From the recent meeting of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers: The writer for OC Weekly has seen too much of PBS star Edward James Olmos in the past. He celebrates NALIP‘s turnout (without Olmos) as “the new punks of Latino media.” Speakers questioned the intentions of CPB under the Bush administration, reports Victor Payan.

An American University project wants to develop best rights practices for producers. Profs. Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi found filmmakers frustrated and broke because of escalating copyright costs. Example: The two Eyes on the Prize series are no longer distributed because (as the Washington Post reported) it would cost so much to renew archival footage rights. The foundation-backed project aims to give producers a sharper ken of copyright law. Too many pay royalties for material that’s in the public domain or should be regarded as fair use, such as incidental background music in docs, they said. See the short FAQ and 35-page report (both PDFs).

The recording industry aided preservation efforts by public TV’s Great Performances and public radio’s American Routes and Beale Street Caravan. The producers were among this year’s recipients of aid from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences preservation grant program. For more information on grants and other opportunities, see Current Opportunities.

WGUC will buy another Cincinnati public radio operation, WVXU and six affiliated repeater stations, from Xavier University. The sale price of $15 million is the second-largest sum ever paid for a pubradio license, WGUC President Richard Eiswerth told the Cincinnati Post last week. Selling WVXU was “tough but very necessary,” said Xavier’s president, Michael Graham. The Cincinnati school will use the funds to build a student learning and residential center. The deal had been in the works since September but kept under wraps, according to WGUC. With the acquisition, WGUC will likely become a full-time classical station — it now airs some news programming — and WVXU will focus on news and talk, Eiswerth said.

Christopher Lydon is returning to the radio with Open Source, a co-production with the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. PRI will distribute. Lydon hosted public radio’s The Connection until he and staffers had a public falling-out with Jane Christo, then his boss and g.m. of Boston’s WBUR-FM.

“[W]e could be much more effective if we would just get better at asking listeners to give based purely on value,” says consultant John Sutton in a blog post about on-air fundraising practices. “So few can do it well.”

Nearly half of distance-learning courses used by K-12 schools are given by college-level institutions, says a major U.S. Department of Education study released March 2. Nine percent of schools used distance learning in 2002-03, with 328,000 enrollments a year (counting some students more than once). Two-way video is the most popular platform, used in nearly half of school districts. A big PDF of the full 97-page report is available online.

A different pro-family lobby–this time the Family Pride Coalition of gay parents–is raising a ruckus, calling a “virtual rally” on Thursday, March 10, with supporters phoning and sending e-mails to the U.S. Department of Education disapproving Secretary Margaret Spellings’ attack on the two-moms episode of Postcards from Buster. For the moment you can see the episode on the coalition’s website. In a Current commentary, public TV exec Ron Santora says Spellings and PBS marginalize many American families while catering to the prejudices of others.

“We think as a family it’s important to understand the world and all the people in it,” says a parent who turned out at a Washington, D.C., church for a screening of the Postcards from Buster “Sugartime” episode. The Washington Post covered the event.

“NPR does a pretty good job, but it seems to delight in its own culture more than is absolutely necessary,” said NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin at a seminar in Mississippi, reports the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

“I don’t think anyone should ever get over the way this country was founded — on not just liberty but also the extermination of the continent’s original inhabitants and the importation of slaves,” says Sarah Vowell in the Kansas City Star.

“[W]hat the classical fade-out tells us more than anything is that the ‘custodians of public taste’ have left the building, ” writes a Washington Times opiner in the wake of WETA-FM’s format change.

Public TV is the subject, not the medium, for a five-day seminar for journalists at UC Berkeley, May 1-6. The Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism is taking applications for 15 seats in the all-expenses-paid seminar for mid-career journalists, “Channeling Public Interest Media: Reporting on the Public Broadcast System.” Participants will also attend parts of concurrent Input 2005 in San Francisco. Application deadline: March 25/28. See explanation on the center’s website. Contact: Lanita Pace-Hinton, (510) 643-7425. The Knight Center is funded by the Knight Foundation and operated by USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. For this and other upcoming events, see Current’s Calendar, current.org/calendar.

Perhaps prompted by the Buster fuss or a slow news day, George F. Will joins a gathering pro-marketplace chorus on the right: “In today’s 500-channel environment, public television is a preposterous relic.” PBS sells so many toys, it must have mass market appeal, he argues, then suggests its fans are the kind who re-read Proust.

Tod Maffin lays out his vision of “vertical listening,” which he also mentioned in our recent article about podcasting. Meanwhile, KCRW-FM launched more than 20 podcasts yesterday.