NPR chief Vivian Schiller: Don’t take the work of news gatherers for granted

At this time of tremendous upheaval in American news media, its leaders should not focus on transformation at the expense of fortifying and expanding concrete, on-the-ground reporting. That was the message offered Thursday by NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller as she delivered the James L. Loper Lecture in Public Service Broadcasting at USC Annenberg. "For well over a decade, at gatherings like this, news people have obsessed about transformational technologies, vanishing business models and new paradigms of mass communication," Schiller told an audience of students, faculty members and leaders of influential Los Angeles-area media who gathered at USC Town……

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……

NPR, Juan Williams and the Clash of News and Talk

"Would you have fired Juan if you were still Vice President of News at NPR?" asked a longtime friend. He was referring of course to NPR News analyst Juan Williams' expression of concern about fellow airplane passengers in "Muslim garb." (Rhetoric note: He was trying to make the exact reverse point than his subordinate preamble suggested, so he's due demerits for poor phrasing.) My answer: It's not a hypothetical. We actually faced these same issues in the late 1980's, when I was head of NPR News: Cokie Roberts, who was covering Capitol Hill for NPR, received an offer from ABC……