Ford Foundation grant signals shift away from public broadcasting

The Ford Foundation, which for decades funded much of public broadcasting, last week shifted its media grantmaking to a different medium – newspapers. The Los Angeles Times announced the $1 million grant, which according to the Times will pay for reporters to cover "Vietnamese, Korean and other immigrant communities, the California prison system, the border region and Brazil." The Times story noted that the new Brazil-based reporter will be the newspaper's first full-time correspondent in Latin America in "several years." Until now, the Ford Foundation has been more closely associated with public radio and television. Ford used to give National……

Fund cuts for public television lead to mergers; is there life after PBS?

WASHINGTON – Coping with reduced funding by state governments and other sources, public television stations are pursuing diverse options ranging from mergers and consolidation to dropping PBS network programs. As reported in early July, funding cuts led to the demise of the New Jersey Network of PBS stations, which were merged into New York's WNET. The station had earlier acquired WLIW on Long Island, so currently, WNET controls PBS programming on stations well to the east and south of New York City. New York is not unique: San Francisco's public television station, KQED, acquired KTEH, serving San Jose and the……

Newspapers Dying: The demise of geographic exclusivity

There are so many reasons why print newspapers are failing. Mostly, people complain that newspaper content is available on the Internet for free, so subscribers need not subscribe any longer, even though in reality circulation revenues were usually not more than 20% of total revenues. Or, more importantly, that classified advertising, the largest profit contributor of any newspaper, has been outdone by the efficiency of transactional web sites for homes, autos and jobs. Then there was the retail consolidation of big box stores, who hardly advertise, and chain department stores (only one advertiser rather than three or four). And the……

Rachlis in LA Times – LA Magazine

Senior Fellow Kit Rachlis is profiled in an article in the Los Angeles Times. Rachlis, during his time as editor-in-chief of the publication, is credited for the building of the Los Angeles Magazine of the 1980's which was viewed as "a lot of fluff and nonsense and fun," to being built as a reliable and award-winning magazine…….

Leading the Way to Better News: The Role of Leadership in a World Where Most of the “Powers That Be” Became the “Powers That Were”

By Geoffrey Cowan Shorenstein Center Fellow, Fall 2007 University Professor and Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership, University of Southern California February 15, 2008 #D-44 © 2008 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Published by Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Discussion Paper Series Abstract During the past several years, as traditional news operations have faced sharp declines in circulation, advertising, viewership, and audiences, and as they have begun to make a seemingly unrelenting series of cuts in the newsroom budgets, scholars and professionals have been seeking formulas or models designed to reverse……

Public radio is enjoying boom times

Dean Ernest J. Wilson III of USC Annenberg and the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy are preparing for the annual James L. Loper Lecture in Public Broadcasting on November 18, 2010. This year's speaker is NPR president and CEO, Vivian Schiller. Public radio, despite the failings of most media outlets in the US, is experiencing an increase in listeners and in funding. Below is an article published in The Los Angeles Times by James Rainey exploring the growth that is occurring in public radio. ——————————————————————————————————————————————- Larry Mantle, right, host of KPCC's popular "AirTalk" program. (Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times……

PBS: End of the Old Boys Network?

Los Angeles station KCET's announcement on Friday that it is canceling all PBS programs is a dramatic, all-stakes-on-the-table gamble. KCET is gambling that, without hefty payments to PBS and substituting a new lineup of independent and international programs for the PBS network feed, it will be a smaller but sustainable public service broadcaster. For its part, PBS is gambling that KCET cannot possibly go through with its plan and will have no alternative but to pay the substantial dues required to keep PBS programs on the station…….

Laughing at Democracy at the Mall

Marty Kaplan is one smart guy. He is now the director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment and society at the Annenberg School of the University of Southern California. The rest of his resume is embarrassing to the rest of us: He graduated summa cum laude in molecular biology from Harvard, received a first in English at Cambridge, earned a Ph.D. in modern thought from Stanford and, as a vice president of Disney, wrote a movie for Eddie Murphy. He has this theory about entertainment taking over the news, even the world. At the blackboard, he……