Penn State Public Broadcasting is producing and broadcasting a live Town Hall Forum at 6 p.m. Eastern tonight (Nov. 30) for students and university administration to discuss the ramifications of the sexual abuse allegations surrounding former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.  The Town Hall will air on WPSU’s World multichannel with additional feeds provided by WPSU to the Pennsylvania Cable Network and the Campus Cable Network as well as online.

PBS President Paula Kerger spent an hour on KQED’s Forum program Wednesday (Nov. 30), taking listener questions on public broadcasting and its future. She revealed that to raise revenues, PBS is considering a “subscription model” that would enable paying subscribers to have access to “a larger library” of archived material, reports Adam Powell of the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. Kerger said some new PBS programs might be available “for a fee,” which she compared to PBS selling DVDs of shows. Listen to the audio here.

Dick Meyer, executive news editor at NPR, has accepted a new position as executive producer for BBC News, America. His last day at NPR is Dec. 9. A memo from Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s senior v.p. and g.m. of digital media. and Margaret Low Smith, its acting senior v.p. for news, said Meyer was “instrumental in establishing NPR.org as a serious force in digital journalism.” Meyer joined NPR in March 2008 from CBSNews.com. He also produced political and investigative reports for the CBS Evening News, and is author of the book Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium. 

Four public broadcasting stations will participate in a Mobile Emergency Alert System (M-EAS) pilot project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and LG Electronics to assess the potential of sharing crisis information via Mobile Digital TV services. WGBH in Boston, Vegas PBS and two Alabama Public Television stations (WBIQ in Birmingham and WAIQ in Montgomery) will serve as test markets. “By using terrestrial over-the-air TV broadcasting, rather than cellular network connectivity, M-EAS is expected to meet critical needs for emergency alerts,” a PBS announcement said. The goal is to prove the viability of M-EAS using existing standards, and to create a template for use by all broadcasters, public or commercial.

Gary Knell, former head of Sesame Workshop and incoming NPR c.e.o., will be chatting live on Twitter from 3 to 3:30 p.m. Eastern Thursday (Dec. 1), his first day of work. Hashtag: #nprceo

Veteran pubcasting exec Mark Vogelzang has been appointed president and c.e.o. of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, operator of statewide public television and radio networks with a budget of about $10 million. He succeeds Jim Dowe, MPBN president since 2006, who is retiring next month. The appointment, announced Nov. 29, comes as Vogelzang completes an interim appointment as g.m. of WBFO-FM, the university-owned NPR News station in Buffalo that’s being sold to WNED, a community-licensed pubcasting operation that serves radio and TV audiences in Buffalo and Canada. The proposed $4 million sale has gained approval from New York state policy makers — including Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — and is now pending before the FCC.

WPSU-FM and WPSU-TV at Penn State University have been tangentially drawn into the ongoing child sex abuse case against former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Last week, Pennsylvania court administrators who assigned Senior Judge John M. Cleland to handle the charges announced that Cleland had no known connections to the university — but his wife served for 15 years on the Penn State Public Broadcasting Board of Representatives, a volunteer panel advising the university on the operation of the stations, reports The Citizens’ Voice newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Julie Cleland was on the board from 1995 through 2009, including as chairman and vice-chairman.

Phyllis Campbell, known to public radio listeners in southwestern Ohio as “Mama Jazz,” has died at the age of 89, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. She hosted jazz programming on WMUB in Miami from 1979 to 2006 and became one of the station’s most popular and distinctive personalities during 27 years on the air. “She was feisty as all get-out, passionately devoted to jazz, and unabashedly loyal to her legions of fans,” Cleve Callison, former WMUB g.m., told the Enquirer.

Arizona Public Media is launching a local version of the Create multicast lifestyle channel, to be called Ready TV, starting Dec. 1, reports the Green Valley News & Sun. “Ready TV is very similar to Create but it is programmed locally to accommodate the local Southern Arizona time zone,” said Sue DeBenedette, marketing manager for AZPM. “With Create, it was programmed and scheduled on the East Coast, so that primetime shows did not air in primetime here in Southern Arizona. Scheduling it locally gives AZPM the freedom to program those shows that resonate strongly here in this market rather than being dictated to by a national feed.”

American Public Media has acquired community news funding website Spot.Us, and will incorporate it into the Public Insight Network (PIN), APM announced today (Nov. 29). Spot.Us and PIN each “believe in the power of the independent voice in journalism,” said Joaquin Alvarado, senior vice president of digital innovation at APM. Spot.Us, founded in 2008 with a seed grant from the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge, lets the public fund journalism that is then distributed by newsrooms nationwide; PIN provides journalists with more than 130,000 self-identified news sources through its unique database.

House Republicans today (Nov. 29) released their spectrum incentive auction bill, reports Broadcasting & Cable. It was introduced by Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and is set to be marked up and voted on in the committee Thursday. It would authorize the Federal Communications Commission to reclaim spectrum from broadcasters for auction and compensate them from the proceeds. It also would compensate broadcasters not giving up spectrum for the costs of moving to another channel or sharing channels with another broadcaster, as well as the cost to cable operators of carrying the new signals. A Senate version of a spectrum auction bill has already passed out of the Commerce Committee.

Carmen DiRienzo, founding president and c.e.o. of the Spanish-language public TV channel V-me, has resigned her posts, effective Dec. 31, the network announced today (Nov. 28). She will continue to serve on its Board of Directors. Alvaro Garnica will assume the new position of general manager, with overall responsibility for daily operations. He is g.m. of Plural Entertainment, which V-me describes as its “sister company and primary production partner.” Garnica also spent nine years in programming at Grupo Prisa, a Spanish-language media conglomerate that purchased a significant stake in V-me Media Inc. in October 2009. In today’s announcement, DiRienzo said: “I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to lead a creative, dedicated team of professionals in such a worthwhile venture.

Next Avenue, which has been called “the biggest public media initiative being undertaken anywhere in public broadcasting,” has hired a staff of eight and so far raised $6 million in foundation money for the web-based project designed to “hyper-serve” America’s aging population. Staffers will be located in New York, St. Paul, Denver and Washington, D.C., creating “an interesting new model for a public television station — a virtual organization — as well as journalism hubs across the country,” the initiative, based at Twin Cities Public Television, announced on Monday (Nov. 28). The hires: Donna Sapolin will be Next Avenue’s vice president, editorial director and general manager; she’s former editor-in-chief of This Old House magazine and vice president/editorial director of Woman’s Day Special Interest Publications.

CNSNews.com, the news website of the conservative Media Research Center, is reporting that former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) is developing a Sunday morning talk show for Maryland Public Television. The first episode of The Whole Truth is scheduled to be produced Nov. 29 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., according to CNSNews.com, and will air in January. “This is a pilot, and we hope to put on many, many additional programs — depends on how well we do and how well it is received,” Specter told the news site. His first guests include former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and former Sen.

T.J. Lubinsky, whose musical pledge specials have brought in some $300 million for the pubcasting system, “is not a trained musician,” reports the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the paper in his adopted hometown. “He doesn’t play an instrument and can’t sing very well, but he has a keen, almost supernatural ear for music.” One example is a 3 a.m. recording session of Phil Spector’s “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron.” To Lubinsky, the castanets just did not sound authentic. And he was correct, because the castanets Spector used were made from ebony and used by flamenco dancers. “We found an instructor at Carnegie Mellon who had the real ones for teaching flamenco,” recalled producer Paul Brownstein.