NPR exec tells conservative pranksters exactly what they want to hear*

Yesterday, NPR's president gave a speech about the future of public radio at the National Press Club. But no one is talking about that. Instead, it's the words of NPR fund-raising executive Ronald Schiller, that are ringing out across the interwebs today.

Here's a summary of what went down from the New York Times:

The executive, Ronald Schiller, was recorded secretly by the Republican filmmaker and mischief-maker James O’Keefe. On the videotape, Mr. Schiller tells people posing as Muslim philanthropists that the Republican party has been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that Tea Party supporters are “seriously racist, racist people.” Mr. Schiller indicates that he is sharing his personal point of view, not NPR’s.

Dana Davis Rehm, a spokeswoman for NPR, said in a statement Tuesday, “We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.”

The release of the video comes at a sensitive time for NPR. Republicans in Congress who view NPR as biased are trying to cut federal funding for its local stations across the country. They are likely to seize on the video as further evidence of their views and further reason to reduce funding for the stations.

Schiller, who is no relation to NPR President Vivian Schiller, was already on his way out at NPR after taking a job with the Aspen Institute. But, well, whatever.

*Update: If you want to see how conservatives are playing this story, here are two links the influential Heritage Foundation recommended in its daily email blast: "Bad Timing for NPR" and "NPR's Diversity Doublespeak". All of this comes as public radio advocates, including KCRW's Jennfer Ferro, urge the Senate to keep the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded.

Lingering questions about NPR post- Williams

How much did the heavy-handed management style of former NPR news chief Ellen Weiss have to do with her forced resignation in the wake of the Juan Williams firing? Paul Farhi at the Washington Post gets an inside look and finds a communication breakdown between Weiss and NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, and some relief inside the NPR newsroom at Weiss's departure. Here's part of the story:

Inside NPR, Weiss's sudden departure caused mixed reactions. While some saw it as capitulation to outside pressure, others were privately joyful. They viewed Weiss's tenure as divisive and questioned her judgment on several fronts, especially her personnel decisions. 

Some of the hard feelings toward Weiss in NPR's newsroom sprang from a bruising cutback in December 2008, the first employee layoffs at NPR in 25 years. NPR eliminated 64 jobs and wiped out three programs in a move designed to close a $23 million budget gap. Some of NPR's most-seasoned journalists were let go, including hosts Alex Chadwick and Jacki Lyden, correspondents John McChesney and Elaine Korry and editor Marcus Rosenbaum. (Lyden was later restored to part-time status.)

NPR news exec resigns in wake of Williams firing

NPR released two memos today. The first says NPR must update its ethics guidelines based on an independent review of news analyst Juan Williams's firing. The second says Ellen Weiss, senior vice president of news at NPR and the person who called Williams to give him the boot, has resigned. The two memos are connected, obviously, though its not yet clear whether Weiss was forced out or bolted because of the NPR board's blatant meddling in news business.

Copies of both memos are here.

According to the first memo, the NPR board has demanded the news division establish a committee to review and update its code of ethics, both to ensure NPR journalists doing work for outside media outlets have more free rein and so the news division's "practices encourage a broad range of viewpoints to assist its decision-making, support its mission, and reflect the diversity of its national audiences"

The NPR board also gave CEO Vivian Schiller a renewed vote of confidence, but has withheld her bonus for 2010.

The second memo, written by Schiller, offers some background on Weiss's tenure at NPR and says who will step in for her until a new senior vice president of news is named, but it offers no detail on why she left. Was she forced out to give House Republicans their pound of flesh? Or is her exit a protest over how NPR has handled the Williams affair?

Here's more from NPR's news blog, which steps lightly around the connection between Weiss and Williams:

For background on the Juan Williams dismissal, you might start here. Alicia Shepard, NPR's ombudsman, previously said that the firing "was poorly handled." Williams previously said he thinks he was fired because "I appear on Fox." Weiss was the NPR executive who informed Williams of his dismissal, which came after he said on Fox News Channel that he gets nervous when he sees people in "Muslim garb" on airplanes. NPR said the remark was the latest in a pattern of problem comments made by Williams over recent years.

As NPR's David Folkenflik reports for our newscast, after Williams' dismissal "conservatives blasted NPR, and Fox News' most prominent opinion hosts made a cause of it. Republican lawmakers threatened to cut federal funding for public broadcasters."

As for the review done by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, David summarizes the findings this way: "It found that the termination of Williams' contract was entirely legal. But the board said the report called for a full review of the company's policies on ethics and outside appearances and for them to be applied consistently to all personnel."

He adds that Weiss "joined NPR in 1982 and rose through the ranks, holding a variety of key positions, such as executive producer of All Things Considered and national editor. She helped lead coverage of some of the biggest stories and highest-impact investigations in recent years. And she is credited with leading the network through an era of wrenching changes in journalism. But her dismissal of Williams — by phone — became a flashpoint in the debate."

Juan Williams, the most important man in America today

I find it hard to get too worked up about NPR firing Juan Williams for saying he gets "nervous" when he sees Muslims on an airplane. One could certainly argue that NPR handled the situation poorly from a PR perspective; and any inconsistency in how NPR applies its policy prohibiting analysts and reporters from offering opinion is certainly newsworthy. My main takeaway: If Williams wasn't supposed to offer opinions on cable news shows, NPR should have fired him long before he stumbled into an issue that's so politically charged.

What have we learned from all of this? First, conservatives who didn't like NPR before don't like NPR even more now. Second, despite repeated claims that NPR is a taxpayer-funded operation, it really isn't. Third, getting fired by the "lamestream" media is lucrative. Last, pundits yelling the loudest about censorship aren't necessarily the most consistent on the issue. From Bloggasm:

The conservative media watchdog Newsbusters claimed today that “Juan Williams has done nothing wrong” and that “what he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe.” This is the complete opposite of the view it took on Nasr’s rather anodyne tweet. “CNN has finally taken a step in the right direction in removing a terrorist sympathizer from their ranks,” the blogger wrote several months ago. “It’s a shame it took this amount of publicity and attention from organizations like the MRC to get the job done, as Octavia Nasr should never have been granted the position of authority to begin with.”

Four in the morning

1. Guests on public television news and interview shows are mostly white and male. FAIR

2. NPR fired Juan Williams for statements he made about Muslims on "The O'Reilly Factor" (WaPo). There's some push back from other media (Slate). NPR's president explains further (LA Observed). Williams does more talking on Fox (NYT).

3. Jim Rainey does not think public radio will replace newspapers as a main source of local news. LA Times

4. Have you applied to become the next editor of Newsweek? Hispters should probably apply twice. The Awl

NPR wants to expand statehouse reporting

National Public Radio has accepted a $1.8 million grant from the Open Society Foundations, a group started by billionaire and liberal activist George Soros, as part of an effort to hire 100 reports in 50 states to keep an eye of state politics. NPR president Vivian Schiller described the project to the New York Times, which summarized it this way:

The journalists would not be part of typical statehouse coverage, but instead would work on enterprise journalism that looks at how state government decisions play out over years, and extend beyond a single state’s borders.

Study: NPR is a party that you're not invited to

A new study says that National Public Radio needs to shed "perceptions that its programs are elitist and stuffy" if it wants to grow its audience. From a Current report on the study:

When encountering public radio, news consumers from various demographic groups share a common problem: They feel excluded. “It is really important that people hear themselves in the programming,” said Margaret Low Smith, v.p. of programming. “We’re talking about a private party, versus a party where everyone’s included and planning the same party,” she said. 

Quoted in a presentation on the study is a young adult Latino user of new media: “NPR, I feel, is mostly for educated adults from middle class and up. That is my impression.”

Some objections to the traits of NPR News are sure to prompt pushback from listeners and producers who value complexity and ambiguity, and don’t mind lots of words. Wordiness is a problem for one white woman who spoke to researchers about NPR: “I think it can be clever and quirky, and smart and insightful. But I don’t choose to listen to it because it’s too much talking for me.”

Smith believes there are ways to welcome more people to the audience without sacrificing quality. “It’s not about being not as smart or not as deep,” she said. It’s about telling stories with an ear that detects exclusion. NPR hosts do that now, she said, by quickly interrupting interviews with an identifying phrase when someone drops a name that would be unfamiliar to many people. 

To be consistent in catching off-putting insider assumptions, “it’s critical that people at the editorial table reflect a range of economic positions in life, a range of political views and a range of color,” Smith added.

The study was conducted by the Los Angeles-based firm SmithGeiger.

Four in the afternoon

1. NPR is looking for an ombudsman (or woman). NPR

2. NBC News is building newsroom in Conan O'Brien's old studio. LAT

3. The Washington Post on the downward side of the arc. CJR

4. Irony blushes as a judge bars "reporters" from a public auction of two Philadelphia newspapers. WSJ

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.

Four in the morning

1. God is dead... No, wait. The mainstream media is dead, and Andrew Breitbart is coming to collect the body (just as soon as that thing with James O'Keefe is taken care of). NPR

2. The Los Angeles Times shuffles a few editorial positions and hires former Daily News sports reporter Steve Dilbeck to blog about the Dodgers. LAO

3. The Twitter bullies are out. Nick Bilton at the New York Times is highly offended that New Yorker writer George Packer is leery of the new "information economy" that comes in the form of Tweets. NYT (Packer's original post)

4. The Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has honored five journalists: Celeste Fremon of WitnessLA, Denise Nix of the Daily Breeze, Claudia Peschiutta of KNX 1070, Dave Lopez of CBS2/KCAL9, and Andrew Blankstein of the Los Angeles Times. SPJ

Public radio and the Internet

The following excerpt from LA Magazine's interview with KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour paints a picture of the tensions inside public radio as NPR and affiliate stations contends with the realities of the Internet:

Today I would say that one of the major issues is the importance of maintaining and strengthening and recognizing local stations. In many ways, it’s emblematic of the country itself: Public radio is an extremely diverse, even anarchic system. It’s not centrally controlled. Every station is independent. For people who love order, this is a nightmare. For somebody like me, who celebrates diversity, it is a triumph. There are always those inside public broadcasting who would like to see a “well-managed system.” KCRW wouldn’t exist under their aegis. And the Internet has complicated everything. In public radio it is unseemly to talk about being competitive. You know: “We’re all one big system; we have trouble surviving as it is, so we’re not competing.” That’s nonsense. We are all competing with each other. KCRW has subscribers in every state and some abroad. The Internet makes us available in San Francisco, in New York. We are getting into each other’s markets. There have been attempts to gather us into one big group under NPR. We are not interested. We want to sing our own song. It costs money. The more successful you are on the Internet, the more you have to pay for increased bandwidth and increased staffing. We have a very large audience on the Web. I think it may be the largest of any single station that’s Webcasting. And it’s expensive.

What advice would you give to your successor about that?
It’s all radio. I guess that’s the first advice, because there is an enormous shifting away, a lack of investment in programming and increased investment in the new bells and whistles of digital technology. But the reason people listen is that they’re intrigued or fascinated or interested in the content. That’s the most important thing to remember, and it is the thing that increasingly concerns me—that independent producers, the people who are the creative types, are marginalized today in favor of the technology people. It’s a real failure not to understand that the business you’re in is programming.

At NPR, too?
NPR must invest in programming. It cannot simply invest in Morning Edition and All Things Considered. It must be seen—and it isn’t now—as a place that welcomes independent productions. NPR doesn’t have a program director right now who listens to new stuff. When This American Life began in 1995, Ira, who had worked at NPR, could not get NPR to take the program. That is not better today. It’s even worse. Instead the focus at NPR is online. The Internet gives NPR a voice to go over the heads of the local stations, OK? That’s the big danger.

Four in the morning

1. More eager gossip about Apple's iTablet - for journo-techs, this is the second coming. Time

2. The biggest loser in MediaNews Group's bankruptcy? Hearst Corp. Alan Mutter

3. LA Magazine profiles longtime KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour, who's stepping down in February. LAmag

4. Analyzing the collapse of the Washington Post. New Republic

"Frontline" founder decries commercialism in public journalism

In a speech at USC, David Fanning, the founding producer of "Frontline," criticized public television and public radio stations for the "shameful" act of using sponsorships to sell products. Here's part of what he said:

I am particularly concerned about a threat to our essential public identity. This is already happening. They're called “sponsorships”, but they are essentially commercials all over public broadcasting websites, local and national, radio and television. I’ve argued strenuously that we are threatening our special status as non-commercial media ... we all swim in a sea of commercialism, and that’s precisely why we need to keep ourselves clean of it.

One day, I’m afraid, when most of our work is experienced on the web, we will wake up and the public will say we’re no different from the rest of them. Why should we give you our membership money? And why should the government give you our tax dollars?

(via Romenesko)

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)

Four in the morning

1. I guess we now know what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks of prior restraint. NYT

2. California Watch and KQED's public radio program California Report have teamed up. CW

3. The LA Weekly has hired a new blogger. LAO

4. It's good to be a New Yorker: The magazine hasn't suffered the kinds of cuts that its sister publications have. NYO

WNYC gets back "To The Point

More details on the return of "To The Point" to WNYC in New York City. The show will broadcast Monday through Friday starting at 10 p.m. The show will make its debut on Friday, Oct. 9.

Burying the lede, and everything else*, **

David Folkenflik had a fascinating and highly disturbing piece today on Morning Edition about a story written by reporter Scott Anderson for GQ that was buried so deep it's been scrubbed from the Internet. The story was entitled "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power." From NPR's web story:

[Anderson's] investigative piece, published in the September American edition of GQ, challenges the official line on a series of bombings that killed hundreds of people in 1999 in Russia. It profiles a former KGB agent who spoke in great detail and on the record, at no small risk to himself. But instead of trumpeting his reporting, GQ's corporate owners went to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure no Russians will ever see it.

The corporate owners don't seem to have any concerns over the accuracy of the story or with Anderson's safety. An email from Jerry S. Birenz, a lawyer for Conde Nast, the corporate owner of GQ, indicates financial motives were at play:

[Birenz] ordered that the article could not be posted to the magazine's Web site. No copies of the American edition of the magazine could be sent to Russia or shown in any country to Russian government officials, journalists or advertisers. Additionally, the piece could not be published in other Conde Nast magazines abroad, nor publicized in any way.

It wasn't just that there was no reference to Anderson's piece on the cover of this month's GQ, which featured a picture of Michael Jackson, a reference to tennis star Andy Roddick's wife and a ranking of obnoxious colleges and top drinking cities. At this writing, I cannot find any reference to Anderson's piece on the Internet.

Listen to the Morning Edition piece here.

*Update: Gawker is working on a Russian translation of the GQ story. The site has also scanned the article from the magazine for anyone who wants to read it.

**Update II: The New York Times picks up the story.

The new boss

National Public Radio named a new chief executive today. From the New York Times (in more ways than one):

Vivian Schiller, who heads the online operations of The New York Times, will leave the paper to become the president and chief executive of National Public Radio, the network announced on Tuesday.

Ms. Schiller, 47, will take over NPR on Jan. 5, heading a nonprofit corporation with a budget of more than $150 million and an endowment of more than $240 million. It provides news and entertainment programming to more than 800 public radio stations around the country and claims an audience of 26 million people.

In case you were wondering, no, I don't work for NPR.