Warren Olney gets an award

Warren Olney, host of KCRW's "Which Way, LA?" and "To The Point" will be one of three honorees on Tuesday to receive the inaugural Bill Stout Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. KPCC's Larry Mantle and Patt Morrison will also receive the award.

Four today

1. Four New York Times journalists are missing in Libya, including two-time Pulitzer-winner Anthony Shadid. NYT

2. Pew's State of the Media report for 2011. Pew

3. KPCC is looking for a web designer/developer. APM

4. A neo-Nazi rally is planned for March 19 in Claremont to "respond" to a pro-immigration rally at the Claremont Colleges. Daily Bulletin

KPCC news staff could grow by leaps and bounds

Bill Kling, the soon-to-be retired president and CEO of American Public Media, wants big boosts in reporting staff at four APM stations, including KPCC in Pasadena. If his fund-raising dreams come true, he'd flood the L.A. market with as many as 100 reporters, each with salaries that will make most journalists in Southern California drool.

This could all be pie in the sky, of course. But even if he's only half successful, this could be a major shift in how L.A. gets covered. Ken Doctor at Newsonomics has the story, and here's an excerpt:

The initial four stations involved in the alliance planning are WNYC in New York, WBEZ in Chicago, KPCC in Los Angeles and Minnesota Public Radio, in the Twin Cities, says Bill Kling, current (and now retiring, ”MPR’s Bill Kling Steps Down — and Up — From Public Radio“) president and CEO of the American Public Media Group (APMG), the parent of the L.A. and Twin Cities stations, as well as a major syndicator of public radio programming.

One hundred “public media” reporters and editors in a market is a huge increase. Among those four stations, the news staff now ranges from 12 to 30 each. It’s tough to count precisely because these are legacy radio operations, and radio requires different job descriptions than digital news. Still, at those numbers, the alliance members are aiming at adding more than 300 reporters and editors in four markets, if the plans succeed. Kling says the positions created “would be a very good job for people who love journalism,” in the six figures with full benefits.

Kling and his colleagues are strategizing their plans and foundation asks — and his hope is that funding can be locked down by next June, when he formally steps from his APMG post. He says his post-retirement plan is to focus on the building out of public media. If it is, hiring could commence by mid-2011.
How much funding?

The plan will cost about $5 million per market per year, says Kling, or $25 million for a five-year funding plan, which is what the group aims to obtain. So that’s $100 million if four markets can be launched; $150 million, it it’s six markets. After the first four markets, Kling says, “we’d go on to five, six, seven, eight.”

NPR's Project Argo getting underway

National Public Radio's $3 million Project Argo will officially launch September 1. The idea behind the project is for national headquarters to invest in local news reporting that benefits both local affiliates and the national news shows. The money comes from Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is being used to create a network of local blogs (twelve so far).

One of the new blogs funded through Project Argo is at KPCC (or Southern California Public Radio, as the Pasadena-based station prefers to be called). The blog is titled Multi-American and is written by former San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Leslie Berestein Rojas. Here's how she and the blog are described:

Leslie most recently covered immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She has retraced the steps of migrants along desert smuggling trails, investigated immigrant detention contractors, and told the stories of families left behind in Mexico’s migrant-sending towns. A native of Cuba raised in Los Angeles, Leslie has also written for Time, People, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. She has reported from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Multi-American is both a news project and a discussion forum. It’s also part of a partnership between Southern California Public Radio and NPR involving a dozen public radio stations around the country, among them 89.3 KPCC, in which we’re experimenting with filling the gaps left in news coverage by a shrinking media industry. KPCC’s Jason Kandel is managing and editing the project.

Nieman Journalism Lab has a list of the other blogs around the country. There are two in San Francisco for some reason.

Ruiz on KPCC*

Reporter in Exile blogger Todd Ruiz will be on KPCC's "Air Talk" with Larry Mantle at 11 a.m. today to talk about the rising violence in Thailand.

*Ruiz got bumped.

Mantle's silver anniversary

KPCC's Larry Mantle celebrates the 25th anniversary of AirTalk today. Don Barrett has a writeup of the show and the man behind the mic. LA Radio

Public radio's ratings game

Some good news (and job security) out of the recent ratings results for KCRW. First, the overall numbers, as reported by Jim Rainey at the LA Times:

General Manager Ruth Seymour of KCRW-FM (89.9) told me last year she didn't think much of Arbitron's new Portable People Meter. The meters counted just 289,000 weekly listeners for KCRW in August, well behind another public-radio fixture, KPCC-FM (89.3), which had 549,000. Though Seymour has retired, she owes me a "toldya." The most recent Arbitron report puts KCRW at 514,000 weekly listeners, right on the tail of KPCC's 544,000.

In addition, Public Radio International, which distributes KCRW's "To The Point," reported a 28-percent increase in ratings for the national syndicated talk show. The increase was largely due to WNYC in New York putting TTP back on the air, although there was growth in Washington and Dallas as well.

KPCC into expansion

The Pasadena-based pubic radio station KPPC has moved into a new building, plans a new morning show, and has expanded its newsroom. From the LA Times:

At a time when many public broadcasters are financially strapped -- reliant on shrinking government funds, meager college support, and subscription drives dreaded by listeners -- KPCC has thrived by tapping a board willing to write big checks and hit up their rich friends for contributions. Taking the lead are Gordon Crawford, managing director of the Capital Group, the Los Angeles investment fund manager, and Jarl Mohn, who built E! Entertainment Television.

-snip-

In the last 10 years, KPCC has won more than 230 regional and national journalism awards, and grown from a weekly audience of about 200,000 to nearly 600,000, second in size only to WNYC-FM in New York among news and information public radio stations and consistently ahead of KCRW-FM locally. (Classical music programmer KUSC-FM is the top rated public radio station in Southern California.)

SCPR has about 30 reporters, with bureaus in L.A., Orange County, the Inland Empire and Washington. (Times columnists Patt Morrison and David Lazarus and other staff members are frequent contributors to KPCC programming. Times reporters and editors appeared on KPCC programs about 150 times in 2009.)

A new show in town

KPCC has tapped former "Day to Day" co-host Madeleine Brand to host a new one-hour show that will run in her old time slot, starting at 9 a.m. Currently, KPCC runs BBC at that time.

From the press release:

SCPR will immediately begin building a staff for this currently unnamed program. The staff will include producer/reporters, online, technical and support staff. The program itself will cover a wide range of topics, but all with a distinctive Southern California perspective.

I expect that a flurry of resumes from former NPR West producers and unemployed/underemployed/unhappy L.A.-area reporters is already on its way to KPCC's new Pasadena offices.

(found via LA Observed)

NPR's version of hyperlocal

The folks at NPR have started hiring staffers to oversee Project Argo, a collaboration with local NPR affiliates set to launch this summer.

With $3 million in seed money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation, NPR will hire bloggers for two-year stints at several local stations to do beat reporting. As I understand it, the stories are supposed to enhance the coverage of the local stations while giving NPR a well of localized material to draw upon.

Here are the participating stations:

KPBS (San Diego); KPCC (Southern California); KQED (San Francisco); KALW (San Francisco); OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting); KPLU (Tacoma/Seattle); MPR (Minnesota Public Radio); WAMU (DC); WXPN (Philadelphia) ; WNYC (New York); WBUR (Boston); and WGBH (Boston).

NPR is all about collaboration these days, so I'd expect Project Argo, if successful, to become a seed for other media partnerships in these areas.

(found via Romensko)

Comings and goings

Los Angeles Daily News reporter Jason Kandel is moving to KPCC to become online managing editor. His departure leaves an opening for an online breaking news reporter at the DN. LAO

KPCC heading to DC

Kitty Felde is heading to Washington, DC to open a new bureau for public radio station KPCC. LA Observed has the press release - which, somewhat bizarrely, quotes local congressmen saying it's a swell idea.