Yogurt has a live culture.

Excerpt: "On the Fans of Folk Radio WUMB wall, member Carol Lashnits poses the observation and question: "It's wonderful that WUMB is honoring Dick Pleasants. I just wish that the money raised went to him and not to Pat's $7 million capital campaign. Doesn't that seem a bit unethical?"

Low Down in Beantown is the latest entry in the continuing national saga of the milquetoastification of "public" radio and the acts of the corporate management thinking behind it.

Low Down in Beantown

Posted on January 6, 2011 

The oblivious liberal might fall prey to being hornswoggled by the appeal posted here yesterday — that is, the plea to man the barricades and fend off the Republican hordes seeking to defund public media. After all, the website beseeched viewers, the raison d’être for said media is a focus on “quality local programs” and “a particular focus on the needs of underserved audiences.” When the laughter in Austin and Boston died down, it became clear that those underserved audiences no doubt referred to lovers of Triple A music — the Bob and Jack of FM radio.

A recent gaucherie noted on the Facebook site of the Fans of Folk Radio WUMB, here, and passed on by Jeff Boudreau, serves to illustrate the savoir faire of the bean counters who’ve become the arbiters of “public” these days. The Facebook note — entitled “Doesn’t that seem a bit unethical?” — reads as follows:

On the Fans of Folk Radio WUMB wall, member Carol Lashnits poses the observation and question: “It’s wonderful that WUMB is honoring Dick Pleasants. I just wish that the money raised went to him and not to Pat’s $7 million capital campaign. Doesn’t that seem a bit unethical?

Dick has been a mainstay in Boston folk radio for 40 years, of late relegated to a two-hour shift on Saturdays on WUMB. The note quotes the WUMB website:

Over the years, he has staunchly supported dozens (maybe even hundreds) of musicians and has encouraged the launch of dozens of folk music venues. Boston has a reputation as a great music city. Dick Pleasants is one of those individuals who helped create that image.
For 40 years Dick has shared the music he loves with us. Many of his friends think it’s time for us to return that love. On Friday, January 7, 2011 at 7:00pm at Sanders Theater, several musicians and many of his friends will pay tribute to Dick in a one-of-a-kind, and once-in-a-lifetime celebration of a “really special guy” and “one of the most down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet.”

Can you feel the love? Well, if you’re in the Boston area, you could have partaken of this lovefest for just $50 a pop, $100 if you felt you’re of the real special VIP sort and wanted to be seated up front and meet and greet Dick.
But wait. There’s more. And it is special:

You can use Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, or you can print out copies of this PDF of our 11″ x 17″ special full-color Hi-Resolution poster about the event and distribute it in your neighborhood.

Wa-a-a-y down at the bottom is the one footnote: “Proceeds will benefit WUMB’s Capital Campaign, by naming a room after Dick Pleasants in the new WUMB Studios & Offices.” You just know it’ll be a very special room, too.
And the author, in a nice turn of phrase, summed it up aptly:

WUMB is not the only Boston-area radio station where Dick has spent his 40+ year career (others include WCAS and WGBH, but supported by that last sentence, it appears to be the only one willing to turn him into a marketable commodity. So, yes to Carol, we agree with your statement, but are not in the least surprised.

Not surprised in Austin, either. After blithely hacking the hours of three free-form deejays and cutting their benefits, KUT suits brazenly dubbed them “Legends” and shamelessly hawked their names in the following fundraiser. This is de rigueur in public radio management nowadays. Perhaps one or two of the 24,000 passers-by stopping in here may have missed our oft-repeated witticism: the difference between these management types and yogurt? Yogurt has a live culture.

 ---
posted with permission.

Fairy Tales Can Come True

Reposted with permission.

Source  

Fairy Tales Can Come True

Posted on October 8, 2010 by admin

This post from Radio-Info.com should give pause — but it won’t — to those rabid musical directors at our “public” radio stations chasing after the fabled youth market with their programming of Triple-A tripe. In it, we learn of “The American Youth Study; Radio’s Future II,” a look along with Edison Research at where the kids really are going, not where the mindless mass of suits thinks they’re going. Among the findings of the study, which looks at “the 12-24 listeners as well as the 22-34 year olds (following up on the same group from the 2000 study)” is this astounding fact: “[T]ime spent with over-the-air radio is down from 2 hours and 43 minutes (reported in Edison’s year-2000 study) to 1 hour and 24 minutes.” A second significant finding: “[A] majority of listeners want a personality along with the music.”

Jeez, kinda makes you wonder what’s going to happen to all the glorious plans of those feckless leaders who sought to woo the young’uns while simultaneously throwing the fogeys under the bus. (Recall, if you will, that the average age of the listener to public radio is 54, with 90% of them over 35.) Yet the bean counters slaver over the latest listings from the Purple People Meter of Arbitron, laying out the big bucks to be tallied alongside their commercial counterparts worshipping at the totem of Triple A.

Additional information is posted here at the Edison website, including this gem: “Alternative Rock stations were selected by half as many listeners in 2010 as in 2000.”

Once upon a time, in a land far away, public radio was concerned with airing music not heard on a thousand other stations. KUT GM Stewart Vanderwilt once piously pronounced:

KUT is . . . a community for music lovers. From adult rock to folk, from blues to world music, KUT seeks out music that isn’t promoted, packaged, or hyped. Music you wouldn’t find without us. . . . KUT is a community of people like you — principled and independent, curious and intelligent. People who cherish their rights as individuals to think, speak and act for themselves. Citizens who get involved when they know that they can make a difference.

That went away when the grand visions of empire building — which included a tripling of the budget to countenance multiple HD channels, the “best and the brightest” high-dollar executives in the radio world to supplant the old guard, a new building, a massive local news presence (not to mention a PR campaign to convince the public they knew what they were doing) — put a crimp in the old budget. Time to get a new plan, and that meant scrabbling in the dirt with all the commercial vagabonds faced with hard times in the Magic Land of Radio.

NPR Ate My Local Public Radio Station

Readers of this blog are familiar with Boston's loss of folk and roots programming from WGBH (formerly known as "New England's arts and culture station", now "New England's news and information station" and a WBUR wannabe (WBUR is also a NPR affiliate which already had a news and talk format) and WUMB (formerly known as "folk radio WUMB", now refers to its AAA programming as "Boston's NPR music station").  If this is news to you, use the blog's "search" feature located at the lower right corner.

Copied from their sites/recent posts, for your review here are several websites / blogs social networking pages educating the public about the nationalization of local public radio stations.

Keeping the Public in Public Radio

http://keeppublicradiopublic.com/

...and its Facebook mirror....

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Keeping-the-Public-in-Public-Radio/107942542579499

The mission of "Keeping the Public in Public Radio" is to inform and educate public radio listeners, to expose national programming trends taking place at their local public radio stations, and to support local listener groups in their efforts to restore listener ownership to their stations.

NPR Ate My Local Public Radio Station

http://www.facebook.com/pages/NPR-Ate-My-Local-Public-Radio-Station/113531905356015

Dedicated to the "public" (remember us? we used to be a part of "public" radio).

Share your NPR takeover horror stories like "College radio station KVTI, the popular 51,000-watt “I-91″ from Clover Park Technical College in Tacoma, has been absorbed into the borg of Northwest Public Radio and Washington State University..."

"I can only assume this has something to do with the almighty dollar. Isn't this supposed to be public radio and aren't we the public. Folk music has been a mainstay on WGBH for as long as I can remember. Acoustic artists are as popular as ever and in some ways even more popular then in days gone by. I don't get it. WGB...H should be ashamed of itself. Well, as Ma Joad said, "We're the people and you can't stop us and you can't lick us. We just keep coming, 'cause we're the people."
~Jim Kweskin, November 11, 2009, on learning of the cancellation of Blues on WGBH and Folk on WGBH.

p.s. If you have information of a more personal or sensitive nature, you can email that to keeppublicradiopublic@gmail.com 

NPR Ate My Local Public Radio Station

Affiliated with... Keeping the Public in Public Radio http://www.facebook.com/pages/Keeping-the-Public-in-Public-Radio/107942542579499 Supporters of Folk and Blues on WGBH http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=201481030324 Support Larry Monroe and Paul Ray at KUT htt...

Whereas "Keeping..." is news oriented (NPR's "Project Argo", the HD radio scam, station takeovers, dropping music in favor of syndicated NPR/APR programs and talk shows, recalcitrant station bureaucrats, etc.), "NPR ate..." is a place where displaced and dissatisfied former fans/members of public stations that have been overrun by the NPR "borg" can share storeis of how they have been affected.

Prometheus Radio Project

http://www.prometheusradio.org

...and its Facebook mirror....

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Philadelphia-PA/Prometheus-Radio-Project/12921391882

The Prometheus Radio Project builds, supports, and advocates for community radio stations that bring together and empower local, participatory voices and movements for social change. To that end, Prometheus strives to: demystify technologies; illuminate the political process that governs access to our media system; and demonstrate the powerful effects of media on our lives and our communities!

Announcing "Keep Public Radio Public"

Should donations to public radio AND taxpayer dollars support canned content on substandard HD radio? At the expense of our local deejays and shows? What's going on with public radio: the wrong turn.

http://keeppublicradiopublic.com/

The mission of "Keeping the Public in Public Radio" is to inform and educate public radio listeners, to expose national programming trends taking place at their local public radio stations, and to support local listener groups in their efforts to restore listener ownership to their stations.

The Unholy Alliance

Radio, in general, is in freefall, and radio executives everywhere are desperate to find a way to reverse the trend. Enter HD radio and the unholy alliance between iBiquity (aka iNiquity) and NPR. (But this also includes car manufacturers, who have invested in the whole scam and are now trying to force public acceptance by including HD radio in their high-end models — or asking the public to fork out extra in the more base models.) NPR, through grants of 75-85k from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stations to help fund transmitters (that’s taxpayer money, folks), plus discounts and mega-deals on many other items, and iBiquity, which has just lowered the going rate on its subscription fees, have pushed the idea onto hundreds of public radio stations. Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning of the expense for the stations that have signed on…

In an era of unfettered growth, this didn’t seem a problem, but as public radio listenership and support have flattened out over the past decade or more, it forced major budgetary changes. What NPR offers is buckets of canned content. With a whole network of HD-compliant stations, it can shore up its bottom line by selling, along with the BBC and PRI, shows to all of its subsidiaries and filling all this dead air. But its effect on local programming has been devastating. In Austin, at KUT, they downsized two overnight deejays and replaced them with a canned jazz show that costs them all of $3,000 a year. After forcing out longtime station stalwarts, KUT is filling two HD stations with mass-produced product. And this is happening in city after city across the nation. To the business-management types who control our “public” radio stations, hey, what’s not to like? They no longer have to pay salaries or benefits to on-air personalities, but rather can see their stations basically run out of a closet, ultimately. That’s where all this business acumen is taking us.

And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the HD radio scam itself, to which a separate category will be devoted. A particularly good website for information is hdradiofarce.com (link on right), which details the skullduggery behind the captains of industry foisting this off on the public.

This site is the first move nationwide to link listeners outraged by the actions of the unholy alliance in taking the public out of public radio. We’ve joined an alliance of our own with, initially, five cities, and we’re working to identify folks in dozens of others whose stations have been ravaged in the HD radio scam, where national, canned content has overridden local control and sensibility. The call to action will soon follow.