Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

KUSP will continue coverage of developments in the Summit Fire through the weekend. We are striving to compile the most relevant information about all aspects of the fire at kusp.org, and we’ve been grateful for the words of encouragement we’ve received about our on-air reports and the web site.

Special thanks go out to the news team at KQED Public Radio for their enthusiastic collaboration with us from Thursday night into Friday morning. Their professionalism and their public service commitment were inspiring and reassuring at a very anxious time for Santa Cruz County residents.

We’ll do our very best to keep you informed in the days ahead…

KUSP is covering the Summit Fire in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties with updates every 20-30 minutes. We have our staff and volunteers marshaled to report the story and provide information to people phoning in to the station. We are incredibly fortunate to have KVCR’s Duncan Lively volunteering to help us today — he was in the area completing his move to San Bernardino today and dropped in to help. The magic of a station that welcomes volunteers….

We’re working hard to link important information to the kusp.org web site too… you’ll find the link to the fire pages at the top of our main news headlines.

Today the Knight News Challenge, a program of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, announced a $327,000 grant to Quiddities Dev Inc. a web solutions organization based here in Santa Cruz. With KUSP’s collaboration, Quiddities will develop RadioEngage, an open source publishing platform optimized for the needs of public radio stations.

KUSP will pilot the project here at kusp.org and our content team, led by New Media Director Steve Laufer, will work closely with Quiddities’ designers as they explore this new territory for public media.

As an open source project based on the Drupal software platform, RadioEngage will be available for all public media organizations to freely implement and improve upon as soon as it is released. Our objective is deeper community participation and engagement by allowing the creators, contributors, and listeners of news, information and music to communicate and collaborate directly and easily.

A year ago, at the time the first Knight News Challenge grants were awarded, Knight recognized Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism project with its Knight News Innovation EPpy Award. We are incredibly honored that Knight chose our collaboration with Quiddities to further advance their commitment to community-service-focused, participatory public radio.

The full press release for the grant (as a pdf file) is linked here. We’re very excited about this opportunity and I am grateful to Margaret Rosas and her team at Quiddities, KUSP Development Director Virginia Wright, the aforementioned Steve Laufer, and all of the staff and volunteers in KUSP New Media who worked hard to create the proposal… and to the fine people of the Knight Foundation who saw it as worthy of such generous support!

Watch this space!

KUSP’s work to update our programming service is moving ahead. Look for some interesting ideas, and invitations for your help and participation, in the next few days and weeks.

Meantime, I would like to direct your attention to “Corps of Discovery – Pioneers of Pub Media,” wherein Rob Paterson, for whom I’ve expressed appreciation and admiration before in this space, will endeavor to point out the public media organizations doing the most important pathfinding for all of us public broadcasting types.

The site is just a baby right now, but I anticipate great things. In the immortal words of the first great radio program director I worked for, “read it, learn it, live it!”

(edited on July 23, 2008 to add: Rob seems to have decided to keep his public media comments in his principal blog, rather than populating this one… so I’m pulling the “Corps of Discovery” out of the blogroll for now.)

Today’s major earthquake in China’s Sichuan province is being covered extensively by all media, but I wanted to let blog readers know that NPR has had much of the key All Things Considered staff in the city of Chengdu (about 60 miles from the epicenter) for the last several days, gearing up for what was planned as a week of special broadcasts from there, starting next Monday. Now, of course, they’ve shifted to all-out coverage of the breaking news in the region.

The “Chengdu Diary” blog from the NPR team, linked here, is worth a look.

A flurry of activity in public radio this week revolving around a show we don’t carry, “The Infinite Mind,” did remind me that by now I should have mentioned Alicia Shepard, who currently holds the ombudsman post at NPR.

As the Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO) defines the job, “A news ombudsman receives and investigates complaints from newspaper readers or listeners or viewers of radio and television stations about accuracy, fairness, balance and good taste in news coverage. He or she recommends appropriate remedies or responses to correct or clarify news reports.”

Ombudsmen in America’s electronic media are terribly rare. ONO only identifies three; NPR’s, PBS’s, and ESPN’s. NPR’s was the first, established in 2000.

Alicia has been on the job at NPR since last fall, which is when I met her. She impressed me from the first meeting and her critical eye on NPR coverage in the past six months or so bodes well for the interests of listeners.

If NPR’s fairness, balance and accuracy are something you’re concerned about, you should be aware of what Alicia’s up to. Her page at npr.org is here; when you go to that page you can subscribe to her RSS feed or sign up to get e-mails whenever she publishes something new.

(updated to add: Alicia’s analysis of “The Infinite Mind” situation is linked here. You’ll also see a thoughtful dissection of the complicated relationships between NPR and the other parts of public radio that produce programming.)

Tickets are now on sale for “Maximum Funny: Kasper Hauser and Friends,” a one-night-only comedy show that is a benefit fund-raiser for KUSP. It’s Saturday night, May 24, at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. Tickets are available at Streetlight Records in downtown Santa Cruz, or you can buy tickets on line by following this link.

Jesse Thorn of “The Sound of Young America” put the show together as a way of showing his support for KUSP. We are really happy to see Jesse’s show take off the way it has… it started at UC Santa Cruz’s station, KZSC, then moved to KUSP about the time the podcast version really began to get national attention. After about a year on KUSP, Public Radio International picked up the show and it now airs on stations as big as WNYC in New York (which in public radio terms is just about as big as it gets).

Jesse lined up the Kasper Hauser sketch comedy troupe to headline. They’ve appeared on Jesse’s show, his web site is a gateway to a lot of their on-line material, and they did Sky Maul, one of the funniest parody books I’ve ever seen. Also on the bill are stand-up comedians Mary Van Note and Brent Weinbach.

You need a laugh, right? You need public radio, right? Now’s your chance to ensure a continuing supply of both vital commodities!

Thank you to all the Monterey Bay area fans of This American Life who came to our live-via-satellite show at the Century Cinemas in Monterey last night. It looked like we drew a crowd of about 60-70 people, and the show was a lot of fun to watch.

I was asked a couple of questions last night that might be of more general interest:

1. Q: How come KUSP did this event in Monterey? A: Relatively few theaters in the U.S. have the satellite and digital projection equipment that allows these kinds of live national hook-ups. The Century Cinemas are, I think, the only theaters in Monterey or Santa Cruz County with that equipment. This American Life was also screened in San Jose, but when we were offered the chance to be part of the event, we thought Monterey would be more convenient for more of our listeners. Plus we knew it was a nice theater, and the staff at the Century Theaters were very supportive and helpful — so thank you to them also!

2. Q: Did KUSP receive any of the admission price for the show? A: Actually, no. Proceeds went to the theater operator and This American Life. We thought it would be a good promotional opportunity for us and for a show we’re really proud to have on our station, but it wasn’t a fund-raiser for KUSP.

Again, if you came out last night, thanks!