Our counterparts at WAMU have let us know that Diane Rehm caught a heel in the hem of her slacks while running across the street yesterday afternoon — and fell, cracking her pelvis. She’ll be OK, they expect, but will be off the air for a few weeks while she recuperates. You can send her get-well wishes at drshow@wamu.org, or on her Facebook page…
Rob Paterson has stimulated a lot of my thinking in the past three years or so concerning organizations and social networks. Today he posted to his blog a careful and extensive breakdown of public radio’s efforts to engage with its audience in the Internet age. NPR brought Rob in as a catalyst to a major planning effort with stations that started in late 2005. He has remained a friend and a thoughtful critic.
As readers of this blog know, we have worked diligently at KUSP to move our station in this direction. And I concur with Rob – the potential for positive and transformative change is now being realized, as 2009 turns to 2010.
Fans of public radio should take heart in the growing impact of what we are all building together — as listeners, local stations, collaborations of local stations, and national/global networks (like NPR and BBC).
So, thank you for being part of our construction team!
Not much today has gone normally, it’s fair to say. Most of the KUSP news and information team have been working since early this morning on coverage of the Lockheed Fire, which broke out last night near Bonny Doon. KUSP’s on-line coverage is here. Our reporters are working day and night to bring you accurate and up-to-date information as it becomes available.
However, tonight brought another round of unexplained transmitter problems that knocked out our 88.9 transmitter, and the other KUSP signals that depend on it. People in the vicinity of the Lockheed Fire may have a more reliable signal from our downtown/west side Santa Cruz translator on 89.3. Our engineer is at the 88.9 transmitter site now working to isolate and fix the problem.
KUSP’s summer music festival broadcasts are a vibrant part of our station’s heritage. For some thirty years we’ve brought some of the finest live music performed in the Monterey Bay region to radio listeners, and in recent years, to a worldwide Internet audience.
Right now three of our festival series are underway. The 2009 broadcasts of the Carmel Bach Festival started on KUSP in July and continue through September 11. Last night KUSP presented the opening night performance of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, “Azul.” The Cabrillo Festival runs through August 16. KUSP will broadcast the upcoming Cabrillo performances on tape delay starting August 18.
The third festival underway right now is new to KUSP and new in that it’s only on kusp.org (we have no radio broadcast rights) — George Wein’s Jazz Festival 55, live from Newport, Rhode Island. We’re offering the live webcast of selected performers thanks to WBGO, WGBH and NPR Music. To hear Newport, just go to our home page and follow the “Jazz at Newport” link.
Note that the audio on the Newport stream is sometimes there, and sometimes not. WBGO wasn’t able to get streaming rights to all the Newport performances, and apparently they’re just stopping the web stream in between. This is a familiar situation for us at KUSP when it comes to jazz festivals — Larry Blood, our producer, works hard all summer long to line up our Monterey Jazz Festival broadcast, and while we try, we don’t always get broadcast rights for all the performers in the festival’s main stage line-up.
Speaking of Monterey, the 52nd Annual Monterey Jazz Festival comes your way on KUSP as the capstone to our 2009 summer season — September 18, 19, and 20. As in past years, we have no Internet streaming rights to MJF, but we’ll be there in full force on the radio, so tune in!
The full KUSP summer music festival schedule is linked here. There’s a link off the home page at kusp.org too.
This afternoon (Wednesday 8/5) our main transmitter that broadcasts on 88.9 MHz malfunctioned, knocking off our analog FM and our digital HD Radio signal. This in turn killed most of our other frequencies. The Downtown Santa Cruz signal (89.3) and Hollister/Gilroy signal (89.1) receive their audio through different means and are unaffected, as are the Internet streams at kusp.org.
Our engineers are on top of the mountain where the transmitter is right now trying to diagnose and repair the problem. As information becomes available I’ll report what I can here…
Update at 6:30 PM: the transmitter is back on the air. We appear to be experiencing cooling problems. Other radio stations using our same site (in general, FM and TV stations are clustered together to reduce costs and minimize the impact of their antennas and towers) are grappling with similar issues this afternoon. Temperatures are cooling off now and that may be helpful. We will continue investigating this problem tomorrow.
