KALW beta testing news website

San Francisco's KALW-FM launched a new website today that combines local news, arts and culture coverage and community engagement. KALWNews.org features reporting from the station's drive-time newsmagazine Crosscurrents and provides links to reporting by other local news organizations. It also invites users to share their stories, report on their communities and submit comments or commentaries. One of the five reporting beats carved out by the KALW newsroom--criminal justice coverage--will expand under NPR's Argo Project, a national-local pilot testing station-based approaches to online news coverage, according to Holly Kernan, news director. KALWNews.org was developed in collaboration with Margaret Rosas of Quiddities, the Santa Cruz-based company that received a Knight Foundation grant to develop an open source web publishing system for public radio stations. Kernan described the launch as a beta test. "This is an experiment in public media," she said.

"Think Tank" ending 15-year run

The long-running weekly pubaffairs series Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg is ceasing production at the end of the month, according to a press release. "It is no secret that it is very hard to raise money for any kind of media underwriting or advertising now, public or private," Wattenberg said in the statement. "But I hope that when the economy turns around, which I believe has already begun, we will be back not only with our weekly public television program, but with some exciting specials which are already in development." Over the past 15 years guests have included legal scholar Robert Bork, economists Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith former ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and congressman Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Audience study fails to think outside the box, Hill says

Public radio needs to completely re-engineer itself for the networked environment, writes Hearts of Space producer and host Stephen Hill, in a critique of public radio's Grow the Audience project final report. The recommendations "are mostly bland reiterations of the core values of the public media catechism . . . , cautiously extending a toe outside the box while continuing to view the world from inside it," he writes. "This approach cannot work, because innovation is not needed at the level of the public radio value system. Nor will modest, incremental online innovations be sufficient. What is needed is a new set of incentives and structural relationships between the major elements of the system and the audience that will enable and fuel an expanded set of digital services with their own logical business models" [Emphasis in original]. Hill, who produces radio programs and operates a subscription-based online music service, has been a leading advocate for creation of a comprehensive web service of pubcasting content. Hill's critique is adapted from a report he wrote for the Grow the Audience project last summer.

Public media conference to focus on high-impact projects

"Real Stories, Real Impact" is the subject of this year's Making Your Media Matter confab sponsored by the Center for Social Media at American University. The meeting, In Washington on Feb. 11 and 12, will examine "methods for assessing various elements that contribute to high-impact public media projects," according to the center. Register online.

Blogger criticizes "Between the Lions" CD in Chick-fil-A kids' meal

Tim Graham, a blogger with the conservative site Newsbusters, was upset during a recent drive-through visit to Chick-fil-A. Included in his daughter's kid's meal was a Between the Lions CD, with logos of WGBH and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. "This underlines how blurry the line is between public broadcasting and private-sector merchandising," he writes on the site that calls itself "the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias." The "Hypocrisy!" in the headline refers to PBS President Paula Kerger's comments at the recent winter press tour that children's programming on commercial stations is built mainly around opportunities to sell toys to kids.

Frontline delays "Dancing Boys" documentary

Frontline has delayed its Dancing Boys of Afghanistan documentary due to concerns over the safety of a boy in the film, Broadcasting & Cable reports. It's about the custom of "Bacha Bareesh," in which boys are sold to men who keep them as concubines. In the film, an Afghan journalist infiltrated one of the rings and spoke with several boys and their "masters." It was schedule for Jan. 19; a repeat of A Death in Tehran will air instead.

BNET says San Francisco news hybrid is a no-go; Berkeley dean denies report

The deal to start up a local nonprofit news organization in San Francisco (Current, Oct. 13, 2009) has fallen apart, according a BNET blog report quoting anonymous sources. KQED, the public radio and TV outlet that was to partner with the journalism school of the University of California in Berkeley to launch the organization with backing from philanthropist Warren Hellman, is beset by internal turmoil, reports David Weir, a journalist/blogger and former KQED exec. "Sources have told me that the various parties to the negotiations have not been able to come up with a consensus over how to run the new news organization, and as of today, financier Hellman’s patience has apparently run out." UPDATE: Neil Henry, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, tells Poynter Institute blogger Jim Romensko: "The Bay Area News Project is alive and well and ready to start business. The first board meeting will be conducted next week. We have secured an outstanding CEO and an extraordinary editor in chief whose names will be announced later this month. The only change since our announcement in September is that KQED will not play a role as a founding partner, but we look forward to its active participation."

Strategies for pubradio audience growth lack priorities, Sutton says

Public radio marketing consultant John Sutton is troubled by the "something for everybody" approach outlined in "Public Radio in the New Network Age," the final report from the CPB-backed Grow the Audience project. "'Do everything' is not a strategy," Sutton writes on his blog. Even if decision-makers follow the report's recommendation to focus resources on stations in the top 50 markets, "the reality is that there aren’t enough resources to serve the objectives listed....Further prioritization is necessary to make smart, effective investments in audience growth." The report, written by the Station Resource Group after an 18-month research and consultation project, is "silent" on how these priorities will be set, Sutton notes. "We believe the difficult decisions about who gets help and who gets left behind should be fully transparent."

Start social networking before disaster strikes

In an interview with BayNewser, Andy Carvin explains how NPR News is using social media to track developments and find sources in Haiti. The network's social media guru also offers some insights about how to cultivate contacts and reliable news sources over time.

PBS stunned at volume of preschoolers' video streaming: 87.5 million streams in month

PBS was expecting online streaming of PBS Kids shows for the 2-5 set to be popular when it started late last year; the usage of shows for older kids, 6-plus, which went online earlier, had fluctuated around 2 million video streams a month. They were not prepared for the tots’ appetite: 87.5 million streams in December. PBS kept mum about the number until the press tour and the NETA Conference this week. Station folk broke into applause Wednesday as PBS education chief Rob Lippincott announced the figure. Streaming of the little kids’ programs rises in the evening as the grownups’ NewsHour grabs the TV sets, he said.