Matthew Lasar, a professor and media writer who authored a book on the history of Pacifica Radio, examines two of the “smaller recommendations” in Free Press’s recent white paper on public broadcasting reforms, and cautions against its proposal to strengthen the role of local station Community Advisory Boards. Free Press’s ideas for “pumping up” CABs assume that “there is an almost Rousseauean entity out there called ‘the public’ or ‘the community’ that, when consulted, will always serve up selfless suggestions about how to make a community or public radio station better….Lots of people who attend public media board meetings go there for self-interested reasons.

More than 25,000 Wisconsin veterans and their supporters journeyed to the LZ Lambeau outreach May 21-23 in Green Bay, Wisc., organized by Wisconsin Public Television, the state Department of Veterans Affairs, the Wisconsin Historical Society and many vets’ groups. The gathering was meant as a “welcome home” for Vietnam-era military members (image: Current). The highlight was an evening show inside legendary Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, with music performances and preview segments of WPT’s documentary on veterans from the state. A moving “Missing Man Table Ceremony” honored POWs and MIAs, and 1,244 empty chairs nearly filled the football field, one for each military member and civilian from Wisconsin killed or missing in action in Southeast Asia.

Two different takes on NPR’s mobile strategy began circulating on the Web yesterday: MobileActive reports on how NPR’s work in the mobile space is attracting an audience with different usage habits than visitors to NPR.org; and pubradio fundraising consultant John Sutton writes that NPR’s aggressive push into mobile distribution could eventually undercut the dues-based business model that sustains its newsmagazines.

Austin’s KUT will begin booking acts for the Cactus Cafe, a music venue and bar in the University of Texas’s student union, in August. The partnership, announced after months of discussions about how to keep the Cafe open, puts KUT in charge of scheduling performances 200 nights per year and devising a business plan that will make the money-losing venue self-sustaining. That will include some mix of live broadcasts from the club, sponsorship sales, improved box office operations and sales of downloadable podcasts; managers of the Texas Union will oversee bar operations separately. “We believe the Cactus Cafe plays an essential role in the Austin music experience and are committed to preserving and sharing that experience with the UT campus and beyond,” said Stewart Vanderwilt, KUT director.

Pubcasters including WNET President Neil Shapiro and Malcolm Brett, PBS Board member and director of broadcasting and media innovations for Wisconsin Public Television, donned hardhats and jaunty reflector vests for a May 19 tour of the spiffy new Austin City Limits theater construction in Austin (background, Current, July 20, 2009). Leading the group through the maze of building material was Bill Stotesbery, g.m. of KLRU. It’s part of a $300 million downtown redevelopment just across from city hall. The 2,500-seat venue is on schedule for a December opening, and funding work is going well. Above, that’s the stage to the right and seating to the left.

A veterans’ group is complaining that Wisconsin Public Television’s LZ Lambeau outreach event this weekend “has become a pro-war exhibition aimed at getting kids into the military,” writes the Green Bay Press Gazette. Veterans for Peace will conduct its own workshops and discussions on recruiting, combat stress and ongoing international conflicts as the massive event takes place in Lambeau Field (Current, July 6, 2009). WPT envisions the weekend as a tribute to Vietnam-era veterans who never received a proper welcome home. But the Veterans for Peace website calls the happening “a militaristic fair.” LZ Lambeau Project Manager Don Jones told the Press Gazette he welcomes Veterans for Peace participation, and there will be space at Lambeau Field for all veterans’ groups to distribute literature.

A forest supervisor’s decision to stop Idaho Public Television from filming in a wilderness area has sparked a U.S. Forest Service investigation, reports the Associated Press. Even Gov. Butch Otter called the ban an “ill-advised decision.” IPTV has been filming in the 2.3-million acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area for more than 30 years but this year was told the shoot is considered commercial, and therefore prohibited. “If Ansel Adams were alive today and wanted to bring his camera into the Frank Church wilderness, would the Forest Service let him?” said IPTV g.m. Peter Morrill. The station wanted to send one cameraman to film students doing conservation work for its Outdoor Idaho.

Lester Crystal, the president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, is retiring on Aug. 31, the production company of PBS NewsHour said in a statement. He will continue as a senior advisor through the end of the year. Crystal was hired in 1983 to transition the show from the half-hour MacNeil/Lehrer Report to the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. He became president of the production company in 2005. In a statement to staff, founders Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer said that NewsHour “would never have been launched and sustained as successfully as it has been, and become the institution in the nation’s journalism that it has, without Les.”

CPB President Pat Harrison announced a July 1 launch of the multiplatform World content project (Current, Sept. 8, 2009), and told station execs May 20 in Austin that CPB would cover their fees for the first year of carriage. The long-awaited project will use emerging media to draw in producers and news consumers of more widely varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as a younger crowd. The work is being developed by partners including WGBH, ITVS, the Bay Area Video Coalition, NPR and members of the Minority Consortia. One of the first projects is “The Skin You’re In,” incorporating content from stations, viewers and users about everything from genetics to tattoos, to explore the the idea of identity.

Tony Cox, host of the talk show produced by the African-American Public Radio Consortium, says farewell to listeners in a post announcing an official end to the short-lived program. “I had big hopes for this show. And everything I could possibly have asked for came true. . . except the money.” Upfront with Tony Cox began airing repeats earlier this year while producers tried to raise money; with no funders on board they called it quits as of May 14. It was the second of two midday programs that AAPRC put into production last year. Michael Eric Dyson, host of the first show, received a $505,000 CPB grant to relaunch his program as a production of WEAA in Baltimore.

Starting this fall, Frontline will be more aggressive with viewer engagement on the Web, Executive Producer David Fanning said during yesterday’s panel on PBS’s news and public affairs initiative, moderated by NewsHour’s Hari Sreenivasan. “A narrative bright line runs through the mists of material,” Fanning said. “The idea is to say, here it is, but you don’t have to stay up three nights to figure it out.” Documents will be posted and Frontline journalists will point site visitors to the most important facts. “The Cigarette Papers” in 1998 provides a good example: “Five thousand pages of a drama in three acts starting in 1952,” Fanning said.

Free Press’s proposals to expand federal subsidies for public media may be one of many “long shot crusades” launched by the progressive media reform group, writes Matthew Lasar in Ars Technica, but one thing is certain–commercial broadcasters and electronics manufacturers “will protest these ideas early, often, and very loudly if any of them actually surface in a Congressional bill.” Lasar believes that Free Press raises important questions about how to fund the journalism that is vital to democracy, and media reformers are better advocates for a new funding mechanism than public broadcasters themselves. “Public television in particular has sunk into a comfortable malaise of genteel poverty and compromise with the very commercial practices it was originally designed to transcend.”

Pubradio programming veteran Jody Evans will sign on as executive director of Western North Carolina Public Radio in June. Evans, former p.d. of Austin’s KUT and Vermont Public Radio, was appointed after a national search for a new manager at the Asheville-based public radio outlet known as the “Mountain Air Network.” “Jody has experience building a statewide public radio organization in Vermont and has a passion for strengthening community-based programming,” said WNCPR Board Chair Lach Zemp. Evans directed programming at VPR when it split its network to offer two distinct services–all-news and all-classical. WNCPR also broadcasts two different program streams: classical music and news on WCQS 88.1 and its network of FM translators, and all-news on WYQS 90.5.

CPB is providing Frontline with a $6 million grant to allow it to produce programs year-round, according to the New York Times. The show is also strengthening its cooperation with journalism schools and nonprofit news orgs, including the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, e.p. David Fanning told the paper. More of its original reporting will go onto the Web, and more content will be shared with pubTV and pubradio stations. And “Frontline/World,” its international coverage partnership with KQED in San Francisco and WGBH in Boston, will move entirely online.

In an online chat yesterday, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales responded to complaints about a remark in his vividly critical May 11 review of Need to Know‘s premiere that co-host Alison Stewart “looked as though she would have been much more comfortable in [Bill] Clinton’s lap” during an interview with the former president. Shales said that he only meant that Stewart seemed too cozy with Clinton. “I perhaps should have said that cohost Jon Meacham looked as though he wanted to broadcast from Clinton’s lap, too. They were both too soft on Bill, but then he brings that out in journalists — of both sexes.