BEYOND PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

We had a staff meeting yesterday at which senior staffers outlined Arizona Public Media’s growing use of social networking media. It’s great that we’re going to make a bigger push with Twitter and blogging and Facebook and such, but I’m not sure that some of us completely understand its potential.

One of the major guidelines, at the PBS level, is don’t blog or tweet anything you wouldn’t say on the air; as the senior staffer said, we don’t want to alienate the core PBS audience. (I’ll leave aside the fact that I work in radio, which has nothing to do with PBS, but that’s common shorthand.) If we’re afraid of offending the average existing viewer/listener, we’re using social networking for the wrong reason.

OK, tweeting “The boss is a jackass” is a bad idea wherever you work, if you hope that the jackass will continue to employ you. And it’s poor form to overuse the Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television (although “piss” seems pretty commonplace today).

But the basic problem with worrying about putting off the core listener/viewer is that, first, the core listener/viewer—some nice 60-year-old who likes Mozart and British mysteries—probably isn’t that into Facebook, blogs and Twitter. And second, the whole point of using those media is to attract new followers to public broadcasting. Most of those people have a much looser attitude toward acceptable content, and they particularly need to see material that’s honest and witty and a little edgy if they’re going to trust is as honest or at least entertaining.

One of the arts organizations I help run, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, has a MySpace page simply because a teenager related to the board president took it upon himself to set it up one day. Somebody on the board is supposed to be supervising it, but a friend request I sent last spring still hasn’t been answered, and the page itself hasn’t been updated since January. Most of the board members just don’t understand that things like MySpace are not simply billboards in cyberspace; they’re interactive, and require a little bit of maintenance. Organizations that don’t get this end up looking clueless, and as foolish as a parent who tries to be “with it” to connect with his kids, without really grasping a single thing about the kids’ music and clothing style.

If you’re going to do this, do it right or not at all.

VISITING AN ENDANGERED REST STOP

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

After hearing the Arizona Department of Transportation plans to close 13 of its 18 rest stops beginning next week to save the state some money, I decided to pay a visit to one of the popular sites on the chopping block.

The Sacaton rest stop is a bit north of Casa Grande and is your last official rest stop before heading into Phoenix from Tucson (or the first after Phoenix heading toward Tucson).

I arrived there on a Saturday afternoon, following some business I had to take care of in Phoenix. The stop, on the eastbound side of Interstate-10, was quite busy in the late afternoon. I’d say there were more than 20 people there during my visit. There was a couple enjoying a smoking break and some relaxation by their motorcycles, families stretching their legs and using the facilities and even some truckers resting up from a long haul.

The place also has a bit of commerce. Native Americans sit by quietly displaying jewelry they’re selling and vending machines sit in the shade waiting to be fed money, in exchange for a snack for the weary traveler. The place also has a number of picnic tables and an area to walk your canine companions.

The rest stop also now serves as a political rallying site, with hand-made signs and people handing out cards to call the governor’s office to save the rest stops from closing.

An ADOT flier calls the closures “temporary suspensions,” saying they “will allow the department to reallocate funds to ensure the safety of the traveling public by focusing on roadways first."

At the same time, the flier also states that the status of the rest stops will be assessed by the end of June, which closes out the current fiscal year (which still has no complete spending plan).

While ADOT says it going ahead with the closures, there are more than a dozen rest stops that are privately-owned or privately-operated and they will remain open.

For the complete list of rest stops slated for closure, view the flier.

I HAVE RETURNED AGAIN

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

A long, long time ago I announced that I’d soon be resuming blogging. Obviously, I was being too optimistic. Since then, I’ve been doing my own job (announcing live from 6 a.m. to noon every weekday), plus half the work of each of two other employees who got laid off at the beginning of summer. I’ll tell you more about what I’m up to behind the scenes later, but for now you’ll just have to take my word that I’ve been too busy to blog.

But I did streamline my life at the beginning of September by giving up my arts-editor position at the Tucson Weekly, whereupon I promptly absconded to Greece and Rome for two and a half weeks. Now I’m back, and settling into a routine, and it looks like I’ll finally be returning to the blogosphere on a regular basis.

I may not post again until next week—I’m trying to catch up on a backlog of CD cataloguing—but for now, I’d like to point you in the direction of Jack Shafer’s denunciation of the Federal Trade Commission’s new disclosure rules for bloggers.

In short, the guidelines require bloggers who review or promote products or services to disclose any connections they may have to the manufacturers or service providers. There have clearly been abuses of celebrity bloggers promoting stuff in return for payment, but really, the FTC is over-reacting. Look: Every classical music magazine—those few that still exist, anyway—review CDs provided free of charge by the record labels or their publicists. Everybody knows this. Nobody worries about it. Negative reviews flow as freely as the positive. And even holier-than-thou newspapers thrive on freebies. They’d quickly go bankrupt if they had to pay for their sportswriters’ and arts critics’ admission to the events they cover.

Just for the record, every CD I’m likely to review in this space (most of the reviews are reprints of items I provide to magazines) came to me gratis directly from a manufacturer or a publicist, or from them via a magazine editor. That’s the only time I’m going to say it. If you want to know how I feel about the FTC’s power grab, read Shafer’s article, and see the graphic representation of my attitude to the FTC below.

AN EXPANSION OF NEWS

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

While some other media outlets are cutting back on the amount of news they deliver, we at AZPM actually are expanding.

Admittedly, we scaled back coverage awhile back, as staffing and finances forced the elimination of our bottom-of-the-hour newscasts. Now, through a combination of factors, we have brought back some of those newscasts and added local features at other times.

The new schedule is a bit tricky, but I'll try to put it in perspective. We are adding newscasts back to All Things Considered at 32 minutes past the hour.

Morning Edition is a bit trickier, but we hope you'll like what we're doing. Monday-Thursday adds a feature at 6:30 and 8:30 and a newscast at 7:33. Friday adds newscasts at 6:33 and 7:33 and Arizona Spotlight continues to air at 8:30.

We may tweak things as we go, but that's how it stands now. We hope you'll tune in. Once we get some of the production kinks out of the way, we'll bring you some of these new features on the Web site as well.

STARS SHINE IN OCTOBER, SOME PLANETS, TOO.

posted to From the General Manager by Jack Gibson

For our Classical music fans, in October we invite you to join us for the second annual 20th-21st century composers festival, “Ives/Copland and the American Spirit Music Festival (The Fathers of American Concert Music)” at The University of Arizona. The Festival will include four concerts and an introductory symposium, providing a rich panorama of the music of these two progenitors of American music. The entire School of Music will be engaged, with performances including the Arizona Symphony Orchestra, UA Wind Ensemble, Arizona Choir, Arizona Contemporary Ensemble, and faculty from the wind, string, voice, and piano areas. Additional information is available at www.music.arizona.edu.

On television, you won’t want to miss Phoenix Mars Mission: Onto the Ice, documenting the experiences of the people responsible for the success of the Phoenix Mars Mission. The one-hour program premieres Tuesday, October 13th at 9 p.m. on PBS-HD channels 6 and 27. From practice landings and simulations to real-life and the heart-pounding "seven minutes of terror" for the spacecraft’s decent onto the planet’s surface, Phoenix Mars Mission: Onto the Ice follows Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith and the rest of the Phoenix Lander team as they work to successfully land an exploratory vehicle on Mars for the first time in over a decade.

Phoenix Mars Mission: Onto the Ice picks up where the last Phoenix Mars Mission documentary left off, just after the exciting launch from Earth. Onto the Ice will be released to public television stations nationally, in early 2010.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to publicly congratulate our terrific staff on some exciting news. Arizona Public Media’s staff earned 13 Emmy nominations in seven categories. The 2009 Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards ceremony will be held Oct. 24 in Phoenix, when winners will be announced. Also, KUAZ 89.1 our NPR affiliate again won the Tucson Weekly Best of Tucson award for “Best Radio Station for News.”

Our team works hard to bring you the best locally produced programs, none of which would be possible without your continued support. On behalf of our entire team, thank you.

Sincerely,

Jack Gibson
Director and General Manager
Arizona Public Media®

MOSEY ON OVER TO OUR HOME PAGE

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

We've added a local news area to the front page at AZPM.org, but let's get some things straight first.

We're not chasing ambulances, monitoring traffic accidents or tallying shootings and murders. Quite frankly, we don't have the resources, nor the desire, for blood and guts. That is why you don't hear many of these stories on the air. We're an alternative to that, but I'm preaching to the choir, as they say.

What you will find are stories that we feel are important to you, or stories that just don't fit in with our normal broadcasts (although they could). They won't necessarily be the late-breaking stories you'll find at the local newspaper's site. Our staffing won't allow us to compete with that, so there's no use in trying. This is sort of in "test mode" now and the final product we'll roll out in a few months will look much different and have much more content. Think "NPR," if that helps.

Admittedly, it will be a slow process, but we hope to get more stuff to you each day and the older stories will fall off (when I remove them). I'm pretty much the gatekeeper of this area for now, so let me know what you think?

I'm not here to promote stuff or make you feel good, but beyond that, I'm open to ideas.