The FCC is questioning the Daystar religious broadcasting network’s qualifications to purchase two public television stations, citing lack of sufficient proof of local control and educational programming. A March 13 FCC letter provides insight into the commission’s nearly yearlong delay in approving the sale of WMFE-TV in Orlando, which the station canceled last week, and could affect the pending purchase of former PBS affiliate KWBU in Waco, Texas. The Daystar Television Network was the buyer in both cases — and also bid on KCSM-TV in San Mateo, Calif. In the letter, Barbara Kreisman, chief of the video division of the FCC’s media bureau, addressed the two local entities involved in those sales: The Community Educators of Orlando, and Community Television Educators of Waco.

In reaction to recent pressure from the indie film community following Current’s story on PBS’s move of Independent Lens and P.O.V. from Tuesdays to Thursdays, the network has agreed to consider shifting the indie showcases to another night, reports the New York Times. An open letter to PBS from Kartemquin Films now has several hundred signatories. And PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler weighed in on the controversy in his column Thursday (March 22). His concerns as a PBS viewer, he writes, “are two-fold. One is that the series not be marginalized if that is what the schedule change winds up doing.

Two former Libertarian candidates for Congress are suing pubcaster WNIN in Evansville, Ind., contending they were wrongly excluded from a debate at the station, according to the Evansville Courier & Press. Other defendants named in the suit are the League of Women Voters of Southwestern Indiana, the president of that organization, and the national League. John W. Cunningham and Edward Gluck are asking for $450,750 in damages. The lawsuit centers on a Oct. 26, 2010, debate at the WNIN-PBS9 studio between one Republican and one Democratic candidates for the 8th District seat.

To Karen Everhart, recently appointed interim managing editor of Current: The announcement that the March 12 issue of Current is the last to be published under the editorship of Steve Behrens brought back so many memories for me from the last 35 years. In 1977, Steve and I were colleagues and he was the editor of the in-house publication of the nonprofit where we both worked when I introduced him to my good friend Jim Fellows. Jim loved smart and talented people, and he soon became a fan of Steve’s many journalistic talents. So, it wasn’t too surprising for me when, a couple of years later, Jim persuaded Steve to join him at the National Association of Educational Broadcasters to design and launch a new newspaper covering exclusively the field of public broadcasting. 

Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR-FM in Baltimore, is gone from the station after more than nine years, reports The Baltimore Sun. His last day was March 16. According to the newspaper, Khalid “had been on probation in February for comments he posted on the Facebook page of a friend questioning the influence of Israel on American politics.”

Amie Klempnauer Miller, who has written proposals that raised more than $20 million, will mentor a pilot group of AIR producers this spring. Application deadline: April 18. The Development Exchange (DEI) and the Association of Independents in Radio are jointly organizing the four-hour training session for the first time. Miller, who is DEI’s foundation support coordinator, will help producers find their way, identifying and building relationships with possible funders and designing case statements specifically for them. Info online. Contact: Erin Mishkin, erin@airmedia.org, 617-825-4400.

NPR News announced today (March 21) that it has hired CNN v.p.and deputy bureau chief Edith Chapin to lead its foreign desk, starting May 14. It also promoted Didi Schanche to deputy senior foreign editor; she has been an editor with that unit since 2001. Chapin will oversee correspondents based in 17 bureaus worldwide as well as a team of editors and reporters in Washington, D.C. Chapin has spent her career at CNN, beginning in 1987. Based in London in the early 1990s, she covered events in Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire and Ireland. For seven years she directed editorial coverage from CNN’s New York bureau, including its reporting on 9/11 and its aftermath.

Aereo, an new online TV service supported by media mogul Barry Diller, has filed a countersuit against PBS, WNET and several other broadcasters who are claiming copyright infringement, according to Reuters. The suit, filed Tuesday (March 20) in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, also includes plaintiffs Fox, Univision, and WPIX, a CW station in New York City. It comes about a week after Aereo filed a similar suit in response to a complaint from ABC, CBS, NBCUniversal and NBCUniversal’s Telemundo. The new service, which launched this month in New York City, says it offers “proprietary remote antenna and DVR” technology “that consumers can use to access network television on web-enabled devices.”

The merger of PBS member station WTVI in Charlotte, N.C., with Central Piedmont Community College was approved Tuesday (March 20) by Mecklenburg County commissioners in a 6-3 vote, reports the Charlotte Observer. “This is not about saving a legal entity, it is about saving local programming that is valuable to our community,” Chairman Harold Cogdell said. “It’s about access to education through programming, as well as those (students) learning to put together that programming at the community college.” The county will provide financial support for the merger of $357,000 to finalize the deal and some $800,000 over the next four years for equipment upgrades.

NPR is applying for a Knight News Challenge grant of $340,000 to develop an app, GeoGraph, based on its successful experiment last year that drove visitors to Seattle’s KPLU.org via geotargeted posts on the NPR Facebook page. “The project could have an impact on how other media companies — and possibly brands — distribute content through Facebook,” noted the Inside Facebook website. In its News Challenge application, NPR said, “We will enable publishing through specific pages on Facebook, starting with NPR’s 2.3 million ‘likers’ in partnership with our 268 member stations. We will build our GeoGraph tool using Facebook’s Graph API.

The State of the News Media 2012, the annual report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, was released Monday (March 19). Among the data of interest to pubmedia stakeholders: A look at how community news is faring (“The future for local and regional sites probably will see increased use of news networks and partnerships — with public radio, local television, even local daily newspapers that may have resisted such alliances just a few years ago”); a section on Native American media (“Mark Trahant, a former president of the Native American Journalists Association, described the state of Native media as ‘a narrative of expansion'”), and an in-depth look at the PBS NewsHour’s ratings, staffing, financial support and content (“The PBS NewsHour differs in its agenda from other television news programs.

NPR Labs has launched an interactive online mapping system, reports Radio World, to give pubradio and pubTV stations a better idea of analog and digital coverage of their signal in cars, on mobile handheld devices and indoor receivers. NPR Labs Senior Technology John Kean told the site that the system allows overlays to compare analog and HD radio at original and higher FM power levels. The DTV coverage, especially for  mobile devices, will predict how well viewers can receive full service and translator systems. The ATSC-M/H coverage was developed with assistance from the Open Mobile Video Coalition. “The demographic data is ideal for gauging and comparing coverage for actual populations, which planners and underwriters may use,” Kean said.

The FCC took another step yesterday toward licensing more low-power FM stations, which advocates for community radio have been awaiting for years. The commission will begin to work through a backlog of thousands of applications for FM translators under a new system that it adopted yesterday, a modified version of a proposal that it floated last summer (Current, July 25, 2011). The translator applications must be processed first because some could conflict with potential LPFM stations. The FCC will toss out FM translator applications in larger markets to make way for LPFMs in those areas while continuing to process applications for translators that would serve less-populous areas.

The Writers Guild of America, East, is urging its 4,000 members to sign Kartemquin Film’s online open letter to PBS protesting the network’s move of indie showcases Independent Lens and P.O.V. from their longtime Tuesday timeslots to Thursday nights (Current, March 12). In an email to its members, WGAE President Michael Winship, senior writer on Moyers & Company, said, “It is imperative that we all support high quality public affairs programming and give it the opportunity to reach the widest audience possible.” “PBS’s decision to move these two programs from their long-held primetime slots is a disservice to viewers and undercuts a critical part of public television’s mission by diminishing the independent voices essential to diversity and democracy,” he wrote.