WNET’s accounting problems have cost it $1.96 million out of a series of production grants totaling $13 million, following  a two-year federal investigation of the big New York station’s grant accounting. Federal lawyers and the licensee — Educational Broadcasting Corp., now officially known as WNET.org — signed a settlement in which the station gave up 15 percent of the grant money: $950,000 to be paid back to the feds for inadequately documented or prohibited costs, and $1,015,046 that the station has spent on the productions but agreed to give up. By the time of the settlement, the growing sum of unreimbursed expenses had cut a $7.8 million hole in the station’s financial fabric.

An NPR-led project this month officially launched planning for a joint Public Media Platform to put public radio and TV content on the Web and mobile devices. By year’s end it aims to create a “proof of concept” prototype. The six-month, $1 million planning initiative will build on NPR’s experience with its open Application Programming Interface, experimenting with ways to make public media content available for noncommercial public service, not only on comprehensive on-demand platforms and station websites but also through specialized widgets yet to dreamed up by creative hackers. Project participants — most of the major program distributors in public broadcasting — will work out terms of use and technical systems for sharing content among local stations, indie producers and others.

A think tank in tiny Hoquiam, Wash., about 70 miles west of Olympia, has received a license from the FCC to create a pubradio station at 91.5 FM. The Grays Harbor Institute provides lectures, seminars and workshops on various issues including poverty, racism, education and the environment; past speakers have included activist Angela Davis and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D). Now it is the licensee for KGHI, according to the Daily World in Aberdeen, Wash. The paper says that station supporters hope to program “news sources, speakers and syndicated programming with radio of a purely local flavor, along with a free-form song format weighted toward classical music.”

With the departure of g.m. Craig Brush earlier this month from PBS affiliate KCOS in El Paso, Texas, retired TV exec Dan Krieger has taken the helm, according to the El Paso Inc. website. “How long will I be here? I don’t know,” Krieger said. “I expect four to six months. If I fall in love with it, I’ll stay. But I really like my previous life.” He’s a businessman who retired nearly a decade ago as g.m. of local CBS affiliate KDBC. Tanny Berg, KCOS board chairman, said Brush’s departure was amicable. “Mr. Brush has decided to resign to explore different avenues to use the talent he has in a different vein,” Berg said.

PBS’s Next Generation Interconnection System-Non-Real-Time Program File Delivery Project (NGIS-NRT) is back on track, after challenges including federal funding snags, a management change and technology issues, reports Broadcasting & Cable. The project is working to deliver programming as compressed digital files. “Catch servers” are now in place at 15 stations. Each server has 12 terabytes of storage for about 10 days of content. Files are encoded using MPEG-2 at high-quality mezzanine compression rates-33 megabits per second (Mbps) for HD video and associated audio, and 13 Mbps for standard-def video and audio. If beta testing is done by the fall, rollout to stations could begin by the end of the year.

Nonprofit fundraising arms of the state-owned network in West Virginia and the school-board-operated stations in Miami are under fire as public officials scrutinize longstanding financial relationships that underpin their operations. West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Miami’s WLRN-FM/TV, like many other public radio and TV operations owned by state and local governments, rely on sister nonprofits, often called Friends groups, to raise as much as 40 percent of their annual budgets. These private 501(c)(3) nonprofits around the country differ in many details but typically have separate governing boards and sometimes their own staffs.   A major reason for their existence is also cause for the complaints: They give pubcasters more flexibility and speed in purchasing and contracting than government procedures usually permit and they can pay for programming or other mission-related activities that the stations couldn’t otherwise afford.

Gretchen Weber, associate producer for Climate Watch on KQED in San Francisco, is spending two weeks at Toolik Field Station, an Arctic climate change research station, as a Logan Polar Science Fellow. Follow her adventures — including breakfasts of reindeer sausage — on her KQED blog.

Crain’s Chicago Business today (June 21) takes a look into both WTTW’s current money woes and pubTV’s future plans. The Chicago PBS affiliate endured recent staff reductions of 12 percent. Viewership has fallen almost every year since 2005, the paper says. Member, sponsor and government revenues are all down. “The Chicago PBS outlet faces a more fundamental problem, however: attracting viewers in a digital era that’s bombarding them with options,” the paper notes. Lawrence Grossman, PBS president from 1976 to ’84 and now on the Connecticut PBS network board, provided big-picture analysis, saying that pubTV “is not going to survive unless it reevaluates where it’s going.”

An NPR-led project this month officially launched planning for a joint Public Media Platform to put public radio and TV content on the Web and mobile devices. By year’s end it aims to create a “proof of concept” prototype....

Today, Seattle’s Crosscut.com concludes its two-part story on KCTS and its CEO, Moss Bresnahan. He’s hoping the station can work together with a new neighbor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose headquarters is going up across from KCTS. “We’ve talked to them about the fact that they’re going to be our new neighbors . . . and how can we make good use of this proximity,” Bresnahan said. “They’ll be bringing in world leaders of all kinds, and so are there ways that we could take advantage of that in terms of programming,” perhaps supplying guests for the station’s Conversations program, or producing shows on foundation initatives.

Pubcasting thought leader Rob Bole writes on his Public Purpose Media blog that public service media no longer has an innovation problem. However, “What we have is a risk problem. As a group, an industry, a system . . . we are not properly arming ourselves with the necessary enterprise skills, tools and perspective to make our efforts sustainable.” Pubmedia folks must realize that “inherent in the act of innovation is a risk assessment and acquiring the necessary skills to manage it.” As one commenter noted, “Provocative post, as always.”

History Detectives launches its eighth season Monday (June 21) with a live Tweetfest. Viewers get to chat with the show’s investigative team while watching the broadcast, which attempts to answer questions including: Is Andy Warhol’s art on the moon? (Spoiler alert! Answer here.) Use hashtag #histdet_pbs, or check out the show’s custom TweetGrid. The team will be online for two back-to-back sessions so viewers across the country may participate.

PRNDI honored Cincinnati-area news director Maryanne Zeleznik with the Leo C. Lee Award for her three decades of work in public radio journalism.

The primary figures in the histories of the PBS series Frontline and Sesame Street were saluted by PBS CPB Ralph Lowell Medal: Frontline auteur David Fanning received CPB’s 38th annual Lowell medal May 18 during the PBS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. The prestigious honor has been presented since 1975 for outstanding contributions to public television. Fanning began his career in journalism at a newspaper in his native South Africa before shifting to American pubTV in 1973. PBS “Be More” Award: Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of Children’s Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) and prime creator of Sesame Street, received the award recognizing contributions to society that exemplify the PBS spirit of “Be more” — “expanding horizons, opening up possibilities and exploring new ideas.”

The Association of Public Television Stations thanked advocates beyond the D.C. Beltway APTS gave its David J. Brugger Grassroots Advocacy Award to Dr. Louis Sullivan, board chair of the Atlanta Educational Telecommunications Collaborative Inc. and former U.S. secretary of health and human services. The Brugger Award, named for the former APTS president, recognizes an individual who has shown “exemplary leadership in advocacy on behalf of public television,” APTS said. APTS’ National Advocacy Awards for 2010 saluted individuals or stations that exemplify effective advocacy for pubTV. Recipients were: Malcolm Brett of Wisconsin Public Television, Molly Phillips of Iowa Public Television, and Rob Shuman of Maryland Public Television.