This Saturday, June 19, is an annual holiday that doesn't get a whole lot of press: Juneteenth, African American Emancipation Day, first celebrated in Galveston, Texas in 1865 and now a worldwide event. In celebration, KUAT-FM will have works by black composers scattered through the day's schedule--such American figures as William Grant Still and Duke Ellington (a suite from The River, starting at 10 a.m.), and, because it's now an international event, the Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was once so prominent that he was called the "African Mahler." His music sounds nothing like Mahler's, though, as you'll discover if you tune in for his Clarinet Quintet about 9:30 and then stick around for Mahler's Symphony No. 9 beginning a bit more than an hour later.
While we did try to be all-inclusive with the variety of service members that appear in Unforgettable: The Korean War we obviously were not able to represent every type of contribution to the war effort. I apologize to those who were left out. However, I must admit, I never thought about the help of these four-legged veterans!
Perhaps you’ve noticed the evolution of the AZPM website over the past couple of months. While it was a herculean effort on the part of programmers to revamp the site, most of the hard work is done and now we are in the tweaking and value-added stages.
Yeah, the colors and overall look appear much the same as before, but the site now focuses on being what is called a “news.org,” meaning it is primarily a news site now (at least on the main page) at azpm.org. Gone (mostly) are the promos for what’s coming up and how great we are. You can still see that stuff on the subpages. Now, you’ll see news stories and big spotlights of our top stuff, along with subcategories where stories live forever. NPR news stories soon will populate the site as well, to add content, even though they now appear in brief form at the KUAZ page. We have some technical issues we need to address before being able to bring you the full menu of what is available.
Putting all the good stuff at the main page also works better for us when it comes to promoting the website. It’s much easier for us to direct you to azpm.org than it is trying to send you a harder-to-find area that could be a subpage of a subpage. You may also hear some people say "azpublicmedia.org" on occasion, but that’s really an alias for azpm.org and you can’t get to subpages directly by using that URL. Try it and you’ll see what I mean. It only takes you to our main page and that address often is the subject of much debate within the organization. Personally, I’m a big fan of the simple azpm.org, but that doesn’t mean everyone agrees with me.
Other things added to the site recently include the ability to see the number of story comments at a glance and have the video player pop out of a story, if all you want to see is the video and you don’t care about the text that appears when you actually click on a link. Hopefully, we’ll have a quick link to audio for our radio stories as well. Of course, the audio is fully embedded if you take the time to click on a story.
Also in the works...a new elections page (separate from our politics area) is being populated with content and should be live very soon. You’ll find info on all of the candidates and a lot more, but I don’t want to spill all the beans just yet.
In many ways, it has been an outstanding year for Arizona Public Media - but your support is needed to wrap up our fiscal year and secure our financial future.
We successfully concluded the celebration of 50 years of service to the community on KUAT-TV Channel 6 with many community events and even a "Stay Home Un-Gala" that generated much needed funding for our core broadcast activities. AZPM brought Ray Suarez, Garrison Keillor and Neal Conan to Tucson, enjoyed a day learning about Arizona National Parks in conjunction with Ken Burns's television series, hosted a local debate with two sitting United States Supreme Court justices, informed our audiences on several key voter propositions, and many other program services that upheld our mission of informing, inspiring and connecting our community by bringing people and ideas together.
On the radio side, KUAZ-AM/FM our flagship NPR station achieved its highest ever audience share in the Winter 2010 quarter and ranked as the number one news/talk station in Tucson, and the fourth overall in the important morning drive-time. The Diane Rehm Show helped boost morning listenership, and investments in our transmission technologies ensured that audiences would enjoy a crisp, clear signal.
Classical KUAT-FM celebrated its 35th anniversary on the air, and many supporters from the UA School of Music came to give their accolades to the quality of music and depth of announcer knowledge that the station provides. Two of AZPM's original productions were broadcast nationally on PBS (our second in two years in the PBS national program schedule), and we were recognized with 13 Emmy-Award nominations while bringing home eight awards. Our website was redesigned to foster ease-of-use and viewer feedback, and upgraded with PlayPBS - a service that allows audiences to view full-length PBS and AZPM programs wherever and whenever through their computers.
Yes, it's a lot to complete in one year - and one final step is to make sure that we reach our needed financial goal before June 30th to ensure that we have the resources to cover our projected costs. I encourage you to make YOUR contribution today.
This just in from our Web experts: "The Classical Music Archive now lists all available metadata as long as the song has already aired." That means you can now find the composer, title, label and catalog number of every CD we've played in the recent past. Go here, which seems to give you only a list of our syndicated concert programs (Chicago Symphony and such), but if you click on an individual date, you will be taken to complete music listings for that day.
