Media – Page 261 – Media Nation

WGBH acquires WCRB Radio

This press release literally just came in. I’ll be talking about it tonight at 7 p.m. on “Greater Boston” (WGBH-TV, Channel 2). The full text of the release follows.

Public service broadcaster WGBH today announced plans to acquire New England’s leading all-classical music station WCRB 99.5fm from Nassau Broadcasting Partners of New Jersey. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed pending filing with the FCC.

WCRB is a 27,000-watt station, deeply rooted in the Boston region, serving audiences for more than 60 years with a broad reach in New England, drawing some 340,000 loyal listeners each week. WGBH is uniquely poised to operate WCRB, with its extensive classical music programming experience, its state-of-the-art Fraser Performance Studio, and its strong alliance with Boston’s premier classical performing organizations, artists and audiences. With WCRB added to WGBH’s radio services — 89.7FM in Boston, and WCAI and WNCK on the Cape and Islands — WGBH will serve listeners from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, adding renewed vigor to the cultural economy of the region.

“An opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime. The acquisition of WCRB by WGBH signals a new era for the Boston broadcast landscape, and for our city’s renowned classical music tradition,” said WGBH Board Chair Amos Hostetter. “WGBH’s depth of experience, demonstrated leadership in radio, and commitment to excellence will bring a new level of service to this market.”

“From its very first broadcast, WGBH radio has provided audiences with the best in classical music and performance. Today we are excited to reinvest in this tradition for a new generation of listeners,” said WGBH President and CEO Jonathan Abbott. “The acquisition of WCRB will allow WGBH to sustain the vibrant classical music tradition of the Boston area.”

WGBH will finance the purchase with a special capital campaign, Keep Classical Alive, inviting both major donors and grassroots supporters to participate and become founding members of its all-classical service. Although WCRB is licensed as a commercial frequency, WGBH plans to operate the station as a non-commercial service in keeping with its mission to provide public media service for audiences in the greater Boston area. Over the coming months WGBH will fine-tune the formats of both WGBH 89.7 and WCRB 99.5 to create lineups that are complementary.

“Preserving WCRB’s heritage as one of the country’s premiere classical radio stations was an important objective for Nassau. We are extremely pleased that WGBH will be continuing this heritage and are confident in their future stewardship of such an important Boston tradition,” said Lou Mercatanti, Chairman and President of Nassau. “This is a win for everyone — most especially our loyal listeners.”

Since the 1950s WGBH has taken advantage of Boston’s vital classical music tradition. From its debut broadcast from Symphony Hall in 1951, classical music and performance have been a hallmark of WGBH’s service, featuring the region’s world-class orchestras, artists and conservatories. It has partnered with music organizations both large and small, from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Handel & Haydn Society, to the New England String Ensemble and the Boston Children’s Chorus. It has nurtured young musicians with school enrichment programs, and helped launch emerging artists.

“This is a truly exciting development. Classical music is part of our common world heritage, and as such it is in the public interest for an institution like WGBH to make sure our voices are sustained and celebrated,” said cellist Yo-Yo Ma. “As both a performer and a listener I applaud WGBH for making this significant investment in our community to ensure that the classical music genre will remain alive and well on Boston radio.”

“This is great news for music and arts education,” said Linda Nathan, co-headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy. “Keeping classical music vibrant is an extremely important resource to enhance learning. WGBH’s new service will further enrich the educational experience for students of all ages.”

“For more than 50 years WGBH and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have partnered to further the cause of classical music in Boston and beyond,” said BSO managing director Mark Volpe. “With facilities that provide unmatched technical excellence for recording and broadcasting live performance, WGBH is uniquely positioned to bring heightened awareness of the beauty and power of classical music. All of us at the BSO are excited by the possibilities resulting from WGBH’s acquisition of WCRB.”

In addition to live radio broadcasts, WGBH has been a pioneer in moving classical music onto new platforms, with live streaming, an all-classical HD channel, podcasts and mobile applications. The acquisition of WCRB will greatly enhance these efforts to serve new audiences on a broad array of distribution platforms in New England and beyond.

WGBH was represented in the transaction by Public Radio Capital.

The Taylor group gets two boosts

The Stephen Taylor-led group that’s seeking to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. is getting more interesting by the day.

Last week the Globe reported that the group includes Mary McGrath, who’s best-known for producing two Christopher Lydon-hosted shows on public radio, “The Connection” and “Open Source,” and who is a formidable journalist in her own right.

She also hails from a legendary family of journalists that includes her brother Charles “Chip” McGrath, a staff writer for the New York Times; her brother Jim McGrath, an editorial writer for the Albany Times Union; and her nephew Ben McGrath, a staff writer for the New Yorker.

On Saturday the Globe revealed that Stephen Taylor, a former high-level executive at the Globe, has been joined by his cousin Ben Taylor, a former Globe publisher who was removed by the Times Co. in 1999. (The Taylors sold the Globe to the Times Co. in 1993.)

Is it OK to start feeling optimistic?

Going lean and green with GlobeReader

Tomorrow morning, for the first time in more than 30 years, we won’t be looking for the Boston Globe on our front walkway. Last night I took a rather momentous step — I canceled home delivery of the Monday-to-Saturday print edition, leaving us only with the Sunday paper.

Why did we do this? It’s been inevitable since early this summer, when the Globe made a couple of important changes in its distribution model. First, it unveiled GlobeReader, an electronic paper that’s a faster and easier read than the Web edition. Second, it raised the price of its print edition.

Seven-day home delivery of the Globe now costs $46.56 a month in Media Nation. With advertising in what may be a permanent decline, readers are going to have to pick up more of the cost, so I certainly don’t fault the Globe for charging more. But our family is not immune from economic pressures. For us, it makes sense to go with paper on Sundays and use GlobeReader the rest of the week.

By canceling the daily Globe, are we contributing to the paper’s financial woes? We thought long and hard about that before making our decision. The Globe remains the most important news organization in Greater Boston. Civic life would be much poorer without it.

We would not have canceled the paper if the only alternative was to read it on the Web. Like virtually all newspapers, the Globe is struggling with its decision some dozen year ago to offer its content online for free. At one time, newspaper executives assumed that advertising revenues would eventually justify that decision. It didn’t happen — it may never happen — and the way out of that morass is unclear. We were not about to contribute to that pain.

But Globe executives presumably had their eyes wide open when they unveiled GlobeReader in the midst of a recession and made it available to anyone with Sunday home delivery. Clearly, the idea was to preserve the Sunday edition at all costs. I’ve been told that the Sunday paper accounts for as much as 60 percent of the paper’s revenues. So no, I don’t feel guilty about taking advantage of the Globe’s new business strategy.

Although this was not an overriding factor, it’s also true that electronic delivery is far better for the environment.

Is our move to GlobeReader permanent? Not necessarily. Mrs. Media Nation, whose affinity for old-fashioned print is stronger than mine, is interning at a school library this fall as she works her way toward a master’s. Once that’s over, depending on her schedule, we may resume print.

But if the folks at the Globe are going to offer a variety of electronic-distribution options (not just the Web and GlobeReader, but the Kindle and a mobile cellphone edition, too), we’re going to take advantage of them. I can only hope that they know what they’re doing.

How meta is this?

Media Nation links to the New Haven Independent’s coverage of the Annie Le murder, noting that the news site refrained from naming the suspect, Raymond Clark, until he had been formally charged. The Independent links back to Media Nation’s commentary on said decision and asks its readers to comment.

Check out the discussion.

Getting ready for the stretch run

In Theo Epstein-like fashion, the Boston Globe is getting ready for the stretch drive by bolstering its sports staff.

Peter Abraham, who covers the (gasp!) Yankees for the Journal News, which serves the Lower Hudson Valley, is joining the Globe to cover the Red Sox for the paper and Boston.com. “I’m sure some of you will accuse me of being a traitor because I’ll be covering the Red Sox,” Abraham writes on his blog. Yet the comments are surprisingly kind.

And speaking of refugees from Yankee country, Matt Pepin of the Times Herald-Record [now fixed] of Middletown, N.Y., has been named the sports editor of Boston.com. He’ll join the staff on Oct. 5, just in time for the playoffs. Adam Reilly has the details.

Torturing a Cheney photo

Well-known photojournalist David Hume Kennerly is ripping mad at Newsweek for cropping his photo of Dick Cheney and his family to make it look like the former vice president is picking over the remains of a small animal. (Be sure to click through so that you can see the before and after pictures.)

Appropriately enough (make that inappropriately enough), the photo was used to illustrate something Cheney had said about torture, of which he’s all in favor.

Noting that Newsweek had taken a picture of a warm family scene and cropped it so that it looked like an animal sacrifice, with Cheney as the knife-wielding priest, Kennerly writes:

This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

Kennerly’s right on target, as the lame response from a Newsweek spokesman makes clear. The photo was tortured into something that it was not. As a result, it’s not journalism, either.

Murder suspect charged — and named

Police in Connecticut this morning finally charged Raymond Clark in connection with the murder of Yale University student Annie Le. And with that, the New Haven Independent — which had refused to identify Clark when he was merely a “person of interest” — has named him and posted a photo.

Earlier: “Ethics, competition and a high-profile murder.”

Paul Bass on (not) naming names

After I posted an item earlier today on the New Haven Independent’s decision not to identify Raymond Clark, the “person of interest” in the murder of Yale University student Annie Le, I invited editor Paul Bass to comment on his decision.

Bass replied by e-mail, telling me that “you’re so right — it’s futile. But we wanted to be consistent.” He added that “we originally broke the story about this suspect. The national media said a student was the suspect. We reported that, no, it was a lab tech, and we gave details that wouldn’t lead the public to be able to find him. We had the name pretty early, and some good info, but decided to go with the basic story.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Bass explained, “We do have quite a strong policy about withholding names. In our routine police stories, we rarely name people (non-public figures) arrested unless there’s a compelling reason, or we’ve gotten their side. We might be wrong, for sure. Lotta back and forth. Maybe a futile high horse thing. Don’t know.”

Chasing the missing e-mails

Two quick comments on the growing controversy over the missing City Hall e-mails:

The Boston Globe has done an impressive job, both in uncovering the fact that Michael Kineavy, a top aide to Boston Mayor Tom Menino, had deleted the e-mails, and in following up. In particularly like the story in today’s paper about the forensics of e-mail recovery.
Attorney General Martha Coakley’s quote in the Boston Herald today strikes me as the first misstep of her Senate campaign. “Particularly understanding this is the middle of a [mayoral] campaign, we get lots of complaints from folks who are adversaries who have a particular agenda,” Coakley says.

Whoa. Though it’s certainly true that the e-mails — public records — may prove to be no big deal, it’s also true that they may be related to the criminal probe of former state senator Dianne Wilkerson. Coakley’s going to have to do better than that.