Check out this startling report from Public Media Company showing how the public support (the dollars raised by individual stations, not from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) for radio is overtaking that of public TV. I've always maintained that when public radio concentrates on its public service journalism mission, it will grow audience... and that's what's been happening over the years. Partly this graph shows the challenge of public TV in this highly competitive environment for video attention, but it also shows radio's exceptional staying power. Public Radio Overtakes Public TV – Public Media Company. While both public radio and television revenue have grown in recent years, radio’s higher growth rate has led to public radio revenue overtaking public TV’s revenue for the first time ever (based on Non-federal Financial Support (NFFS) data from CPB). It is easy to see why when you compare the revenue growth rates of public... Continue reading

7 lessons from revenue teams at exemplary Civic News Organizations. During the American Journalism Project’s first few months, one focus of ours has been to understand what’s known and what’s not known about Civic News Organization revenue operations. We’re learning a lot about the Civic News Organizations, or CNOs, doing crucial public-service journalism throughout the country, in order to be prepared in our own work to boost the sustainability efforts and the revenue-generating capacity of the CNO ecosystem. We know, for example, that people matter. The success of revenue teams depends on the talent and effort of people who believe in local news and spend all day, every day figuring out how to pay for it . As such, one of the first projects we undertook was to study existing revenue roles and teams within exemplary CNOs, in partnership with the News Revenue Hub and the Impact Architects. Today we’re... Continue reading

(I'm glad to see Pew rolling out its 2019 State of the News Media, piece by piece. Yours truly pays close attention to the public broadcasting industry, so it makes sense to highlight that section here on the blog. Good to see stability and financial growth in NPR/PBS land, but troubling to see audience growth is flat.Click through for the full dive! -- MM) Hundreds of local and regional radio and television stations comprise the U.S. public media system. On the radio side, organizations such as NPR, American Public Media (APM) and Public Radio International (PRI), which merged with PRX in 2018, produce and distribute programming, reaching audiences through local stations as well as digital channels. Individual stations, such as New York’s WNYC and Chicago’s WBEZ, produce nationally syndicated original journalism as well. On the television side, PBS NewsHour produces an evening newscast that airs on local PBS stations around... Continue reading

(It's been happening gradually for many years. Public radio has invested in news coverage. Commercial radio has gambled on talk, talk, talk. So here we are... the cross fade in audience loyalty is happening. Having spent my career in building local public media news, I'm feeling satisfaction today. -- MM) What do heritage commercial News and Talk stations WBAP, KIRO-FM, KOGO and WBT have common? Not so long ago, each was the leading radio news source in their market. According to Nielsen Audio May 2019 PPM ratings, they were replaced in the top spot by a local NPR News/Talk station. Spark News readers know about the amazing progress NPR News/Talk stations have made in growing their listening and number of listeners in recent years. However, commercial radio operators are just beginning to hear the news... Read Ken Mills' full article: SPARK NEWS: IN 32% OF NIELSEN PPM MARKETS, NPR NEWS... Continue reading

SEATING IS LIMITED. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: MAY 1st! Sixth Annual PRNDI News Manager Training & Certification When: June 12-13, 2019 (prior to the start of the PRNDI Conference) Where: NPR Headquarters, Washington, DC Who: Public media news directors, managers or aspiring news managers from any size shop, any experience level. Seating limited to the first 20 applicants. What: Two-day training on essentials of modern public media newsroom management, resulting in a custom action-plan and a PRNDI certificate of completion. "Presenters were well-prepared, organized and very helpful." -- Aaron Schachter, WGBH Why PRNDI provides this important training Today's newsroom leaders face BIG challenges: they set editorial strategy and ethical standards for their organizations; they plan short-term and long-range coverage; they assign and edit stories to serve changing audience needs; they manage people and budgets; and, they're helping navigate a digital future for public media journalism. This dynamic, interactive two-day workshop will focus... Continue reading

American Journalism Project Launches Major Effort to Reinvigorate Local News with $42 Million in Founding Commitments - American Journalism Project. American Journalism Project Launches Major Effort to Reinvigorate Local News with $42 Million in Founding Commitments - American Journalism ProjectNew venture philanthropy organization will work collaboratively to catalyze a new generation of civic news organizationsFeb. 26, 2019. Miami, Fla. — The American Journalism Project, a new initiative to reinvigorate mission-driven local news through the power of venture philanthropy, today announced its official launch with $42 million in lead funding commitments, a Board of Directors, and its first three hires.Founded by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton (founders of Chalkbeat and The Texas Tribune, respectively), the American Journalism Project is the first venture philanthropy organization dedicated to strengthening an ecosystem of civic news organizations that believe local journalism a public good.The organization will support existing and emerging news organizations with grants and... Continue reading

Things We Don’t Talk About (But Should): An Open Letter to Media FundersJessica Clark, Dot Connector StudioMolly de Aguiar, News Integrity InitiativeNext week, several hundred people from national, community, and place-based foundations, as well as newsrooms and other nonprofits, will come together at the Knight Media Forum in Miami. The conference focuses on philanthropy’s role in strengthening local news and information, which is essential for healthy communities and a vibrant democracy. We believe there’s an important conversation missing from the conference schedule: a discussion of the power imbalance inherent in funder-grantee relationships, and what we can do about it.Funders wield immense power over the field of nonprofit news, from what they choose to value and support, to how the boundaries of “journalism” are defined, to how they design their systems and processes. Any nonprofit that has ever tried to figure out how to get its foot in the door with... Continue reading

REPOSTING FROM ASU SITE. BIG NEWS IN PUBLIC MEDIA.October 26, 2018 The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has awarded a grant of $1.1 million to Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication to develop and manage the Editorial Integrity and Leadership Initiative. The two-year initiative will provide training for 100 editors to strengthen their ability to lead public media’s growing newsrooms and collaborations while upholding the highest editorial standards. ASU's Cronkite School is establishing an initiative that will provide training for 100 editors to strengthen their ability to lead public media’s growing newsrooms and collaborations through a $1.1 million grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Download Full Image “Skilled, effective editors are vital to the success of public media’s journalism as they oversee the development of content that informs our country’s civil discourse,” said Kathy Merritt, CPB’s senior vice president of journalism and radio. “This initiative will... Continue reading

Journalism School Educators Academy – The Whole Story. On July 12 and 13, nine journalism educators from universities across the United States gathered in Portland to take part in the inaugural Solutions Journalism Educators Academy at the University of Oregon’s George S. Turnbull Portland Center. The Academy is an initiative of the Catalyst Journalism Project. Kathryn Thier, a University of Oregon instructor and leading expert on the practice and teaching of solutions journalism, developed and taught the intense two-day training on teaching solutions journalism at the collegiate level. Thier covered sessions on teaching the four qualities; framing, sourcing and finding solutions stories; advocacy, rigor and impostors; community engagement and interviewing; story structure; creating learning goals and objectives; and refining assignments and instructional activities. Nicole Dahmen and Brent Walth, also UO faculty members, contributed sessions on how solutions journalism connects with visual communication and investigative reporting. In addition, participants heard from... Continue reading

Letter from the executive director: Announcing ‘Local that Works’ finalists | Current “What is happening in public media is the best-kept secret in America. Stations are amplifying under-covered stories, seeking solutions and doing a good job with limited resources. We have to shout from the rooftops how public media is improving people’s lives.” The four finalists for 2018 are: Alaska Public Media in Anchorage for “Community in Unity” — a solutions-based journalism project that convenes face-to-face conversations between people who would normally never interact, such as incarcerated people and those who’ve never been in a prison. KALW-FM in San Francisco for “The Intersection” — a radio series that documents the social, demographic and economic changes in Bay Area neighborhoods through the voices and stories of people who live and work near a specific intersection or corner. PBS Charlotte for “3D: Dreamers, Doers, Destiny” — a multiyear, multifaceted initiative to engage... Continue reading

Beloved war correspondent Ernie Pyle would've turned 118 years old today. He never reached his 45th birthday, as he died instantly from a Japanese sniper shot to his head during a battle in Okinawa. The Pulitzer-winning Pyle was among the most famous journalists during WWII, revered for his honest, folksy accounts of the boys in the trenches. Born in rural Indiana, he planned to retire in New Mexico, where he had built a small wood-frame house on a hill in Albuquerque. That house became the Ernie Pyle Branch Library, the first branch in the Albuquerque-Bernalillo Public Library System. Librarian Leslie Fox asked me to speak at today's Ernie Pyle Day celebration. Here are my remarks. Thanks to Leslie Fox for putting this together… and thanks to presenter Ron Paneboeuf (from NM Veteran's Memorial Park, who talked about Pyle's connection with New Mexican war cartoonist Bill Maudlin)… and thanks to the... Continue reading

News From Your Neighborhood, Brought to You by the State of New Jersey - The New York Times. Like publications in the rest of the country, New Jersey’s suburban newspapers pulled back as their business model vaporized, leaving fewer reporters to dig into local scandals or dispatch to neighborhood events. Tiny outfits like The Village Green, which covers two North Jersey towns, have sought to fill the void. The website recently featured articles about a coming vote on installing a four-way stop sign in South Orange and an update on an overnight police chase. Mary Mann, one of The Village Green’s two editors, juggles writing stories with running the website, working from her kitchen counter when she is not at meetings or protests. “I would love for us to have more county coverage,” Ms. Mann said, adding to her wish list more reporting on public schools, affordable housing and how... Continue reading

“Known but not discussed”: Low-income people aren’t getting quality news and information. What can the industry do about it? » Nieman Journalism Lab. “Known but not discussed”: Low-income people aren’t getting quality news and information. What can the industry do about it? » Nieman Journalism Lab Continue reading

(From Judith Smelser Editing & Consulting March 2018 Newsletter) It was early 2014. I'd just left my job as managing editor at Colorado Public Radio and launched into the world of self employment as an independent public media consultant, trainer, and editor. Then-PRNDI President George Bodarky and longtime trainer and consultant Mike Marcotte asked for my help with a new project that PRNDI hoped would fill a major gap in the public media training world: a workshop for current and aspiring news managers. This was a subject close to my heart. Like many public media news directors, I had been thrust into the job for the first time when my predecessor stepped away. I was a pretty decent reporter, but I had no idea how to run a newsroom, much less how to manage the colorful personalities that tend to inhabit newsrooms. I learned by trial and error, but it... Continue reading

SEATING IS LIMITED. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: MAY 15th! Fifth Annual PRNDI News Manager Training & Certification When: June 20-21, 2018 (prior to the start of the PRNDI Conference) Where: DoubleTree Hotel, Philadelphia, PA Who: Public media news directors, managers or aspiring news managers from any size shop, any experience level. Seating limited to the first 20 applicants. What: Two-day training on essentials of modern public media newsroom management, resulting in a custom action-plan and a PRNDI certificate of completion. "Presenters were well-prepared, organized and very helpful." -- Aaron Schachter, WGBH Why PRNDI provides this important training Today's newsroom leaders face BIG challenges: they set editorial strategy and ethical standards for their organizations; they plan short-term and long-range coverage; they assign and edit stories to serve changing audience needs; they manage people and budgets; and, they're helping navigate a digital future for public media journalism. This dynamic, interactive two-day workshop will focus... Continue reading

Democracy Fund establishes two new local funds By Teresa Gorman and Josh Stearns Local news is critical to a healthy democracy, and we believe that the future of local news is local. This simple idea has shaped the way Democracy Fund has thought about its work to support and strengthen the public square in America. Today, we are announcing two new locally-based and locally-driven funds – totaling more than $2 million – that will invest in ideas, people, and organizations that are working to ensure people have access to the news and information they need in these communities. The funds will focus on building more healthy news ecosystems as a vital part of just communities and a healthy democracy. These funds are not focused on maintaining the status quo in local news, but on pushing forward changes that improve how journalism serves the public and makes news and information more... Continue reading

Author’s Pretext: In Part One, I described the evolution of the New Mexico News Port as an innovation-collaboration-publication lab seated in the Communications & Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico. We explored how it started, how it now operates, its successes and challenges, and what the lab could become. In this part, I flip the telescope around and describe this teaching-hospital-model from the vantage point of the classroom instructor. This series is my contribution to the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism’s “Disruptive Educator” program, for which I was named a 2017 Fellow. I welcome your questions and comments. In the Classroom: Where the Heavy Lifting Happens Busy is the journalism instructor who succeeds in publishing every student in his reporting course. It’s not enough to impart best practices, set a deadline and then give a grade on a paper or test. Rather, you have to guide every story... Continue reading

I figure the big J-programs like Cronkite, Missou, Grady and the like are light years ahead in the Teaching-Hospital-Model of journalism They’ve grown the culture and have the resources to launch working newsrooms that produce real-world journalism from inside their schools. But what about the rest of us? Continue reading

Imagine that public broadcasting never happened in the United States — that the educational stations and networks never formed; that the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 never passed; that NPR, PBS and all of their hundreds of member stations never existed. Now imagine that this year, in 2017, there was a sudden, national wave of interest in creating a new media system subsidized by taxpayer dollars. What would such a system look like? via www.knightfoundation.org Continue reading

While the simplistic analysis of the value of public media based on the sole metric of abundant distribution and content options is wrong, it is vital to understand the technology and market changes – most importantly the confluent forces, discussed below, of big bandwidth, big data and big media – that are transforming the environment for media enterprises. These developments are already disrupting, restructuring, and in some cases, destroying parts of the media ecosystem. via www.knightfoundation.org Continue reading

“In public radio, there's this person we consider, called ‘Mary,’” said Sarah Alvarez, a recent John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. “Sometimes, when people are pitching stories, somebody will say, ‘Well, why would Mary care about that?’ And Mary is in her 50s, she's well-educated, she's white, she's affluent. And Mary is not Maria, you know?” via www.knightfoundation.org Continue reading

This unhealthy nexus between taxpayer funding and journalism has been a feature, not a bug, of public broadcasting from the start. The CPB was created by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the broadcasting component of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. The Act had a noble pedigree. Its roots can be found in the missionary zeal of 19th century New England Yankee educational reformists, whose tastes and cultural proclivities left an indelible imprint on many of America’s leading intellectual institutions. The belief by these Boston Brahmins that much of America was a cultural Appalachia upon which the New England habits of self-improvement could be imposed found a niche in the revolutionary new media of the 20th century. But this history also contains the roots of something less palatable: a sometimes patronizing approach (perhaps also harking back to the sneering patricians), which rankles many Americans. Newt Gingrich quipped in 1996, “I... Continue reading

“The biggest crisis in America is the crisis of local news,” New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet said on a panel in Silicon Valley in May 2017. The Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal will be fine, Baquet argued. “We have to figure out the Buffalos, the New Orleans, the Atlantas ... so if a school board does something important in a suburb of New Orleans or Atlanta, it's covered. … I would say to philanthropists and local leaders, you should think of a way to sustain local journalism," Baquet said, according to media journal Poynter. "I don’t know what that model is."[8] via www.knightfoundation.org Continue reading

I have a lot of sympathy for governments and regulators trying to navigate today's media and culture landscape. Nobody wants to be the Donald Trump of culture policy, bailing out of international agreements and promising to bring back the coal jobs. And nobody really wants to turn back the clock. via www.knightfoundation.org Continue reading

MIAMI – Dec. 7, 2017 – What is the role of the public media system in a digitally-driven 21st century? How might the system change to inform community today? These are the principal questions addressed in six white papers released today, commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The body of work provides diverse and provocative perspectives on ways the public media system could or should reimagine itself for the 21st century. via www.knightfoundation.org Continue reading