• Film Highlights Predatory Prison Phone Rates

    Chancellar Williams
    October 12, 2012
    This Friday, the film Middle of Nowhere will open in several cities around the country. The film explores a woman’s struggle to stay in touch with her incarcerated husband. This is a challenge facing many families, and a big part of it is due to the high cost of prison phone calls — as much as $17 for a 15-minute call.

  • The Impact of Public Media: 'I Learned to Read and Count to 100'

    Josh Stearns
    October 11, 2012

    Public media reaches nearly every household in the United States, from sea to shining sea. This week, Americans stood up in record numbers in support of Big Bird, NPR and PBS. But we wanted to find out why public media matters to so many people — so we asked America to tell us.

  • The Dirty Truth

    Amy Kroin
    October 11, 2012
    If you rifle through some history textbooks, you’ll see that some pretty significant stuff has happened on Oct. 10th. Some of it's pretty dark. But good things have happened on Oct. 10 too. Consider Oct. 10, 2012, the day the Political Ad Sleuth database went live.

  • "C" Is for Cookie --- That's Good Enough for Me

    Amy Kroin
    October 10, 2012
    I was a true Sesame Street kid. I adored the Odd Couple-esque squabbling between Ernie and Bert. I was a sucker for both Professor Grover and Grover the hapless waiter. I loved trench-coated Kermie’s trenchant reports from the field. But no character grabbed me quite like Cookie.

  • The Next Big Thing for Big Bird

    Josh Stearns
    October 9, 2012
    We have a plan to save Big Bird. If we’re going to stop threats to public media in their tracks — and I think we can — we’ll need thousands of stories from people like you.

  • Big Bird Tweets and Roars

    Timothy Karr
    October 8, 2012
    How do you spell “meme”? In the five days since the Denver presidential debate, Big Bird has stormed social media as people everywhere have gone online to defend public broadcasting against defunding threats.

  • Political Hush Money

    Timothy Karr
    October 8, 2012
    The Miami Herald's Edward Wasserman cites two Free Press reports on political ad spending in a cutting commentary on the state of local television news. “The funders of political advertising appear to have purchased not just airtime, but immunity from media scrutiny,” writes Wasserman.

  • Stand With Big Bird

    Josh Stearns
    October 4, 2012
    Thanks to last night’s presidential debate, public media funding is back in the spotlight again. Let’s be clear: Cutting federal funding for NPR and PBS will hardly make a dent in the budget but will have a huge impact on jobs and journalism in local communities. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting budget is about $445 million dollars. That’s less than $1.50 per person per year — or about one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget.

  • Tonight's Smackdown: Obama, Romney and the Declaration of Internet Freedom

    Alexandra Martines
    October 3, 2012

    The Declaration of Internet Freedom has arrived in Denver, Colo.— just in time for tonight’s presidential debate.

  • Serious Newspaper Cuts Hit Syracuse

    Josh Stearns
    October 3, 2012

    Advance Publications’ cuts at the New Orleans Times-Picayune took effect this week, and many longtime employees left the newsroom for good. Almost simultaneously, word leaked out that Advance planned to cut about 115 jobs at the Syracuse Post Standard. News of these cuts hit home for me in part because I grew up outside Syracuse, but also because journalism in Syracuse has already been gutted so badly.

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