Three Things Datebook for the Week of 2/21/2022
This week's Datebook previews a Twitter Spaces conversation on who owns Black media. Also, newsrooms earning trust with communities of color, and we remember Rick Madden, who died 20 years ago today.
It’s President’s Day, which allows me to use one of my favorite Presidential quotes. What President said if they had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”?
If you know the answer, drop me a quick email at tim@publicimpactgroup.com. Obvious hint: It was not the 45th President.
THING ONE: Who Owns Black Media?
A Three Things reader shared with me information about this virtual event coming up this week on Twitter Spaces, featuring an extraordinary group of thought leaders discussing the vital role of Black media in today’s information ecosystem.
The Pivot Fund and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will present the conversation on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, at 7:00 pm (Eastern).
If you aren’t aware of The Pivot Fund, you should be. It’s a new venture philanthropy organization looking to invest $500 million into BIPOC-led, culturally competent news organizations. The Pivot Fund Founder Tracie Powell will moderate the discussion with Kamesha Laurry. Kamesha is the 2020-2021 Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund Legal Fellow for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Here is the all-star panel for this conversation:
Sara Lomax-Reese is the President and CEO of WURD Radio in Philadelphia. Last August, I wrote about WURD Radio and its deep connection to the Black community in the City of Brotherly Love. The station is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
Cheryl Thompson-Morton is the Black Media Initiative Director for the Center for Community Media at the Newmark J-School at CUNY. The focus of her work is to support Black media outlets through training, research, convenings, and connecting them to financial resources.
Hiram E. Jackson is the chief executive officer of Real Times Media (RTM), a multimedia company headquartered in Detroit. RTM owns several prominent Black newspapers, including The Atlanta Daily World, Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine, The Chicago Defender, The Michigan Chronicle, and The New Pittsburgh Courier. Last fall, the company announced a partnership with iHeart’s Black Information Networkp to distribute RTM’s news and related content on its digital platforms and 32 affiliate radio markets.
Joseph Torres is the Senior Director of Strategy and Engagement with Free Press. Free Press is an advocacy group that seeks to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media. The Future of Journalism is one of five major issues that Free Press is working on that includes a project called “New Voices," focusing on the critical role of local journalism in our communities.
The panel will talk about the entry barriers to starting a media company and how those specifically affect Black owners. The subject of media reparations will also be explored as these industry leaders will make a case for culturally-competent news and information for Black communities.
To be a part of what should be a lively and thoughtful conversation, you should follow @PivotFund and @RCFP on Twitter as they will post info to connect to the discussion via Twitter Spaces.
Another virtual event worth checking out this week is happening on Wednesday at 12 noon (Eastern) when Kerri Hoffman, CEO of PRX, is the guest on the RAIN Podcast Business Lunch.
RAIN is Kurt Hansen’s Radio and Internet News, which is an excellent source of information and commentary about the future of radio and the emergence of streaming audio.
I’m sure Kerri will be elaborating on her thought-provoking essay in NiemanLab’s Predictions for 2022, where she wrote about her desire for “A revitalized public media — more representative and relevant.”
She added in the piece that it “may not be able to compete with commercial media on access to capital, but it can win on trust, quality, empathy, and engagement.”
You can register for this webinar session at this link.
THING TWO: Trust 101 - Earning Trust With Communities of Color
As public media’s journalism efforts seek to be more inclusive in its coverage, the team at Trusting News is offering a terrific opportunity for newsrooms interested in earning trust with communities that many news organizations have traditionally neglected.
Joy Mayer, the Director of Trusting News, recently shared a post on Medium that applications are now being accepted for its “Trust 101” class dedicated to helping newsrooms better understand the challenges, roadblocks, and opportunities to gain trust with communities of color.
Mayer writes that the class will talk about and wrestle with issues such as:
identifying past and present barriers to trust with communities of color
assessing source diversity and community connections
identifying and executing effective outreach strategies
cultivating humility and responsiveness in your newsroom culture
tying relationship-building to your core mission and values
Letrell Deshan Crittenden of the American Press Institute will lead the class with the Trusting News team. Dr. Crittenden has deep research and practical experience on this topic as API’s Director of Inclusion and Audience Growth.
The course requires two participants from each newsroom to apply together. This structure enables the partners to support each other’s plans and follow through and implement them. In addition, the Trusting News folks strongly recommend the team includes someone in a leadership position, though that is not required. By leadership position, they mean someone with decision-making authority — over the newsroom overall or supervising reporting areas or teams.
Trust 101: Earning Trust With Communities of Color training will run from March 21 -April 29, 2022. If you’re interested, you need to act this week as the priority application deadline is next Monday, February 28, 2022.
Here’s the link to apply if you’re interested.
THING THREE: Remembering Rick
It was twenty years ago today that Rick Madden died at the age of 56.
Rick was the longtime Vice President of Radio at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and made an indelible mark on the industry during his 19 years at CPB.
Tom Thomas of the Station Resource Group delivered a beautiful eulogy of Rick at his funeral a few days after his death.
He opened his remembrance with these words:
Rick was a baker.
He liked the crusty, authentic tastes and textures you’ll rarely find in a commercial bakery. But he also enjoyed the process itself. The simple ingredients of flour and water, sugar and salt. The chemistry of the yeast. Hands kneading and working. The wait for the rise. A result that was both practical and pleasurable for family and friends.
There is a lot of the baker in how Rick lived and worked: simple ingredients, hands firmly on the dough, chemistry, patience, more than a little heat, and gifts of great sustenance and pleasure not just for us, but for this nation.
Funerals tempt us to overstate virtue and accomplishment. While Rick would relish a moment or two of such indulgence, he was, first and foremost, a man who insisted on the facts.
David Giovannoni, Rick’s good friend and audience researcher par excellence, reminded us the other day that when Rick first came to CPB, public radio’s audience was some 9 million. At the end of Rick’s watch, that number was more than 22 million. Many people helped make that happen, some of whom are here today. But if we gave David a little time and a few charts, I am certain he could trace Rick’s fingerprints at every critical turn.
So let me say that each day there are millions of Americans whose lives are richer, whose understanding of their world is deeper and clearer, whose spirits soar higher because of what Rick has done.
And that is a fact.
Rick’s time at CPB happened to coincide with the years that public radio, in many ways, grew up. During Rick’s tenure at CPB, public radio first started to pay serious attention to audience data.
Current’s Mike Janssen wrote in his obituary that Madden was willing to fund projects by David Giovannoni, George Bailey, the Station Resource Group, and others that resulted in “a more audience-minded approach to programming that built listenership while drawing criticism from some producers as well as advocates of community radio.”
For a trip down memory lane, here’s a link to all 324 pages of the Audience 88 report that provided public radio with its first in-depth profile of the public radio audience, among many other things.
It was under Rick’s tenure that the Radio Program Fund was founded and provided the seed money to many of public radio’s signature programs: Fresh Air, Marketplace, This American Life, along with funding for NPR’s newsmagazines along the way. Unfortunately, his funding decisions also led to some programs, like the ill-fated Heat from NPR, for example, not surviving because of a lack of investment from CPB.
Under Rick, the Program Fund also helped create satellite networks to serve Native American and Latinx audiences.
Rick would often push station and network leaders to think differently.
In 1995 after Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party swept into Congress and proclaimed that they would end federal funding for public broadcasting, Madden and others at CPB created the Future Fund, much to the chagrin of some in the system.
Madden was the first director of the radio fund designed to support initiatives to increase the industry’s non-governmental financial support and achieve increased productivity and new operating efficiencies that result in significant savings. These included the first focused effort to build a major giving strategy for public radio.
The Radio Future Fund also brought us “Brilliant on the Basics,” or BoB. This project focused on achieving “a sustained increase in our ability to convert listening to listener support.”
And Rick was often well ahead of his time.
I remember this idea he had in the late 1990s for this thing called “Membershop” that was perfect for a small station like the one I was at during this time.
The idea was designed for stations to join backroom operations for economies of scale, centralized expertise in membership fundraising within a single database. If this sounds familiar, it has become a reality with the creation of CDP.
Under Rick, the Future Fund also provided money for PRUP, the Public Radio Underwriting Partnership, that introduced Jim “Taz” Taszarek, Sr., to public radio stations for the first time. The 1997 project was managed by PRI and brought modern sales techniques to selling underwriting on public radio. The result was a huge increase in underwriting at many stations.
And most likely, without PRUP, there would not be Market Enginuity, which was co-founded by Jim’s son, Jim Taszarek, Jr.
We’ll most likely never see the likes of someone like Rick again because of the singular influence he had on the industry. While he was open to ideas and led countless consultations with station and network leaders, Rick drove the agenda. As a result, the decisions that came from those gatherings were almost always exactly what Rick wanted when the conversations started.
I am personally grateful to him because of his encouragement of me professionally.
He included me in several of those consultations when I was very new to the industry and leading a tiny station in Indiana. I think it was perhaps that the station I was running included his beloved alma mater, Notre Dame, in its coverage area.
Whatever the reason, Rick was enormously generous with his time and support for our work at this small station.
One of the things that I found so special about Rick was the delight he seemed to have in proclaiming his funding decisions.
In Mike Janssen’s obit of Rick, he shared the story from producer Mary Beth Kirchner remembering a visit from Madden to announce her first grant from CPB.
“The thing that I was struck by then, and with each subsequent grant, is how genuinely happy he was when he gave me the news,” she said. “He was almost as happy as you were yourself to hear that you had funding for some project you wanted to do.
“He found joy in letting that creative spirit free and saying, go and do it. I will never forget the two of us looking at each other — he was just so happy when I was happy.”
I was among those who cried when Rick received the Edward R. Murrow Award the year before he died at the Public Radio Conference in Seattle. And I cried again when I heard of his passing from brain cancer 20 years ago today.
Kevin Klose, who was NPR President at the time, remembered Madden in the 2002 Current obit saying, “Rick loved new ideas and worked ceaselessly to nurture them. Thousands of men and women in public radio and millions of listeners have been touched by his innovative ideas and constant push for progress. He told us, ‘Think as big as you can,’ and his vision will continue to shape the landscape of public broadcasting.”
Twenty years later, we continue to need the kind of “big thinking” that Rick always pushed us toward in public radio.
I opened this section of the newsletter with Tom Thomas’ opening comments from his eulogy of Rick at his funeral on February 25, 2002. Tom has given me permission to share the rest of his remarks to close this week’s Datebook.
In America’s great cities, stations have moved from the periphery of civic and cultural life to significance as community institutions because Rick challenged them, demanded, really, that they do better. Then he supported them generously when they did so.
In the central valleys of California, immigrant families shape their lives, the health of their children, and the dreams of their futures with critical information broadcast in a language they speak and understand. Rick fought for that service and nourished its growth for fifteen years.
And in the hearts and minds of dozens of creative and talented men and women, there is the knowledge that someone believed in their vision, trusted their commitment, knew that they heard with an inner ear, and so gave them a chance to tell their stories and sing their songs.
People are inspired to lives of public service by such belief and trust. Rick gave it with care and generosity.
Care and generosity: that was Rick.
Those are facts. There are many, many more like them.
But let’s also note that Rick could be tough.
I remember the first time I met Rick. David Brugger, a man whose many accomplishments include bringing Rick to CPB, introduced us. I said a few words about what I did and then told him, a part of my job, I’m afraid, is to make your job more difficult.
Oh, that’s alright, said Rick. I’m sure I’ll make it part of my job to return the favor. He was true to his word.
The great radio producer Jay Allison put it this way:
“I forged my relationship with him in argument. This is how it worked: You make your point very effectively, you think. Then Rick asks an unexpectedly difficult question. He sits there, satisfied with himself. He stumped you. You think . . . trying to find a logical, or mystical way around it. Sometimes you find it and come back with a rebuttal, for which he has another question. This can be mighty frustrating. And educational. Because his questions sometimes force your thinking to change.”
Jack Mitchell was both NPR’s first employee and much later, the Chairman of its board. Jack has seen many come and go in our field, and he sorted it out like this:
“Rick’s long tenure at CPB suggests both the depth of his commitment to public radio and his ability to make tough decisions without making enemies. I know of no one who does not respect him, a very rare accomplishment in a business that too often lets egos and personal agendas get in the way of working together.”
Rick had the good fortune to find a profession he truly loved, to find a position in which he could grow and flourish, and to find a legion of colleagues that would come to regard him with great affection. I am one of them; he was a great and true friend.
There are many others who would be honored to stand here in my place. They would say the same thing.
Rick Madden was a man who aimed to make a difference in a life of public service. We who had the privilege to work with him were pushed by his risks and provocations. We gained from his attention to detail and his relentless hard work. We will miss his imagination, his humanity, and the generosity of his spirit.
To Rick’s colleagues at CPB, your friends in public broadcasting know you have taken a blow. There is a tear in the fabric of our professional lives and we will work together to make it whole.
To Rick’s family, and especially Erin, Kate, and Cathy, let me say that there are hundreds of people across the country who share your loss and share your grief. Their thoughts and prayers are with you this day.
Tom Thomas | February 25, 2002
Thank you for honoring the memory of Rick Madden. I will always remember when Rick told me when I was a producer for the Smithsonian that our proposal for the Peabody award-winning radio documentary "Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was" was approved and an agreement would be forthcoming. CPB support and Rick's encouragement launched me into public media where I have worked for over 25 years. I am truly grateful.
Jacquie Gales Webb
VP of Radio for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
You have done a great job, Tim, of doing the impossible, which is to articulate the importance of Rick’s leadership for the public radio system. I respected him, I always wanted his opinion on ideas I had, and I was heartbroken when he died. Any success I have had in the field can be traced directly back to all I learned from Rick and the many projects he funded. I still miss him and remain so grateful for him. Thank you for this remembrance of a truly great man.