PBS President Pat Mitchell told a gathering of the network’s managers this week that she will step down when her current term expires in 2006. “Under Mitchell’s leadership, prime-time ratings rose to the highest ever and PBS stations extended their reach for digital broadcasting to over 89 percent of the country. Mitchell also added diversity to the schedule – including the ‘American Family’, an emmy-nominated series featuring a Latino family, and ‘American Mystery!’ a special featuring Indians living in the Southwest.”
Blog
Death Of A Salesman (And His Dream)
“Its gradual demise lacks the éclat of the Gillette takeover, the disappearance of Fleet Bank, or the offshoring of John Hancock, but Cahners Publishing Company’s death by a thousand cuts has had a significant impact on civic life in Boston. The name of Norman Cahners, the hustling young Harvard grad who turned a Navy inventory newsletter called ‘The Palletizer’ into a trade publishing empire, was quietly removed from the company’s signature Newton Corner headquarters a while back. Now the Boston-area staff is leaving the building entirely… The purge of the Cahners name was completed two years ago, when the founder’s daughter Nancy was summoned to Newton to remove her father’s portrait.”
Kennedy Center Makes Major Push On Arts Ed
Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center has announced that it will spend a whopping $125 million on performing arts education programs over the next five years. The new initiative includes plans for a new theater specifically designed to accomodate young audiences, a collaboration with Disney Theatricals to encourage the production of school musicals, and an extensive arts management training program. The money for the project will be raised entirely through private donations.
Conductor Marcello Viotti, 50
“Viotti, director of La Fenice since 2002, conducted at renowned opera houses worldwide including Milan’s La Scala and the Vienna State Opera. His time at La Fenice coincided with its reopening in 2003 after it was destroyed by fire in 1996. He fell into a coma after suffering a stroke during rehearsals for Jules Massenet’s Manon last week.”
AZ Opera Closes Budget Gap
Arizona Opera has met a $500,000 fundraising goal and qualified for $250,000 in matching funds from the city of Phoenix, offsetting a budget shortfall created when the company was forced to temporarily move to a new home while its existing venue is renovated.
Edinburgh Fest Scraps £5 Tickets
A few years back, the Edinburgh International Festival sought to recapture some of the crowds and attention which had been diverted to the hugely popular Edinburgh Fringe by creating a new late-night concert series featuring some of the world’s finest classical musicians, with all tickets priced at a rock-bottom £5. The idea was to try to draw new audiences who ordinarily wouldn’t have come near the concert hall. Instead, while the Festival’s existing audience found the £5 admission attractive, no one else seemed to much care. So this year, the Festival is pulling the series altogether, claiming that it had the opposite effect on ticket revenue from what was intended.
When Is A Blogger Not A Journalist?
As more and more bloggers enter the realm of investigative journalism, some have begun to face similar quandaries to those faced by “real” journalists, and the issue of First Amendment protection for the self-styled reporter crowd has started to be seriously debated. “A useful first step would be to learn whether bloggers are covered by existing state statutes that protect journalists from having to cough up sources. The vast majority of states mark a clear line between professional journalists and everybody else. How do reporters qualify? They must be employed by news organizations — or as bloggers refer to it, the dreaded MSM (mainstream media).”
24 Lessons For An America At War
The third season of the terrorism drama, 24, currently running on the Fox network, has stirred up a lot of controversy with its depiction of an American Muslim family secretly made up of terrorist killers. Fox has acknowledged the sensitive nature of the plot, running a public service announcement featuring the show’s lead actor reminding viewers that most American Muslims are, well, still Americans, and don’t want to kill anyone. But the show has become much more than simply an envelope-pushing shockfest: in fact, for all its bluster, it’s a fairly decent depiction of all the unresolvable contradictions, moral quandaries, and societal soul-searching faced by a country at war.
A Machine That Measures Thrills
“What thrills us depends on our personal hopes, fears, loves and desires. But now a British designer, working with a computer scientist, is creating a machine that can measure the experience of thrill. The hope is to create an industry-standard measure that can be used to gauge thrilling experiences, and, ultimately, dynamically modify such experiences in real time. For computer gamers, the prospect is tantalizing.”
Berlin – Catching Up With Culture
Berlin seemed to have it all culturally after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Seen from, say, London, Paris or Vienna, Berlin had all the ingredients to become a, if not the, European cultural capital. Almost overnight, the city government was owner of 17 museums, 3 opera houses, 8 orchestras and 17 theaters. Further, as the only city to experience German unification firsthand, Berlin itself became a work in progress. For artists, this meant unfettered freedom to explore new avenues.” The reality has turned out somewhat different…