Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

The first Public Radio Camp is now history, committed to scores of tweets on Twitter, a hoped-for wiki entry or two, and a lot of work yet to be done.

Behold, a Wordle from Quiddities’ Margaret Rosas reflecting the Twitter traffic:

The second day of this event was much smaller than the first; about eight participants versus the 60-70 present on day 1. One of the things we did was spend some time discussing the overlapping spheres of public media; one model put public media organizations into three groups, shaped by significantly different histories and schemes for regulation… public broadcasters (over-the-air radio and TV) in one sphere, the community media centers with roots in cable TV public, educational, and governmental access (PEG for short) in a second sphere, and the print-based and/or Net-based media groups (Wikimedia, projects like Public-Press.org in the Bay Area, and so on) in a third sphere. Some public media efforts (Democracy Now! came immediately to mind) touch all three spheres, others only one or two. Thinking about these different approaches to public media might help us be more effective in the roll-out of RadioEngage.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who took part in the BarCamp, and we’ll push forward from here…

I thought today’s Public Media Camp was a success, on the whole. At least 60 participants came to NextSpace in downtown Santa Cruz on the first of two days of visioning and planning about web content for public media organizations. Most participants were from the Santa Cruz area; many were from the San Francisco Bay Area, including folks from KQED and KALW; and I was especially happy to see people from NPR’s Public Interactive division, and from American Public Media.

Great thanks to all the event sponsors: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, NextSpace, Sunkist Naturals, Lifestyle Culinary, Armanasco Public Relations (special tip of the cap to Tom Honig), Drew Miller Insurance Services, B. Ruby Rich, and above all to our colleagues at Quiddities that put it all together.

Significant take-aways for me included these:

KUSP’s on-line ambitions are greater, and closer to realization, than most public radio organizations of similar size;
Many KUSP people, and many other Santa Cruzans, want to use on-line public media to strengthen our community;
KUSP’s fire coverage this past spring and summer had a sizable influence on people’s perception of the station and its potential as a media organization operating on-line;
I saw a number of content producers working on news and information that have fairly concrete ambitions for how they want to serve audiences on-line, but not as many content producers focused on music are as far along;
Ideas abound about ways to generate financial support for public media from on-line users, but (at least with this group) I saw very little agreement about which ideas were most likely to succeed, and few of these ideas have actually been tested;
In a related story, few people if any thought the main ways public radio has raised money from people over the years — pledge drives and direct mail — will work effectively for on-line audiences;
And the last two points combined could mean real trouble for public broadcasters in the near future.

The Santa Cruz Public Radio Camp may spawn similar BarCamps elsewhere in the U.S. in the coming months, which will be a welcome development, as this seems like a productive way to advance planning for public media’s on-line services to viewers and listeners.

The event will continue tomorrow.

Tonight is the first night of a BarCamp event called “public media camp,” sponsored by Quiddities Dev. Inc. — our collaborators in the RadioEngage project. Follow the above links to find out more about what we’ll all be doing. If you’re in the Santa Cruz area, you can register on site Saturday morning between 9 and 10 AM.

And, it’s free!

Look for reports on the goings-on this weekend.

In recent months, and particularly since September 1st, we’ve been expanding KUSP Reports, the feature stories about news and cultural events in our area that are part of our morning and afternoon news programs, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered. The number of volunteers working on KUSP Reports has now outstripped our inventory of portable recording equipment — the gear they need to go out into the field and record sound at news events, do interviews, and so on.

KUSP Leadership Circle donor Paul Johnson wants to see more local coverage on the air. To make this possible, he has offered us a matching challenge grant. If KUSP members donate $1,000 to buy our volunteers more field recording gear, he will match that with a $1,000 contribution of his own. This campaign is starting today and will run until the end of next week.

You can support our news volunteers and meet Paul Johnson’s challenge by making a donation via this link!

This morning NPR announced that Vivian Schiller, the Senior VP and General Manager of NYTimes.com, will be the organization’s new CEO. She takes over on January 5. At 47, she will be one of NPR’s youngest chief executives, and the first woman to hold the top post.

She has been with the Times since 2006; before that, she was a television executive, most recently at the Discovery Times channel (a New York Times/Discovery Productions joint venture), and prior to that, at CNN/Turner Broadcasting.

Throughout the recruitment process (which has been underway since spring) NPR has stressed the importance of having a CEO with a deep understanding of news and of on-line content delivery. Given her resume, they appear to have succeeded in meeting those objectives. I look forward to meeting Vivian and sharing my impressions of her with you…

Full details are available elsewhere at kusp.org… but in capsule form, we’ll begin election coverage at 4:00 PM Tuesday on KUSP and continue at least until 12 midnight. On our main FM channel, we’ll be combining national coverage from NPR, statewide coverage from The California Report, and regional reporting by our staff and volunteers around the Central Coast.

On kusp.org we will have our live stream as described above, plus a second stream with five hours of special election coverage from Democracy Now from 4:00 to 9:00 (followed by a simulcast of our KUSP-1 programming from 9:00 on), and extensive on-line content from public broadcasting’s web collaboration (major partners include NPR, the NewsHour from PBS, Minnesota Public Radio, and KQED in San Francisco).

The launch of KUSP-2 is something we’ve been waiting a long time for; we had planned on this content being on our HD Radio channel too, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, we are experiencing technical problems right now with the part of our digital transmission system that carries the signal from our studio to our transmitter, and our analog back-up system can only carry our primary FM signal. So for this election special, KUSP-2 will be an Internet stream only.

I’m also excited about being in on NPR’s Vote Report Project, which involves use of newer on-line tools like Twitter (and relatively old-fashioned technology like voice mail) to get a sense of whether people are experiencing problems voting, from now through the time the polls close. Alison Stewart interviewed Andy Carvin of NPR about the plan on Weekend Edition Saturday this morning; you can hear that story here.

On Wednesday we have two special programs following up on the election results, in addition to coverage in our regular programs; Democracy Now will be extended to two hours (from 9:00 AM until 11:00), and a California Report special on the election results in California will come your way from 2:00 PM until 3:00.

I’ll post more updates as needed.

For everyone at KUSP, I want to express thanks for the support we received from our listeners during our fall pledge drive. We were apprehensive, it’s fair to say, going into the campaign in the midst of global financial turmoil. In the end, we made our key goal — 900 pledges according to the unofficial tally — and came within 4% of the total number of dollars pledged during our Fall 2007 campaign. Pretty good results!

Membership is the biggest single source of KUSP income, and pledge drives account for a little more than half of our annual membership revenue (with the rest chiefly coming through renewals by mail). While more work will have to be done to keep KUSP healthy in this financial climate, we’ve taken a big step forward in this drive. So, for everyone who has given so far, thanks — and if you haven’t, you can go here and make a gift right now!

Any public radio station goes through much scrambling as the start of a pledge drive nears. KUSP’s charge towards the start of this Fall’s drive has been plagued by technical problems and I want to apologize to all our listeners for the disruptions.

Here is the story on two of the more serious lapses:

For several weeks the digital microwave system that carries our broadcast signal from the Santa Cruz studio to our main transmitting site has been acting up. The problem has been most evident in the late afternoon to about sunset, and would knock us off the air for varying amounts of time. After three weeks of mostly-fruitless troubleshooting efforts, our Chief Engineer recommended that we temporarily switch to our backup analog microwave equipment, which we tried to do on Tuesday, October 7. That switchover went very badly, as part of the backup system refused to work correctly with our HD Radio transmitter. We were forced off the air repeatedly, for fairly long periods of time, and our sound quality suffered until we aborted the job in mid-afternoon.

We tried again today — Wednesday, October 8 — with better results, though we still had several interruptions in programming. Right now we are on the air with our analog FM signal; our digital HD Radio broadcasts will be unavailable until we can find and fix the problems in the digital microwave equipment that we were chasing down in the first place.

Then, due to human error at the station, our recording process for “Marketplace” ran amok and resulted in the accidental broadcast of a week-old program at 5:30 today. Such a gaffe should never happen. We determined the cause and I promise I will do my utmost, as will my co-workers at the station, to prevent any future mistakes such as this.

Thank you to all KUSP listeners who are bearing with us! Read the rest of this entry »

Democracy Now reports that host Amy Goodman and program producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar were arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota on Monday 9/1. The link to the news release and video of Amy’s arrest are here.

DN reported late Monday night that all three had been released from custody.

Democracy Now goes on to say:

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

There was very little mainstream coverage of RNC protests today. We inserted a story from KUSP volunteer reporter Christopher Krohn into All Things Considered today — that story was recorded early in the afternoon in downtown St. Paul. Chris’ story indicated the situation was potentially serious, as the later arrests of DN journalists certainly proved.

As I reported here a month or so ago KUSP is making a change in programming strategy on weekdays, from early in the morning through the end of the afternoon commute. KUSP’s new schedule in those times focuses on what we believe are public radio’s most significant news and information programs. We think the KUSP audience will come to appreciate our new programs: The Story with Dick Gordon; our new collaborative project with station KALW in San Francisco, Your Call; Day to Day from NPR News, The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU in Washington; and Marketplace.

Several programs in this schedule now air twice - either twice the same day for two weekday programs, or on two different days for some weekend programs. This idea has disconcerted a number of people, but the reasons for doing it are fairly straightforward.

We are repeating several programs we know can serve large and loyal audiences. Not many people can be tuned in to KUSP all day, every day… so by strategically repeating what we think will be among our most-listened-to shows, we increase the chances that a potential listener will have a chance to tune them in. Experience at other stations indicates that more people benefit from having a second chance to catch the show, than are put at a disadvantage by running into a show they’ve already heard once.

Another reason is more long-term. KUSP’s programmers are working on several new projects, which might meet listener needs and desires better than anything we’ve done before. We’ve seen in the past few weeks how hard it can be for a station to end programs that a number of listeners care about (even if, compared to other programs on the station, the shows that are ending reach relatively few listeners). But sometimes a station needs to create time for something new — as we’re doing now for our collaborative project with KALW, “Your Call.”

When our program development projects bear fruit (and I definitely believe they will, though I can’t say for sure when), it will be less disruptive, we hope, to adjust the schedule to make room if some of our daily content before the switch includes repeats. This also includes looking carefully at programs airing on KUSP as well as on another station in the area.

Not every popular program is practical to repeat. We thought long and hard about repeating Democracy Now! which currently attracts the most loyal audience of any of KUSP’s weekday shows. The problem is, by the time we air Democracy Now, the program is already three hours old; since DN! is a topical news program, a repeat broadcast later in the day runs the risk of bringing listeners news that is out of date. Other news programs where our content repeats (Morning Edition, for example, or Marketplace) have personnel in place all morning and afternoon so that, if news events warrant, stories can be updated.

As we go along I’ll write more about the new shows on the schedule, and look forward to seeing your comments.