It’s one of several Flappy Bird clones on the market but the only one starring Bert in an 8-bit sheen. • Today marks the premiere of a series of web video specials co-produced by PBS NewsHour and Al-Monitor, a news site featuring reporting and analysis by journalists and experts from the Middle East. The first, posting at 7 p.m. Eastern time, focuses on Syria.
WLRN in Miami won large-market radio Murrows for feature reporting and use of sound. Chicago’s WBEZ also won for news documentary and hard-news reporting. The award for investigative reporting went to KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting, both based in San Francisco, for “Broken Shield: Exposing Abuses at California Developmental Centers.”
An analysis recommends that the Salisbury University Foundation negotiate with another pubcaster to operate its two Delmarva Public Radio outlets as music stations.
The State We’re In, an English-language public radio series produced by Radio Netherlands Worldwide in partnership with WAMU in Washington, D.C., will shut down production next month, according to its producers. The show, which relates first-person accounts of life-changing experiences, has an audience reach of 12 million people, but it fell victim to domestic austerity measures imposed by the Dutch government in 2011. When Radio Netherlands’ government funding was cut by 70 percent, The State We’re In was reported to be one of the few programs to survive the transition. “We were assured at that time by Radio Netherlands’ outgoing management that the show was still going to be an integral part of Radio Netherlands, but those assurances didn’t hold,” Greg Kelly, the program’s editor, wrote in an announcement posted Sept. 28 on the show’s website.
With national producers offering new programs and the Magliozzi Brothers retiring from Car Talk, program directors at public radio stations may have an opportune moment to update strategies for weekend programming. Yet with no surefire hits available beyond the familiar warhorses, there’s no easy formula for success when Saturday rolls around.
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.
Radio news veteran Jim Asendio resigned as news director of Washington’s WAMU-FM last week after an internal dispute over a private fundraising event turned into a public clash over the editorial firewall protecting the station’s newsroom. Asendio objected when top managers required him and two reporters from his staff to participate in a “Meet the Producers” breakfast and panel discussion that the station hosted for major donors Feb. 22. The choice was stark, the news director said: “I could either not show up and be in trouble, or show up and violate my ethics, so I tendered my resignation.”
The showdown, first reported by Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, put a spotlight on one of the touchiest subjects in cash-strapped newsrooms — firewalls designed to protect working journalists from undue influence by funders and to prevent appearances that such conflicts exist. Similar conflicts are playing out behind the scenes at public radio stations across the country, according to Iowa Public Radio’s Jonathan Ahl, who is president of Public Radio News Directors Inc.
“Some of our members have given us the indication that people aren’t necessarily crossing the firewall, but they’re walking up to it and peeking over it” too often, Ahl said.
Gerald Poulsen, known in radio as bluegrass music host Jerry Gray, died Feb. 2 in Roanoke, Va. He was 78. His son Mark Poulsen told the Washington Post that his father had health complications from a heart transplant that he received after suffering a heart attack on the air in 1989. Poulsen started in 1971 at Washington’s WAMU-FM at American University and for 30 years hosted The Jerry Gray Show on Saturday afternoons, featuring traditional country music, featuring stars such as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers and Patsy Montana.
Zeleznik tapped for Leo C. Lee Award
Maryanne Zeleznik, news director of Cincinnati’s WVXU, received the annual Leo C. Lee Award from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. during its annual conference in Louisville last week. PRNDI also bestowed 93 awards for public radio work produced in 2009. Among Division A stations, with five or more full-time news staffers, WAMU received three awards, Chicago’s WBEZ, Oregon Public Broadcasting and Pasadena’s KPCC won two each. In Division B, with three or four full-timers, Nashville Public Radio, Connecticut’s WSHU and Cincinnati’s WVXU took home two apiece. Among smaller stations, KCLU (Thousand Oaks, Cal.) and KLCC (Eugene, Ore.) won four awards each.
Producers for public broadcasting — and developers for its websites — received 14 Peabody Awards, announced March 31, 2010
Regarding websites, the judges honored two in public media:
Sesame Street’s (“prodigious adaptability . . . delightfully educational, interactive,” the Peabody announcement said) website
NPR’s (“one of the great one-stop websites. And there’s music you can dance to”) website
Peabodys went to six PBS programs — double the number won by any other organization:
“Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About,” about the great New York choreographer, from WNET/American Masters, produced and directed by Judy Kinberg, with Susan Lacy, e.p. — website
“The Madoff Affair” from RAINmedia and WGBH/Frontline, written and produced by Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith, edited by Jordan Montminy, with Chris Durrance, co-producer — website, watch online
two films on Independent Lens—
“The Order of Myths,” about the black and white Mardi Gras traditions of Mobile, Ala., by Margaret Brown, with Folly River Inc., Netpoint Productions, Lucky Hat Entertainment and ITVS (“highly original, moving and insightful”) — website
“Between the Folds” from Green Fuse Films and ITVS about the art of paper-folding (“makes you gasp at the possibilities — of paper and of human creativity”) — website
“Endgame,” a dramatization of secret talks that helped end apartheid in South Africa, from Daybreak/Channel 4/Target Entertainment, presented on WGBH’s Masterpiece Contemporary — website
“Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times,” from KCET, Los Angeles (“drama enough for several feature films”), written, directed and produced by Peter Jones, with Brian Tessier, supervising producer, and exec in charge, Bohdan Zachary — website
KCET also scored with with its regional broadcast SoCal Connected—specifically two reports on the medical-marijuana conflict (“lively, eye-opening coverage”)—“Up in Smoke” by correspondent Judy Muller, producer Karen Foshay and editor Alberto Arce, and “Cannabis Cowboys” by reporter John Larson, producer Rick Wilkinson, editor Michael Bloecher, and associate producer Alexandria Gales.
As a self-proclaimed evangelist for HD Radio, I am often asked why I have inculcated it so deeply in the workings of WAMU in Washington. We devote several full-time employees to produce more than 50 hours a week of live original programming for our multicast channels — bluegrass and Americana music on Channel 2, and news and information on Channel 3. We further demonstrate our commitment to multicasting on our main channel. For the first year after we started multicasting three HD Radio channels, we spent at least 15 seconds of every hour on our flagship signal cross-promoting Channels 2 and 3, and our hosts still give them at least four spots a day. Reminding listeners of the other offerings in our “radio community” requires a sizable investment in airtime, as well as the traffic department’s writing and logging.
All of these years, Diane Rehm’s voice: the vehicle for ordinary sentences she enunciates so emphatically that they carry their utmost weight. But creaky on the edges, hitting snags. It’s a voice reliably there at midmorning on her NPR talk show, familiar; listeners love it. Except for the inevitable detractors, who say they find Rehm grating, or schoolmarmish. Love or hate that voice, it’s illuminating to learn that a physical problem contributes to Rehm’s on-air distinctiveness.
