Tom Dollenmayer, former station manager of WUSF pubTV and radio in Tampa, Fla., has assumed that role at WFDD-FM at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Denise Franklin, who had been at the station for 11 years, departed as g.m. March 22. According to the local Business Journal, Franklin had been involved in recruiting and selecting Dollenmayer to fill the spot, which is a new position at the station. A decision about whether to hire a g.m. will be made after Dollenmayer settles in, station spokesperson Molly Davis told the publication.

A consultant who evaluated the performance of seven CPB-backed Local Journalism Centers has recommended that CPB continue funding the multimedia startups for another year. But interactive-media consultant Rusty Coats advised CPB to qualify its continued support for LJCs by requiring the centers to adopt a set of best practices. These would help guide the centers through the more challenging aspects of their work, such as collaborating in multiplatform fundraising and media production. In his evaluation of the seven regional LJCs launched with CPB aid in 2010, Coats found that four are performing relatively well, but the remainder struggle with issues of collaboration and long-term sustainability.

The University of Southern California is buying San Jose-area commercial radio station KCNL for $7.5 million to add to its Classical Public Radio Network, reports Radio Survivor. Currently KCNL airs a Spanish-language paid-programming talk format. The sale is “big news” for CPRN, “which has been vocal about its desire to expand its programming into the South Bay area,” the site notes. USC hopes to begin airing classical programming on KCNL in advance of the license transfer through a lease management agreement. USC also filed a request with the FCC to change the status of KCNL from commercial to noncom after the license transfer.

“On Shaky Ground,” a collaborative news report from nonprofit news organization California Watch and KQED in San Francisco, has won an IRE Medal, the highest award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. The judges called it “an extraordinary effort examining seismic safeguards in place to protect California’s schoolchildren from earthquakes,” with “astonishing breadth, depth and creativity.” Stories were published in more than 150 news outlets and translated into four languages, and video segments appeared in every major California media market. Another pubmedia collaboration, among ProPublica, NPR and Frontline, received an award for multiplatform reporting. The judges called  “Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America” a “hard-driving investigation into this little-understood part of the criminal justice system.”

PBS NewsHour will air a segment tonight (April 2) on concussions in youth football that former Dateline NBC correspondent Stone Phillips had reported and posted on his website. According to the New York Times, Neal Shapiro, president of WNET in New York, brought the report to the attention of Linda Winslow, NewsHour e.p. Phillips suffered two concussions as a high school and college football player. He paid to produce his own news report on the topic. The segment is about 14 minutes long and features on-camera interviews with researchers. It’s his first since leaving Dateline in 2007. “I did not have any plans for it to be broadcast,” Phillips said.

Pacifica Radio’s listener support is down almost 25 percent since 2006, and stations KPFA, WBAI and WPFW “have been running seriously in the red” for several years, according to Arlene Engelhardt, executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, in a column on Radio Survivor. Pacifica “as a whole” lost $5.5 million from 2007 to 2010, she said. Those three years would have included the financial contraction that came with the 2008 financial crisis and recession, when cash-strapped stations turned to the network for aid. “Stations have met their payrolls by not paying their share of network-wide expenses (Central Services) — for Democracy Now!

Three talk-show staffers at WILL-AM in Urbana, Ill., are retiring, Illinois Public Media said on its website. Departing will be David Inge, longtime host of morning show Focus; the show’s producer, Harriet Williamson; and Afternoon Magazine host Celeste Quinn, married to Inge for 24 years after the two met at the station. Inge, retiring June 30, has conducted more than 12,000 Focus interviews in his 29-plus years as the program’s host. He started at the station as a classical music announcer, then became a reporter. He also hosted WILL-TV’s pubaffairs Talking Point from 1992 until it ended in 2001.

Now on current.org, a behind-the-scenes look at the work at Oregon Public Broadcasting in the months leading up to its scheduled national GOP primary presidential debate, canceled just days before the high-profile event.

Kartemquin Films is beginning work to form a permanent advocacy group to serve as a liaison between independent filmmakers and PBS, in the wake of the controversy surrounding PBS’s rescheduling of Independent Lens and P.O.V. and their subsequent ratings and carriage woes (Current, March 12, 2012). Gordon Quinn, artistic director and founder of the Chicago documentary production house, said he is in conversations to partner with the International Documentary Association on the effort. Public television “is not just another outlet for independent producers,” Quinn told Current. “The public aspect of it is of vital importance to us.”

PBS’s fiscal 2013 draft budget, which the board today (March 30) approved to send to stations for comment, contains a 2 percent membership dues increase. At the board meeting at headquarters in Arlington, Va., Barbara Landes, PBS c.f.o., said this is the first dues increase for stations since fiscal 2009. Also at the meeting, directors unanimously approved a change in language in PBS’s common-carriage policy to align with PBS’s ongoing primetime revamp. The two-hour nightly limit was removed to accommodate three-hour programming blocks. The change does not affect total common carriage hours over the season, or station flexibility to preempt common-carriage programming.

Wisconsin Public Television will be testing a “text to pledge” model that it hopes will combine the immediacy that mobile users expect with the more nuanced interaction that stations need to establish a lasting relationship with members. David Dickinson, online manager at Wisconsin Public Television, writes in a post on the PBS Station Products & Innovation blog that the station wants to provide users the ability to text a number with a pledge for any amount, then the station will contact them to fulfill payment and become a member if they choose.That approach “may offer the best of both worlds,” Dickinson writes.

Several basic partnership models have emerged in the growing collaborative journalism ecosphere, writes the Free Press‘s Josh Stearns on MediaShift. There are commercial partnerships, often contractual agreements among newspapers and TV stations; nonprofit and commercial agreements, such as the recent NBC-pubmedia partnerships (Current, Jan. 17); public and noncom collaborations, connecting pubmedia outlets with one another or with other nonprofit news organizations (Current, March 30, 2009); university collaborations; and community and audience cooperative work, including APM’s Public Insight Network (Current, Jan. 24, 2011). “We are still at the early stages of experimentation with large- and small-scale collaboration across the news and journalism ecosystem,” Stearns writes.

The FCC has selected three companies — Auctionomics, Power Auctions and MicroTech — to help it design upcoming spectrum auctions, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Leading the team is Auctionomics Chairman Paul Milgrom, a Stanford professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences who was the main academic contributor to the FCC’s original spectrum auction design. Also on the board of Auctionomics, reports TV Techology, is Reed Hundt, former FCC chair. Power Auctions, based in Washington, D.C., has designed spectrum auctions for Canada and Australia, and MicroTech of Vienna, Va., will lend technical expertise. Congress last month authorized the FCC to conduct auctions of TV spectrum to free up bandwidth for mobile devices (Current, Feb.

Denise Franklin is gone from her post as general manager of NPR member station WFDD at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. “There are a lot of talented professionals at WFDD, and I wish them the best,” Franklin told the Winston-Salem Journal. “I can’t comment beyond that.” Brett Eaton, Wake Forest spokesman, confirmed to the paper that Franklin is no longer employed by the university but declined further comment. Franklin had been with the station for 11 years, first as a news host. She became g.m. in 2007. Interim g.m. is Molly Davis, the station’s director of marketing and community outreach.

Rick Lore is the new vice president and chief development officer at Maryland Public Television, responsible for membership, on-air fundraising, major and planned giving, publications, outreach and community engagement at the station in Ownings Mills, Md. Lore had joined the station on an interim basis last fall following the departure of Joe Krushinsky, MPT’s former vice president of institutional advancement, who is now director of station development services at PBS. Previously he served as executive director of Friends of Milwaukee Public Television, the fundraising affiliate of Milwaukee Public TV. Earlier, he worked for nearly eight years as director of on-air fundraising for PBS, as well as director of development for pubTV stations in New Hampshire and Dayton, Ohio.