CPB recently released its Public Broadcasting Revenue report (PDF) for fiscal year 2012. Findings about the number of contributions, total contributions and the amount of cash business (direct revenue such as underwriting and payments for services, but not in-kind services) show that public radio’s fortunes have been rising as public television’s have been on the decline, to the point that they are close to intersecting in these areas.  

The FCC announced Tuesday details of its plan for working through the more than 2,800 low-power FM (LPFM) applications that it received during the recent filing window. Its first priority is identifying some 900 “singleton” applications that do not conflict with others filed during the window. The commission will start granting those permits next month, according to the public notice, and will then give remaining applicants a chance to resolve conflicts with each other. The FCC will then move to identifying tentative selectees. “It is clear . . . that the FCC is working quickly to try and wrap up much of this proceeding by Christmas or shortly after the new year begins,” wrote attorney Paul Cicelski on Pillsbury’s CommLaw Center blog.

Detroit may have filed for bankruptcy, but public-service reporting efforts there and in Michigan just got a big boost. The Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation announced Tuesday $500,000 in support to two projects, the Detroit Journalism Cooperative and the Michigan Reporting Institute. The cooperative consists of five nonprofit media organizations that will receive $250,000 from Knight to focus on the city’s financial straits and engage citizens in the search for innovative solutions. The convening partner is Center for Michigan, a “think and do tank” advocating for citizen involvement in policy issues, along with pubcasters WDET-FM, Michigan Radio and Detroit Public Television, as well as New Michigan Media, a network of ethnic and minority-oriented news operations.

Alyce Myatt, media arts director for the National Endowment for the Arts and a former PBS executive, is leaving the NEA next month. She joined the agency in January 2011 and broadened its media arts grant category. Traditionally, most of that funding went to public television and radio projects; Myatt widened the pool of recipients to include work on transmedia, app development and video games. “I was given an extraordinary opportunity to expand federal support for the media arts to encompass every platform used by Americans to engage with art,” Myatt said in a statement. “It has been an incredible honor to do this work and to be with colleagues whose knowledge represents the depth and breadth of the arts in America.”

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a constitutional ban on political advertising on public television and radio stations, Reuters reports. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 8-3 that Congress was justified in prohibiting pubstations from running paid ads for for-profit entities, issues of public interest and political candidates. In April 2012, a three-judge panel of the same circuit voted to allow pubcasters to run those ads in the Ninth Circuit states of the West.

The new chair of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, is urging public broadcasters to sell their television bandwidth in upcoming spectrum auctions, reports TVNewsCheck. In an appearance Monday at Ohio State University in Columbus, Wheeler advocated for channel-sharing deals in which broadcasters would sell off pieces of spectrum and consolidate their signal with other broadcasters. Wheeler said that arrangement would give “forever cash-starved” pubcasters a “pot full of cash” that they could use as an endowment to run their operations while using spectrum more efficiently. “It may be just a great godsend to the PBS business,” said Wheeler, a former PBS Board member.

The cotton T-shirt, a public radio merchandising staple, is front-and-center in a new multimedia project from NPR's economics reporting unit Planet Money.

NPR news executive Stu Seidel and librarian Kee Malesky have accepted buyout offers from NPR, and social media strategist Andy Carvin has told Current that he plans to take the buyout as well. The employees will leave NPR at the end of the year. Seidel is the network’s managing editor for standards and practices. He worked for NPR as a freelance editor from 1996-98, then joined in December 1999 as senior editor of Weekend Edition Sunday after a year with Marketplace, where he was senior editor. He later worked as deputy managing editor for news. In 2011, he led coverage from Japan of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country.

As more local pubcasters fall out of compliance with CPB’s rules for transparency and open meetings, they put themselves at risk of new financial penalties from the corporation’s Inspector General. Under a policy that took effect early this year, the IG has more flexibility to recommend fines for station grantees that don’t meet CPB’s standards for releasing financial records, for example, or for providing adequate notice of board meetings. One station — Lakeshore Public Media of northwest Indiana — has already been fined $5,000 because it failed to document announcements of public meetings. Many other stations are vulnerable to such penalties, according to CPB officials, who have been advising local pubcasters about problems with compliance during appearances at public media conferences.

Mountain Lake PBS will air a special live broadcast Dec. 6 to introduce the public to a rare collection of folk songs from the Adirondacks. The Plattsburgh, N.Y., pubcaster and TAUNY (Traditional Arts in Upstate New York) are partnering on the presentation, Songs to Keep: Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector, inspired by the Marjorie L. Porter Collection of North Country Folklore at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. Porter, a local historian and newspaper columnist, dedicated her life to preserving the tunes. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, she traveled the state interviewing and recording musicians and singers and collecting songs, transcripts and writings.

Kentucky Educational Television’s Everyday Learning Collaborative today received more than $1.14 million in grants from the Louisville-based James Graham Brown Foundation and the national PNC Foundation. The new partnership among KET, the National Center for Families Learning and Metro United Way will provide resources for early childhood educators and families throughout the state, with a special focus on low-income children. The Brown Foundation’s grant of $818,775 is the second-largest private gift in KET’s history. As part of its Grow Up Great initiative, the PNC Foundation invested an additional $325,000. PNC had provided $150,000 in 2010 that helped launch KET’s Everyday Science for Preschoolers prototype.

New Jersey–based freeform community radio station WFMU will replace The Best Show on WFMU in January with a program hosted by comedian and musician Dave Hill.

Daphne Dowdy Jackson, v.p. of development and marketing at WPBT in Miami, moves in January to assume leadership of the OETA Foundation, the fundraising arm of OETA-The Oklahoma Network in Oklahoma City. The appointment was announced today by James Cook, chair of the OETA Foundation Board. Jackson will replace President Robert Allen, who retires at the end of December. At WPBT, Jackson oversees renewals, direct mail, additional gifts, telemarketing, sustainers, viewer services, on-air fundraising, major gifts, planned giving, grants and marketing. Jackson’s department raises about $9 million annually. From 2004-12, Jackson was g.m. at Basin PBS in Midland, Texas. She led a successful capital campaign to secure a new home and brought the station out of debt while producing several award-winning public television programs, the announcement said.