50 YEARS

posted to From the General Manager by Jack Gibson

Dear friends,

This month KUAT Channel 6 and our public media organization celebrate 50 years of service to the Tucson community and Southern Arizona. With your support and loyalty, we offer what we believe to be the best content on television, radio and online.

For a half-century we have delivered consistent, award-winning, in-depth news and public affairs, science and nature, arts, entertainment and educational children’s programming, and we have moved in a bold way into the digital age, offering our content in virtually every available communications platform. We provide exceptional original content for and about this community from Arizona Illustrated, Arizona Spotlight and The Desert Speaks to last year’s Tucson Remembers and Phoenix Mars Mission: Ashes to Ice, to name but a few.

In the land grant tradition of Arizona’s first university, The University of Arizona, KUAT-TV6 launched on March 8, 1959 and was the first public station in Arizona.

The stations of AZPM have spent the last 50 years solidifying their reputation as high-quality, trusted sources for lifelong learning. Over the years, we’ve moved and added transmitters to improve our signal quality and reach, and built radio stations that deliver classical music, National Public Radio (NPR), local news, jazz music and last year, public radio and television in Spanish. Arizona Public Media (AZPM) was adopted in January 2008, as the name for the parent organization of the UA public media stations that now offers six channels of television content and three channels of radio. AZPM also maintains a strong and growing online presence, routinely featuring live streaming video − in real time, from the state legislature or a campus lecture hall.

Today, we feel the impact of the current economic turmoil, as does every organization in this community and, indeed, every family. We are managing our expenses and generating support – albeit at a slower growth rate than in the last two years. The fact is, nearly 60 percent of our operating revenue is locally generated from people like you. Your local investment in our stations in turn supports PBS and NPR, who rely in large measure on station membership support.

In the coming years, Arizona Public Media will continue to explore all options to make our organization more cost effective, more visible and more responsive to both the community and the campus community. Our efforts in this area are not simply reactive to current conditions, but reflective of our culture of responsibility as custodians for precious resources provided to us through the generosity of our donors, corporate underwriters and The University of Arizona.

Arizona Public Media exists to serve the public. We are committed to being the most trusted and valued media organization in this community. We maintain this commitment through our public-private funding model, which allows us to be responsive to our communities and viewers while maintaining our independence from any single funding source. One of the great strengths of public media is that it is universally available, and available to all, regardless of economic means.

If you are a fan or supporter of our stations, we thank you. If you haven’t tuned in lately, we invite you to see all the new offerings and classic favorites that Arizona Public Media offers. Our hope is that you will continue to find us worthy of your time as a viewer, listener and supporter for the next 50 years.

Sincerely,

Jack Gibson
Director and General Manager
Arizona Public Media®

A NEW COLLABORATION

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

When newspaper reporters lose their jobs, where do they head? The answer, in a couple of communities, is Public Broadcasting.

The PBS/NPR trade journal Current has a story about new collaborations being formed in this tough economy that is wiping out old-school newspapers.

Groundbreaking collaborations are beginning to surface as public broadcasting stations partner with laid-off print journalists to bolster multiplatform local and regional reporting. In St. Louis, 14 former newspaper reporters now work at desks at public TV station KETC. A similar relationship is just getting under way at KCTS-TV in Seattle, with reporters moving in just last week. Though future business models and financial relationships remain undefined, pubcasters and newspaper journalists are finding that their missions mesh nicely. Both work to keep the community informed and involved in public affairs. Both value their roles in educating viewers and readers. Both are passionate about those goals and have high standards.

You can read the entire article here.

MASS UNAPPEAL

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Douglas McLennan’s recent blog post on the failings of CNN and other cable news purveyors leads to a comment on where newspapers have gone wrong:

Rather than attract a hipper younger audience, they alienated their core readers and failed to get the kids as well. In our increasingly nichefying world, using mass-culture strategies to get bigger audiences works against you. A proliferation of sources means that people can be pickier to get exactly what they want, and general bland multi-purpose content has less and less appeal. A lesson for anyone competing for an audience these days.

It’s also a lesson, I might add, for public broadcasting. You can find the full post here.

HANK CINQ

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Last night I attended Arizona Theatre Company’s presentation of The Acting Company/Guthrie Theatre’s joint touring production of Shakespeare’s King Henry V. I’m not reviewing it for the Weekly, because it will be long gone by the time the review would hit the street, and I’m disinclined to blog a full review. But I do want to call your attention to it; it’s a good production, and I don’t think tickets are selling very well.

It’s not perfect, and it never quite lives up to its initial coup de théâtre, but it’s a solid and often inventive production that attends as closely to the humor as to the stirring battle cries. Some audience members have objected to the set and costumes, but I think they’re very effective, especially for a touring production. The set is a curving faux-brick wall with sliding panels, evoking the lower reaches of a Medieval tower, and the costumes suggest both the Middle Ages and the World War I period without ever yanking the action out of the original context.

The dozen actors perform valiantly, all in multiple roles except for Matthew Amendt as Henry. Despite my overall approval, I have some doubts about Amendt—not his conception of the character, which righly vacillated between the grasping ambition of a young ruler and the charm and fear of a still boyish ex-wastrel. No, I was distracted by Amendt’s delivery, especially during the first half. The accent itself is unidentifiable, sort of Aussie-French-American, mostly American, but spoken in a way suggesting that English was not his (or Harry’s) first language: Amendt tends to stress or draw out the final syllable of a word here and there. Is he trying to emulate Elizabethan pronunciation? If so, he doesn’t go nearly far enough to reproduce that (to us) now nearly incomprehensible accent. And if this were the intent, the other actors would be doing it, too. Very strange. (Also, William Sturdevant, the very strong actor playing Fluellen, employs a thick brogue that sounds a bit more Scottish than the intended Welsh.)

I see I’ve expended more words on quibbles than praise, but I do recommend this production. It runs only through April 5. The Arizona Theatre Company Web site is not readily forthcoming with info—you need to drill down into layers I can’t link to—but you can start your search here.

LATE THEATER, GOOD CHINESE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

The Tucson Weekly has a brand new site design, and here’s your incentive to take a look at it: content provided by little old me.

Two items this week. First, an article on the boomlet of late-night theater:

Five years ago, it was an experiment by a single Tucson theater; this year, it's looking like a local theater trend: provocative performances for night owls. Live Theatre Workshop made the first sustained effort at late-night programming with its Etcetera series, launched at the beginning of 2004 (see "Live From the Eastside," Jan. 22, 2004). Since last fall, two other groups have begun series that cozy up to midnight: Beowulf Alley launched LNT @ The Alley, and the Rogue Theatre is hosting the young artists of the Now Theatre in a series called Rogue After Curfew. Generally, these efforts run on Fridays and Saturdays starting at 10:30 p.m., and finish by midnight. Rogue After Curfew this weekend concludes a run of Tennessee Williams' one-acts with _This Property Is Condemned_; this Friday, Etcetera will open Anne Thibault's _I Wrote This Play to Make You Love Me_; and on April 17, Beowulf Alley will open a two-weekend presentation of Brian Hanson's _I'm Sorry I Liked You_. Success is slow to build. Rogue/Now and Beowulf Alley, which just launched their initiatives a few months ago, are still drawing very small audiences, even though the late-night performances follow mainstage shows that come close to selling out. Beowulf Alley's manager, Beth Dell, reports that the average audience so far for LNT @ The Alley is only 22, and attendance at Now's opening nights has been no better than that. But keep in mind that in early 2004, Etcetera was lucky to get six people to show up for its openings; now, for many shows, it sells out its compact Live Theatre Workshop space and sometimes has to add performances.

You’ll find the full article here. Then put on your bib and accompany me on an excursion to a hidden-away Chinese restaurant:

Sometime in the mid-1990s, Mark Salzman came to town, and we needed to fill him with Chinese food. Salzman is best known for _Iron and Silk_, a memoir-turned-movie (in which he starred) about the time he spent in China teaching English and studying martial arts. I'd fallen in with a group charged with his care during his local appearance, and we thought a Chinese meal would remind him of the good old days. But this is Tucson, where Chinese restaurants abound, but quantity has somehow edged out quality. Where could we take Salzman for a Chinese meal that went significantly beyond adequate? Somebody made reservations at a nice place tucked away on a side street a bit west of Interstate 10, and the meal greatly pleased our guest—and the rest of us. A few years later, the owners sold the business, and the restaurant went into a steep decline; even the booth upholstery started to look shabby. The last meal I had there, early in this decade, was a severe disappointment. A couple of years ago, one of the original owners, Harry Gee, regained control of the restaurant. Recently, two of my neighbors (one of whom is an American of Chinese descent) urged us to give the place another try. We did (with those neighbors joining us)—and I'm pleased to report that the establishment is back in top form.

Get the details here.

MIDDLEBROW ADVOCACY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Greg Sandow expresses my sentiments exactly:

There's a tendency, in arts advocacy, to go all middlebrow, to talk about the arts in rapturous terms, as a part of life that's inspiring and elevating. Whereas art is so much more complex than that. Some of it isn't pleasant. Some of it isn't inspiring. Some of it paints the world in dire colors. Some of it is confrontational. Some of it is difficult.

And if the arts were so uplifting, nobody who loves the arts would be a jerk.

You’ll find the entire post here.