A Station Resource Group analysis of recent financial data from public radio stations (PDF) shows increases in listenership, underwriting revenue and listener support. Fiscal year 2003 was also the system’s strongest ever for net fundraising revenue.

Mark Handley, president of New Hampshire Public Radio, will retire next October to sail across the Pacific Ocean with his wife, reports the Concord Monitor. Handley recently finished his second term as chair of the NPR Board.

Rachel Buchman, a reporter at Philadelphia’s WHYY, resigned earlier this week after leaving a seething voice mail at the offices of Laptoplobbyist.com, a Virginia-based conservative website. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the group circulated Buchman’s message, which advised the org’s members that “God hates you and He wants to kill your children… You should all burn in hell,” via e-mail after it learned that she worked at WHYY. “It was a personal matter that was turned into a public issue,” Buchman said. “Rather than call my journalistic integrity into question, I decided to resign for personal reasons.” (registration req., via Romenesko)

The Supreme Court has denied the American Family Association’s request for a review of a lower-court decision that upheld the FCC’s point system. (PDF, p. 4, see “04-539.”) AFA had argued that the point system, which settles competing applications from noncommercial broadcasters for frequencies, unfairly favored pubcasters over religious broadcasters.

The New York Times covers Tavis Smiley’s departure from NPR. “We would argue that there’s more to be done, but his show was evidence that we were accomplishing it,” says David Umansky, NPR’s interim v.p. for communcations.

The Boston Globe profiles Peter Fiedler, interim g.m. at WBUR-FM.

Tavis Smiley will leave his NPR show Dec. 16. In an e-mail to stations, he appears to blame NPR for failing “to meaningfully reach out to a broad spectrum of Americans who would benefit from public radio, but simply don’t know it exists or what it offers.”

Milwaukee’s school board voted unanimously last week to outsource management of WYMS, their noncommercial station, to local nonprofit Radio For Milwaukee.

“The common thread for us is secrets, that sense of revelation,” says Kitchen Sister Nikki Silva in a New York Times profile.

A Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist draws a distinction between the “corporate” nature of Minnesota Public Radio and the “small, funky and extremely local” stations in the state that are banding together to raise their profile against MPR’s.

“Just how many conservatives does it take to balance out one wily progressive?” asks the Village Voice as it observes Bill Moyers’ departure from public TV. “And now that Moyers is gone, do they really need all this firepower to balance out . . . David Brancaccio?”

Vic Sussman, a longtime journalist and recently senior editor of Marketplace, died yesterday at the age of 65. The Washington Post remembers his curiosity and restlessness.

FCC Auction 37 has closed, with WGBH in Boston apparently the only pubcaster to emerge as a top bidder. The station is in line to pay more than $3.9 million for an FM signal on Cape Cod.

The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz profiles NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin and also notes the growing audience of the network’s On the Media (last item). (Via Romenesko.)

KPBS in San Diego begins broadcasting to Calexico, Calif., today on a newly acquired FM frequency. Calexico and the surrounding area formerly lacked an English-language public radio service, one of few such regions in the country.