Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), on Wednesday (Oct. 6) was declared an official Super Reader during a visit to Marshalltown, Iowa, to honor his work in promoting and helping fund public television, according to the local Times-Republican. As such, Harkin is now eligible to wear his very own Super Reader Cape. “Where I work, they will probably not let me wear it,” Harkin told kids at the Marshalltown Public Library. “But when I go back to my office, I can wear it.” Presenting the honor was Dan Wardell, Iowa Public Television Kids Club host. Super Reader is part of PBS’s Super Why!

The Writers Guild of America East, which reps writers at several pubcasting stations, has written to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski with a suggestion: Comcast should donate $10 million annually over 10 years for news and public affairs programming as a requirement of its merger with NBC Universal. The Los Angeles Times reports that Michael Winship, president of the guild, and Lowell Peterson, its executive director, wrote that the merger “would further consolidate the production and distribution of news and public affairs programming relied on by the American public.” So they think Comcast should “contribute significant resources to the production of truly independent content.”

Lots going on at Mister Rogers’s production company in Pittsburgh. First, it’s no longer known as Family Communications Inc.; it’s now the Fred Rogers Co.  There’s a website redesign. And it just received a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The $496,000 is for a nationwide roll-out of the company’s video-based police training program, “One on One: Connecting Cops & Kids.” It was one of only 19 recipients of 321 applications, and one of the four largest grants, according to the production company. It began developing “Cops & Kids” about a decade ago.

Several stations have joined to continue coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast region, WBHM-FM in Birmingham, Ala., announced today (Oct. 6). Producing content under a $538,000 CPB grant are: lead station Louisiana Public Broadcasting; Alabama Public Television; Mississippi Public Broadcasting; WEDU-TV/FM, Tampa, Fla.; WUSF-TV/FM, Tampa; WWNO-FM, New Orleans; WSRE-TV/FM, Pensacola, Fla.; WVAS-FM, Montgomery, Ala.; and KRVS-FM in Lafayette, La. In addition to creating and sharing broadcast and digital content, the Gulf Coast Consortium will conduct community engagement activities through social media sites and town hall meetings.

The redesign of PBS.org will emphasize broadcast promotions, feature a “Today’s Video” clip for users to catch up on shows that have already aired, and offer web-only content from member stations, reports PaidContent.org, a news site on the economics of new media. There’ll also be a new iPad app for users to preview shows and watch select full-length videos. No word yet from PBS on the launch date.

In a memo to staff today (Oct. 6), WNET/Thirteen President Neal Shapiro announced a four-day furlough for time during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The savings in salaries and operational costs will amount to “upwards of $1 million,” Shapiro said. Employees will take four days of unpaid leave between Dec. 27 and Dec. 30. The WNET workforce had a three-day furlough the same week last year.

“Public Media in a Digital Age” was the topic of the panel discussion Tuesday (Oct. 5) organized by Free Press at the New America Foundation in D.C. The conversation ranged from localism to relevance and funding of pubmedia. “It is profoundly important that local public broadcasting stations are controlled by people in their communities . . . That’s where the funding comes from,” PBS President Paula Kerger said. Also appearing was Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC. He noted that measuring share of audience isn’t what ultimately matters in public broadcasting. “One program can change someone’s life,” he said.

Freakonomics Radio, a new co-production featuring journalist and Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, unveiled its biweekly segment for Marketplace yesterday. The topic for the lead story? Major League Baseball. Specifically: whether the crackdown on steroid use is to blame for the decline in the number of home runs being hit. During an appearance at the Public Radio Program Directors conference in Denver last month, Dubner said the show came into being after he told WNYC senior producer Collin Campbell that, as much as he enjoyed appearing on the station’s PRI series The Takeaway, he couldn’t deal with the early hours required for morning drive-time radio.

WMFE/Public Media for Central Florida is instituting two-week furloughs for all 35 staffers, reports the Orlando Sentinel. Also, there’s also no raises this fiscal year. Station President Jose Fajardo told the paper that membership and corporate underwriting goals are down by $250,000. WMFE is speaking with CPB about its Stations in Severe Financial Distress program, although it has not formally signed on, Fajardo told Current.

CPB President Pat Harrison will be in St. Louis on Oct. 12 as KETC/Channel 9 unveils its new brand identity as the Nine Network of Public Media, the station announced today (Oct. 5). It’s part of the celebration for the opening of its new digital facility, the Nine Center for Public Engagement. There’ll be six interactive demonstration stations in the new building: nineVoices, a website where community members post videos with solutions to local problems; Homeland, an immigration initiative; nineAcademy, digital video storytelling; the Public Insight Network, a site where participants serve as resources for pubmedia news gatherers; and interactive experiences with Nine on Twitter and Facebook.

Bill Buckmaster announced Tuesday (Oct. 5) that he is leaving his the Arizona Illustrated anchor chair after 23 years on Arizona Public Media. His last day is Jan. 1. Two days later, he’ll begin a pubaffairs radio show, Buckmaster, on AM 1330 KJLL. The Tucson Citizen website opined, “This will leave a gaping hole in our local television news. His knowledge, experience and professionalism were a far cry from the ‘two years and I’m out of here’ careers of too many people in our local television news.” (Fascinating factoid: Buckmaster is one of only two broadcasters with an asteroid named after him.

Is public funding of media a good idea? That’s what Spot.us, an open source project to fuel “community powered reporting,” wanted to know. So it did an online survey with assistance from the Reynolds Journalism Institute and Free Press. Just over 400 web users participated to answer, among other things, how media should be financed. Would they support a pubmedia endowment to increase funding for educational programs, arts, and investigative journalism? Overwhelmingly, 84 percent, said yes; 3 percent said no; the rest were undecided. They also would overwhelmingly support (93 percent) the creation of a matching grant program that would combine foundation grants with public funding to support innovation and investment in local news and journalism.

NPR’s Twitter followers are “gadget hounds” and “news junkies,” according to survey results released last week by NPR Research. Of the 10,244 NPR Twitter followers who completed the survey last month, more than three-quarters said they get all or most of their news online. Nearly a third said they spend between one and two hours a day with NPR content but — unlike Facebook fans that NPR surveyed this summer– fewer Twitter users experience NPR content as radio listeners. Two-thirds of responding Twitter followers, or 67 percent, said they listen to NPR radio broadcasts, compared to three-quarters (76 percent) of Facebook fans.

Why everyone but public broadcasters is making federal policy for public media The FCC’s recent National Broadband Plan and its Future of the Media initiative have highlighted a chronic problem in U.S public broadcasting: The system has no long-term policy planning capacity, and therefore it always has had great difficulty dealing with the periodic efforts by outsiders to critique and “reform” it. Public broadcasting ignores most media policy research, whether it originates in academia, think tanks or federal agencies, and it often seems out of touch with major national policy deliberations until too late. That disengagement is highly dangerous because it allows others to set the national legal and regulatory agenda for communications without assuring adequate policy attention to public-service, noncommercial and educational goals.

When Jim Pagliarini and Judy Diaz say public TV should pay more attention to a younger audience, they’re not thinking of viewers in their 20s and 30s. Their Next Avenue project, based at Twin Cities Public Television, aims at Boomers, the big generation now between the ages of 45 and 65, with its biggest numbers toward the younger end. In contrast, 60 percent of PBS’s audience is over 60, Diaz says, though it has many Boomer viewers. “We’re not reaching them, and we’re not engaging them now,” says Diaz. Boomers — “that’s an NPR audience,” she adds. She also uses a word heard more often in public radio: Next Avenue will “superserve” its audience.