The incentives ranging from $500,000 to $1.5 million per station could give an extra push to CPB’s ongoing matchmaking efforts.

After what she termed a “difficult deliberation,” NPR v.p. Debra May Hughes is leaving the network and her post at the top of Public Interactive, which offers website development services to the pubcasting community. Her departure is effective Aug. 31. Hughes said in a letter to colleagues that “the time is right to step down from the helm of Public Interactive and chart a new course,” but didn’t mention what that would be. Hughes began her pubcasting career 14 years ago by launching Car Talk‘s site and steered PI through transitions to new parent companies Public Radio International and NPR.

Documentaries On-Demand, featuring PBS programming, will begin this autumn, reports Multichannel News. It’s a partnership with content distributor Gravitas Ventures. The package will offer 30 hours of PBS-distributed docs and indie titles including those from American Experience and Independent Lens. Some will debut on VOD ahead of their PBS broadcasts and before DVD release. No word on pricing.

An HIV-positive Muppet will be a co-host of the new Nigerian Sesame Street, reports the international entertainment news site C21Media.com. The show is a coproduction of Sesame Workshop and Nigeria’s Ileke Media. It’ll be a three-year run funded by a grant from the United States Agency for International Development. A portion of the money also will go to outreach for the nation’s 25 million preschool children. One host of the 30-minute show will be an HIV-positive girl named Kami. The other is a boy Muppet whose name will be chosen through a national text-message vote. “It is our hope that the series will make a strong impact among Nigerian children and their families, addressing relevant social issues, as well as providing them with a strong foundation of basic literacy and numeracy that will instill an interest in and lifelong love of learning,” said Sesame Street Nigeria exec producer and director of business development Yemisi Ilo.

In international pubcasting news, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has selected a new head of France’s pubTV network — after changing a law to do so, according to Expatica.com. He named Remy Pflimlin, 56, of the press distribution company Presstalis, to lead France Televisions. The move aggravated several lawmakers. “The naming of the president of public television by the chairman of the republic is the crowning of a process of putting France Televisions under political and financial control,” Socialist Senator David Assouline said. Previous leaders of France Televisions were selected by an independent regulator; last year, Sarkozy passed a reform allowing the president to choose pubmedia execs.

After losing 18 percent of its budget in state funding cuts last year, WVIA in Pittston, Pa., ended its fiscal year 2010 on June 30 with a surplus, reports the Times-Leader newspaper. “We’ve got a better station today than we had a year ago,” President and CEO Bill Kelly told the paper. “If you had told me that a year ago, I’d have told you you were nuts.” It hasn’t been an easy journey, however. More than seven positions were eliminated and the remaining 38 full-time staffers took a 5 percent pay cut and furloughs. Kelly took a 15 percent salary reduction and management took 12 percent.

The governor says the state can’t afford New Jersey Network anymore. NJN’s leaders say it would do better as a nonprofit anyway. But the NJN employees’ union predicts that a spun-off nonprofit NJN inevitably would fade away, its valuable assets and New Jersey news lost forever. Looks like the ideal time for a Legislative Task Force on Public Broadcasting, lawmakers decided June 29.

Dish Network is suing the Federal Communication Commission over the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act, which requires the satTV provider to deliver noncom stations’ HD signals by next year, reports Broadcasting & Cable. The suit, filed last week (July 1) in Las Vegas where Dish is incorporated, seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction against the FCC’s enforcement of the Act. “This is not a case about whether PBS provides important and worthwhile programming or should receive funding from the government,” Dish said in a statement. “Dish highly values PBS programming … This case is about who gets to make the editorial judgment whether to carry local PBS stations in HD — Dish or the government.”

Stirrings of audience life in multicast channels may the big reason why the national Nielsen ratings acquired by PBS have been rising even though local Nielsen numbers are still generally slipping. Audience analyst Judith LeRoy, co-director of TRAC Media Services, told Current that Nielsen includes multicast channels’ viewers in national PBS numbers, which are network-oriented, while they are counted as separate channels in local data, which are more strictly channel-oriented. Multicast channels such as Create, World, V-me and some locally packaged channels tend to have no measurable audience or a fraction as many viewers as the largest PBS channel in town, but small increments from two or three additional channels per market could mount up quietly, given that most stations don’t see the data because they’d have to pay extra to Nielsen.

To advance Vocalo, its radio/web experiment in reaching a younger, more diverse audience, Chicago Public Media (formerly Chicago Public Radio) said Friday that it’s shifting its emphasis to the broadcast side to create “a dynamic broadcast that draws a sizeable audience.” Vocalo is dropping the jobs of five training and outreach employees. Seven Vocalo staffers remain, writes Vocalo blogger Robert Feder. This fiscal year, the licensee will have to operate without $312,000 that the state government contributed in fiscal 2010, the Chicago Tribune reported. WTTW public television earlier said it would cut 12 percent of its staff after losing $1.25 million from Illinois.

NPR won four national Edward R. Murrow Awards in latest RTDNA contest honoring excellence in electronic journalism. Top winners among the 14 additional public radio newsrooms recognized by the Radio Television Digital News Association for 2009  include Boston’s WBUR, honored for overall excellence among large-market radio stations, and Michigan Radio’s The Environment Report, cited for best news series in the radio network division. Among five public radio outlets that won in the small-market division, North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y., won a Murrow for investigative reporting by David Sommerstein and WSHU in Fairfield Conn., for Charles Lane’s continuing coverage of attacks against Latinos in Patchogue, Long Island.

Public TV cleaned up at the Creative Arts Daytime Emmy Awards June 25 PBS and American Public Television, as distributors, had 16 winners (and earlier, 53 nominations). Nickelodeon’s programs and artists won 11 Emmys and ABC’s won 10. Sesame Street scored seven and Electric Company five. Avec Eric, APT’s new food series with chef Eric Ripert, took an award for graphic design. The competition covers broadcasts during the calendar year 2009, 2 to 6 p.m. Public TV winners included: Outstanding Children’s Animated Program Curious George Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Ellen Cockrill, Carol Greenwald, Dorothea Gillim David Kirschner and Jon Shapiro, e.p.;

A pubradio reporter testified Wednesday (June 30) about being hit by a police officer during a violent May Day event three years ago, according to Courthouse News Service, a nationwide news service for lawyers and the media based in Pasadena, Calif. Patricia Nazario of KPCC in Pasadena told the court she had hidden behind a tree to call her editor when a police officer stabbed his baton to the right side of her back. Nazario asked him why he did so, the officer said, “Shut up, move!” then hit her just above her knee, knocking her down, she testified. She said the cellphone she was using to talk to her boss went flying over her head.

Oklahoma Educational Television Authority has dropped three longtime on-air news personalities due to state budget cuts, reports the Oklahoman. News anchors Gerry Bonds and George Tomek and weatherman Ross Dixon, “who have won numerous awards and combined for nearly 45 years of experience with OETA,” the paper notes, left after Wednesday’s (June 30) 6:30 p.m. Oklahoma News Report. John McCarroll, OETA exec director, said a $994,000 drop in the 2010 fiscal budget by the Legislature, added to $725,000 additional cuts this year, prompted the changes. He said their salaries “are a big part of that $994,000 that we’re going to be able to divert to other things.”

The Miami Herald‘s columnist Glen Garvin recently came across a piece he wrote in June 1993 bashing NPR. Now he writes: “NPR remains a cultish echo chamber with a tiny audience anchored in a dying medium, funded almost entirely with money extorted from taxpayers. Other than that, public radio is great.” Here’s the original 7,300-word column that ran in the Chicago Reader.