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…

Shakespeare Santa Cruz announced this afternoon that they had processed $416,417 in contributions from over two thousand donors… handily surpassing the $300,000 they were required to raise before 12 noon today by their organization’s parent institution, UC Santa Cruz. This means SSC will be able to go forward in planning and fund-raising for their (reduced) 2009 summer season.

Their press release is linked here.

We can celebrate the continued existence of Shakespeare Santa Cruz, while acknowledging that (a) they still have a ton of money to raise in order to meet their $1.49 million dollar budget for next year, just not on as short a deadline, and (b) in the context of what feels like a shrinking economy for the arts in this region (as our own budget cuts bear witness), there are many unanswered questions about what the ripple effects of SSC’s crisis will be for everyone that is a part of that economy.

Stay tuned…

The first Public Radio Camp is now history, committed to scores of tweets on Twitter, a hoped-for wiki entry or two, and a lot of work yet to be done.

Behold, a Wordle from Quiddities’ Margaret Rosas reflecting the Twitter traffic:

The second day of this event was much smaller than the first; about eight participants versus the 60-70 present on day 1. One of the things we did was spend some time discussing the overlapping spheres of public media; one model put public media organizations into three groups, shaped by significantly different histories and schemes for regulation… public broadcasters (over-the-air radio and TV) in one sphere, the community media centers with roots in cable TV public, educational, and governmental access (PEG for short) in a second sphere, and the print-based and/or Net-based media groups (Wikimedia, projects like Public-Press.org in the Bay Area, and so on) in a third sphere. Some public media efforts (Democracy Now! came immediately to mind) touch all three spheres, others only one or two. Thinking about these different approaches to public media might help us be more effective in the roll-out of RadioEngage.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who took part in the BarCamp, and we’ll push forward from here…

I thought today’s Public Media Camp was a success, on the whole. At least 60 participants came to NextSpace in downtown Santa Cruz on the first of two days of visioning and planning about web content for public media organizations. Most participants were from the Santa Cruz area; many were from the San Francisco Bay Area, including folks from KQED and KALW; and I was especially happy to see people from NPR’s Public Interactive division, and from American Public Media.

Great thanks to all the event sponsors: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, NextSpace, Sunkist Naturals, Lifestyle Culinary, Armanasco Public Relations (special tip of the cap to Tom Honig), Drew Miller Insurance Services, B. Ruby Rich, and above all to our colleagues at Quiddities that put it all together.

Significant take-aways for me included these:

KUSP’s on-line ambitions are greater, and closer to realization, than most public radio organizations of similar size;
Many KUSP people, and many other Santa Cruzans, want to use on-line public media to strengthen our community;
KUSP’s fire coverage this past spring and summer had a sizable influence on people’s perception of the station and its potential as a media organization operating on-line;
I saw a number of content producers working on news and information that have fairly concrete ambitions for how they want to serve audiences on-line, but not as many content producers focused on music are as far along;
Ideas abound about ways to generate financial support for public media from on-line users, but (at least with this group) I saw very little agreement about which ideas were most likely to succeed, and few of these ideas have actually been tested;
In a related story, few people if any thought the main ways public radio has raised money from people over the years — pledge drives and direct mail — will work effectively for on-line audiences;
And the last two points combined could mean real trouble for public broadcasters in the near future.

The Santa Cruz Public Radio Camp may spawn similar BarCamps elsewhere in the U.S. in the coming months, which will be a welcome development, as this seems like a productive way to advance planning for public media’s on-line services to viewers and listeners.

The event will continue tomorrow.

Tonight is the first night of a BarCamp event called “public media camp,” sponsored by Quiddities Dev. Inc. — our collaborators in the RadioEngage project. Follow the above links to find out more about what we’ll all be doing. If you’re in the Santa Cruz area, you can register on site Saturday morning between 9 and 10 AM.

And, it’s free!

Look for reports on the goings-on this weekend.