Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

We are very happy to announce that Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! will appear at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz at 7:30 PM on Monday night, April 13, in a benefit for KUSP. Tickets are available now on-line at this link; preferred seats are $36.00 and general admission is $24.00. All proceeds from ticket sales benefit KUSP.

Capitola Book Cafe will be on hand that night so you can purchase copies of Amy’s most recent book, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times” – written with her brother, David Goodman. Amy will be signing books in the auditorium after the talk.

Amy’s previous two appearances at the Rio have sold out, so get your tickets right away!

We are so pleased that Amy can come to Santa Cruz on our behalf, and grateful to our friends at the Rio Theatre and at Capitola Book Cafe for helping us present this event!

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.

Full details are available elsewhere at kusp.org… but in capsule form, we’ll begin election coverage at 4:00 PM Tuesday on KUSP and continue at least until 12 midnight. On our main FM channel, we’ll be combining national coverage from NPR, statewide coverage from The California Report, and regional reporting by our staff and volunteers around the Central Coast.

On kusp.org we will have our live stream as described above, plus a second stream with five hours of special election coverage from Democracy Now from 4:00 to 9:00 (followed by a simulcast of our KUSP-1 programming from 9:00 on), and extensive on-line content from public broadcasting’s web collaboration (major partners include NPR, the NewsHour from PBS, Minnesota Public Radio, and KQED in San Francisco).

The launch of KUSP-2 is something we’ve been waiting a long time for; we had planned on this content being on our HD Radio channel too, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, we are experiencing technical problems right now with the part of our digital transmission system that carries the signal from our studio to our transmitter, and our analog back-up system can only carry our primary FM signal. So for this election special, KUSP-2 will be an Internet stream only.

I’m also excited about being in on NPR’s Vote Report Project, which involves use of newer on-line tools like Twitter (and relatively old-fashioned technology like voice mail) to get a sense of whether people are experiencing problems voting, from now through the time the polls close. Alison Stewart interviewed Andy Carvin of NPR about the plan on Weekend Edition Saturday this morning; you can hear that story here.

On Wednesday we have two special programs following up on the election results, in addition to coverage in our regular programs; Democracy Now will be extended to two hours (from 9:00 AM until 11:00), and a California Report special on the election results in California will come your way from 2:00 PM until 3:00.

I’ll post more updates as needed.

Democracy Now reports that host Amy Goodman and program producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar were arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota on Monday 9/1. The link to the news release and video of Amy’s arrest are here.

DN reported late Monday night that all three had been released from custody.

Democracy Now goes on to say:

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

There was very little mainstream coverage of RNC protests today. We inserted a story from KUSP volunteer reporter Christopher Krohn into All Things Considered today — that story was recorded early in the afternoon in downtown St. Paul. Chris’ story indicated the situation was potentially serious, as the later arrests of DN journalists certainly proved.

As I reported here a month or so ago KUSP is making a change in programming strategy on weekdays, from early in the morning through the end of the afternoon commute. KUSP’s new schedule in those times focuses on what we believe are public radio’s most significant news and information programs. We think the KUSP audience will come to appreciate our new programs: The Story with Dick Gordon; our new collaborative project with station KALW in San Francisco, Your Call; Day to Day from NPR News, The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU in Washington; and Marketplace.

Several programs in this schedule now air twice – either twice the same day for two weekday programs, or on two different days for some weekend programs. This idea has disconcerted a number of people, but the reasons for doing it are fairly straightforward.

We are repeating several programs we know can serve large and loyal audiences. Not many people can be tuned in to KUSP all day, every day… so by strategically repeating what we think will be among our most-listened-to shows, we increase the chances that a potential listener will have a chance to tune them in. Experience at other stations indicates that more people benefit from having a second chance to catch the show, than are put at a disadvantage by running into a show they’ve already heard once.

Another reason is more long-term. KUSP’s programmers are working on several new projects, which might meet listener needs and desires better than anything we’ve done before. We’ve seen in the past few weeks how hard it can be for a station to end programs that a number of listeners care about (even if, compared to other programs on the station, the shows that are ending reach relatively few listeners). But sometimes a station needs to create time for something new — as we’re doing now for our collaborative project with KALW, “Your Call.”

When our program development projects bear fruit (and I definitely believe they will, though I can’t say for sure when), it will be less disruptive, we hope, to adjust the schedule to make room if some of our daily content before the switch includes repeats. This also includes looking carefully at programs airing on KUSP as well as on another station in the area.

Not every popular program is practical to repeat. We thought long and hard about repeating Democracy Now! which currently attracts the most loyal audience of any of KUSP’s weekday shows. The problem is, by the time we air Democracy Now, the program is already three hours old; since DN! is a topical news program, a repeat broadcast later in the day runs the risk of bringing listeners news that is out of date. Other news programs where our content repeats (Morning Edition, for example, or Marketplace) have personnel in place all morning and afternoon so that, if news events warrant, stories can be updated.

As we go along I’ll write more about the new shows on the schedule, and look forward to seeing your comments.