In a 20-page report released today (Oct. 15), a 10-member bipartisan New Jersey Legislature committee called for “a dramatic reconfiguration” of New Jersey Network, reports the Star-Ledger in Newark. Gov. Chris Christie (R) earlier this year had recommended ending state funding (Current, July 6, 2010). The report also rejected Christie’s deadline of Jan. 1, 2011, for a transfer of the state-supported pubcasting network to an independent entity. Also, the paper is reporting that there’s plenty of activity behind the scenes. One possibility is a partnership between New Jersey broadcasters and WNET/Thirteen in New York City. Or Montclair State University could take a key role in production of NJN content.

CPB and PBS just announced (Oct. 15) almost $72 million in federal grants for the Ready to Learn early childhood literacy campaign from the U.S. Department of Education. The two submitted a joint application in June in response to an RFP to fund “research, development and deployment of transmedia content to improve the math and literacy skills of children ages 2-8, especially those living in poverty,” according to the announcement. The grant provides around $15 million annually from 2010 to 2015. It’s the fourth Ready to Learn grant to CPB and PBS since 1995 (Current, June 6, 1994).

Big changes are coming in PBS’s winter/spring 2011 primetime schedule — including a shift for Nova from its longtime Tuesday slot to Wednesdays, and two themed content nights. A Thursday (Oct. 14) memo to station execs and programmers says the weekly Nielsen ratings that PBS began using last year, an improvement over the previous monthly numbers, provided a “depth of audience data” to allow it to “better optimize audience potential for our content.” In the case of Nova, additional research showed potential to expand its audience through the schedule change. Nova’s move to 9 p.m. Eastern Wednesdays will allow for two to three hours of themed content that evening on science, exploration and natural history.

The annual conference of K-12 teachers and educational experts of various stripes has been scheduled for March 18-19 in New York. Last year, attendance approached 10,000 (video highlights). Again it will take over many rooms of the big New York Hilton in midtown.

By now you may very well be one of the 4 million viewers of the Sesame Street spoof of that cheeky Old Spice commercial on YouTube. Here’s the behind-the-scenes story from Miles Ludwig, vice president and executive producer of Digital Media at Sesame Workshop, via Mashable, a social media and web tech news site. Ludwig says around 50 single-shot takes were recorded, with take 35 as the magic number.

A Nova film crew has been at the site of the Chilean mine disaster since Sept. 5, and the program will air its hourlong doc “Emergency Mine Rescue” on Oct. 26, the WGBH science show announced Wednesday (Oct. 13). Its Pioneer Productions crew conducted interviews that will provide an in-depth account of the scientific aspects of the rescue. Viewers will get a look at the engineering, biological, and geological factors, as well as the psychological and physiological toll the miners faced in their two-month captivity more than 2,000 feet underground. “Emergency Mine Rescue” premieres at 8 p.m. Eastern (check local listings).

Vegas PBS is Ground Zero for one of the most anticipated debates in the nation this election season: Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) vs. GOP candidate Sharron Angle. It’s their only face-off during the campaign. The station is approaching 85 requests for media credentials from the major networks (CNN, FOX News and MSNBC) as well as reporters from as far away as Japan, Germany, Netherlands,  England and France. The Thursday (Oct. 14) debate is being produced with the Nevada Broadcasters Association. Watch online here from 9 to 10 p.m. Eastern.

Massachusetts station WFCR is buying WNNZ, a 50,000-watt outlet on 640 AM, and converting it into noncommercial operation, the WFCR Foundation announced today. WFCR began programming NPR news and talk on WNNZ in 2007 under contract with Clear Channel Communications. The $600,000 purchase, to be initially financed through a four-year loan from Public Radio Capital, secures the AM outlet for WFCR’s expanding news and information service. In August, the Amherst-based pubcaster acquired another channel for news — WNNZ-FM, a 100-watt station on 91.7 MHz that was previously operated by prep-school students of the Deerfield Academy.

In a memo to NPR employees today (Oct. 13) posted on the Poynter Online Romenesko journalism blog, President Vivian Schiller cautioned staffers against participation in the dueling rallies on the National Mall planned for Oct. 30 by Comedy Central’s faux-news pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. ” … [N]o matter where you work at NPR you should be very mindful that you represent the organization and its news coverage in the eyes of your friends, neighbors and others,” she said in the memo, which was attached to a copy of NPR’s News Ethics guidelines. “So please think twice about the message you may be sending about our objectivity before you attend a rally or post a bumper sticker or yard sign.”

In an interview with the St. Louis Beacon, the nonprof news site partnering with St. Louis’s KETC, CPB President Pat Harrison makes a strongly worded case for the corporation’s involvement in funding news coverage. “My job is to invest in high quality journalism and let the chips fall where they may,” Harrison said. “I don’t even have to like it; I just have to make sure it gets funded. And I am dedicated to that. We are going to gore people’s oxen. On any given day, I may have somebody from one side of the aisle complaining that we are very, very left, and another call that says we are too right.

“KCET is dead; long live KCET,” writes Los Angeles Times TV Critic Robert Lloyd in today’s (Oct. 13) column. He’s adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the station’s departure from PBS as of Jan. 1, 2011. “If, as the station has claimed, the economic downturn had made it difficult for KCET to raise the money PBS demanded from it, will it be any easier, without the lure of an Antiques Roadshow or American Masters, to raise the money to realize this unrevealed new vision?” Lloyd writes. “One can easily imagine, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, a vicious circle of diminishing returns, in which cheaper programming leads to fewer pledges, which in turn leads to even cheaper programming, which leads to fewer pledges.”

President Barack Obama today (Oct. 13) announced his choice for appointments to several administration posts. Included is Beth Kobliner, to serve as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability. The financial expert has a regular segment on public radio’s The Takeaway and is a content adviser to Sesame Workshop’s upcoming Financial Education Initiative, a bilingual outreach program to promote financial literacy in very young children. Here’s a video interview of Kobliner at last year’s TV Critics Press Tour, discussing her participation in the doc “Your Life, Your Money,” which ran on PBS in April 2009.

Here’s an interesting exchange on the future of soon-indie KCET between Doc Searls, head of Project VRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and John Proffitt, longtime public broadcaster and pubmedia analyst. “KCET has some faith — or at least a good idea — that Whatever Comes Next will be good enough for lots of people to watch,” Searls writes on his blog. ” … Dumping PBS was a brave move by KCET. They deserve congratulations for it.” But Proffitt predicts that the station will slowly become “a video production house for grant-funded film and commercial work where possible,” and be gone in five years.

Just what does Minnesota Public Radio’s Bill Kling have in mind for the regional news initiative announced last month as his next act? A $100 million expansion of newsgathering capacity at public radio stations in four to six major markets, reports Newsonomics blogger Ken Doctor. Minnesota Public Radio and KPCC in Los Angeles, sister stations in Kling’s American Public Media family, are planning an alliance with New York’s WNYC and Chicago’s WBEZ. Each participating station would hire 100 reporters and editors. “That’s ‘public radio’ grown into ‘public media,’ meaning that these news operations would be digital-first, text-heavy and video-ready, while porting over the audio from radio,” Doctor writes.

Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston “was the first radio station in the United States to be bombed off the air” in May 1970, soon after going on the air, recalled Rick Campbell in a Houston Chronicle blog. That October, 40 years ago this month, the station was dynamited into silence a second time during a broadcast of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.” Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested; two got off by testifying against Jimmy Dale Hutto, who was convicted and sent to jail. He allegedly planned to bomb the Pacifica stations in Berkeley and Los Angeles. When the station resumed broadcasting in January 1971, PBS’s Great American Dream Machine covered the event live.