Plus: MoJo's nonprofit mojo, and Judy Woodruff's biscuits.

After hearing statements of dissent from its two Republican commissioners, the FCC approved on a party-line vote Wednesday the release of a notice requesting comment on the nuts and bolts of the upcoming broadcast spectrum auction. The notice, which will be issued later this week, considers complex specifics of the auction of interest to broadcasters, such as calculations to determine opening bid prices and the process for reassigning television channels. It builds on the commission’s Incentive Auction Report and Order and Mobile Spectrum Holdings Order adopted in May, which set basic rules. Congress asked the commission to conduct the voluntary auction to clear bandwidth for mobile devices.

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY ASSOCIATION Independent Lens took home four wins from the 30th annual IDA Documentary Awards. The public TV documentary series won the award for best curated series for the second year in a row, along with the Humanitas Documentary Award, ABCNews VideoSource award and Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award. The Humanitas Documentary Award recognizes films that, according to the IDA, explore what it means to be human when facing differences in “culture, race, lifestyle, political loyalties and religious beliefs” that create barriers between people. Thomas G. Miller’s film Limited Partnership, about the struggle of a legally married same-sex couple fighting for U.S.

Jerry Blumenthal, a founding partner of Chicago documentary house Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters), died Nov. 13 after battling cancer. He was 78. “Jerry was my filmmaking partner for over four decades,” said Kartemquin co-founder Gordon Quinn in a statement. “His sense of story, people, politics, and art and artists, will be missed. With Kartemquin we went through good times and bad, but with Jerry we always found time to laugh.” Blumenthal had worked at Kartemquin since the production of its first documentary in 1966, Home for Life, an examination of two older adults adjusting to life after arriving at a nursing home.

Plus: Collaborations in pubmedia, and a poet's Pacifica show.

Frontline has hired two investigative reporters and promoted a digital specialist to create its first desk producing original investigative journalism across platforms. The Enterprise Journalism Group, announced Wednesday, consists of new hires James Jacoby and Anya Bourg, who previously produced for CBS’s 60 Minutes. Frontline’s senior digital reporter, Sarah Childress, was promoted onto the team. The group is supported by an $800,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, announced in June. Over the next two years, the journalists will report major projects via text, video, photos, audio and graphics across Frontline’s platforms. Raney Aronson-Rath, deputy executive producer, said journalistic flexibility is driving the project.

Colorado Public Radio and the Colorado Symphony have ended their 15-year relationship after a disagreement over the value of the symphony’s performances to the station and a demand for editorial control over coverage of the ensemble. CPR stopped airing symphony performances as of Nov. 30, ending an arrangement that had been in place since 1999. Colorado Symphony CEO Jerome Kern said that in addition to providing performances to CPR free of charge, the symphony had bought underwriting on the station, to the tune of about $91,000 in the last fiscal year. In the symphony’s eyes, it was giving CPR not only valuable content but cash as well, Kern said.

The show will be hosted by founding producers of This American Life and Radiolab.

Vme is not the only public TV multicast channel that’s gaining traction with viewers. Create and World, channels featuring how-to shows and public affairs programs, have the widest carriage and remain the most popular. Although audience data on PTV multicast channels is limited — in part because only 20 stations are able to subscribe to ratings services for their channels — viewership has grown 18 percent over the past four years, according to TRAC Media, which provides ratings analyses to local pubcasters. Lifestyle-oriented Create is the most dominant of the three channels. Since its national launch via APT distribution 10 years ago, it has secured carriage on 106 licensees and now reaches 78 percent of television households.

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When the 13-year international combat mission ends in Afghanistan Dec. 31, NPR’s Kabul bureau will also close. NPR decided in 2012 that it would close the Kabul bureau this year because of the planned reduction of U.S. troops in the country, according to an NPR spokesperson. Starting in 2015, coverage of Afghanistan will be handled by Philip Reeves, NPR’s correspondent based in Islamabad, Pakistan. “We are confident that Phil Reeves can cover the news coming from Afghanistan,” said Edith Chapin, senior supervising editor of NPR’s International Desk, through a spokesperson. Meanwhile, NPR is shifting its priorities and resources to Seoul, South Korea, where it will open a bureau early next year.

Six public broadcasting organizations filed joint comments Wednesday with the U.S. Forest Service protesting proposed special-use permits and fees for still photography and filming on National Forest Service lands. “The version of the commercial filming directive currently proposed suffers from significant constitutional infirmities,” the organizations said in the document. “Were it to be enacted without revision, it would be subject to serious legal challenges” and could infringe the First Amendment rights of journalists, filmmakers and photographers, they said. Joining forces on the filing are the Association of Public Television Stations, CPB, NPR, PBS and two stations that produce wilderness programming, Idaho Public Television and Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Two doctors who focus on the relationship between incarceration and public health have teamed up with a Sesame Street Muppet to call attention to the issue. Prompted by Sesame Workshop’s “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration” initiative, the video released in October features two experts on prison health, the creator of the Sesame Workshop initiative and Alex, a Muppet with electric blue hair and an incarcerated father. The video followed the publication of “Sesame Street Goes to Jail: Physicians Should Follow,” an article in the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Drs. Dora Dumont, Scott Allen and Jody Rich called for physicians to pay more attention to mass incarceration and took note of Sesame Street’s involvement.

Plus: Bill Keller keeps cool.