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May 29, 2012

NCME and iMA sponsoring Public Media Innovators audio webinar on Wednesday

Here's a look at "What ‹audio› means for public radio," from Matthew Tift of Wisconsin Public Radio. Tift is on the panel for the first-ever Public Media Innovators webinar, at 2 p.m. Eastern Wednesday (May 30) from the National Center for Media Engagement and the Integrated Media Association. Subjects will include PBS's COVE 2.0, the pros and cons of the PRX HTML5 jplayer for audio, and NPR's experiment in continuous listening, Infinite Player.

NBC, noncom reporting relationships "still in infancy" but producing stories

The collaborations between several NBC owned-and-operated stations and nonprofit news enterprises, part of Comcast's deal to takeover NBCUniversal (Current, Jan. 17), are generating "important stories they've broken together," reports TVNewsCheck.

KNBC Los Angeles and noncom KPPC-FM together revealed that a teacher arrested for sexually abusing students was paid to retire by the local school district. The nonprofit newsroom ProPublica provided data for stories on NBC stations in New York, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Hartford, Conn., on federal stimulus money. And in Philadelphia, WCAU and noncom WHYY regularly share Web content such as political and cultural reporting and weather.

"The feel of the partnership is really good," Chris Satullo, WHYY's executive news director, told the media website. "I just don’t know if the output is where we want it to be.”

But as WCAU spokeswoman Kathleen Burke noted, the the relationship is “still in its infancy.”

WPR site will enable listeners to "see" Bach piece as it is performed

Wisconsin Public Radio has developed a website to accompany its upcoming broadcast of the "Open Goldberg Variations," which is the "first fan-funded, open source, and completely free recording" of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," according to the Boing Boing website.

WPR's site will display the score, enabling listeners to "see" the music as it plays from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Central June 24, "a first-ever event, proving bleeding edge technologies," said Robert Douglass, who launched the Kickstarter project behind the production.

Partnering with WPR is MuseScore, a free music composition and notation software.

Family of WRVO's Chris Ulanowski publicly discusses his suicide

The family of Chris Ulanowski, the longtime news director of WRVO-FM in Oswego, N.Y., is speaking out about his suicide in a story in the Post-Standard at the one-year anniversary of his death.

"Most people didn’t know that the confident professional they heard on the air struggled with a severe mental illness called borderline personality disorder," the newspaper noted, "which causes unstable moods, behaviors and personal relationships. One in 10 people who have it commit suicide — more than 50 times the rate in the general population — and more than half attempt suicide at least once."

Sale approval delay by FCC hinders fundraising efforts at KUSF-FM

The FCC has yet to approve the sale of University of San Francisco's KUSF-FM, which was announced 16 months ago, reports the Bay Citizen. “It’s extremely unusual,” said Michael Couzens, an Oakland, Calif., communications attorney and former FCC staffer. “The mentality of the staff is shaped by the fact that commercial entities lose their financing if they dink and dunk around for months and years.”

And because the deal isn't finalized, federal rules prohibit KDFC from airing pledge drives, "a huge loss as it attempts to remake itself as a nonprofit," Bay Citizen notes.

“The KUSF delay has definitely impacted us, and we hope the FCC will come to a decision soon,” said Brenda Barnes, president of classical music giant KUSC. Licensee University of Southern California spent more than $6 million to purchase two frequencies: KUSF, as well as Christian music outlet KNDL, previously licensed to Howell Mountain Broadcasting Co.(Current, Jan. 24, 2011).