PULLMAN, Wash., Jan. 27 — Washington State University issued the following news release:

The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University was rated among the top 25 journalism schools in the country in a survey by a national magazine for news professionals.

Finishing near the top in the survey by NewsPro Magazine were Syracuse University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the University of Missouri, and the University of Southern California. The top 25 were published in the December issue of the magazine. No specific ranking was assigned to most schools listed among the top 25, including the Murrow College.

Named for its famous CBS News alumnus, the Murrow College is the only program in the Northwest that offers sequences in all six communication fields: advertising, broadcasting, communication, communication studies, journalism, and public relations. It offers the only comprehensive broadcast program in the state. Its broadcast journalism sequence has been rated in the top 5 in the nation by the Radio Television Digital News Association.

The latest journalism school rankings survey was the first by NewsPro Magazine. The survey also asked readers what they would most like to see taught at journalism schools. The top answers were “writing,” “reporting,” and “ethics.” Other answers included “digital or new media,” “grammar,” and “objectivity,” according to the magazine.

Articles in the same edition of the magazine featured efforts at journalism schools to combine technology and journalism, producing journalism graduates also savvy in areas like social media and web design. It is that “multi-platform” approach to journalism that has been incorporated into the communication program at Murrow College, which features computer labs and graphics design facilities.

The College is noted for combining professional skill-building and theory. It operates Northwest Public Radio, a 16-station regional network that can be heard by 3.6 million residents in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, along with two PBS television stations. Student-written news stories are published by professional news organizations throughout the state through the “Murrow News Service,” which includes a bureau in the state capital, Olympia.

The magazine based its survey on more than 400 persons who were in a pool of subscribers to NewsPro and “TVWeek.com.” They described themselves as news professionals, educators and students. More than 136 respondents listed themselves as “non-news professionals,” a category that the magazine said includes television producers and network executives. For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com

Turns out American Public Media’s former president, Bill Kling, was right — Garrison Keillor wasn’t irreversibly determined to retire from hosting A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor sparked a kerfuffle in the system in March when he told the AARP Bulletin that he was leaving the show in spring 2013. Back then, Kling had dismissed Keillor’s statement as a publicity stunt, intended to tease supporters and bring new contributors into the APHC talent mix. “He throws things out there to see what the reaction would be,” Kling told Current in March.

Sure enough, Keillor told the Sioux City Journal Dec. 1 that he had “thought about” leaving his hosting duties at the program. “And then it panicked me . . . which got me to rethinking the whole brilliant idea,” he said. “The show is going well. I love doing it. Why quit?”

For those of you keeping track, Keillor created APHC in 1974. He said his first farewell on June 13, 1987, proclaiming he was “returning to the life of a shy person.”

In March 1988 he did ‘‘A Prairie Home Companion: The 2nd Annual Farewell Performance’’ at Radio City Music Hall.

Within two years, he was back on the radio with a Prairie Home–like show called American Radio Company of the Air. By 1992, Keillor was back with APHC.

Philadelphia’s NBC station will work with pubcaster WHYY and its hyperlocal news project NewsWorks. NBC’s station in Los Angeles similarly will work with American Public Media’s KPCC-FM. NBC’s San Diego station hooked up months ago with the nonprofit newsroom voiceofsandiego.org. All 10 NBC TV stations will work on projects with nonprofit newsroom ProPublica. The partners will share such things as story development, footage, technical facilities, personnel, promotional time and website connections.

By James Rainey, Tribune Newspapers
December 27, 2011

The voice coming out of the radio sounded folksy and a bit worn out, speaking words so honest they almost made you feel embarrassed to be listening in. But all Don Holzschuh, a trucker from Iowa, did was tell the truth: The bills could pile up so high, sometimes it was hard to make it on his income of about $50,000 a year.

When interviewer Kai Ryssdal suggested the recession had been over for a couple of years, Holzschuh snorted out a short chuckle. “I’m one nostril above the water,” he said, “and when a wave comes by, it puts me under.”

Holzschuh’s words came courtesy of “Marketplace,” the Los Angeles-based public radio program that has grown while other old-media outlets have been shrinking and has built an expanding national audience by putting a human face on business and the economy. It’s done all this from an unlikely, off-off Wall Street perch: studios on Figueroa Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles.

It hasn’t hurt that interest in all manner of financial news has risen during the ongoing economic crisis. Among the beneficiaries have been franchises with a sharp focus on markets and investors, including the more well-rounded, consumer-oriented “Marketplace.”

Snippets of “We’re in the Money” or “Stormy Weather” accompany the show’s good or bad news on the markets, refrains so ubiquitous that they join talk doyenne Terry Gross’ purr and the incessant cackle of the “Car Talk” guys as the signature sounds of public radio.

“Marketplace” has grown into a behemoth and spawned several spinoffs because it does more than merely “the numbers.” The half-hour show specializes in finding owners who’ve lost homes in the mortgage crisis, commiserating with the growing legion of unemployed and, as a recent example, inviting actress/writer Mindy Kaling of TV’s “The Office” in to muse about Christmas among her Hindu family.

The cumulative weekly audience for the “Marketplace” and its related programs, like “Marketplace Money” and the “Marketplace Tech Report,” has grown to a combined 9.3 million per week. That’s compared with 5.3 million a week in 2001, shortly after the franchise was bought by the Minnesota-based public radio power that is now called American Public Media.

More than 500 public radio stations carry the shows. That includes “Marketplace Money” on the weekend and “Morning Report,” updates that public radio stations tend to sprinkle into weekday breaks in National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

“Marketplace” has survived for more than two decades. But before it came along, tweedy public radio hadn’t embraced business programming. Then a journalist named JJ Yore, who had covered public media, moved West from Washington, D.C., to launch “Marketplace,” which began with only three other full-time employees, including Jim Russell, a co-creator and the show’s first executive producer.

Yore just wanted to tell good stories and to send a message by basing the program far outside the financial industry’s cozy home base. He had no idea about the complications involved in sustaining such an enterprise. The program survived only because the University of Southern California stepped in during the 1990s to give it financial support and a home, KUSC-FM. But a platform for long-term growth didn’t come until 2000.

That’s when radio magnate Bill Kling and his Minnesota-based network bought not only “Marketplace” but also, in a separate deal, acquired control of Pasadena, Calif.-based KPCC-FM. The “Marketplace” staff has almost doubled in size since then, to nearly 50. Yore recently was promoted to general manager of the franchise and was replaced as executive producer by Deborah Clark, a veteran of the show whose previous efforts helped make the former NPR program “Day to Day” a small gem.

“Marketplace” works because it shucks the jargon and prognosticating that drive a lot of business reporting, in favor of a straight-ahead, vernacular style.

The show routinely presents people who reside far away from Wall Street, such as elderly Americans who marvel at the minuscule earnings from their certificates of deposit. The show betrays no political tilt and doesn’t shrink from dissenting voices.

Rick Wartzman, a longtime business journalist and executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University in California, praised “Marketplace” for “humanizing business.” He added: “It’s a great thing they do, because sometimes people get so steeped in it they forget that business is really about people. There has to be that human dimension.”

Host Ryssdal, 47, doesn’t come with the standard journalism pedigree. He flew in the Navy, served as a staff officer in the Pentagon and then joined the foreign service, before getting into radio while in his 30s.

“Marketplace” stands out as one of the few major economic shows not based in New York. Ryssdal, a father of four whose profile is rising as he appears on cable TV and plays host at major business forums, likes it right where he is.

“It gives us perspective,” he said, “and helps us not get caught up in the craziness.”

The “Marketplace” staff does not expect any quick exit from the story of our economic travails.

“What everyone has realized is there is an underlying shift in the economy,” Ryssdal said. “It’s going to take years to work through it. This is not a stock market story. It’s so much more.”

jrainey@tribune.com

Creagh directed ATC and became its executive producer during NPR’s formative years, from 1971 to 1981. In the 1980s he managed CPB’s Satellite Program Development Fund, which provided seed money for programs to be distributed over the new Public Radio Satellite System.

Creagh produced jazz programming with pianist Billy Taylor as host and managed KLON-FM, the Los Angeles-area jazz station in Long Beach now known as KKJZ. He built and managed Baltimore’s WJHU-FM, then licensed to Johns Hopkins University; started and directed the radio doc anthology Soundprint while at WJHU and became e.p. of Monitor Radio, the daily news service of the Christian Science Monitor, an early alternative to NPR news programming.

“In the days when we often began ATC unsure of exactly how it would end 90 minutes later, Dave’s was the steady hand on the tiller,” recalled Rick Lewis, who was a newscaster in NPR’s early days and then succeeded Creagh in other jobs. “There might have been pandemonium behind the scenes, but the precision of NPR’s sound was already emerging.”

“I always thought of Dave as modern day Tom Sawyer,” said Ernest Sanchez, a longtime public broadcasting attorney and a friend of Creagh’s for more than 35 years. “When there was serious work to be done, Dave was capable of recruiting anyone to help with the work, and convincing them they would have fun. And Dave always delivered on the fun, along with serious, imaginative results.”

“He appreciated the art of radio,” independent pubradio producer Jay Allison told Current. “He was open to the new, and he encouraged talented young producers and their unlikely ideas. Not every skilled manager is willing to to do take that risk. We all still benefit from the people and ideas Dave ushered into public radio.”

Most recently, Creagh was senior v.p. of the nonprofit Alliance for Public Broadcasting.

He was the son of Neida and Edward Creagh, a well-known correspondent with The Associated Press during the 1940s and ’50s.

Current is working on a full obituary.

Those states reduced spending on public media by 42 percent of their 2008 amount.

Free Press, which has joined the defense of federal and state aid to public media, gave the study a timely release date, one week before the congressional Super Committee’s Nov. 23 [2011] deadline to cut vast sums from the federal budget and deficit.

Josh Stearns, Free Press“As federal lawmakers are considering making further cuts to public broadcasting nationally, we wanted to make sure they understood the full picture of public broadcasting in their states,” said Josh Stearns, co-author of the study and associate program director of Free Press. “We thought if they could see that public broadcasters are already doing so much more with so much less in their state, it would help them defend the funding.”

Although some state legislatures provide no direct appropriations to pubcasting whatsoever, state funding historically has been a key source of revenue for many public TV operations. The cutbacks, like the recession itself, hit the country very unevenly. While public stations at large got 12 percent of their revenues from state governments in fiscal year 2009, state aid to stations:

* has been cut in half since 2008 in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas and South Carolina;
* was completely zeroed-out in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida (though in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott’s veto preserved subsidies for statehouse coverage — related story).

The spending cuts took a cumulative sum of $202 million from system revenues during the four years.

The damage was most severe in rural states where state legislatures have given extra support for statewide public TV networks that have high transmission costs for reaching relatively sparse populations.

But state funds likely have been slashed even more deeply than the study indicates because its figures don’t include all cutbacks in state universities’ support for public radio stations. Two-thirds of pubradio stations are licensed to universities, and the cash and in-kind support the stations receive are most often at the discretion of university administrators, not state policymakers.
Stearns said the researchers included only spending lines identified in state budgets, including all of those for public radio that they could find.

The study’s totals also looked at only 24 states, omitting the smaller cutbacks in states where they amount to less than 5 percent.

The report, On the Chopping Block: State Budget Battles and the Future of Public Media, compares the reductions in states’ general ledger funds with huge cuts imposed on pubcasters over four years.

The authors, Stearns and graduate research fellow Mike Soha, argue that “public broadcasters are bearing the brunt of both tough economic times and misguided attacks.” They contend that elected officials in many states were politically motivated to cut pubcasting funds.

The analysis highlights states where pubcasting funds have dropped by 25 percent or more, despite the beginnings of recovery in some state budgets. In Florida, for example, where the governor’s last-minute veto in June zeroed out a $4.8 million appropriation to public TV and radio stations, the state’s general ledger spending increased nearly 34 percent this year.

“In general, the cuts to public media are extreme when compared to budget cuts generally, meaning that public broadcasters are being forced to shoulder more than equal weight in these tough economic times,” the authors write. “The result is that local public media risks becoming less local in their content and services to communities.”

The authors also point to states where lawmakers from both parties worked together to preserve pubcasting funds.

Republican-dominated legislatures in Indiana and South Carolina are among those that resisted proposals to eliminate pubcasting subsidies.
Mystery in the funding puzzle

Because of wide variations in the ways that state governments fund and in some cases operate pubcasting networks, these tax-based subsidies are extremely difficult to track.

“Every state looks different, every budget process is different in how the money flowed to public broadcasting,” Stearns said. “That makes it really hard to generalize on the impact of the cuts.”

“We wanted to see what the impact is when you put all the cuts together,” Stearns said. “There’s been so much attention to public broadcasting cuts at the national level, we wanted to look at what was happening at the state level.”

Skip Hinton, executive director of the Organization of State Broadcasting Executives, closely follows how public TV stations fare in state budget battles. His tally of funding cuts during the same time period had reached $80 million, an estimate that he noted is “pretty close” to what Free Press researchers found.

But Hinton questioned whether Free Press had “oversimplified” its claim that public stations suffered disproportionately large cutbacks compared with other pieces of state budgets. For example, he said, a state government struggling with high health care costs, would have to make deeper cuts from other spending lines. Also, he observed, public TV and radio networks that are part of state governments may not be as vulnerable to cuts as the independent stations run by nonprofits, he said.

CPB’s system revenue report for fiscal year 2009 — two years old, the most recent available — demonstrates how much more public TV stations depend on state government aid. States provided 16.6 percent of TV’s total revenue, compared with 3.7 percent of public radio’s.

Radio, in contrast, relied more heavily on state universities and colleges, which gave 10.5 percent of their revenues, compared with 6.9 percent of public TV’s.

Stearns and Soha see bright spots for public media to recover and potentially reverse the funding losses. They point to states in which lawmakers worked on a bipartisan basis to preserve aid to pubcasting — and call for reforms at the state level to strengthen firewall protections.

“[R]ecent events illustrate that while our public media system still enjoys support across affiliations at the local level,” the report said, “it needs new structures and policies to protect it from extremists’ political meddling.”

Robert Samuelson’s otherwise sensible Nov. 7 column, “Busting the budget myths,” unfortunately and mistakenly characterized federal support for public broadcasting as among “unaffordable frills.” It is neither.

Public broadcasting represents a little more than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the federal budget. Public broadcasting costs about $1.35 per citizen per year in America, a tiny percentage of comparable figures, among them $31.13 in Canada, $67.34 in Japan, and $85.52 in Great Britain. This modest federal investment makes possible not only great television but extraordinary educational resources and other public services.

Reams of peer-reviewed research have proved the educational value of public television to preschool children, helping them get ready to learn and ultimately to compete in a global economy. Local public television stations have been deeply engaged in kindergarten through 12th grade education for years, through such initiatives as Maryland Public Television’s Thinkport online interactive learning platform.

And now comes PBS Learning Media, which will bring thousands of digital learning objects — created from the best of 40 years of public broadcasting and the best of what we do going forward — to K-12 classrooms nationwide.

Public television also is putting its infrastructure to incorporate public safety and homeland security, job training and other essential public services.

These aren’t frills. They help create a well-educated, well-informed, cultured and civil society capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship in the world’s most important democracy. It doesn’t get much more essential than that, and that’s what we do in public broadcasting, on a remarkably modest budget.

Patrick Butler, Arlington The writer is president and chief executive officer of the Association of Public Television Stations.

CPB gave its top honor for individual service, the Ralph Lowell Award, to Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the bowtie-wearing, bike-riding Oregon Democrat who chaired and helped create the Public Broadcasting Caucus in Congress.

“Rep. Blumenauer is dedicated in his support of public media,” said CPB President Patricia Harrison in the announcement Nov. 18, timed for an evening ceremony in Washington, D.C. “He understands the value delivered to every American citizen through public service media, on air, online and in the community, and the important role that each public television and radio station – locally owned and operated – plays in strengthening our civil society.”

“Not only do our public broadcasting stations provide us with valuable information, but they also directly support 21,000 jobs in hundreds of communities across America,” the representative said, making a point seldom heard in recent years. “I am honored to receive this award and will continue to fight for the future of this treasured institution in American media.”

The Portland resident served in the state legislature 1972-78, was elected to terms in local government 1978-96, and served in Congress since then. He is now a member of the House committees overseeing taxes and the federal budget.

The Peabody Award-winning news quiz show to make its TV debut with a “2011 Year in Review” special on BBC AMERICA

New York – November 16, 2011 - BBC AMERICA and NPR announced today that the Peabody Award-winning radio quiz show, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, will make its television debut on BBC AMERICA with a “2011 Year in Review” special on Friday, December 23, 8:00pm ET/PT. The year-end special will also broadcast on NPR stations on that weekend, December 24 and 25.

Host Peter Sagal, along with official judge and scorekeeper Carl Kasell, will lead a panel of both US and UK talent, including comedians Paula Poundstone and Alonzo Bodden, through 2011’s biggest events. The special will look back at the year’s top stories from an American and British perspective and will also include listener contests and celebrity guests from both sides of the pond. The show will tape in front of a live audience at the Chase Auditorium in Chicago on December 2.

Perry Simon, General Manager, Channels, BBC Worldwide America says: “The comedy panel show has been a staple of British television and Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! is the gold standard of the format on radio in the US. This year-end special offers the perfect opportunity to join forces with our friends at NPR and is a great addition to our new original programming development stable. As a long-time listener of Wait Wait Don’t… Tell Me!, I think its television debut is long overdue and I can’t wait to see what Peter, Carl and the team look like.”

Doug Berman, creator and benevolent overlord of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and Car Talk, says: “It’s going to be pretty much what we do every week, except NPR has to add a budget line for pants.”

Host Peter Sagal says: “This is terrific, because I always assumed that the only way I could get on the BBC would be to have David Attenborough narrate my mating rituals. Glad this happened instead.”

Now in its 14th season, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! has an audience of more than 3.2 million listeners weekly on 595 NPR member public radio stations. Its audience has grown in every ratings period since its premiere in January 1998. The radio show is produced by NPR and WBEZ.

Spokane Public Radio airs Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me:
KPBX 91.1, Saturdays, 2-3pm
KSFC 91.9, Saturdays, 11-12am & Sundays 10-11pm