Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

Today the KUSP community mourns the loss of Dale Owen, who passed away yesterday at his Santa Cruz home.

Dale has been part of our station since 1982, when he first hosted a classical music program for us. “A Classic Example” and its forerunners entertained and inspired our listeners for the next thirty-one years.

From 1985 until 2009 Dale was also part of our professional staff, soliciting program sponsorship and other support from Monterey Bay area businesses. He was recognized as among the most effective fundraisers in public radio.

In 2009 KUSP’s Board of Directors elevated Dale to Lifetime Membership, the highest honor the station can confer on staff members and volunteers.

At this time we have no information about plans for memorials or other ways to honor and celebrate Dale’s life. We will share any public information when it becomes available.

On May 2 and May 7 KUSP will present screenings of the Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! cinema event at the Regal Santa Cruz 9, on Pacific Ave. in downtown Santa Cruz.

The show starts at 8:00 PM on Thursday, May 2. The encore screening starts at 7:30 PM on Tuesday, May 7.

The May 2 show has been sold out for days, but tickets are still available for May 7.

Here’s the extra-added-fun-part:
We have a special little thank you for everyone who shows up, but we have a bigger thank you if you get there early! If you’re in the theater at least fifteen minutes before the show starts (in other words, 7:45 on Thursday 5/2, 7:15 on Tuesday 5/7), you can be part of a free drawing for some special prizes from KUSP. But you have to be there early — they won’t let us interrupt the ten minute pre-show leading up to the official starting time.

So, come early and get your chance to take home some fun stuff, courtesy KUSP!

We’re in the home stretch of KUSP’s broadcast of the 55th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s KUSP’s 32nd year as MJF’s local broadcast partner, and the third year where we’ve collaborated with the festival on Internet-delivered content.

The big change this year, thanks to the festival and their sponsors, is our live video feed every night from the Night Club. We’ve seen some terrific performances the past two nights, and we’re looking forward to tonight’s Hammond B3 Blowout.

We’ve been mentioning the funding situation for the MJF broadcast on the air this weekend, and I think some of what we’ve said bears repeating here.

For most of the time our summer music festivals have been on the air (MJF, and the Carmel Bach Festival and Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music) they’ve been paid for through a mix of KUSP funding sources. The biggest piece (typically over 90% of the festival production budget) has been made up of grants from non-profit foundations that support the arts in Monterey and Santa Cruz County. The specific sources have rotated around over time, but the foundation sector has been the go-to place for our broadcast funding. Most of these foundations also directly support the presenting organizations, and their support for our broadcasts sort of leverages the investment they make in the music festivals themselves.

In 2012, we experienced an unprecedented reduction in our foundation support. There are many reasons for this, most of which revolve around the shifting priorities of the foundation sector. The pressure on foundations to respond to cuts in government funding is immense and affects many different economic sectors.

In any event, at the start of this summer we were faced with a decision about what to do about our summer festival broadcasts, absent the foundation support that had been so important for so long. Having already committed to our Carmel Bach Festival season (the first of the three festivals each summer), our Board of Directors and our fund-raising leadership (staff and volunteer) determined to go out and raise the “missing” foundation money from our listener-contributors and our local business community. The original budget for the 2012 festival season was $35,000.

We reached our goal for the Cabrillo Festival by the end of July and then turned our attention to MJF. Going in to the start of the broadcast, we still had about $3,400 left to go to make our budget. We’ve invited our listeners to contribute at kusp.org in between the sets this weekend.

We are grateful to all the people who have made a gift so far to our music festival fund, and to our sponsor for the Monterey Jazz Festival broadcast, Nordic Naturals. But as you can see, with $3,400 or so left to raise, there’s room for you too!

After we get home from the jazz festival, we immediately turn our attention to the KUSP Fall Pledge Drive, the proceeds of which supports everything you hear on KUSP and experience at kusp.org. The goal for the pledge drive will be quite a bit higher than the campaign to save the summer music festivals, of course, and the stakes will be even bigger. It’s a critical time for public broadcasting in America, and this drive is our one best chance to not only fund the programming you’ve come to rely on, but to prepare ourselves as a station for what may lie ahead down the road.

As always, we welcome your support, and your comments.

KUSP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Affordable Care Act cases will continue throughout the day today.

NPR’s special coverage of President Obama’s statement about the decision, and analysis of the decision itself, aired at 9:00. A special extended edition of Your Call with Rose Aguilar runs from 10:00 until 12 noon — the second hour is focusing on the impact of the decision in our area.

We will join the Diane Rehm Show at noon – this hour of programming will feature national reaction; guests include Jeffrey Rosen of the George Washington University School of Law, Susan Dentzer of the PBS NewsHour, and Susan Page of USA Today. This program is recorded, unlike most of today’s coverage, so the story may move forward in the time between the recording and the time you hear it on KUSP.

Live coverage returns with News Hour from the BBC at 1:00 PM — which will undoubtedly include other news too. We will stay live at 2:00, pre-empting today’s broadcast of The Story with Dick Gordon for an early start to All Things Considered from NPR News.

Our regular schedule resumes at 3:00 with Marketplace, followed by All Things Considered, and continues through 6:00. At six we will broadcast a wrap-up program of all the day’s events from NPR News, hosted by Jennifer Ludden. Musica della Sera brings us back to regular programming tonight at 7:00.

One of the things that informed our scheduling today was the fact that many of our daytime programs are normally delayed a few hours for the west coast, and the timing of the news and reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision was especially problematic for a couple of programs. Democracy Now, for example, was produced today before the decision was announced, but would have aired on KUSP afterwards. Fresh Air and The Story have even longer lead times, and we felt the various other sources we could draw upon would be more relevant than the regular programs we were offered today.

Finally, I hope you’ll visit our special kusp.org page on the future of health care in light of today’s news. Our digital news team is seeking out the most useful coverage from across the whole spectrum of our news sources. I think it’s adding some real insight to this very complex story…

For the past few days we’ve been announcing a special event for our listeners — a live performance of This American Life via satellite from New York, transmitted to specially-equipped movie theaters across the country.

KUSP is the sponsoring station for two screenings — in Salinas at the Century 14 Northridge Mall, and in downtown Santa Cruz at the Regal Santa Cruz 9 on Pacific Avenue.

The show plays at 8:00 PM our time (the show goes out live to theaters in the Eastern and Central time zones, tape delayed for us).

Click on this link for Santa Cruz tickets, or this link for Salinas tickets. The event is also playing at theaters in San Jose, Cupertino, and Monterey, but KUSP is not sponsoring those screenings. You can see all the theaters where the show is happening by combining these lists: here (big chains), here (independents), and here (Canada!)

Today Ira sent out an e-mail with more about the show than we have room for in our on-air announcement. He writes:

Our all-star lineup for the May 10th cinema event has gotten all-starrier! David Sedaris will join David Rakoff, Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro, Glynn Washington, Ryan Knighton, the Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company and OK Go.

I’ve been so busy putting this show together I fear sometimes that the promos we’ve done for it have not communicated just how special and different it is. We’re trying to make a show that’s more visual than any stage show we’ve ever done, so there’s animation and dancing and a little movie and we’ll be performing the whole thing in front of a rear projection screen that we use throughout, to enhance the stories.

In short, we’ve been trying to think of things that can’t be done on the radio. Things that are best done in a movie theater. Making this our most ambitious live show ever. I was talking to a friend last week and realized, right, this is either going to be the most amazing thing we’ve ever created onstage, or it’s going to be a complete train wreck and there is no in-between.

You should be there.

And if you still need more inducement, we’ll have special giveaways that night for folks who come to the Salinas or Santa Cruz shows. I hope you’ll join us!

On the day that Apple begins retail sales of its new iPad, we learned that a major public radio piece about Apple was not what it purported to be.

The week of January 8, KUSP broadcast an episode of This American Life titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The program was an adaptation of Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” In the stage show and the radio program, Mike Daisey takes Apple and a major contractor, Foxconn, to task for their labor practices in China.

The TAL episode took off – becoming the most downloaded program in the series’ history, and it brought even more attention to the already accelerating news coverage of Apple contractor business practices in China.

Among the listeners to the radio show was Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for another of our programs, Marketplace. As a reporter based in China, Schmitz has first-hand knowledge of Apple’s operations, and had doubts about some of the specifics in the radio program.

Ultimately, Marketplace and TAL joined forces to better understand what parts of Mike Daisey’s account were verifiable, and what wasn’t. As it turned out, many important details in the story didn’t stand up.

Consequently, TAL has decided to retract the original story in its entirety. Here is Ira Glass’ blog post about the situation.

A segment of tonight’s Marketplace (3:00 and 5:30 PM on KUSP) will report on the story, and next week’s broadcast of This American Life (Sunday 11:00 AM, repeating next Friday at 7:00 PM) will also cover the situation. That program will include an segment with Rob Schmitz; Ira will also be interviewing Mike Daisey.

TAL has always used both straight reporting and fiction to tell their stories, but with bright lines around each. It’s to their credit that they have moved strongly to set the record straight in this situation, and I am eagerly awaiting the upcoming broadcast…

On his way to becoming one of public radio’s most talked about producers, Jesse Thorn brought his weekly program to KUSP. Admittedly, not all that many people talk about public radio producers, but anyway…

Bullseye, previously known as The Sound of Young America, arrived at KUSP in 2006, and it’s still here — Sunday nights at 8:00. It had started across town at KZSC and, after a short gestation period here, moved into national distribution via PRI, Public Radio International.

At the time Jesse’s show hit KUSP it already had a large following as a podcast — iTunes regularly featured it as one of their top picks. Jesse methodically built the audience for his show and introduced more podcasts about people and things that are awesome.

As part of “Transom,” a web site devoted to the making of radio (particularly public radio), Jesse has revealed his “12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success.” It’s a great insight into how independent media works (or doesn’t work) — and it does describe some of the qualities that have enabled Jesse to accomplish things in his profession in ways almost none of his contemporaries have.

And it’s a fun read.

On Monday 1/30/2012 Marketplace ran an installment of their series, “My Life Is True.” The series presents personal narratives of people struggling to make things work in today’s economy. The story was about Leo Webb, who told about being an Iraq war veteran and coming home with little in the way of marketable job skills.

Listeners wrote and called in expressing their skepticism about the commentary. On Wednesday Marketplace announced that the facts in the story could not be verified, and concluded that it probably had been fabricated. The web version of the story has been pulled off their site and they’ve issued apologies to the listeners, and to us.

We regret it any time a KUSP producing partner or contributor makes this kind of error — but we’re happy that Marketplace followed up when listeners contacted them questioning the veracity of the commentary, and took action based on what they found (or in this case, didn’t find).

Accountability does matter.

This week we’re very happy to add one of the best radio features about science to the KUSP schedule. EarthSky airs just before 1:00 PM seven days a week.

Deborah Byrd, now the program’s Editor-in-Chief, started the program in 1991. In the past twenty years EarthSky has expanded its reach and diversified its content. Today, supported by over one thousand science advisors, Deborah’s team reports on all facets of the natural world through a worldwide network of over twelve hundred stations.

With this change we bid farewell to Sandra Tsing Loh and The Loh Down on Science (which is still available here via its producing station, KPCC).

The change puts a first-class team of science reporters on our air every day, and makes a little more room available in our morning and afternoon news schedule for news and information of all kinds. As always, we welcome your feedback…

Fans of KUSP’s Saturday night lineup know all about Sweet Power, our 10:00 PM soul show hosted by Seth and Alex. We’re really thrilled that this week, Sweet Power is the new featured program on “The Mix” at npr.org.

“The Mix” selects the most original station-produced music shows from NPR stations across the country, and taps the hosts for a representative selection of tracks you’d hear on their show. Visitors to npr.org then can start the live stream of the mix when they visit, and read a little about the show too.

It’s great to see KUSP recognized on NPR’s home page (which may be a first) — and it’s even better that we can share Seth and Alex’s wonderful work with a whole new audience.

Of course, you can hear the latest edition of Sweet Power anytime you want through The KUSP Music Show Player at kusp.org. And catch the show live, using that time-honored technology called FM radio, every Saturday night at ten!