American Public Media is also the largest producer and distributor of classical music programming in the United States.
Headquartered in St. They vary in structure and principal activities. NPR is a mission-driven, multimedia news organization and radio program producer. They achieved it in seven years. Similarly, it is irksome to the public radio community that as foundations and potentially governments, too look to revitalize local news by investing in start-ups and nonprofits, they seem to be looking at a blank slate, ignoring the public media infrastructure that is already in place.
With the exception of the largest markets and a few others, the local effort at NPR was indeed nothing special a decade ago. There are odd license-owners on the roster, too, like the public school system in Miami, Georgia state government, or the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, Texas.
That model has become shaky. A playlist of your favorite music is available in many other places. Now, a commitment to local news not only plugs gaps in coverage of a given community, state or region, but builds loyalty for membership donations and foundation support.
Barnes and other NPR executives have also identified kicking collaborations up a notch as a key growth strategy. That can mean sharing stories among stations or with other non-radio nonprofits — ProPublica for the biggest stories, a local investigative start-up for others.
As the newsrooms are staffing up, collaborations create a multiplier effect. A case in point is a regional group in Texas , run from Dallas. Vice President of News Rick Holter told me that four big-city stations — his and counterparts in Houston, San Antonio and Austin — provide assigning editors and some specialist reporters for the pooled coverage. The work reaches into 12 stations around the state and is broadcast on 30 frequencies including those in small towns.
The coordinated effort has added benefits. News breaks in the middle of the national shows eat up the time and effort of a small local staff.
Plugging stories from the state network into those slots frees up the local station journalists to do more substantive hometown stories. The structure also smoothed out what could otherwise have been embarrassing holes in coverage. The El Paso station has a small news staff, and the station in the Rio Grande area went out of the news business earlier this year when the Catholic diocese owner disaffiliated with NPR and reverted to religious programming. But KERA and the network had added a full-time immigration reporter who could roam the border as the flow of news dictated or could dispatch a team after the mall shooting in El Paso.
Not every opportunity is as big as Texas, but a similar structure is being put together in Ohio and a third is in the works for the Gulf Coast states. NPR is also building out a national collaborative network, said Bruce Auster, who directs the effort. Reporters at stations around the country contribute stories on 10 beats. As in the USA Today network, that creates a local to national and national to local system for generating deeper coverage.
I was first exposed to an expansive vision for local public radio nine years ago in a conversation with Bill Kling, founding father and longtime CEO of Minnesota Public Radio. Having grown his own empire to Paul Bunyan-esque scale, Kling argued with some passion, that many other stations were underachievers in local news and could do a lot more.
You need an independent board of directors who know what they expect and go out and raise money for it. Minnesota Public Radio has a news staff of , McTaggart said. I sampled a half dozen mid-sized markets. There was remarkable consistency to their stories — doubling or more news staff since the start of the decade and partnering within the state to go after bigger stories than a single station could tackle in WFPL in Louisville, Kentucky , is part of two regional collaboratives and, after a current hiatus, looking to grow more.
Still, new coverage opportunities come up that might have been newspaper staples in the old days, George said, such as economic development and business in Louisville and traditional accountability beats like city hall and education.
In addition to providing free high-quality, educational programming for children , arts, and award winning current affairs programming , public media stations provide life-saving emergency alert services. Public media is a system of independently owned and operated local public radio and television stations. In rural , Native American and Island communities, public broadcasting stations are often the only locally-owned-and-operated media outlets.
A handful of public broadcast licensees operate stations in more than a single state. More than 1, local public radio stations and more than local public television stations currently receive support from CPB.
CPB also provides funding to producers of programming, but cannot distribute or broadcast it. Each local public media station maintains sole authority and responsibility for selecting, presenting, and scheduling the programs that it airs.
0コメント