National Public Radio (NPR)

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 9:07am on Friday, March 5th, 2010

Confidential Magazine Was the National Enquirer of the 1950s

NPR reported on March 2, 2010:

"For decades, Americans have reveled in celebrity gossip eagerly reported in supermarket tabloids and now on Web sites like TMZ. Our guest, Henry Scott, is going to take us back to a time in the 1950s when a new magazine called Confidential was blazing the celebrity scandal trail.

Behind its lurid red and yellow cover, Confidential had stories of Robert Mitchum putting on an obscene display at a dinner party and Rita Hayworth neglecting her children. And there was the tale of Frank Sinatra joining Joe DiMaggio and his friends to kick down an apartment door in search of Marilyn Monroe. More on that one shortly.

Henry Scott says Confidential was published by an eccentric New Yorker who loathed Hollywood and paid a network of cops, hookers, and even mainstream journalists for tips and stories."

The full story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123584348

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 2:06pm on Friday, January 22nd, 2010

No NY Times-style Pay Wall for NPR

Business Insider reported on January 20, 2010:

"NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller, the New York Times' former senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com from 2006 to 2008, thinks the Times' new plan for a metered paywall system is a worthwhile experiment. But she doesn't plan on going down that road with NPR.

"I think it’s a really worthy experminent and I wish them great success with it," she wrote us in an email. "Much less risky and 'exclusive' than walling off part of their content on first entry (which was the TimesSelect model)."

TimesSelect, a two-year experiment that ended in September 2007, charged NYTimes.com users $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for access to Times columnists and the newspaper’s archives.

"The whole industry will be watching to see how that works and whether they should follow suit…except NPR," Schiller continued. "Our very successful pay model (300mm+ a year across NPR and NPR member stations) is voluntarily and will remain thus."

The full story:
http://www.businessinsider.com/vivian-schiller-on-nyt-paywall-a-worthwhile-experiment-2010-1

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:20pm on Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Worth magazine interviewed National Public Radio president and CEO Vivian Schiller about the changing business of journalism. From the interview:

"What’s NPR’s mission?

To fill the information void. We have more foreign bureaus than ABC, CBS, NBC. We have reporters on beats most newspapers don’t cover, like education and religion. In many communities the NPR station is the only locally owned and operated news organization. We’re the only ones looking out for the interests of that community and not the bottom line of some corporation hundreds of miles away.

How do you pay for that?

Our biggest revenue stream is fees from member stations, which have multiple revenue streams, the largest of which is listener support—$ 300 million a year from about 2.5 million people.
NPR’s next biggest revenue stream is underwriting by companies that advertise in other media.
Next is philanthropy.

Way, way down the list is some money we get from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There’s a big misunderstanding that we’re substantially funded by the government. We’re not. It’s a few million dollars a year on a budget of $157 million."

The full interview:
http://www.worth.com/index.php/component/content/article/4-live/829-qaa-with-nprs-vivian-schiller

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 10:58am on Friday, January 8th, 2010

Conservatives Angry About NPR Cartoon, Once They Find Out About It

Npr. org reported on January 8, 2010:

"For nearly two months, the animated political cartoon sat on npr.org virtually unnoticed. And then someone discovered it, was disgusted and launched it into the blogosphere -- making it a raucous rallying point for conservatives.

The conservative tom-tom was extremely impressive.

When the "Learn to Speak Tea Bag" cartoon making fun of "Tea Party" activists was published on Nov.12, there were 5 comments. By 6 p.m. this past Monday, there were 258. By Wednesday night, over 1,100 people had commented and it was still the most-recommended link on NPR's web site. On Monday and Tuesday, calls came in every 10 minutes. Over 300 wrote to me -- most of them angry.

The 90-second animation, which creator Mark Fiore calls satire, "teaches" the viewer to speak conversational "tea bag."

It's actually not that funny -- especially to those on the right, including members of the Tea Party movement, which is populated by passionate Americans who don't like the direction President Obama is taking the country."

The full story:
http://www.npr.org/ombudsman/2010/01/loud_protests_on_nprs_tea_part_1.html