Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

About a week ago word emerged from UC Santa Cruz that the campus-sponsored Arts & Lectures series would be discontinued in all but name at the end of the current season, with all of its associated personnel losing their jobs. The Santa Cruz Sentinel story about A&L is linked here and a letter from the university’s Assistant Vice Chancellor for University Relations to the program’s donors was posted to Arts & Lectures’ web site here.

UCSC Arts & Lectures has had a long and close relationship with KUSP; many of the visiting speakers that come to Santa Cruz are public radio people you hear on KUSP (David Sedaris, who gained fame on “This American Life,” appeared on October 26; NPR’s Scott Simon appeared last spring). A&L has depended on KUSP to help them publicize their events, and we’ve worked together on projects that we think are appreciated by our respective audiences – which overlap quite a lot.

It seems that UCSC saw no way it could continue its budgetary support for Arts & Lectures, and also saw no possibility that sufficient community support could be rallied behind the program – a situation far different than that experienced by Shakespeare Santa Cruz, which like A&L is part of UCSC.

Perhaps the strongest message to community supporters of the arts can take from this is, don’t wait for a warning shot from the sponsors of the programs you care about. Understand their financial and programmatic health and be there to help them when they need your support…

About a week ago I mailed a letter to a lot of KUSP members whose subscriptions are coming up for renewal. In the letter I reported that KUSP’s program stream would be accessible in the public radio directory on iTunes. When I put this in the letter, I was relying on an e-mail we got from Apple on January 6 that said:

Would love to add your station, you should have received an email with all the info we require, which you partly provided. If you can send the full details we can get you added.

And then, after we sent them a bunch of technical info, they wrote back on January 15 and said:

Update will be live in 24 hours.

That coincided with when I finished the letter and we sent it off to be printed. But, as fortune would have it, Apple still hasn’t plugged us into the directory.

Guess I should have known better, and if you’ve been hunting around unsuccessfully for KUSP in their public radio directory, I apologize.

With lots of programming on offer and plans changing by the moment, it’s been a little hard to pin down our schedule for the next couple of days… but here’s the plan as of the moment:

On KUSP-1 (over the air + on-line at kusp.org), we’ll be depending on our staff here, our volunteer reporters in Washington, NPR and American Public Media.

NPR coverage on KUSP-1 starts at 3:00 AM (6 AM in Washington) and will continue non-stop until 11:00. We’ll come back home for Your Call with Rose Aguilar and you, from 11 to noon; then we’ll bring you The Story with Dick Gordon at a special time of 12 noon (NPR will not be producing “Day to Day” on Tuesday). At 1:00 we’ll rejoin NPR’s live coverage and continue with that until 5:30, when we’ll bring you Tuesday’s broadcast of Marketplace, followed by Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Afternoon live coverage should include reports from KUSP volunteers on what’s been happening through the day, in Washington and on the Central Coast.

We’ll also activate KUSP-2, our second program stream, at kusp.org. Unfortunately our engineering staff has been unable to resolve the technical problems plaguing our HD Radio signal, so we won’t be able to carry KUSP-2 over the air. On KUSP-2 we’ll present a two-hour special early edition of Democracy Now beginning at 6:00 AM — following that, Amy Goodman will anchor their live Inauguration coverage, which will continue until 11:00 AM. At 11 KUSP-2 will rejoin KUSP-1 for Your Call.

One more thing… we’ll have a special two-hour Democracy Now wrap-up program Wednesday on KUSP-1 (over the air + on-line) beginning at Democracy Now’s usual time, 9:00 AM.

Americans for the Arts is a national advocacy organization seeking to develop more public (and political) support for arts and cultural activity in the U.S. They’ve released a nine-point plan calling on the incoming Obama administration to take steps to reinforce the arts economy as part of an overall economic recovery strategy.

There are some sound concepts behind these proposals, I think… and the problem definitely hits home for me as the head of an arts/cultural organization that has a paid workforce 28% smaller today (in full-time-equivalent-position terms) than it was on July 1. I see many other arts organizations in the Monterey Bay area making deep cuts in their operations as well, and it hurts.

Americans for the Arts created this link to encourage their members to contact Congressional representatives and express their views on federal support for the arts as part of economic stimulus. More info on their thinking can be found here.