A Minnesota public-access TV studio serving five cities will shut down this month, “an example of accessible, hyper-local television being forced to refocus in an era of instant, free video uploads to YouTube and Facebook,” reports the Star Tribune.  Comcast no longer wants to run the studio, and the Southwest Suburban Cable Commission says  equipment needs updating and the facility produces too few programs for Edina, Eden Prairie, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Richfield. “You need a studio that provides gravitas for the cancer survivor, the politician, the minority group,” Jeff Strate, who has produced a show at the studio, told the newspaper.

The Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Investigative Reporting unveiled its new YouTube channel, The I Files, today. The channel, funded by the Knight Foundation, will be curated by CIR and will repost investigative-reporting videos from a wide assortment of content partners. Among the partners is the Investigative News Network, a consortium of 60 nonprofit news organizations that includes American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Among CIR’s for-profit partners: The BBC, ABC News, The New York Times and Al Jazeera. The channel will include videos from freelance journalists as well. The I Files launched with ten videos, including two original pieces of reporting from CIR: a look at the woman who provided court testimony that brought the murderer of journalist Chauncey Bailey to justice, and an animated exploration of hamburger production.

Nonprofit investigative-journalism organization ProPublica announced Tuesday a new partnership with The News Outlet, an community-journalism nonprofit based in northeast Ohio. The initiative, which The News Outlet detailed on its website, is an investigative-reporting workshop for journalism students at Youngstown State University, which founded The News Outlet and operates the website from its campus. The partnership, billed as a pilot project, adds a component to an advanced reporting course in YSU’s journalism school. Students will report and produce investigative stories under the guidance of ProPublica managing editor Stephen Engelberg. Engelberg will visit the campus for the first week of the class, then join the class weekly via Skype.

Charles Grantham, chief operating officer of Alabama Public Television, has resigned, effective Aug. 31. Grantham told Current that the “additional stress and frustrations” at the station in the wake of the controversial terminations in June of Executive Director Allan Pizzato and his deputy, Pauline Howland, have taken a toll on him. Since the firings by the Alabama Educational Television Commission, Grantham had been publicly voicing his concerns about the future of the station. “I’m glad I’ve been able to be a spokesman and make some of the staff feelings known to the commission and others during all this turmoil,” he said.

In a special meeting Tuesday, the Alabama Educational Television Commission voted to hire a Birmingham law firm to defend it against a complaint filed by the former head of Alabama Public Television, Allan Pizzato, whom they fired in June. Commissioners, meeting in a conference room at APT headquarters in Birmingham, entered into executive session to discuss the issue, filing past portraits of nine lay leaders from APT’s fundraising organizations that still hang on the walls despite their resignations in protest of Pizzato’s termination. The Commission returned to vote 6-0 vote to retain the Birmingham law firm of Wallace, Jordan, Ratliff & Brandt, then promptly adjourned.

Applications are now being accepted for the first Tim Emmons Memorial Mentoring Scholarship. Emmons, former program director and general manager of Northern Public Radio, died in February after a long battle with cancer. The scholarship was announced today by Peter Dominowski and Scott Williams, longtime friends of Emmons and business associates with him in Strategic Programming Partners. The recipient, a current or aspiring public radio program director, will work directly with Williams and Dominowski for one year. Mentoring will include major aspects of successful programming, such as program scheduling, effective promotion, understanding audience data and air checking. “Any area that will help them become a more knowledgeable and successful PD,” the two said in the announcement.

WNYC, the producer of public radio’s Radiolab, has found “no reason to believe” that frequent contributor Jonah Lehrer’s appearances on the show are “compromised.” Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker Sunday after Tablet magazine revealed that he had made up quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Here’s the full statement from WNYC: Jonah Lehrer has been a regular contributor to Radiolab as an “explainer,” making technical science more accessible and bringing much needed meaning to new scientific research. He has been a lively and compelling voice and has helped make the history of science come alive for listeners.

Georgia Public Broadcasting is laying off eight full-time employees and nine part-timers as it outsources its master-control operations over the next 90 to 120 days, station spokesperson Nancy Zintak told Current. Transitioning its master control to Encompass Digital Media in Atlanta will save the state network around $300,000 annually, Zintak said. Zintak said GPB “looked very carefully” at the two CPB-backed public-broadcasting centralcasters, the Jacksonville Digital Convergence Alliance that serves seven stations from Florida, and Centralcast LLC, running controls for 13 stations in New York and New Jersey. A “huge part” of the decision, Zintak said, was that Encompass is an Atlanta-based company.

The new nonprofit newsroom that NPR and WWNO announced today will not compete directly with the Times-Picayne, NPR’s Kinsey Wilson told Current in an interview. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on plans for a hybrid radio-digital news operation covering New Orleans, played up the potential for competition between the news outlets, but Wilson sees it differently. “I wouldn’t characterize it as a competitor,” said NPR’s chief content officer and digital strategist. “Frankly I don’t think that’s how anybody locally [sees it], and certainly not how we’re looking at it.” WWNO and various New Orleans community leaders attempted to rally behind the T-P when cutbacks were announced in June, Wilson said.

NPR is launching a new nonprofit newsroom in New Orleans in conjunction with WWNO, the local public radio station owned by the University of New Orleans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The partners announced the changes today. The new venture, which will include a revamped, local-news–focused WWNO lineup as well as the website NewOrleansReporter.org, is a response to the declining resources of the city’s daily for-profit newspaper, the Times-Picayune. On June 12 the owners of the T-P announced plans to cut 201 personnel, nearly a third of its staff, and cut back print operations to three days a week beginning in the fall.

Sesame Workshop is getting into the for-profit educational franchise business, starting with India, where it’s launching Sesame Schoolhouse preschools and after-school clubs, reports the Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time blog. The Workshop has had a presence in the country since 2006 with Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Hindi version of Sesame Street. Sesame Workshop India also takes the show on mobile screens into slum communities in five cities. Sesame Workshop aims to have 20 franchised schools open by March 2013, with plans for 382 within five years, according to the report. So far, one has opened in Jaipur, the capital and largest city in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan.

In a move signalling its ambitions to extend its clout and influence in public radio, Boston’s WGBH has acquired Public Radio International, the Minnesota-based program distributor of radio programs such as This American Life, The World and The Takeaway. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the sale will help to stabilize the nonprofit program distributor PRI, which ran an operating deficit of $2 million in 2011, according to PRI spokesperson Julia Yager. “This is a deal borne out of shared visions,” Yager said in an interview with Current. PRI began examining its options last year as its leadership considered the implications of various funding scenarios for public media.

The national board of the Pacifica Foundation voted Sunday (July 22) to begin a search for two new top executives. The board will not renew contracts for Executive Director Arlene Engelhardt and Chief Financial Officer LaVarn Williams, which both expire Nov. 30. The two were invited to apply for new terms in their positions. The action was reported in an email to the SaveKPFA listserv and confirmed by Margy Wilkinson, chair of the local station board at KPFA, Pacifica’s Berkeley station, who attended the meeting. In a separate, related action, budget cuts totaling $1 million at Pacifica’s five radio stations, ordered by Engelhardt in the wake of an auditor’s report, were put on hold (Current, July 9).

Oregon Public Broadcasting is making major changes to its broadcast radio lineup as of Aug. 6, reports The Oregonian. “All the long-form music programs are going away from OPB radio,” John Bell, director of member communications for OPB, told the newspaper. Gone are The Thistle and Shamrock, the Celtic music show the station has carried since the 1980s; the local In House and American Routes are moving to opbmusic.org and HD radio. The variety show eTown is canceled, as are the comedy program Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know? and Garrison Keillor’s daily literary short, The Writer’s Almanac. “There’s not any program that’s not popular with some audience,” Bell said.