Wednesday link grab bag

Some odds and ends we didn’t get to last week amid Marty’s posts from the Public Radio Program Directors conference:

:: Minnesota Public Radio has rolled out an iPhone app for listening to its various streams of programming.

And Todd Mundt says that American Public Media, which is organizationally a sibling of MPR, is releasing an iPhone app next month that will include streams from any public radio station that asks to be included. I heard that public radio was working toward some sort of collaborative iPhone app, and I wonder whether this is it. WKSU in Kent, Ohio, is working on an app for its Folk Alley stream.

Meanwhile, APM has posted some classical jobs.

:: A columnist in the Fort Myers Florida Weekly praises the format change on the city’s WGCU-FM, which cut classical and brought NPR’s Fresh Air to the airwaves, among other news and talk programs. The arrival of Terry Gross’s interview show is what has this columnist particularly pleased. Here’s what she had to say about the classical fare:

WGCU-FM used to play a lot of classical music. But when I’d tune in, I rarely heard anything I’d want to continue listening to and would change the station. And friends of mine who were avid classical music lovers would complain about the quality of the selections. (I heard the music was determined by focus groups up in rural Wisconsin.)

That made me laugh. I wonder what she’s referring to. My hunch is that somehow she heard that the station was using research conducted by George Bailey, who worked with PRPD on the Classical Core Values studies. Bailey lives in Wisconsin, last that I knew, but the focus groups were actually conducted around the country.

:: The program director at WHQR-FM in Wilmington, N.C., was fired last week, says the Wilmington Star.