Public media for young Angelenos: it's more than news

"For our target audience, entertainment is the gateway drug to news," said Nicole Childers of L.A. Public Media (LAPM) when she unveiled LA>Forward, the first content offering of Radio Bilingue's service for a new generation of young adults in Los Angeles. Childers, chief content officer of the CPB-backed start-up, presented the website and the research that informed its design Sept. 24 during a session at Public Radio Program Directors conference in Denver. The multimedia website launched Sept. 16 with coverage of news, entertainment and sports--key topics defined during seven months of research led by Paragon Media Strategies. Short-form video is key to reaching young Angelenos, Childers said, and she screened several that reflected the balance her editorial team is trying to strike between cultural relevance, news that directly impacts the lives of young Latinos, and passion for sports. LAPM is initially targeting Latinos but plans to expand its reach to other ethnic minorites, all of whom want a media service that represents their experiences as Angeleos and "the melting pot that is L.A.," Childers said. "We consider entertainment to be the lure for those in our target audience who would not ordinarily come to the site if we only offered news and information," she explained. The PRPD session was moderated by Paragon's Mike Henry and also featured two contemporary music stations making inroads in reaching younger, college educated adults, The Current in Minneapolis and Radio Milwaukee. Henry's presentation is downloadable here with free subscription to Paragon's website.

Here's a map to the public media network universe, without all those annoying folds

Do you feel caught in the kudzu of the public media 2.0 ecosystem as entities network and proliferate? Check out "A Guide to Rising Public Media Networks in the U.S.," courtesy of Jessica Clark at the Center for Media, via the MediaShift blog.

Library discovers film gems in PBS collection, turns over copies to British Film Institute

The Library of Congress is turning over to the British Film Institute more than 68 rare recordings from 1957 to 1969 that were discovered in the Library's National Educational Television Collection, reports the Government Video website. NET was the forerunner to PBS. PBS had donated its film and video holdings, some 20,000 reels, to the library through WNET/Thirteen in New York. For many years, NET imported a host of British teleplays and comedies -- still popular on PBS today. One gem that is typical of the collection: Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens in “Much Ado About Nothing,” stage-directed by Franco Zeffirelli, from 1967. “In the archival world, television repatriations are exceedingly rare," said Mike Mashon, head of the library’s Moving Image Section. He said the library is “delighted” to make high-quality preservation copies of those programs and share them with the BFI and the British public. “In the meantime, we’ll keep looking for more lost shows.”