As anticipated, the FCC today (April 26) invited public comment on allowing noncommercial educational (NCE) broadcasters to spend a small percentage of their total annual broadcast time to conduct on-air fundraising activities for other nonprofits. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is asking for input on whether the ban on third-party fundraising remains necessary to preserve the noncommercial nature of NCE stations; if there should be limitations on the stations that engage in the third-party fundraising; whether fundraising should not exceed 1 percent (about 88 hours) of a broadcaster’s total annual airtime; if there should be a durational limit on each specific fundraising program; if participating stations should submit annual reports to the FCC on their fundraising activities and, if so, what information; and whether participating stations should be required to certify in renewal applications that they have complied with any limits on third-party fundraising.

U.S. House Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Ranking Member Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) have launched a bipartisan Federal Spectrum Working Group to examine how the federal government can use the nation’s airwaves more efficiently, the two announced Wednesday (April 25). Walden said the group will “take a comprehensive, thoughtful, and responsible look at how to improve federal spectrum use as part of our ongoing effort to make the most efficient and effective use of the public’s airwaves.” In February, Congress gave the FCC authority to conduct broadcast spectrum auctions to free up bandwidth for mobile devices (Current, Feb.

PBS NewsHour has hired visual journalist Tom Kennedy, formerly of WashingtonPost.com and the National Geographic Society, as its managing editor for multimedia. Kennedy currently teaches in the multimedia, photography and design department at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. In more than 35 years in print and online journalism, he has created, directed and edited projects that have earned Pulitzers, Emmys, Peabodys and Edward R. Murrow awards. At the NewsHour, Kennedy will be responsible for the program’s online content strategy and digital operation. He was managing editor for multimedia at WashingtonPost.com, developing its multimedia section and creating the first documentary video team for an American newspaper-based website.

The issue of spirituality in motivational speaker Wayne Dyer’s pledge programming has resurfaced in the latest CPB ombudsman’s column, after the PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler, addressed the topic earlier this month. Getler wrote that he “sensed” that Dyer’s programs violate PBS’s Editorial Standards and Policies to provide “nonsectarian” content. Aaron Pruitt, director of content at Montana PBS, wrote to Joel Kaplan, CPB ombudsman, to express concern over the lack of discussion of Dyer’s content among pubcasting programmers or development staffers. “I have been working in public television now for nearly 18 years,” Pruitt writes. “The silence regarding this topic, in these otherwise lively discussion groups, is deafening.

WBEZ in Chicago has hired veteran newsman Zay N. Smith as a blogger, according to Bob Feder’s media column in Time Out Chicago. Smith “was a popular fixture” in the Sun-Times for 13 years, Feder notes, with his Quick Takes column, “a collection of quirky news items, political punditry and random observations.” Beginning May 7, that column will appear three times a week on Chicago Public Media’s website.The Sun-Times discontinued Quick Takes in 2008, and Smith resigned a year later. Coincidentally, in one of Smith’s Quick Takes columns seven years ago he admitted he had “no idea” what a blog was.

The FCC has dropped an agenda item on noncom on-air fundraising from its April 27 public meeting, “which more than likely means it will be voted and approved before the meeting,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. The item had been a notice of proposed rulemaking inviting public comment on allowing non-CPB grantees “to conduct on-air fundraising activities that interrupt regular programming for the benefit of third-party nonprofit organizations.” The National Religious Broadcasters have sought more latitude in on-air fundraising for other nonprofits, B&C notes. The item proposed allowing noncom stations to use 1 percent of annual airtime for those activities.

The year’s second Public Media Futures forum, on public TV strategies in local production, will be webcast live Saturday, April 28, from Los Angeles. To connect, go to the website communicationleadership.usc.edu, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Pacific time (12:30 to 4:30 Eastern time). Submit questions here. Tentative start times of the three sessions: 9:45 a.m. Pacific / 12:45 p.m. Eastern: Nashville Public Television, a former school-board dependent whose local programs now outdraw the PBS schedule. 10:45 a.m. Pacific / 1:45 Eastern: San Diego’s KPBS, a “fully converged” FM/TV operator that recently launched a half-hour nightly news show. 12:15 p.m.

WNET has claimed two Overseas Press Club awards, among several awarded to public media news organizations. The New York City station won both the Edward R. Murrow Award for best TV doc on international affairs, and the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for best Latin American reporting, for Women, War and Peace, a five-part series produced by Fork Films. The Lowell Thomas Award for best radio news of international affairs went to NPR for its coverage of the Arab Spring. And the best online investigation of an international issue or event was awarded to a collaboration between ProPublica and The Financial Times, “Tax Wars: A Cross-Border Battle Worth Billions.”

An academic specializing in philanthropic psychology working with WFIU in Bloomington, Ind., has discovered that five words appear to boost contributions among female donors. In a Chronicle of Philanthropy podcast, Jen Shang, assistant professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs of Indiana University, said volunteers during a WFIU pledge drive were instructed to use one of five words when initially thanking donors for calling in to the station: caring, compassionate, helpful, friendly or kind. Shang said women donors who heard one of those words went on to give an average of $100, compared with women who heard simply “thank you,” who gave an average of $83.

Banking on the strong Minnesotan tradition of choral music, Minnesota Public Radio is now offering a public-media first: a web stream of programmed choral music around the clock. The 24/7 stream features professional, college and church choirs singing pieces “from Palestrina to Pärt, spirituals to Schubert.” A major element is the inclusion of Minnesota’s sizable local choral talent, including ensembles such as VocalEssence, Cantus, The Singers, St. Olaf Choir, Choral Arts Ensemble and the National Lutheran Choir. The stream is part of a larger initiative by Classical MPR to boost choral music. June 7 will be the first annual “Harmony In The Park” — a free outdoor choral festival at Minneapolis’ Minnehaha Park — and MPR will bring the world-famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir to the city’s 20,000-seat Target Center in June 2013.

Stanley Harrison, a former communications director for CPB, died of cardiac arrest on April 5 in Miami Beach, Fla., six days before his 82nd birthday. He had suffered a stroke in November 2011. Harrison oversaw public relations and publications for CPB from 1976 to 1985, where his office was distinguished by a haze of cigar smoke. After CPB, he followed the corporation’s past president, Ed Pfister, to the University of Miami’s School of Communication, where Pfister became dean. Harrison remained a professor of public relations at the school. He had taught part time at American University and at the Pentagon. A specialist on the Baltimore satirist and critic H.L.

A committee appointed by the Educational Broadcasting Authority in West Virginia to examine the financial health of the state’s public broadcaster met for the first time Monday (April 23), and voted to lift several contract and hiring freezes, reports the Charleston Gazette. The review was prompted by testimony in January by Dennis Adkins, executive director of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, before the House Finance Committee that the station may have to reduce programming due to state funding cuts and a reduction in underwriting. “To put it bluntly,” he said in January, “our expenses are outpacing our revenues.” At the meeting Monday, Adkins had better news.

The two remaining finalists bidding for KCSM-TV in San Mateo, Calif., are local groups aligned with Independent Public Media and Public Media Company. The bid amounts have not been disclosed. Independent Public Media is headed by former pubcasters John Schwartz and Ken Devine, who are working to preserve noncom TV licenses for the public system. (Current, Oct. 17, 2011). Public Media Company, run by Marc Hand and Ken Ikeda, is affiliated with Colorado-based Public Radio Capital. Six groups submitted bids for the station, which was put up for sale in December 2011 by the San Mateo Community College District.

A committee of Maine’s legislature unanimously voted April 5 to reject Gov.  Paul LePage’s bid to eliminate funding for the state’s public broadcasting network. The bipartisan 13-member Joint Standing Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs agreed to keep the Maine Public Broadcasting Network’s $1.7 million appropriation in the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Unless the governor vetoes the budget before April 26, the spending plan will take effect with MPBN’s funding intact. The appropriation is 13 percent less than last year’s state subsidy for MBPN, but President Mark Vogelzang told an MPBN reporter that he was happy with the restoration of funds.

No, there won’t be any windfall of Obama and Romney Super PAC gazillions for public stations this year. By a 2–1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco did indeed rule April 12 that public broadcasters can carry political and public-issue commercials, but the decision is unlikely to take effect any time soon, even in the Ninth Circuit states of the West. Neither side in Minority Television Project v. FCC got everything it wanted in the decision, so one or the other could ask the appeals court for a review by a larger panel of its judges even before the District Court implements the appeals court’s order.