Note to Howie Carr: When mocking someone for misspelling a state legislator’s name, try extra hard not to misspell the name of a congresswoman. It’s Kuster, with a “K.”
Category: Media
Some worthwhile online videos about Nelson Mandela
Since learning of Nelson Mandela’s death a few hours ago, I’ve watched:
- The New York Times’ excellent video overview of his life.
- The speech he gave after his release from prison.
- A report from WGBH-TV’s old “Ten O’Clock News” on Mandela’s 1990 visit to Roxbury.
- A clip from an interview Mandela did with Bill Moyers in 1991.
- And, for good measure, Artists Against Apartheid’s video for “Sun City.” Where else can you see Miles Davis, Lou Reed and Miami Steve in one (virtual) place?
What I haven’t watched is any television coverage. It’s a new world, isn’t it?
Hartford Courant to absorb last vestiges of Advocate alt-weeklies
Long before I decided to write a book about the New Haven Independent, I knew who Paul Bass was. The New Haven Advocate, like The Boston Phoenix, was one of the crown jewels in the world of alternative weeklies. Bass, who spent much of his long stint at the Advocate as its chief political columnist, was something of a legend in that world.
The first time we met, in 2009, he told me he had decided to launch the Independent, an online-only nonprofit news site, in part because he was unhappy with what had happened to the Advocate under the ownership of the Hartford Courant and its various corporate overlords. (I wrote about the sale of the Advocate papers for the Phoenix in 1999.)
This week, about eight months after The Boston Phoenix died (survived by its sister papers in Portland and Providence), the Advocate breathed its last. In this case, there isn’t even a body to mourn, as the Courant absorbed the Advocate into a weekly supplement called CTNow. The Hartford Advocate and the Fairfield County Weekly are being subsumed into CTNow as well, according to this account by blogger and former Advocate writer Brian LaRue.
Bass has written a heartfelt tribute to the Advocate and what it meant to New Haven — and to him. Among other things, he gets at something I’ve been thinking about: whether community news sites like the Independent are, in a sense, the new alt-weeklies — not as opinionated, not as profane, not nearly as far to the left, but nevertheless representing a type of journalism that is engaged with the community in a way that few daily newspapers are.
New Haven Independent seeks to build community radio station
This article was previously published by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
The New Haven Independent, which launched eight years ago amid the first wave of online-only community news sites, may soon expand into radio.
The nonprofit Independent is one of three groups asking the FCC for a low-power FM (LPFM) license in New Haven, Conn. If successful, editor and founder Paul Bass says that “New Haven Independent Radio” could make its debut at 103.5 FM in about a year.
“It would be a fun thing if we get it. I’m told it’s very hard,” Bass says. “We’re by no means talking as if we’re going to get this license. We thought it would be worth a shot.” He envisions a mix of news from the Independent and La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, the Independent’s content partner (and landlord), as well as music, public affairs, and shows produced by local nonprofit organizations. The station would be on the air at least 16 hours a day.
The three New Haven applications are part of the FCC’s great LPFM land rush. Legislation signed by President Obama in 2011 eased restrictions on low-power stations, and the FCC is expected to approve about 1,000 applications sometime in 2014. More than 2,800 applications were received by the deadlinelast month, according to the website Radio World. (Thanks to Aaron Read of Rhode Island Public Radio for tipping me off about the Independent’s application.)
According to the Prometheus Radio Project, a longtime advocate of expanded community radio, “the over 800 low-power stations currently on the air are run by nonprofits, colleges, churches and emergency responders.” For years, the radio industry and (believe it or not) NPR fought the expansion of LPFM, arguing that new stations would interfere with established broadcast frequencies — a concern that advocates say is unwarranted.
Like all LPFM stations, New Haven Independent Radio’s broadcast footprint wouldn’t extend much beyond the city limits, although it would stream online as well — which could be significant, Bass says, given predictions that most cars will have streaming Internet radio within a few years.
Inspired by Haverhill
Bass says he got the idea from WHAV Radio in Haverhill, Mass., a nonprofit online community station (it also has a weak AM signal) whose volunteer general manager, Tim Coco, is seeking to expand with an LPFM license of his own. (I wrote about Coco’s radio ambitions last summer.) Coco, who runs an advertising agency and is a local politico of some note, is also among a group of residents working to launch a cooperatively owned community news site to be called Haverhill Matters, under the auspices of the Banyan Project.
“I’m happy I provided some inspiration,” Coco told me by email. “I believe the more local voices, the better for the community.”
Although Bass, if he is successful, may be the first hyperlocal news-site operator to start an independent radio station, the connection between the two media is a natural one. For instance, Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit site that covers Genesee County in western New York, has partnered since 2009 with WBTA, an AM station with a strong community presence. An even more ambitious project is under way in the heart of the country, as the St. Louis Beacon news site is merging with St. Louis Public Radio.
Donna Halper, a longtime radio consultant and historian who is an associate professor of communication at Lesley University, says a multiplatform presence of the sort Bass envisions is crucial at a time when the audience has become fragmented.
“These days, it’s a multimedia world, and even a low-power FM station can get people talking” about your work, she says. “In this kind of environment, the more platforms you are on, the more you have top-of-the-mind awareness.”
On the other hand, industry observer Scott Fybush, who writes about radio for his own eponymous website, warns that Bass may not quite realize what he is getting into.
“Twenty-four hours a day of radio is an unforgiving taskmaster,” Fybush said in an email. “There are lots of applicants in this LPFM window who have what appear to be noble ideas, but keeping a station going with engaging programming day in and day out isn’t easy to do.”
Three-way contest
But that’s getting ahead of things, because first Bass has to win the three-way contest for the New Haven license. And that is by no means assured. (Bass’s application was filed by the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit entity that acts as the Independent’s publisher of record.)
According to documents on file with the FCC, the other two applicants are a Spanish-language organization and a Christian broadcaster called Alma Radio. Even though LPFM is intended to encourage localism, Alma proposes to broadcast nationally syndicated religious programs, including “Focus on the Family,” hosted by the controversial evangelical leader James Dobson. Alma Radio’s oversight board, according to a “Purposes and Objectives” document it included with its application, is “composed of members who believe and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Although Bass says his ideas for the station are still evolving, he included a detailed proposal with his FCC application, with such diverse offerings as a morning news program; a daily “La Voz Latino Community Hour”; a collaboration with The Inner-City News, a local African-American publication; community theater; and a two-hour evening program to be called “Joe Ugly Presents Local Hip Hop.” (Joe Ugly is the nom de rap of a New Haven music impresario who runs an Internet radio station called Ugly Radio.)
One of the New Haven Independent’s funders has already put up $3,000, which paid for legal and engineering services. If Bass wins the license, he estimates it would cost $30,000 to build the station and $60,000 to $70,000 to pay a full-time employee to run it — a substantial amount over the approximately $500,000 a year the Independent now receives in donations, foundation grants, and corporate sponsorships.
The opportunity is clear enough. Done right, it would enable Bass to bring New Haven Independent journalism, with its hyperlocal emphasis on neighborhoods, schools, and city politics, to a new audience — and to entice that audience, in turn, into sampling the Independent.
The danger, of course, is that the radio project would drain resources and attention away from the Independent itself, diluting its mission with a gamble on a new platform that may or may not succeed. Bass’s answer to that challenge is simple and direct: “We have to make sure it doesn’t.”
Photo (cc) by Michael Coughlan and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Michael Calderone on what to expect from Carolyn Ryan
One of the first media pieces I ever wrote for The Boston Phoenix, in the mid-1990s, was on the shrinking Statehouse press corps. Among those I interviewed was a young reporter for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy named Carolyn Ryan.
Ryan went on to great success at the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She was recently named the Times’ Washington bureau chief, and Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post has written about what to expect. An excerpt:
Ryan … has managed large reporting staffs in New York and Boston and is known inside the paper as a fierce competitor who sets high expectations. Such attributes can benefit the the Times’ Washington operation, which appears to be stepping up efforts against Politico and others in driving the political conversation of the day. Ryan may help ward off the complacency that news outlets long at the top of the media pecking order can sometimes fall prey to.
Quite a rise for Ryan, a hard-working, talented journalist. She deserves this moment, and I have no doubt she’ll make the most of it.
‘Variable tolling’: A new way of sticking it to drivers
The Boston Globe’s editorial page today endorses a terrible idea: tolls that rise or fall depending on the time of day and the amount of traffic congestion. The editorial describes “variable tolling” as “a technology that keeps traffic manageable by raising prices during busy periods, thus giving drivers an incentive to use the highway at other times.”
Well, I’m fortunate enough to be able to drive off-peak most of the time, so I would be able to take advantage of those low rates. But the vast majority of drivers do not have that luxury.
Far better to improve public transportation so that people have a positive incentive to get out of their cars. Sadly, the transit system gets worse and worse. The carrot is gone, and the stick grows longer.
Lara Logan’s fair and balanced future
I give it six months before Lara Logan is hosting a talk show on Fox News and whining that she was done in by liberals. (See this New York Times report.)
BBJ: Henry is close to selling Worcester paper
The indispensable Boston Business Journal reports that John Henry may be close to selling the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, the “other” newspaper he acquired when he purchased The Boston Globe.
Craig Douglas writes that the T&G may end up in the hands of GateHouse Media, which recently implemented cuts at its two newest Massachusetts properties, the Cape Cod Times and The Standard-Times of New Bedford.
I’d like to think that Henry would sell to local owners if he could find any. The T&G may be a tough acquisition at this point, and GateHouse may be among the few prospective buyers willing to take it on.
My hope is that GateHouse, which is going through a structured bankruptcy aimed at getting $1.2 billion in debt off its back, will prove to be a better steward of the T&G than we’ve come to expect.
GateHouse’s recent move at its weekly papers in Massachusetts — reallocating resources from weaker to stronger papers rather than engaging in out-and-out cuts — offers some reason for optimism.
Update: Henry has what sounds like good news, according to the T&G — no sale before 2014, plus he’s hoping for a local buyer.
The New York Times and the Holocaust
Filmmaker Emily Harrold visited Northeastern on Thursday for a screening of “Reporting on The Times,” which explores how The New York Times covered (and didn’t cover) the Holocaust. Her film is based on Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff’s book “Buried by The Times.”
Click here for my Storify on the screening and the panel discussion that followed.
The return of Christopher Lydon
There’s big news in the Boston public radio world, as Christopher Lydon returns to the airwaves tonight at 9 with “Radio Open Source,” the radio/podcast interview program he’s been doing for some years now. He’ll be on for an hour every Thursday, with weekend rebroadcasts.
And in a sign that times change, he’ll be doing it on WBUR (90.9 FM), from which he and producer Mary McGrath — who still works with Lydon — memorably departed in 2001. Lydon and McGrath got into a dispute with then-general manager Jane Christo over the ownership of “The Connection,” the show they helmed at the time.
Lydon officially announced his return on Monday. The Boston Globe’s Joe Kahn reports on it today, the morning of Lydon’s debut.
Technically this is more of a ramp-up than a return: Lydon had been appearing regularly on Jim Braude and Margery Eagan’s show, “Boston Public Radio,” on WGBH (89.7 FM). I’m a paid contributor at WGBH, but I think it’s self-evident that the rivalry between the two public radio powerhouses has led to better local programming at both stations.
Here is what I reported for The Boston Phoenix in 2005 as “Open Source” was about to launch at UMass Lowell. (Lydon and company eventually affiliated with the Watson Institute at Brown University.)
Lydon is an on-air legend and McGrath knows how to do terrific radio. Best of luck to both of them.
Photo (cc) 2012 by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.