Current's The Pub

Former NPR Managing Editor for Digital News Mark Stencel has just completed a census of active political fact-checking initiatives — and only two are in public media. But he thinks public media is uniquely positioned to do this work and to make the sometimes dry subject matter of political fact-checking more accessible to a broad audience. On this week’s episode, Stencel offers a practical guide on how, when and what to fact-check, and what to do when your fact-checks are inevitably challenged or misconstrued. Also, host Adam Ragusea and his colleagues at Mercer University asked scholarship applicants what they consider to be the most innovative media company. Did any public media make the list? Yes, but nowhere near the top.

On this week’s episode of "The Pub," longtime public radio host Diane Rehm discusses her impending retirement, her advocacy for physician-assisted suicide, and who might replace her in the host chair. And host Adam Ragusea shares his thoughts on NPR’s recent controversial move to conspicuously brand its hourly newscasts as “live.”

A food podcast, a short film about young men in a housing project, a Korva Coleman puppet named “Korvacita” — they’re all products of NPR’s new Story Lab, an innovation unit that started last June. On this week’s episode, we interview the Lab's Michael May before a live video chat audience via Shindig, and he even entertains a few pitches from the crowd. (Thanks to Shindig for sponsoring the episode!) Also, we celebrate The Pub’s first birthday! 

Look out WNYC, there’s a new public radio station in play for top positions on the iTunes podcast chart. WBUR’s new show "Modern Love," a collaboration with The New York Times, hit #1 on the day of its debut last week, momentarily dethroning the mighty "Serial." On this week’s episode of "The Pub," we talk about how they did it with WBUR Managing Producer of Program Development Jessica Alpert and Daniel Jones, longtime editor of the NYT’s “Modern Love” column, on which the show is based. Also on the show, host Adam Ragusea reads through some of Bill Siemering’s 1971 "All Things Considered..." launch memo to stations, a remarkable historical document that we recently digitized. "ATC" today bears only so much resemblance to Siemering’s idealistic vision.

PBS’s “Mercy Street” has two daunting jobs to do at once: A) replace “Downton Abbey,” the most successful drama in PBS history; B) prove that American public television can make great scripted TV instead of just importing it from the U.K. Has this Civil War medical drama succeeded against that nearly impossible yardstick? We ask Slate culture critic (and native Brit) June Thomas. Short answer: No. This week, we hear Thomas’ take on where PBS’s big-budget effort went wrong, and contemplate the role of expensive dramatic series in public service broadcasting. Also, Michigan Radio proves what public media is all about with its Flint water coverage, and host Adam Ragusea argues that news people should stop referring to Martin Luther King Jr. as “Dr. King.”

B.J. Leiderman was an underachieving student at American University in Washington — studying “shall we say, chemistry, wink wink,” he says — when a friend who worked at NPR helped him land the gig that would define his career: composing theme music for NPR’s then-new show, Morning Edition. Commissions to score five more national radio shows followed, and now “B.J. Leiderman” is a household name among the millions of people who hear it in the credits. Leiderman sincerely relishes his public radio fame, but it’s been a tough high-water mark to try to reach again in the years since. He’s a delightful, charming and talented guy whose life and career have been hampered by mental health problems, chronic illness and his white whale of an album — a collection of pop tunes called “Natural Public Leiderman” that he’s been working on for decades, hoping to capitalize on his NPR fame. This week on The Pub we hear some of that album, along with

Is there such a thing as excessively authentic pronunciation? If it exists, it has certainly occurred on public radio, where everybody from classical music announcers to news reporters seem to have a little too much fun pronouncing foreign (to them) words and names. In this holiday encore episode of The Pub, we revisit host Adam Ragusea’s guide to finding the sweet spot between insensitively Anglicized pronunciation and pretentiously exoticized pronunciation. We also listen back to an interview with veteran public radio host Celeste Headlee about the art of writing pronouncers — rough textual representations of how a word or name should be said. Plus, we listen again to a talk with political scientist Patrick O’Mahen, who says his research proves countries that spend more money on public broadcasting have better-informed citizens.

“National Public Radio,” as Bill Siemering envisioned it in the beginning, would “not regard its audience as a ‘market’ or in terms of its disposable income, but as curious, complex individuals,” he wrote in NPR’s 1970 mission statement. Siemering was NPR’s first program director, though he didn’t stay long. This week on The Pub, we’ll consider how public radio today does or does not resemble Siemering’s optimistic, aspirational vision. Also: • A cavalcade of public radio stars attempt to read the most unwieldy sentence ever conceived by humanity — 92 words with 11 distinct clauses. John Hockenberry, Zoe Chace, Jesse Thorn, Bill Littlefield, Celeste Headlee, Jacki Lyden and Jeremy Hobson all try to wrestle this beast to the ground, with varying degrees of success. • Current’s Dru Sefton and Tyler Falk explain why it’s time to starting caring about the FCC’s upcoming TV spectrum auction, and why even radio peopl

In this week’s episode of The Pub, we ask a self-identified public media lefty and a self-identified public media righty the same question: Are public media people generally liberal, and what — if anything — could or should be done about that? Also on the show: - A little quantitative analysis to explain why fans will miss Diane Rehm when she retires next year, comparing her to her midmorning talk competitor, Tom Ashbrook.- The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, in breaking the news of Rehm’s retirement, once again makes substantive changes to an article about public media without acknowledging those changes on the page.- A remembrance of veteran radio reporter Max Cacas, who died suddenly Tuesday at 61.

Public media audiences have always been subjected to an alphabet soup of brands: PBS, APT, NPR, PRI, APM, WXYZ. To an extent, this marketing nightmare has been necessitated by the organizational and technological structure of terrestrial broadcasting, in which networks with one brand identity feed content to local stations with their own brand. But in the digital age, when national networks can serve people directly online, does it make sense to invest in all these hundreds of local public media brands on the Internet? Or should the whole public media community unite behind one brand — one front door online? “The answer is both,” Bob Kempf says on The Pub. The former head of NPR Digital Services — a unit that exists to help local stations create their own digital products — is two months into his new job as vice president for digital services at WGBH in Boston. This week on The Pub, we’ll ask what local stations are for in the digital age. Also: - Barbara Sopato, director o

When you listen to a public radio station, can you tell immediately whether you’re hearing local or national programming? If yes, that no doubt owes to many factors, but one is NPR’s signature mic sound. It’s bright, it’s clear, it’s crisp, and it cuts over the noisiest of cars/trains/planes or whatever is competing with NPR’s programming for the listeners’ ears. On this Thanksgiving episode of The Pub, we reprise a pair of old segments we did about NPR’s secret mic sauce, including an interview with NPR’s chief audio engineer Shawn Fox, who gladly divulged the recipe. Also, we revisit our conversation with former Marketplace Money host Tess Vigeland. Since we spoke, her book about quitting your job with no backup plan has come out, and she’s decided on yet another non-plan: traveling the world for who-knows-how-long.

Martha Little is only a couple months into her new job in commercial media, as senior producer for original content development at Audible. But she previously worked everywhere in public radio — "Marketplace," NPR, WNYC, WBUR, America Abroad — and she has a recommendation for her old field. Public media workplaces work better when they are “feminized,” she says, meaning when workplaces are flatter and more collaborative, rather than being lorded over by an exalted boss, the conventional model she describes as more “masculine” (acknowledging that such gendered terms are merely a convenient shorthand). Also on the show this week: • Brooke Gladstone from WNYC’s On the Media helps me answer your random public media questions, including: Is it better to financially support your local station or the specific organizations that produce the shows you like?• With the help of an excellent package of stories by Current’s Ben Mook about executive compensation, I a

In a live show at the American Public Television Fall Marketplace in Atlanta, host Adam Ragusea talks to travel host and guide Rick Steves about his business model (and why he thinks it couldn’t be replicated), whether he feels pressure to adopt a more “gonzo” style of presenting á la Vice, his advocacy for marijuana legalization and more. Also on the show: • Doc Martin actor Ian McNeice and Celeste Headlee, host of Georgia Public Broadcasting’s On Second Thought, compete in a special BBC-themed edition of our game in which contestants must identify parodies or other appearances of public media in the broader culture. • British public television’s charming tradition of using live continuity announcers, and Channel 4’s daring 2013 experiment with temporarily employing announcers who have communication disabilities. • The battle between Georgia Public Broadcasting and Public Broadcasting Atlanta for radio news-talk dominance, and whether head-to-head com

Does political polling fit with public media’s mission, or should it be left to commercial networks to follow the horse race? On The Pub this week, Sam Fleming, managing director of news and programming at WBUR-FM in Boston, responds to criticism of the practice. Also, Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal talks about his show’s new economic poll, the “Economic Anxiety Index.” While he has copious journalistic reasons for investing in polling, he admits there is promotional value as well in creating new data that other media might pick up. And: • Mira Burt-Wintonick, producer of the recently discontinued CBC radio show WireTap, talks about how she and her colleagues transformed an old radio segment into a viral video that’s likely gotten more exposure than the entire 11-year run of their show. • We open up Adam’s Gripe Bag, a collection of sundry media stories that made me angry in the last week, including Pandora’s botched announcement of an exclusive-but-not-really

"This American Life" producer Stephanie Foo is dismayed by all subpar storytelling, but especially that which can be attributed to the lack of diversity in public media workplaces. This week on The Pub, Foo talks about her frank and funny manifesto for Transom.org, “What To Do If Your Workplace Is Too White,” and offers examples of how reporters of any identity can tell better stories about people of color. Also on the show: • Novelist and journalist Teddy Wayne describes the contrived informality he hears in the voicing of narrative radio, which he decried in his New York Times piece, “ ‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.”• We’re at the dawn of a glorious new era! I talk about exciting emerging technologies for recording high-quality remote interviews, from VoLTE to Ringr, while NPR chief audio engineer Shawn Fox predicts the death of ISDN and its replacement.• What the backlash to a "PBS NewsHour" story about charter schools and the backlash to t

Everybody has a new podcast these days, but "Marketplace Tech" host Ben Brock Johnson is launching a show that does something quite novel with the medium, and it’s inspired by premium scripted television series on Netflix and HBO. But there’s a catch. To access the next episode, listeners will have to solve a puzzle embedded in the previous episode. New installments will post for general consumption every week and can be downloaded like any other podcast, but anyone who wants to binge all at once will have to break the code. This week on The Pub, Johnson debuts some of Codebreaker for the first time in public, anywhere. Also: • What shotgun microphones have in common with time machines, and why host Adam Ragusea thinks they are overused by public radio reporters.• Listeners to The Pub share some of the crazy, stupid and/or threatening negative feedback they’ve received, featuring stories from Bullseye, Louisville Public Media, WFYI, KUT, Marketplace, WESA, St. Louis Public Radio an

Chris Satullo had big, somewhat unorthodox plans for news at WHYY, Philadelphia’s dominant public radio and television station. Then in September, Satullo abruptly resigned his position as v.p. for news and civic dialogue. Subsequent reporting by the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests he was forced out over conflicts with fellow senior managers. On this week’s episode of The Pub, we listen back to host Adam Ragusea's conversation with Satullo. Also: - A reprise of our February interview with former NPR host Jacki Lyden about her new venture "The Seams," an independent news organization and podcast dedicated to covering fashion intelligently.- In a commentary we first ran in April, Adam explains his catchphrase: Authenticity is the new authority.

Radio researcher and consultant Fred Jacobs noticed something as he conducted his latest Public Radio Techsurvey. “What the data are telling us is that, to a great degree, public radio has two audiences,” Jacobs told me on The Pub. “There are the traditional listeners who have been with the space for maybe decades, but then there’s this emerging audience that, really, is smaller — I mean it is younger, it is smaller — but they are fascinating.” What the latest Jacobs Media research shows is that baby boomers and millennials are not only listening differently — the latter being much more inclined toward digital outlets — but also listening for different reasons. On this week’s episode, Jacobs does the numbers. Also: - PBS VP for News and Public Affairs Marie Nelson reflects on her first year on the job, the future of independent film on public TV and the perpetual challenge of diversity.- Host Adam Ragusea decries the pervasive Auto-Tune used by the p

If you want to know how to impress the likes of WNYC, pay attention to how Robin Amer did it. Out of a global pool of 370 applicants, she was one of two winners of WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator competition last week and will now have the opportunity to pilot her show idea, "The City." This week on The Pub, Amer talks about her big plans, also: • Evan Smith, c.e.o. and editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune dishes his nonprofit’s secrets to raising money with live events (from a panel at the 2015 ONA conference moderated by Kai Ryssdal).• Sabrina Roach talks about her job, which is quite possibly the most interesting and unusual in public media: a “doer” at Brown Paper Tickets. The ticketing company pays her to do nothing other than work to make public media stronger.

Anna Sale had three attributes that made her an ace political reporter in New York: a disarming demeanor, phenomenal listening ability and little respect for personal boundaries. Now she’s using those skills to do what she was born to do — getting people to talk about “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” Host Adam Ragusea interviews the "Death, Sex & Money" before a live audience after hours at the Online News Association conference in Los Angeles. Also on the show: • "Reveal" host Al Letson and Curious City creator Jennifer Brandel compete in a quiz game we call, “No one can resist my Schweddy Balls,” in which they identify appearances, references or parodies of public media in movies and TV.• In the shadow of the Hollywood Hills, Ragusea argues that that public media could learn a thing or two about developing new hit shows from the commercial entertainment industry, with the help of Kim Masters, host of "The Business" on KCRW.