Todd Mundt

From this week’s New Yorker:
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken [...]

I watched Torturing Democracy last night and it’s stunning - meticulously researched, utterly amazing, devastating. I don’t feel like getting into the whole discussion about PBS’s inability to schedule the documentary before January 21, 2009: it’s perfectly understandable, given more pressing considerations, like Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns.
But a number of public television [...]

Canadian voters are at the polls today, after enduring (a mere) 37 days of campaigning, so little compared to so much in the US. It’s been an interesting campaign, with an early Conservative lead diminishing, leaving most observers with the impression that the next Tory government will again be in the minority, although perhaps with [...]

I’ll call this my Mark Fuerst post. This graph shows pageviews for our Election 2008 page over the last 30 days, ending yesterday. As with most stations, unfortunately, our Election 2008 page has not had much traction, despite lots of on-air promotion (at least once per hour). Mark pointed this out at IMA’s Public Media [...]

The great folks at Weather Underground in Ann Arbor always seemed to get this Internet thing before others did, and their latest contribution is a new iPhone app: WunderRadio.
When I saw news about it yesterday morning, my first thought was Wow, now I can easily listen to NOAA Weather Radio from Little Rock AR. Perhaps [...]

I realize that even small children are now shooting video, editing it, and posting it online. But I still like to show off some of our video experiments. I’ve talked about some of what we’ve been doing on Louisville’s NPR News Station, but we’re trying a few things on our Triple A and classical stations.
Here’s [...]

I like Mario Batali’s new show on public TV. I suppose if I dug a little deeper, I’d say I like Mario Batali more than I like his new show on public TV. But more about that further down the page.
Marcella Hazan and Faith Willinger are leading lights of Italian cooking, but I think declaring [...]

At the end of the Denver Post’s generally well done piece on Colorado Public Radio:
All parties agree the long-range future is HD radio. The promise of multiple channels delivering a range of programming remains out of reach. Dana Davis Rehm, NPR senior vice president who oversees program services and audience research, said multicasting on various [...]

NPR has opened up its community pages, giving users the opportunity to create their own profile, comment on stories, and recommend them to others. Dick Meyer blogs about it here.
Interestingly, NPR makes special note of NPR staff who are part of the community, an attempt to foster communication between staff and listeners.
NPR’s entry into social [...]

Mark Ramsey says when you’re launching a new program, you have two options to minimize the risk: low-cost experiments or a big budget launch with a proven star. (Looks like BPP got caught in the deadly middle)
Ramsey delivered Saturday’s keynote at the PRPD Conference last Saturday - the audio is now available. Ramsey is the [...]

Paid Content reports this morning that Kinsey Wilson is the new head of NPR Digital Media.
Wilson is the Executive Editor of USA Today. Before that, he was the editor of USAToday.com, and he played a key role in USA Today’s much-talked-about web site relaunch last year.
He replaces Maria Thomas, who left to join Etsy earlier [...]

I forgot to mention this in my post about mobile applications, but NPR Mobile has been on a tear this summer. Right now, there are more than 40 stations participating in the project, which lets users of many different kinds of cellphones access updated newscasts, other streaming audio, as well as a wealth of text [...]