WYPR "darn close" to blanketing Maryland

Baltimore's WYPR will extend its service to Maryland's Eastern shore with the pending purchase of WRXS in Ocean City, a top-40 commercial station broadcasting on 106.9 FM. "The idea is for WYPR to be heard across the state of Maryland," said Andrew Bienstock, WYPR p.d., in today's Baltimore Sun. The expansion "brings us darn close." FCC approval of the acquisition is expected next month. Later in the fall, the Baltimore station will boost its signal to 15,500 watts and begin broadcasting a separate program stream in high-definition.

What next for Murdoch's Wall Street Journal?

Media analysts and writers forecast what will happen now that Rupert Murdoch has succeeded in his quest to buy the Wall Street Journal. Richard Siklos reports in the New York Times that Murdoch will likely go after his newspaper and the Financial Times by "aggressively undercutting advertising and investing heavily in editorial content--particularly in Washington and international news." Poynter Online's Rick Edmonds also predicts an expansion of the Journal's Washington bureau, and not as many defections among the Journal's editorial staff as many would expect. The special committee created to preserve the Journal's editorial independence "won't amount to much," Edmonds writes.

National Archives cuts DVD deal with Amazon

The National Archives announced a non-exclusive agreement to sell digital copies of its historic films on Amazon.com. The first DVDs, a collection of newsreels from the 1950s and 60s, went on sale July 16. The Washington Post contrasted the Archives' agreement with the Smithsonian's controversial contract with Showtime, the premium cable network.

FCC wants DTV education ideas

The FCC is seeking comment (PDF) on potential digital TV transition consumer education initiatives, the commission announced today. The FCC wants input on proposals designed to "convey the timing, logistics and benefits of the DTV transition to consumers," including PSAs, notices on consumer electronics equipment and in cable and satellite bills, employee training by consumer electronics retailers and tweaks to the DTV.gov partners program. Lawmakers last week complained about the government's meager efforts to educate the largely clueless public about the Feb. 17, 2009 switch-off of analog TV. APTS, which has been working to secure some of the relatively paltry $5 million the government set aside for DTV education, endorsed a bill earlier this month that would boost such funding to $20 million. An APTS study found earlier this year that roughly 61 percent of TV households that rely on over-the-air analog had no idea that these signals will cease in 2009.

Senators concerned about digital transition

At a hearing yesterday, Senators lamented the government's puny efforts to educate people about the digital TV transition, reports the Los Angeles Times. Speaking to Federal Communications Commission and Commerce Department officials, lawmakers said more funding was needed for government-sponsored public education, in part because the television industry was not doing enough. The anxiety is fueled by a Association of Public Television Stations survey that indicated 61% of respondents had no idea a digital switch was coming (Current, Feb. 12, 2007)."I think there's high potential for a train wreck here," said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) imagined what would happen if TV screens went blank on Feb. 18, 2009: "They're not going to call you," she told FCC officials. "They're going to call me, and they're going to be mad."

"I think PBS has enormous potential to become an engine of change in the new world of democratized video," writes TV producer Michael Rosenblum, who spoke at last weekend's National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) board planning conference in New York [Via Technology360]. In his blog post following the speech, Rosenblum says, "Perhaps [PBS] is better positioned than anyone else to effect this change - this need for publishing instead of producing." Rosenblum's advice to pubcasters? "Become a node for video literacy. A place where people could come for training, have their work reviewed, edited and if good enough, published. A true voice for the community and a place where the community could learn to speak and resonate. It's a noble goal, and one that commercial broadcasters will not pick up."

NPR joins battle over satellite radio merger

The Washington Post reports on why the proposed merger of two "bit players in the media world"--satellite radio companies XM and Sirius--has stoked such a huge lobbying battle in Washington. The National Association of Broadcasters has mounted an aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign, while NPR quietly petitioned the FCC on July 9 to block the merger. Granting one company a monopoly on digital satellite radio would "substantially harm the diversity of voices" heard on the media platform, NPR lawyers wrote in the petition, because the merged companies would pare their channel line-ups and very likely drop some public radio programming. "A monopoly . . . would certainly be able to demand less favorable licensing terms, thereby forcing NPR and others to decide between program quality and carriage," NPR said. Sirius distributes many NPR talk shows and weekly series; XM offers the Bob Edwards Show and programs from Public Radio International and American Public Media.

Moyers letter to Ombudsman

Bill Moyers responded to PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler's July 20th column, which criticized Moyer's program about impeachment for lacking balance, by writing "The journalist’s job is not to achieve some mythical state of equilibrium between two opposing opinions out of some misshapen respect -- sometimes, alas, reverence -- for the prevailing consensus among the powers-that-be. The journalist’s job is to seek out and offer the public the best thinking on an issue, event, or story. That’s what I did regarding the argument for impeachment." The statement was part of a letter distributed to media who covered Getler's critique, including Romenesko and the right-wing NewsBusters. Getler had written that "there was almost a complete absence of balance, as I watched it, in the way this program presented the case for impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney." Moyers' letter also notes that Getler, in a previous column (January 5) , called for more aggressive reporting on issues surrounding the Iraq war -- including impeachment.

Getler has responded to Moyers' letter in a new column entry. He writes: "while conventional, equal-time balance is frequently a false measure, the absence of any balance can undermine any program."

Study: Social media building new connections in pubradio

The effectiveness of social media tools is hard to measure and such efforts don’t yet produce obvious financial rewards, but many pubradio stations are building new audience relationships with blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other participative online bells and whistles, according to a just-released study. The paper, titled “Public Radio’s Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge,” is sponsored by the Center for Social Media at Washington’s American University and the Public Radio Exchange. It represents one of the first efforts to track how and to what extent stations are incorporating social media tools into their websites. The resulting report isn’t meant to be a comprehensive picture of the system--its designers intentionally reached out to tech-savvy stations, said Jake Shapiro, PRX executive director. “It should be helpful to stations contemplating jumping further into social media experimentation,” he told Current. While such projects may not result in “easy-to-see increases in membership or dollars,” according to the paper, half of the survey respondents said the efforts had helped their stations connect with their communities. The study also outlines some loose recommendations based largely on interviews with staffers from four stations selected based on their “track record with social media”: Minnesota Public Radio, KQED in San Francisco, KUT in Austin and Chicago’s WBEZ.

APTS digital tv study

The Association of Public Television Stations reports that "older Americans are significantly more likely to receive their television signals over-the-air, and are therefore less prepared than the rest of the U.S. population to transition from analog to digital-only television in 20 months." The findings are from a new APTS study based on more than 10,000 phone calls earlier this year. The study also found that that only 17 percent of over-the-air viewers age 65 and older owned a digital TV.