Photo: by Miss Loisy, CC License
Sadly it's true. NPR gave my favorite show The Bryant Park Project the boot! News leaked yesterday in the NYT and was "officially" broken to the fourteen staffers of BPP this morning.
The BPP's Producer Tricia McKinney left this message on their website today:
We are still absorbing the news of our untimely demise. We will still produce new shows for the next two weeks, and we'll keep on blogging and twittering. We may also dip into the Best of the BPP, stuff we're really proud of.
Though the number of listeners were small, especially compared to the traditional NPR standbys, the BPP website did accrue millions of page views monthly. Anemic station carriage and a flagging economy likely conspired to doom the show and it's not surprising that NPR claims they spent $2 million over nine months with nothing to show for it. But was nine months really long enough? Given another year, I suspect that the BPP would have brought more non-NPR listeners into the fold; it’s too bad we won’t get to see that happen.
Various postmortems in the blogosphere also cite internal politics, staff turnover and flawed execution. I enjoyed the show. I loved their goofs. Such as the time they tried to cue a soundbite and ended up playing their entire library of Sound FX. It was endearing. They blogged, they twittered, they broadcast themselves just being goofy. It was different. It was fun, It was interesting and I became "friends" with the people on the show and even behind the scenes. Those who listened generally felt the same, judging from the comment thread.
As of this afternoon, there were 343 comments posted, 99% are positive and sharing their shock and disbelief with the cancellation of the BPP. Here is my comment on the thread:
I don't have much I can add that the others have not already said. Sad. Silly. Awful. Regretful.
What can I say? It's a mistake. NPR's wonderful, I've listened daily since the day of the Stock Market Crash in 1987 and The BPP was the future.
Radio as we know it is dying. You can stream stations on your iPhone!! With the BPP's informal (though substantive style) use of micro-blogging (twitter), blogging and ear to the NET Generation, it could have been the launch pad for NPR's revival.
I'm afraid that this "expensive experiment" canceled before it was given a chance, is the radio version of NPR's jumping the shark. Not the BPP itself, but the act of canceling it and not allowing it to grow or gain an audience and mature.
Sorry BPP gang, you were all great! I'll especially miss Laura's Tweets.
Sent by David M. | 12:41 PM ET | 07-14-2008
An update on a fellow Quaker:
Cal State Fullerton lecturer allowed to add to oath
by Richard Paddock
(Los Angeles Times) June 3 - A Cal State Fullerton lecturer who lost her job because she objected to signing a loyalty oath was reappointed Monday to teach next fall in an agreement worked out between the university and a national civil rights group.Wendy Gonaver, a Quaker and pacifist who said that California’s required loyalty oath violated her religious beliefs and her right of free speech, will be allowed to attach a personal statement of her views when she signs the pledge. “It feels great,” Gonaver said Monday. “It sounds like this was a controversy no one particularly wanted and they are happy to resolve it.”The loyalty oath was added to the California Constitution in 1952 in an attempt to force communists out of public jobs, but in recent years it appears to have done more to keep out religious believers, such as Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Gonaver, who had been hired to teach American and women’s studies last fall, was told just before classes began that she had to sign the oath promising to defend the U.S. and California constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” She refused to sign unless she could attach a personal statement, a practice allowed at the University of California.
People for the American Way, a Washington-based civil liberties group, took up Gonaver’s cause after The Times reported on her case last month.
Judith Schaeffer, an attorney with the group, said she was pleased that the university agreed so quickly to give Gonaver her job. Gonaver will teach the same two classes she was originally hired to teach.
“It just cried out for a resolution,” Schaeffer said. “This is a win-win situation for Wendy and for CSU. Wendy will have her job and she will have it on her own terms.”
Cal State officials said they were happy to have the disagreement behind them.
“CSU is committed to working with individual employees to accommodate their religious beliefs in order to allow them to sign the oath,” Christine Helwick, Cal State’s general counsel, said in a joint news release issued with People for the American Way. “In this case, we are pleased that this dispute ended in a positive resolution and that we were able to work through the process together.”
Cal State Fullerton had initially told Gonaver that she was not allowed to attach a personal statement to the oath. Later, the university told The Times that Gonaver’s six-sentence statement was against the law because it contradicted the oath.
Under the agreement, Cal State will accept a briefer statement from Gonaver in which she says that she supports and respects both constitutions but objects “as an American” to being compelled to sign the oath. She also writes that, as a Quaker, she does not promise to bear arms or otherwise engage in violence.
Earlier this year, Cal State East Bay fired another Quaker instructor, Marianne Kearney-Brown, after she altered the oath by adding the word “nonviolently.” She was rehired days later after her case became public.
Schaeffer said she expects Gonaver’s settlement to set a precedent for other Cal State employees.
“The resolution they reached here is one they should have reached last August,” Schaeffer said. “I think it’s just unfortunate that the right people at CSU didn’t become involved earlier.”
Claudia Keith, a spokeswoman for the university system, said it would not be adopting a new policy on how to handle such cases but would notify administrators on the 23 campuses of the agreement in Gonaver’s case.
Keith acknowledged that the dispute could have been handled better, adding, “We certainly respect employees’ rights to believe in anything they want to believe in.”
The settlement, Keith added, is good for everyone. “She gets to teach and we get a lecturer we wanted,” she said.
For Gonaver, taking a stand on the oath will give her a new perspective when it comes to teaching her American studies class. Part of the course deals with protecting constitutional freedoms.“I feel like I will be able to better teacher because of this experience,” she said. “This section has become personally meaningful to me in a way that it wasn’t before.”
Link to the original story in the LA Times.
Via: Quaker Agitator blog
