I'm all for all-news, better news

2012-03-30 01:27:26

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By Steve Hallock

As a jazz fan and former newspaper jazz critic, I read the news about the looming demise of broadcast jazz in Pittsburgh with sadness akin to losing an old friend. But as a journalist and media scholar/educator, I greeted the change to a virtually all-news format at WDUQ-FM with some eagerness.

Essential Public Media, owner of WYEP-FM, and its partner, Public Media Co., new owners of Pittsburgh's first and oldest public radio frequency, plan to limit on-air jazz broadcasting to six hours a week on Saturday nights while preserving the syndicated Jazz-Works and increasing jazz fare on the Internet and HD. That means about 90-plus weekly hours of on-air radio jazz will disappear July 1 -- quite a hit, especially in the context of this city's jazz history.

Popular news programming -- including National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered" and "Fresh Air" -- will be kept on the revamped 90.5 FM frequency. Along with these mainstays -- and here's the exciting part -- the new broadcast menu is to include an emphasis on in-depth journalism on issues of importance to the region. Some of this will be reportage produced by Web-based PublicSource, created under the auspices of Pittsburgh Filmmakers with funding from the Pittsburgh Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This undertaking will feature long-form journalism with a social justice flavor, using the national ProPublica format as a model, some PublicSource folks told me a few weeks ago. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit organization that specializes in investigative stories that its website describes as "moral force" journalism.

PublicSource plans to partner with other organizations, as well, and bring to the Pittsburgh region a new type of journalism now appearing in cities across the nation that emphasizes community-centered information presented through text, video, audio and photography, using both traditional print and broadcast platforms and the Internet.

Steve Hallock , director of graduate studies for the School of Communication at Point Park University, is author of "Reporters Who Made History: Great American Journalists on the Issues and Crises of the Late 20th Century" ( shallock@pointpark.edu ).
First Published June 1, 2011 12:00 am
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