A “Press Conference to Defend, Not Defund, Public Media” kicks off at 1 p.m. Tuesday (March 15) on Capitol Hill, sponsored by Free Press, “to shine a spotlight on the negative impact that cuts to federal funding for public broadcasting would have on local jobs, local journalism and local communities,” it says. Speakers include Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), NABET-CWA President Jim Joyce, AFTRA President Roberta Reardon, and Craig Aaron of the Free Press Action Fund. MoveOn.org, CREDO Action and Free Press Action Fund will deliver 1 million signatures they collected defending pubcasting from funding cuts.

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) is working with the House GOP leadership office to redraft H.R. 69, which currently targets NPR program funding. A Lamborn aide today (March 14) told Current that they anticipate the bill to be on the House floor Thursday for debate and vote. The new bill will prohibit direct federal funding of NPR, as well as ban the use of federal funds from CPB for payment of dues by local radio stations to NPR.

PBS says stations raised $32 million in the last pledge period in December, down 8 percent on average from a year ago, reports the New York Times today (March 14). So far the March drive shows a 31 percent increase in the number of dollars pledged compared with March 2010. Since 2005, the average amount of time PBS member stations pledge has increased by 9 percent; some stations now devote 10 weeks a year to the special shows, the Times notes.

The State of the News Media 2011 from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism was released this morning (March 14). “The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments,” its overview says. “It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own destiny. News organizations — old and new — still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity—and a new set of players—in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers.” The authors of the eighth annual report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost in 2010, translating to a 30 percent drop in newsroom staff since 2000.

Texas Tech’s KTXT/Channel 5 in Lubbock “has been the absolutely worst-managed television station in America for the past 50 years,” John Kirby tells the Lubbock Avalance-Journal in a story today (March 13). And he’s the station’s general manager. In fact, when he was considering the job, broadcasting buddies around the country warned him not to take it — some even saying, “Are you nuts?” But last October Kirby left his spot at the helm of Eastern New Mexico University’s PBS station KENW and took over at Lubbock, determined to turn KTXT around. He’s made personnel changes, and is inserting local filmmakers’ work into the schedule.

The Texas Tribune in Austin and the Bay Citizen in San Francisco, nonprofit online regional news organizations, will share a $975,000 Knight Foundation grant to create a free, open-source publishing platform for other online news groups, the foundation announced Friday (March 11) from SXSW in Austin. The new platform will manage an integrated library of text, video and audio files; improve the way articles are linked, aggregated and tagged for increased search-engine hits; integrate sites with social networks and bloggers; and offer membership tools and integration with advertising networks to cultivate new revenue streams.

Former CBS News London Bureau Chief John Paxson has joined Murrow Public Media/Northwest Public Radio and Northwest Public Television, in the new position of news director. While at CBS News he supervised staff in London, Paris, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Moscow and Johannesburg. He oversaw the network’s coverage of conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He also spent 10 years as a Voice of America correspondent based in Chicago, as well as a CBS News producer in Dallas, Los Angeles and New York. In his new position he will direct increased regional news coverage for the 15 radio and two TV stations licensed to Washington State University in Pullman.

The Jane Matteson Outstanding Jazz Educator Award, presented annually by the Dakota Foundation for Jazz Education in Minneapolis, Minn., generally honors an individual. But the 2011 recipient is a public broadcasting station: KBEM/Jazz 88 radio, one of the few outlets in America playing 24-hour jazz — and which operates out of studios in Minneapolis North High School. “After 40 years of introducing jazz to new listeners, encouraging young musicians, providing the public with access to the best jazz has to offer — and teaching countless individual students about radio broadcasting and jazz — we could think of no more appropriate recipient for our ‘Jane Award’ than KBEM-FM,” said foundation President Tom Trow.

President Obama defended public broadcasting in a press conference on Friday (March 11), reports The Hill. “I think it’s going to be important for us to have a conversation after we get the short-term budget done, about how do we really tackle the problem in a comprehensive way,” Obama said. “And that means not just going after Head Start or Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s not where the money is.” “These aren’t really budget items; these are political statements,” Obama said.

“Consideration of legislation relating to the federal funding of NPR” will occur in the House of Representatives on Thursday, March 17, according to the new weekly schedule posted by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). The schedule notes that the timing complies with the House’s new three-day notice requirement. The 112th Congress established a minimum three-day scheduling notice to give members and the public time to review bills. The schedule does not specify what bill is under discussion, but several are pending to zero out public broadcasting money. H.R. 69, sponsored by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), targets federal funding specifically for NPR programming.

Jennifer Ferro, general manager of KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, Calif., was among pubcasters who spent time on Capitol Hill this week urging members of Congress to preserve funding, reports the Los Angeles Times. But it’s a tough challenge without bipartisan backing. “The Democratic lawmakers I talked to said, ‘We can’t help. There’s nothing happening across the aisle,'” Ferro told the paper. Steve Bass, president of Oregon Public Broadcasting and a member of the NPR board of directors, said he’s worried that the bipartisan support the system historically enjoyed has been eroded by former NPR exec Ron Schiller’s comments in the video sting.

American Public Television announced that has promoted two staff members, Virginia Hamilton and Hilary Finkel Buxton. Hamilton, previously senior manager of APT’s distribution services, now becomes director of that department. She came to APT from WGBH’s production services and audience services, and she is a current member of the PBS Traffic Advisory Council. Buxton, senior manager in APT’s Exchange Service, has been promoted to director. Prior to her arrival at APT, Buxton also worked in production at WGBH.

Tom Currá is the new second in command at WVIA in Pittston, Pa., the northeastern Pennsylvania and Central Susquehanna Valley PBS and NPR station. The move will allow WVIA President Bill Kelly to concentrate his efforts in national advocacy and a WVIA endowment, according to a station statement. Currá came to WVIA in 2004 after a career in commercial television and as an independent filmmaker. His previous title was senior vice president and executive producer.

“Let’s take a breath and put this NPR fracas into perspective,” advises pubcasting newsman Bill Moyers in Salon, writing with his Public Affairs Television colleague Michael Winship. The two say that NPR walked into a trap “perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer,” activist filmmaker James O’Keefe, who caught NPR’s Ron Schiller in a hidden camera sting. The two call O’Keefe “a product of that grimy underworld of ideologically-based harassment which feeds the right’s slime machine.” They point out that in the wake of the Juan Williams firing, Fox News chief Roger Ailes called NPR execs “Nazis” — and then, while apologizing for that remark, characterized them instead as “nasty, inflexible bigots.”

Executives at several NPR member stations tell the Poynter Institute’s Mallary Jean Tenore they want NPR’s next c.e.o. to appreciate for the digital initiatives that Vivian Schiller helped create, but they don’t want to see NPR abandon its broadcast culture to make the organization a “multimedia company.” Commenting are John Weatherford, chief operating officer of Public Broadcasting Atlanta; Sam Fleming, managing director of news and programming at WBUR; and Torey Malatia, c.e.o. of Chicago Public Media.