This isn’t a huge surprise: NPR affiliates are concerned that podcasts from the large market stations (like KCRW) will cause listeners to switch off their local affiliates, especially during the pledge drives that pay the bills.
I like the argument at the end that the broader reach of shows, wherever they’re produced, should be used to find more underwriting money and that local stations should invest in creating smart local programming of national interest. (Too often, local NPR stations seem to just replay the national shows and maybe classical music. That model needs work in the 21st century.)
One thing overlooked in the story is that broadcasting costs money — KCRW has a series of towers all over Southern California to extend the channel’s reach up and down the dial, for instance — and that it’s certainly possible to readjust spending priorities so that Internet bandwidth is where most of the audience is reached, at an overall savings. Instead of supplementing broadcasting, it could (and probably should) replace it in some areas.
But content is king. If some of the, frankly, pretty awful NPR stations are forced to change or die, the NPR audience and the network itself will be better off.
Want still more World of Warcraft or want to play a character of a new race before the Burning Crusade expansion comes out (later this year, hopefully)?
Check out the Murloc RPG, a Flash-based game that, surprisingly, captures a fair amount of the flavor of World of Warcraft, featuring the adventures of Murk, a murloc living in the Elwynn Forest. You roam the forest on quests from your chief and other important murlocs, fight wolves and other creatures, explore a miniature dungeon, level up, spend talent points to customize your character and, eventually, visit some somewhat surprising areas. (After you reach the end, save your character and reload it to get to explore the area you see in the ending animation and get to have some more fun.)
A mix of gaming news:
- Blizzard has apparently pulled the plug on StarCraft: Ghost, at least for this console generation. This is something of a surprise to me, if true, and a shame: A demo of it was playable at BlizzCon and a long-ago demo I saw of the game when I worked at Blizzard, featuring Nova sneaking her way through a rogue Terran base, stealing a flying motorcycle (sorry, SC fans, I don’t remember what they’re called) and then zipping out into a battlefield with the Zerg and Terran armies clashing all around her looked amazing. (And for those keeping score, this makes two franchise-related games Blizzard has killed for not being all they can be, with the first being Warcraft Adventures, a painful-to-watch old style adventure game developed by a Russian firm.)
- PlanetSide, Sony Online Entertainment’s Starship Troopers-flavored MMORPG — well, they call it a Massively Multiplayer Real Time Shooter, which seems to me to be slicing this particular hair needlessly thin — is now free for a year, sort of. In PlanetSide Reserves, players can check out the game but are restricted as to what rank they can achieve in one of the three warring futuristic armies. I’ll definitely be checking this one out.
- Raph Koster, the man behind Ultima Online and who brought a distinct UO feel to the Star Wars franchise in the troubled Star Wars Galaxy MMORPG — because, when you think Star Wars, don’t you just fantasize about paying $15/month to be a droid repairman? — has left the building. Rumors that Sony would be losing the Star Wars license and that Bioware would be creating a massively multiplayer version of their wildly popular Knights of the Old Republic computer roleplaying games appear to be so much bantha poodoo, however.
Lucas Agrees to Write ‘Star Wars’ TV Series
Star Wars creator George Lucas has agreed to write a 100-episode TV series of the classic sci-fi epic.
The series will focus on the missing years between Revenge of the Sith and the original Star Wars movie, released in 1977.
Producer Rick McCullum said at Monday night’s Empire Awards, “We’re very excited–we just got confirmation George Lucas has committed to writing the Star Wars TV series.
“I guess this is the news all fans have been waiting to hear.”
Yeah, because if there’s one thing the last three (well, four) movies got right, it was the writing …
- In related news: Indy 4 script completed. Well, Harrison Ford says it’s ready, because George Lucas turned in a final script. The good news is that Steven Spielberg is doing a rewrite before the cameras start rolling. Me, I’m hoping for the McCarthy era, Soviet thugs and Rachel McAdams as a university colleague of Dr. Jones.
It was a bug hunt.
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