Outgoing acting FCC chair Michael Copps, in an interview with Multicast News, reveals the commission is working on a notice of inquiry on the future of broadcast journalism. A broad discussion on the state of journalism in America “is something to take a little while. You are going to need to assemble the best brains, and people from different sectors of the communications world and let them come and reason together and see if they can help us chart a path to a media future,” Copps said.

CPB has awarded a $2 million grant to Radio Bilingue to design and develop a multiplatform English language program service for young Latinos in Los Angeles. Radio Bilingue, which produces and distributes Spanish-language news and cultural programming airing on stations in the U.S. and Mexico, will take several months to develop programming before launching the new service in 2010. “Los Angeles sits at the juncture of diversity and new media and this is an opportunity to create a national model for public media innovation,” said CPB President Patricia Harrison in a news release. “This service, developed by Radio Bilingue, will serve and represent a new community of listeners through fresh and innovative content.”

KCSM in San Mateo, no longer a PBS member station due to financial woes, “plans to fill the PBS void” by airing more local shows including its Spotlight! series, in which high-school filmmakers create three- to five-minute flicks, according to The Daily Journal. Some of the aspiring movie mavens are as young as 14. They’re mentored by a staff of pros including producers, screenwriters and special-effects experts and get to premiere their work on KCSM.

PBS is expanding its weekly feed of The Electric Company to each weekday starting Sept. 7, reports Variety. The show, which kicked off in January, is currently the top performer on the PBS Kids Go! Block this year, and has streamed more than 10 million videos at its website.

PBS and impreMedia will stream NewsHour’s feed of Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor this week, translated into Spanish. The feed will run on impreMedia’s website, according to a joint statement issued today. Arturo Duran, CEO of impreMedia Digital, noted in the statement that this is the first time in the Supreme Court’s history that a potential justice grew up speaking Spanish.

For three years, Pittsburgh lawyer, law professor and political analyst Joseph Sabino Mistick has co-hosted WQED’s Roddey v. Mistick, a local political debate show. But now he’s written a revealing column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review regarding the recent WQED layoffs that he thinks “will surely put an end to my role” at the station. Among his claims: “With six executives making six figures-plus … the station’s layoffs include a janitor, a mailroom clerk and a part-time graphic artist who is a single mother.” Furthermore, “This may no longer be a rank-and-file town, but we still have that sense of fairness and equity that was nurtured over generations.

Newsweek reports that USA Network CEO Bonnie Hammer’s first TV job was in 1974 at WGBH on Infinity Factory. Among her duties, the mag says: “Scooping up excrement from one of the show’s costars, a sheepdog.”

This year’s Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference has wrapped up in San Diego. Keith York of KPBS, who covered it for his PMD site, reports that “The Skinny on Online Sponsorship” was one interesting session. In it, KPLU in Seattle/Tacoma reported it’s made $250,000 off its Around the House webpage, where listeners interact and experts lend advice to homeowners. Also successful is its Buy Local page, with five sponsors so far, that touts locally produced foods. The “advertorial” content is created by the underwriting staff. (For more on online sponsorship models, see Current’s October 2008 story.) Now that the confab is over, Current is waiting to hear who won the two free trips: Nine days on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and a Christmas market tour of Salzburg, Linz, Vienna and Prague.

Emergency funds for pubcastingcleared an important hurdle today, as the House’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies subcom approved $40 million in “meaningful, urgent relief directly to local stations,” according to an APTS statement. President and CEO Larry Sidman added, “All of public broadcasting is deeply grateful to Chairman [David] Obey [D-Wisc.] and his subcommittee members for providing desperately needed support to stations battered by the most prolonged recession since World War II.” Next steps: The bill progresses to that chamber’s Appropriations Committee, and on to the House floor. The Senate also needs to weigh in. On Capitol Hill Day in February, APTS and station reps lobbied for a $211 million supplemental appropriation for FY2010, or what Sidman termed “an emergency infusion of funding” (Current, Feb.

High-end outdoor accessories retailer Smith & Hawken is going out of business. What does that have to do with pubcasting? Founding partner Paul Hawken was producer and host of the 17-part series Growing a Business that aired on PBS; it focused on owning and running a socially conscious company. According to Hawken’s biography, the program ultimately played in 115 countries and was watched by more than 100 million viewers. Ten 30-minute episodes ran from November 1987 to November 1990 on PBS.

WQED’s cutbacks are affecting not only station personnel, but also donor foundations’ confidence in the station, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We are concerned about WQED’s future and we care about its mission,” said John Ellis, spokesman for the Pittsburgh Foundation, which has donated more than $600,000 over the past five years. “Like most public service TV stations across the country, WQED needs to develop a sustainable model for public service television in this region and we hope they’re successful in that endeavor.” WQED Multimedia President George Miles promised to present foundations with a new strategic planby July.

Carl Kasell, media elite. That’s according to the Power Grid on Mediaite.com. It ranks personalities by audience, blog entries and Twitter groupies. In all, 12 PBSers and 13 folks on NPR are there, from the expected (Tavis Smiley, Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill) to the slightly more unexpected, such as the longtime authoritative NPR voice Kasell — no doubt, he’s developed a whole new fan base with all those home answering-machine recordings via Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

Think digital coupons. That’s one interesting suggestion that emerged from the Public Radio Development & Marketing Conference in San Diego. Blogging the confab is Keith York, a KPBS programmer who writes the Public Media Digest. York reports that Paul Jacobs of Jacobs Media told a packed session that use of digital coupons is surpassing printed coupons, so stations could offer listeners online coupons and discounts for sponsors. A leader in digital coupons, Safeway, added them to its loyalty card effort last month, the database marketing blog DM News reported. Forbes said some digital coupons fail to offer meaningful savings and even charge memberships to prospective users.

It’s Mailbag time for PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler and — uh oh — some letter writers found PBS’s A Capitol Fourth less than thrilling this year. In fact, they called it “meaningless,” “disappointing” and “insipid.” Writers are also still weighing in on the PBS Board’s new ruling on sectarian programming.

The Poynter Institute’s Amy Gahran is raving about NPR’s mobile web capability, from her current vacation spot in northern Michigan — which has little or no cell or broadband access. “This trip has really hammered home how poorly most news sites handle the mobile Web — and brought one shining star to the fore: National Public Radio,” she writes on the Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits column. She adds: “People want news where they are, and often their cell phone is all they’ve got. Also, they may sometimes only have a couple of bars of cell network connection. It’s up to news organizations to work with those constraints to help build loyalty with this huge market.