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Joe Barr Profile Continued What kind of changes have been made at CPR? There’s been a lot of amazing change and growth at CPR over the last couple of years, and the News Department has been a part of that growth. We had a new General Manager take over about a year and a half ago and he’s made it clear that local news and information is an organizational priority. Needless to say, I’m pretty happy about that! . Why a Health Care reporter? Does your shop have other beats, too? A health care beat was a no-brainer. It’s a major issue for just about everyone and our governor and state legislature have been hashing out health care ideas. It was obvious that we needed a reporter dedicated to tackling this complex topic. Our other major beat is state Capitol reporting. We have two reporters following the legislature full time for our statewide news service, California Capitol Network. Our other GA reporters have areas of focus like education and local politics. I assigned our How is your Morning Edition different than it was a year ago? We’ve made a number of improvements to Morning Edition over the last year. It’s still in flux to a certain extent. We added a news anchor, separate from the host, who is helping us better utilize content produced by all our reporters. We’ve been able to add bottom of the hour local newscasts, and we’re able to respond more nimbly to crisis events. Overall, we have more high quality local material on the air than ever during ME. The primary focus is long-form production, but we’ve also added super-spots of a 1 ½ to 2 minutes in length to our newscasts. This allows us to have more depth and feature-type elements in our newscasts and listeners are giving us a lot of positive feedback. Probably the riskiest thing we’ve done is to add traffic reports. The jury’s still out on that one. What kinds of changes have been made with your statewide service, the The service was started about ten years ago, but was never fully developed from an editorial or business standpoint. It limped along for many years. When I took over as news director about four years ago I made the service a priority. I saw it as a journalistic imperative since other news outlets were cutting back or eliminating coverage of state government in You’re courting newspapers to take your This is new territory for us. To be honest, it’s a byproduct of newspapers laying off their Capitol reporters and closing their bureaus in How is We’ve implemented a very basic underwriting model. Stations used to give us cash for the service. Now, they give us a set number of underwriting avails each week, which we sell, in return for the service. What kinds of challenges have come with these changes, and how have you dealt with them? The biggest challenge has been managing all the growth in my department. (And by the way, I feel quite fortunate to be grappling with this challenge.) We’ve added three new reporters over the last year. I now oversee eight full time employees and four regular contributing reporters. It’s a really talented group, and they’re quite prolific. In response, I promoted our extremely talented Arts Editor into a newly created Senior Producer position to assist with editorial duties and major project development. The most time consuming effort was construction of a new bureau/studio facility for our statewide news service. I’ve been involved in every aspect of the project, which has taken more than a year. That involved a lot of additional work hours. But it’s all been worth it. |
