Lifetime Achievement Awards for Business and Financial Reporting will go to Paul Kangas of Nightly Business Report, and Linda O’Bryon, founder of that broadcast in 1979 and now chief content officer of Northern California Public Broadcasting, according to the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. In nominations announced this week, pubcasters pulled in nods for NewsHour, NOW, Frontline (four), Wide Angle, Nova scienceNOW and the PBS Vote 2008 project. A full list of the Emmy nominees here. Awards will be presented Dec. 7 in New York City.

A panel of media experts gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School this week for a discussion that “acknowledged both the despair and the hope that journalists feel over the present state of the American news business, rocked by economic turmoil and the rise of the Internet,” according to the Harvard Gazette. One participant was Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Jones, former host of Media Matters on PBS and director of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and author of the new book, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. He said that newspapers create most of the “cumulative reporting” that underlies American journalism, and if they disappear it will create “a terrible vacuum” of information that drives the national conversation, according to the paper.

The street running through Kiwanis Park in Charleston, Ill., will be permanently renamed Sesame Street on Sunday, according to the Daily Eastern News of Eastern Illinois University in the central-Illinois city. Mayor John Inyart will read a proclamation to kick off a day of activities hosted by pubstation WEIU and a local commercial radio station. Participants are encouraged to dress as their favorite Sesame Street characters, and have a chance to record their favorite moments from the show.

NPR joined with the proprietor of HD Radio technology, iBiquity Digital Corp., to propose that the FCC quadruple the permitted digital FM power level. In a statement released today they agreed the plan would protect analog FM broadcasts from interference while significantly improving reception of the digital HD Radio signal — especially by receivers indoors, where the digital signal sometimes can’t penetrate. Last fall, after other broadcasters suggested a ten-fold power boost for the digital signal, NPR field tests found the larger increase would interfere with regular FM broadcasts. If the FCC takes NPR’s and iBiquity’s advice, it would authorize a blanket 6 dB increase, from 20 dBc to -14 dBc.

A sculpture Fred Rogers was unveiled today in Pittsburgh as a tribute to the children’s television icon. He’s seated and tying his shoe, facing the city skyline, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It’s titled, “Tribute to Children.” The bronze piece created by sculptor Robert Berks is nearly 11 feet high and weighs more than 7,000 pounds. Berks may be best known for his bust of President Kennedy in Washington’s Kennedy Center. Also, don’t miss the nice audio tribute on WDUQ’s news blog, from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. (Photo: Family Communications Inc.)

The member-supported local news site MinnPost is dissecting salary numbers of Minnesota Public Radio execs. Blogger David Brauer did “a little spreadsheet crunching” of MPR’s IRS 990 forms for the year ending June 2008. Bill Kling, president and CEO of Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, made $373,254 in compensation and benefits from MPR/APM, $180,000 from American Public Media Group (APMG) and $48,000 from Greenspring, MPR’s for-profit arm.

Employees at WNET in New York will have three unpaid days off between Christmas and New Year’s Day, according to Crain’s New York Business. Senior managers at the pubTV station will have five days of unpaid leave. Production staffers involved in daily shows will be exempt.

PBS is picking up where Reading Rainbow left off, launching a new annual writing and drawing contest for children in cahoots with public TV stations around the country. More at current.org.

Now here’s an unexpected question: Did Sesame Street take a poke at Fox News? That’s what PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler is looking at in this week’s Mailbag. In the Oct. 29 episode, Oscar the Grouch hosted the Grouch News Network, covering “all grouchy, all disgustin’, all yucky” news. But another character thinks it’s not grouchy enough and threatens to switch to “Pox News, now there’s a trashy news show.” Viewers wrote Getler to complain that the character actually said “Fox” News. “I can’t really blame them,” Getler writes. “When I went and watched the tape for the first time, I thought I heard ‘Fox’ as well, perhaps because of the association one assumes when you hear ‘news’ right after the word.”

New York magazine is celebrating 40 years of Sesame Street with a pageful of fascinating factoids in its current issue. A few: The show was almost called 123 Avenue B. Designer Charles Rosen based the set “on an amalgam of streets in Harlem, the Bronx, the Upper West Side,” according to the mag. The very first episode on Nov. 10, 1969, was sponsored by the letters W, S and E, and the numbers 2 and 3. And Big Bird is still played by Caroll Spinney, now 75 years old. In other Sesame news, don’t miss the new show opening.

Eleven fictional mini-features, each 15 minutes, created by indie filmmakers will ponder what America may look like in the future. The ITVS project, FutureStates, will run exclusively on its new website in March 2010. ITVS said in a statement that the industry will get a peek at the series at AFI’s Digifest on Thursday in Los Angeles.

WTTW-Channel 11 in Chicago doesn’t have one African American reporter or anchor on staff, writes longtime Chicago media columnist Robert Feder on the WBEZ/Vocalo blog, noting the situation “seems like a throwback to some other era.” Chicago Tonight, the station’s public affairs program, has four white and two Hispanic staffers, he says. A WTTW spokesperson told Feder, “Because we reflect Chicago and we’re so Chicago focused, we know we’ve got to have African American talent. . . . It’s very front of our minds.” However, “given the station’s financial straits,” Feder notes, “it’s not likely to happen any time soon.”

Happy birthday, Public Broadcasting Service! Yes, PBS turns 40 today. The U.S. Census Bureau took the opportunity to recognize the system and its “excellent programs and objectivity” in a short news release today. Let’s hope that your station is having birthday cake. Or at least donuts.

Colorado Public Television on Monday announced a partnership with local journalists for a news website and an investigative news show covering the state. The project, Colorado Public News, “is responsive to the reduction of significant investigative journalism that has occurred nationally and locally with the shrinkage of news staffs in print and broadcast media, including the closure of the Rocky Mountain News,” Wick Rowland, president and CEO of Colorado Public Television, said in a statement. Former Rocky Mountain News investigative reporter Ann Imse will be editor-in-chief. “Since traditional advertising isn’t funding in-depth journalism, we are choosing the PBS model of producing great journalism and asking for tax-deductible donations to fund non-profit, public journalism,” Imse said in the statement.

A local group interested in buying the license for WXEL FM and TV in Palm Beach, Fla., has not submitted required documentation, according to owner Barry University, reports The Sun Sentinel. But the Community Broadcast Foundation of Palm Beach and Treasure Coast disagrees. “Now they’ve come back and say they want documentation of your funding,” said Green, who told the paper that Barry officials have refused to meet with his group. “If you meet with us, you can ask us anything you want.” The FCC may have to intervene, according to one source. Station ownership has been in flux for years.