Michael V. Marcotte

CPB awards $1 million for Editorial Integrity and Leadership Initiative to ASU's Cronkite School

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... Read more →

Attributes of U.S. Public Media Newsrooms: Overview

Using survey research from 2010-2012, the author describes in unprecedented detail the capacity and practices of local public media newsrooms. Read more →

Gender Inequity in Public Media Newsrooms

Looks like we have a ways to go in local public radio and television. Like the rest of the media, women are underrepresented in our newsrooms. What prompted me to take a dive into these never-before-reported numbers was the recent study by the The Women’s Media Center, The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2013, which reported, "stubborn gender inequality in the ways that women are employed and represented in news, entertainment and technology-related media..." "Thanks to detailed reports filed by public stations... we can begin to examine the composition of local public broadcasting newsrooms." The theory is simple: women make up 51% of the population, so their presence in media should be comparable. Where it isn't (and it isn't), discrimination may be in play. While the WMC study includes a section on U.S. radio and television, it lumps public broadcasters together with commercial. Moreover, the data used is... Read more →

Public Radio's Only Hope: Hope

A year at Stanford, and I'm finding my inner optimist. It's probably the contagious positivity around here. So I can't help but see the NPR crisis in hopeful terms. I'll assume you've been following the news and know NPR has now said farewell to three top executives in three months: President & CEO Vivian Schiller, Development SVP Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian), and News SVP Ellen Weiss. The departures were triggered by controversial incidents: the mishandled firing of NPR news analyst Juan Williams, then the sting video of Ron Schiller schmoozing fake nasty Muslim donors while talking smack about Tea Party activists. The immediate context for all this blood-letting is the debate in congress over federal funding of public broadcasting. But the bigger context for you, me and democracy is the future of trustworthy journalism, which my dutiful colleagues and I in public media have been trying to forge.... Read more →

How to Save Ourselves From the 'Save PBS' Routine

Publicly funded media is something worth fighting for at a local and national level. But the politics of the current fight are clear: The right calls for budget cuts because it says NPR and PBS are too left-wing. Liberal defenders weigh in to defend the CPB budget, making few or no demands on public broadcasters. This all but guarantees that public broadcasting will continue to be pushed to the right, and further away from its intended mission. via www.fair.org I have had my quibbles with FAIR (or any other group that wants to use the news system of public media as a means to ideological ends) but I agree with this argument. The CPB is politicized (by design, actually, via its appointed board of directors) and thus has never been the strong heat-shield it needs to be to the protect editorial independence of public media outlets. And the federal budget... Read more →

The American Conservative » Why NPR Must Go

In case you're wondering what the fuss in congress is about this week, here is an excerpt from Pat Buchanan: First, the United States government should not be in the news business at all. Arguments and debates about public affairs should be the province of private citizens. If the government must engage in propaganda in times of war or tension, to sell its policies abroad, the home front should remain insulated from that propaganda. When director Bruce Herschensohn’s brilliant “Years of Lightning, Day of Drums” about JFK’s White House days was made by the United States Information Agency, it was only by special dispensation that it was allowed to be shown to the American public. Of course what Buchanan is doing here is comparing apples and oranges. Domestic public broadcasting in the United States has no connection to the USIA... and what links it has to any executive branch agency... Read more →

Local Public News Conspicuous in FCC's "Future of Media"

Despite general lack of representation, public media journalists were acknowledged -- and often praised -- during a daylong workshop at the FCC, in what could be a signal that stronger federal support is around the corner. Read more →

CPB: Launches New Local Journalism Initiative

Washington, DC -- The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) today announced funding for a major journalism initiative that will increase original local reporting capacity in seven regions around the country, and a planning project to develop an open information architecture to harness the collective power of the public media network. via www.cpb.org Finally! Those of us who took at run at this project were given a very narrow window of time to respond last summer. Only three weeks, as I recall. Boy did we hurry! We thought we were going to launch something by last October! In my case, the LJC proposal I wrote for a consortium of Northeast stations was deemed "too big" (according to a CPB official). Still, I'm a big fan of the effort and expect to be working with "The Plains" group on its training plan. Congrats to all the projects! And thank you, CPB! This... Read more →