“The big opportunity — and where the most disruption is — is in local media.”—Vivian Schiller, president, NPR “I have little doubt in my mind that, whether it’s us or somebody else, [local news] is going to be a very big space in the future.”—Tim Armstrong, chair and c.e.o., AOL In the front of the room, NPR President Vivian Schiller and AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong are laying out their corporate strategies to almost a thousand online journalists. It’s the lunchtime general session of the Online News Association (ONA) Conference, and the topic is one of the principal challenges for American journalism: how to provide and sustain local news.

Patrick Butler, public TV’s new chief lobbyist, wrote speeches for President Gerald Ford, was a founder of the Pew Research Center, and helped provide Ken Burns with funding for his acclaimed Civil War documentary series. Butler starts work as president of the Association of Public Television Stations Jan. 1. The APTS leader has represented major media firms in Washington — the Washington Post Co. for 18 years, and before that Times Mirror Co. and RCA. He’s also been a member of the APTS Board since 2009  and chair of the MPT Foundation, which raises private funds to supplement state support of the state-owned Maryland Public Television network.

Jim Lehrer, the well-anchored anchor of PBS NewsHour, told the Dallas Morning News that he’ll have to “start drooling on the air” before he’ll retire. Being a journalist, he added, is “a state of mind – some of the youngest people I know in journalism are 76 years old, and some of the oldest are 23. It’s little-boy-and-little-girl work. You hear the fire engine, and you want to know where it’s going. I still want to know.” And, yes, another of his many books is coming out next year, this one called Tension City. It’s about Lehrer’s experiences moderating presidential debates.

Dave Edwards, g.m. of Milwaukee Public Radio (WUWM) for 25 years, who took over this month as chair of the NPR Board, announced a task force that will consider “how we serve the audience through radio programming as well as digital.” The move responds to station leaders’ concerns that NPR’s focus on digital advances has meant that it’s “not spending as much time on radio as we should,” Edwards said. Task force members will “examine the economics of the programming landscape and articulate the role that NPR should play in that space,” he said, building on the recommendations from Station Resource Group’s “Grow the Audience” report and a recent audience study commissioned by NPR Research.

Reacting to NPR’s abrupt image makeover — from ascendant news organization to partisan punching bag  — the network’s board last week hired an outside firm to investigate the decisions that invited the comedown, the dismissal of news analyst Juan Williams.Dave Edwards, the board’s new chair, announced that Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a 20-office multinational law practice, is leading the internal review initiated last month. Weil is “highly regarded with considerable expertise in governance issues,” Edwards said, shortly after the board unanimously elected him as its new leader.Security guards with metal detectors checked the unusually large number of onlookers at the Nov.

NPR President Vivian Schiller’s remarks near the end of NPR Board meeting, Nov. 12, 2010. Over the last three weeks, I’ve heard from a lot of people — we all have — challenging what NPR is, what it does, and why we’re here. We’ve heard assaults on our programming, and on our objectivity. We’ve read some critical listener letters  and comments posted on NPR.org and elsewhere. We’ve heard assumptions and conjectures about what happens at NPR, and how decisions are made, or not made. Instead of the news we report being the subject of dinner table conversations, we have become the news.

Here’s early praise for WHYY’s NewsWorks from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University. “I love the whole idea of it,” writes J-Lab Executive Director Jan Schaffer on her blog. “The site has more targeted entry points for community involvement than any site that has crossed my radar.” There’s Snarl, where visitors can complain; Sleuth, for digging into local mysteries; and Sixes, a challenge to sum up news stories in six words or fewer. She also likes its Flickr photostream “Eye on … ,” and a Watchdog feature that focuses on public officials. The site officially launches Nov. 15.

Doug Mitchell, the news producer who staffed NPR’s Next Generation Radio internship and training programs for years, will be project manager for the National Federation of Community Broadcasters’ CPB-funded African American Public Radio Station Services, NFCB President Maxie Jackson announced Wednesday.  After Mitchell lost his job in NPR’s mass layoff in 2009, Public Radio News Directors gave Mitchell its Leo C. Lee Award, recognizing his work encouraging young people, particularly those of color, to get into public radio. CPB documents originally named 28 stations eligible for services under the grant, but the corporation later redefined eligible grantees to comply with recent federal court rulings.

After the mediasphere firestorm and political attack over last month’s firing of news analyst Juan Williams, critics of the controversial decision by NPR management were no-shows at this morning’s public session of the NPR Board at the network’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. NPR, which received a bomb threat after Fox News host Bill O’Reilly denounced the Williams firing and declared that he was taking NPR down, had security guards checking visitors with a metal detector and inspecting their bags. Those who wished to address the board were asked to sign-in, but no one did. In his last remarks as NPR Board chair, lay director Howard Stevenson said: “Nobody is thankful for where we are, but the past is prologue, and now we have to look to the future.

In his column today (Nov. 11), Washington Post columnist George Will says that “NPR’s self-immolation” in firing Juan Williams for his public comments on Muslims is “icing on conservatism’s 2010 cake.” He goes on: “From its inception in 1967, as a filigree on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in 1970 begat NPR, has been a solution in search of a problem. Forty-three years later, in the context of today’s information cornucopia, ‘public’ broadcasting — its advocates flinch from candidly calling it government broadcasting — is even sillier than would be a Corporation for Public Newspapers.” “But in 2010,” Will added, “NPR became useful.

The co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, created by President Obama in February to help balance the budget, are recommending an end to CPB funding as of 2015, according to a draft report released today (Nov. 10). The report also advises zeroing out the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP) and the Agriculture Department’s pubcasting grant program. “The current CPB funding level is the highest it has ever been,” the draft says, and cutting it would save nearly $500 million in 2015. The 50-page explanation of proposals insists that “everything must be on the table” for cuts or elimination.

Pubcasters topped three of four electronic journalism categories in the 2010 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards announced today. NPR won for its reporting on the Gulf Oil spill; Nova ScienceNow, a series produced at WGBH in Boston, for a segment on memory research; and Chedd-Angier-Lewis Productions for their PBS series The Human Spark, produced in association with New York’s WNET. Certificates of Merit were awarded to Oregon Public Broadcasting and Chicago’s WBEZ. The awards, presented annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, honor professional journalists for distinguished reporting for a general audience.

KTOO-TV in Juneau, Alaska, is streaming coverage of the state’s midterm election recount to determine its next U.S. Senator. Visit the station’s 360North live feed page to take a peek at the recount “action” in Anchorage — 15 teams of election officials sitting at tables eying write-in ballots, set to a soundtrack of soothing yet determined vote-counting music. (Right click the image to enlarge.) “While we don’t expect much drama or excitement, every Alaskan will be able to watch through our cameras,” Bill Legere, KTOO’s general manager, said in a statement.

The fight over staff cuts at Berkeley’s KPFA-FM has moved from the streets to the airwaves. A Nov. 8 decision by Pacifica Foundation Executive Director Arlene Engelhardt to dismiss the staff of the KPFA Morning Show — the local program that earns the most financial support from listeners — came under immediate fire. Engelhardt proposed to replace the morning news staple with another program from Pacifica’s Los Angeles outlet, KPFK. The KPFA Morning Show team — Aimee Allison, Brian Edwards-Tiekert, Laura Prives and Esther Manilla — were ordered off the air after Monday’s program, but they managed to mount a “renegade broadcast” on Tuesday Nov.

WNED’s popular live WNED Cooks is returning after six years, the Buffalo station says. A new show on “Family Favorites” airs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Feb. 26, 2011. Viewers submit recipes, and eight will be selected to create the dish in the studio that day. All recipes are compiled in a cookbook. Eileen Koteras Elibol returns as host (Image: WNED). No word yet on whether the episode will grow into a series.