PLEASE SUPPORT COVERAGE OF PUBLIC MEDIA

Spark News is taking a break for the holidays. New posts will return on Monday, January 6, 2020.

We want to thank the organizations and companies that make public media happen. Thank you for the story tips, feedback and constructive criticism.  Most importantly, thank you to our readers. We publish this blog for you.

It is a challenging assignment to report on public media, particularly public radio. Though noncommercial public radio has major impact on our society, sustainability is often hard to achieve.

We publish Spark News as a service to the people who work in public media. In the new year we will continue our work despite limited revenue.

People sometimes ask us if we are trying to compete with Current, the publication that has been covering people media since the early 1980s. We aren’t. Our role is to provide additional depth and context, cover stories not seen elsewhere and express opinions about issues in public media.

We wish our colleagues at Current a sustainable 2020. Current is now conducting a year end fundraising campaign and we urge our readers to donate to them. More information is available here.

We close 2019 with a YouTube video that hopefully will help keep someone safe during the holidays. The video is television coverage of yours truly getting “drunk on the air” at a radio station in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the mid 1980s.

We wish you well and look forward to seeing you in 2020.