Both chambers of the Minnesota State Legislature have voted to restore general fund appropriations for public broadcasting, almost completely rolling back a proposal by Gov. Tim Pawlenty to zero-out $2.015 million in public media subsidies. Differences between House and Senate bills are yet to be reconciled, reports MinnPost’s David Brauer, but the largest cut proposed for pubcasting totals $161,000 over the biennial budget cycle.

Beginning later this week, Frontline, NPR’s Planet Money and PBS NewsHour are partnering across platforms to report on post-earthquake life in Haiti. Planet Money will look at what new economies are emerging from the rubble in Port-au-Prince. That piece will develop into several Web-original Frontline video reports, TV segments on PBS NewsHour and companion radio on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Planet Money’s podcast. The project culminates in Frontline’s broadcast next Tuesday, March 30, of “The Quake,” examining the world’s response to the catastrophe. Featured in that program are interviews including former President Bill Clinton, special envoy to Haiti; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Dr.

In the last three months of 2009, viewers had their eyes on both TV and the Internet — at the same time — for three and a half hours a month, up 35 percent from the previous quarter, according to the latest news from Nielsen’s Three Screen Report.“The rise in simultaneous use of the web and TV gives the viewer a unique on-screen and off-screen relationship with TV programming,” said Nielsen spokesman Matt O’Grady. “The initial fear was that Internet and mobile video and entertainment would slowly cannibalize traditional TV viewing, but the steady trend of increased TV viewership alongside expanded simultaneous usage argues something quite different.”

Comic recreation of a gripping behind-the-scenes drama playing itself out at the Federal Communications Commission, animated using Xtranormal technology.

The stars of TV’s very first reality series, PBS’s An American Family, are reliving their 1973 lives as consultants on Cinema Verite, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of their family’s groundbreaking doc. The Hollywood Reporter says that the film, written by David Seltzer (The Omen), will be directed by Shari Springer Berman and Bob Pulcini (American Splendor). HBO updated the family’s story in 1983, and in 2003 PBS aired Lance Loud!: A Death in an American Family, which focused on the family during his final months. WNET rebroadcast the 1973 doc in 1990 (Current, Nov.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps advises Congress to move carefully in reclaiming spectrum from broadcasters because of the potential harm to a diversity of voices, reports Broadcasting & Cable. His comments come in his testimony prepared for a Thursday House Energy & Commerce Committee oversight hearing on the National Broadband Plan (Current, March 22 issue). “I will be urging great caution,” he tells the committee, “because of the possibly detrimental effects of reallocating spectrum from those stations currently using it to serve diverse audiences. Every local voice that disappears runs against the grain of localism, diversity and competition.” The Plan recommends that Congress set up a spectrum auction to gain bandwidth for the growing number of mobile devices.

Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly, who blogs on the intersection of nonprofs, politics and policy, asks the question: “When is a nonprofit organization sort of like a public agency for the purpose of levels of transparency and disclosure beyond what all nonprofits (above a specific threshold annual revenue level) provide to the Internal Revenue Service in their Form 990s?” The New Hampshire State Supreme Court recently ruled unanimously that nonprofit quasi-public corporations, such as the Local Government Center in Concord (providing advocacy support for municipal governments) are subject to that state’s Right to Know, or “sunshine,” law, reports the Nashua Telegraph.

David Fanning, e.p. of Frontline, discussed the WGBH program’s evolving use of the Web Aug. 23, 2010, in accepting the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. At the same time, the Center honored the winner and finalists for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. One of the four finalists was a reporting project, including a Frontline doc, “Law & Disorder.” The film about white vigilante activities in New Orleans was prepared in collaboration with ProPublica, the Nation Institute and the New Orleans Times-Picayne. [More about Fanning’s award; video.

The host of Latino USA for all of its 17 years, Maria Hinojosa, is now its proprietor, too, along with producer Sean Collins, her partner in a new media company in the digital cloud. Futuro Media Group, announced this month, starts off highly virtual and will get moreso. Hinojosa records her reports in a soundproofed closet in Harlem. Collins, her e.p. for five years and a former producer of All Things Considered, works in his hometown of St. Louis. They share audio and ProTools edits over an ISDN line. The show grew out of the University of Texas’s Center for Mexican American Studies and KUT, which hired Hinojosa and founding producer Maria Martin to start it up in 1993.

Americans’ response to the post-earthquake crisis in Haiti demonstrated the power of technology-enabled charity, but public broadcasters who have tried raising funds from mobile givers say it’s been a money-losing proposition so far. A handful of public stations have tried various ways of soliciting donations by text messaging. Philadelphia’s WXPN asked attendees of last summer’s XPoNential Music Festival to chip in $5 each via text message. In San Francisco, KQED made appeals during campaigns tied to Earth Day programming and 2009 year-end giving. Twin Cities Public Television made pitches during pledge drives, animated 10-second spots and e-newsletters. Text-giving remains a sparsely settled frontier of fundraising with impressive but somewhat theoretical advantages.

One theme of TechCon 2010, PBS’s annual technical and management confab April 7-9, will be “doing more with less,” PBS’s Chief Technology Officer John McCoskey told TV Technology. Lots to cover in the meeting’s nearly 50 tutorials, sessions and panels, including: automation, multiplatform distribution, quality assurance, file-based workflow and the Next Generation Interconnection System (NGIS). One focus this year is the non-real-time file-based distribution aspects of NGIS. “It’s complex, as we need a ‘one size fits all’ solution. … unlike commercial, each PBS member station has complete autonomy over their infrastructure, workflow and subsystems, which makes it a challenging endeavor,” McCoskey said.

CPB today announced PBCore 2.0, a development project to improve pubcasting’s metadata and cataloging resource since 2005. CPB is working to expand the metadata standard to help producers and distributors better classify and describe digital pubmedia content and assist audiences in finding that content across various platforms (Current, Dec. 17, 2007). PBCore 2.0 will be managed by WGBH, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions and Digital Dawn.

Ten weeks before the air date of Need to Know, WNET announced the executive producer. Seven weeks before, the producing station named the co-anchors. On May 7 the new public affairs series debuts on PBS. A lot will be riding on the show. For PBS it’s a rare chance to start a potential “icon series” with new styles and substance, demonstrating that folks in “legacy media” can interact and innovate like digital natives. For WNET it’s an opportunity to establish an ongoing public affairs franchise with a reliable PBS time slot — an asset lacking for three canceled series: the nightly Worldfocus newscast; Wide Angle, which was “locked into” the summer season, and Exposé, which spent its third season as a monthly feature tucked inside Moyers’ show.

Jim McEachern, who was the principal technical leader for the Public Radio Satellite System for its first two decades and was a key planner of NPR’s technical facilities, died March 3 at age 71. He was one of NPR’s first employees in 1971 and worked for the network for 33 years until he retired in 2004. McEachern leaves his wife, Mary E., children Terrance, Elizabeth and Molly, and sister Janet Macidull. The family will hold a celebration of his life Saturday, April, 3, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockville, Md. In lieu of sending flowers, friends may donate to their local public radio stations.

In today’s column Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic, laments what he terms PBS’s “slow but steady shrinkage of airtime devoted to the fine arts, and the increasing trivialization of such cultural programming as does manage to make it onto the network.” Furthermore, “any TV network that claims to be ‘public’ should be offering more than the ultrasafe programming in which Great Performances specializes.”