Lakeland Public Television in Bemidji, Minn., is seeking $3 million in state bonds for construction of a new facility, and it has the City Council’s unanimous support, according to The Bemidji Pioneer. In fact, members of the council agreed that the project should be a top priority. Lakeland plans to build a $4 million facility, with $1 million in local donations. The station has been located at Bemidji State University since it went on the air in 1980.

Salt Lake City pubradio station KCPW 88.3 is facing an Oct. 31 deadline to raise $250,000 to pay off one of two loans it took out in 2008 to purchase the station, reports the local City Weekly. If the station misses the deadline, the loan goes into default and the bank will accelerate the second loan, worth $1.8 million. “That will effectively put us out of business,” KCPW General Manager Ed Sweeney told the alt weekly. “We’ve never been in default on the loan, and we’ve been able to reduce the principle amount by $100,000 since 2008. There’s no way I can come up with $1.8 million.”

California TV personality Huell Howser, who has been with KCET in Los Angeles since 1987, is donating all past and future episodes of his show California’s Gold to Chapman University in Orange, Calif. He’s also giving the university some 300 boxes of materials related to the series including papers, ephemera and memorabilia, as well as around 1,800 books about California. The trove will be housed in the university’s Leatherby Libraries, and all episodes of the pubTV show will be digitized and made available online. “I’m so proud to have a permanent home for my life’s work at a university the caliber of Chapman, and I hope it will be used by students and the public to learn about and understand California even better,” Howser said.

FNX, the first 24-hour Native American television channel, is now on the air. First Nations Experience Television is a partnership between the San Manuel Band of Indians and KVCR, a dual licensee in San Bernardino, Calif. The FNX website says that within the next year, FNX plans to “expand and lead the way as a U.S. producer and national and global exhibitor (via the Internet and over-the air, satellite and cable broadcast systems) of authentic First Nations storytelling.” “This marks the birth of an innovative project that has been in the works for seven years now,” said Larry Ciecalone, president of KVCR/FNX.

Prohibition, the latest historical documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, scored a 2.6 rating among 55 metered overnight stations for its premiere episode, “A Nation of Drunkards,” on Sunday night (Oct. 2). PBS said in a statement that’s 189 percent above the PBS overnight primetime average for the 2010-2011 season of 0.9.

Bonnie Erbe’s life took an ominous turn over Memorial Day weekend, but she doesn’t remember much of what happened. The longtime host of public TV’s To the Contrary was astride her Hanoverian horse, Stand Out, that Sunday, riding in a hunter/jumper show at the Prince George’s Equestrian Center in Upper Marlboro, Md. They approached a fence on the stadium course for a jump, but something went wrong. “The last thing I remember is hanging onto the horse’s neck and thinking, ‘Oh, no,’” Erbe said. Meanwhile in Baltimore, Cari Stein, former executive producer of the 20-year-old all-female news-analysis program, was entertaining a houseful of holiday guests, purposely ignoring her cellphone.

WQED has come up with an idea that initially might make some public broadcasters cringe: an entire multichannel fully devoted to fundraising. Yes, all pledge shows, running 24/7. That’s exactly what WQED Showcase will be. The Pittsburgh station will debut its fourth channel possibly as soon as November. Station President Deborah Acklin came up with the concept for the potential revenue stream, which appears to be a pubcasting first. She said it seemed to her like “an obvious answer in a very tight revenue market.” Besides, “a lot of people really like pledge programming, and we forget that sometimes,” Acklin said.

Ellen Weiss, the NPR News chief who took the network’s blame for the Juan Williams affair, has joined the Center for Public Integrity as its executive editor as of Oct. 3, the watchdog newsroom announced. The center is headed by one of her predecessors at NPR, Bill Buzenberg. “Ellen Weiss is one of the best and most creative news executives in the business,” he said in a news release. CPI hired three other top editors, including Christine Montgomery, the center’s new chief digital officer, who was managing editor of PBS.org for two years while it expanded and then sharply reduced its online-news plans.

WYSO-FM in Yellow Springs, Ohio, will move to renovated studios and increase its signal strength from 37,000 watts to 50,000 watts before year’s end, thanks to a $1 million grant from its licensee, Antioch University, approved by the school’s board Sept. 23. The upgrade will extend the station’s reach in southwest Ohio and improve signal quality. The FCC has approved the changes, university officials said in a statement. “Fifty thousand watts is a big deal,” WYSO General Manager Neenah Ellis said in the release. “WYSO began with 10 watts in 1958 and we are now the dominant public radio station in the Miami Valley.”

In response to media outages after recent disasters elsewhere, the CoastAlaska pubradio group has built two compact portable FM stations for use by pubcasters in the state, called Radio to Go. The nonprofit, which serves seven stations from Juneau, developed the portable kit to go into service within minutes after arriving at a site. The two units, to be stored in separate communities, can be carried by Coast Guard helicopter, commercial flight or ship. Each unit costs about $10,000, including shipping cases, a 150-watt FM radio transmitter, CD players, a digital audio recorder, radio tuner, mixer and microphones, cables, transmitting antenna and mast.

Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network has signed an agreement with the Hartford public school system to establish at CPBN headquarters a hands-on lab where students will learn how to produce TV, radio and online media. Starting with the 2013–14 school year, 100 seniors in the Hartford Journalism & Media Academy will take all of their classes, including core subjects, in the new Learning Lab. “No other public broadcasting institution in the country is taking a third of its facility and building a school there,” said Jerry Franklin, CPBN president. The net plans to invest $3.5 million to convert 20,000 square feet of space into classrooms and production studios for the lab.

Universal Subtitles, a project of the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, is looking for long-form public media projects to translate into multiple languages through its crowdsourcing network. In January the project worked with the PBS NewsHour and volunteers to produce translations and subtitles of President Obama’s State of the Union address. Within 17 hours, the speech had been converted to nine languages, said Nicolas Reville of PCF. Now Universal Subtitles has partnered with American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, APM said at the PRPD conference. The aim is to extend public media’s reach and value by creating and publishing reports in multiple languages, said Joaquin Alvarado, APM’s digital innovation chief.

The draft for the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal year 2012 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill, introduced Sept. 29 by subcommittee Chair Denny Rehburg (R-Mont.), would prohibit CPB from funding NPR and requests a report from CPB on how to remove NPR totally from federal funding by 2014. Under the bill, CPB would receive the already-appropriated amount of $445 million for that year, including $6 million for digital projects. Other agencies in the draft bill would fare worse for the year that began Oct. 1. Discretionary funding in the multiagency bill would shrink 2.5 percent; the sum is 15.2 percent less than President Obama proposed.