WILLblog

From WILL's chief meteorologist and proud new dad Ed Kieser:

"Lucia and I are proud to announce the arrival of our daughter Luciana Eleanora Kieser. She was born yesterday (June 17, 2009) at 12:32 PM EDT... weighing in a 7 pounds 7 ounces... 20 inches long. Mom and baby are doing fine."

Digital television is a great idea in theory. The reality is proving messy at best.

In the best-case scenario, you'd simply turn on your new digital TV and it would pull in video more beautiful than a DVD. Since each TV station can now broadcast up to four different channels, you'd have many times more programming choices than before, over-the-air without paying for cable or satellite service. Some people actually have that experience.

For others, just getting a good digital signal is like alchemy. You need an antenna, and sometimes an outdoor antenna, because the signal strength of digital TV is about one-hundredth that of analog. With analog a weak signal might yield a noisy picture, but with digital you get...nothing. Like anything digital, it's either on or off. If you have the wrong antenna, you won't get the new digital VHF channels including WILL's channel 9. So you have to know something about antennas, which most of us probably thought we'd left behind along with 8 track tapes.

But wait, the chaos gets better. If you have cable service, you may no longer even get your favorite local stations at all. That's what happened in the Bloomington, Illinois area, where WILL-TV is no longer available to Comcast cable customers. Or more precisely, WILL-TV is no longer available to Comcast customers who have the analog Comcast cable service. If you have the analog Comcast cable service, do you even know that? Once you ffigure that out, you can upgrade to digital cable for free and get a new digital set-top box. Comcast will keep your monthly bill the same for 12 months, but after that your bill will likely increase. Or you can drop cable and get WILL-TV over-the-air, if you have a TV with a digital tuner, or a digital TV converter box, if you are within range of WILL-TV's digital TV signal. Lots of ifs there.

(Fore more excruciating detail on the Bloomington Comcast situation, see David Thiel's post on TV Worth Blogging.)

Further, the 50 some cable services throughout central Illinois process their signals in different ways. An HD signal on one cable service may look very different from another service. We're getting many reports of out-of-synch audio, and people naturally assume we can do something about it.

Still further, the aspect ratio for HD is 16x9, whereas Standard Definition (SD) is 4x3. What does a 4x3 picture look like on your 16x9 HDTV? Hard to predict, because it depends on both the station producing the signal, and how that signal is processed by your cable service.

Many if not all of these issues will be sorted out over time. We may eventually arrive at the promised land of digital TV actually working. Meanwhile, if you're totally fed up with trying to watch TV I have a suggestion. There's always something good on the web.

Stepped outside of my office today and found the Campbell Hall lobby brimming with guitars and guitarists. The 17-member Guitar Ensemble from Illinois State University was here to play a Bach Brandenburg Concerto in advance of their concert in the evening. The segment aired today on WILL-FM's new Live and Local with Kevin Kelly.

Print journalism spent the 1980s and '90s taking profits and then, in the decade that followed, impaling itself on the Internet. - David Simon, Washington Post

So the Baltimore police no longer provide reporters with the names of officers involved in police shootings. Their ranks have been so thinned, no reporter has even asked for so long the police forgot the law mandates they provide this information without delay, to anyone. But it's not just the law enforcement beat in Baltimore. Science and environmental reporters, political reporters, financial reporters, and especially foreign bureaus have been cut, cut again, then cut some more over the past two years. At a time when so much news is being made, and the stakes are higher than ever, our view of the world is dimming. And that's today's news.

Labels: media, news

WILLblog was always intended to provide an insider's view on the public broadcasting world. (Soon we'll call it public media, but that's another post for another day...) Today I have some troubling news about struggling stations around the system. Of course just about everyone is dealing with fallout from the economic mess we're in, so this isn't meant to say "poor us." This is, however, about public broadcasting, so here goes: WNED REDUCES BUDGETED EXPENSES AND STAFF POSITIONS (Buffalo, NY) State funding for public TV, radio on chopping block (Charlottesville, VA) Layoffs at WBEZ, Vocalo (Chicago, IL) These are only three news items about very large cuts at local stations. I have friends at other stations all over the country, and many of them are laying off staff, cutting local programs, and reducing services just to survive. Of course newspapers across the nation are being hit even harder. In the case of some, like the Chicago Tribune, solvency is imperiled by excessive debt from buying other newspapers. Others, like the Rocky Mountain News, just couldn't make their payroll. Here is an important question we must raise as high as possible: At a time when, more than ever, we need to know what's happening, who will report the news? One other thing occurs to me as I ponder the fate of local npr and pbs stations: We have a chance to salvage the disaster happening to communities whose newspapers are folding, if we can remain strong enough to deliver. Might be a big if...

This massive Bur Oak lives in the front lawn of the Natural History Building on the corner of Green Street and Matthews in Urbana. According to Geography Professor Bruce Hannon, it's the oldest living thing on the University of Illinois campus. Now 200 years old, the tree "was a sapling when the prairie fires swept easterly across what is now Champaign, routinely consuming everything before them," says Professor Hannon. "The wetlands that became the campus subdued these fires, allowing only the hardiest trees to survive. The Boneyard creek stopped the spread of the fire and allowed the Big Grove to flourish beginning in what is now downtown Urbana, and spread eastward. Only remnants of that grove remain, along with our most famous tree. It is important to learn the impact on the landscape we have had over that last 200 years. This living survivor provides us with a starting point." You can help celebrate Earth Day and a Bur Oak Birthday Party at 4 pm this Friday, April 27th at the tree itself. The Grand Prairie Friends will present landscape drawings, and give away Oak seedlings with growing instructions. Growing things that last: what a good idea!

Labels: Earth Day

President Bush made himself available for an extended interview with Jim Lehrer on the Newshour on PBS today, which is airing here in Champaign-Urbana as we speak. The subject is (surprise) Iraq. The President was disappointed that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "fumbled" the execution of Saddam Hussein in such an indignified way...and of course there are a few other problems too. How exactly do you conduct a dignified execution? Never mind, I don't think I want to know. Anyway, here's the archive page for this interview from the Newshour, complete with audio links: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/politics/bush-interview_01-16-07.html